King James III's bombardment of the nearby castle of Dunbar, which was in 1479. He also remembers the comet which was supposed to have foretold the King's defeat at Sauchieburn which was in 1488. However, it was in 1490, he reports, that he "first left the paternal hearth". In 1490, probably under the influence of Robert Cockburn, another Haddington man, destined to be an influential bishop (of Ross and later of Dunkeld), he decided to go to Paris to study among the great numbers of Scots there at the time. University It is not known whether he attended university in Scotland as a student – there are no matriculation records of him and he claimed never to have seen the university town of St Andrews, Fife as a young man (though he did complain later of its bad beer). He seems to have decided to prepare for Paris at Cambridge in England. He says that in 1492 he attended "Gods House", which later became Christ's College. He remembers the bells – "on great feast days, I spent half the night listening to them" – but was obviously well-prepared, as he left for Paris after three terms. In 1493 he matriculated in the University of Paris, France, then the foremost University in Europe. He studied at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and took his Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1495 followed by his master's degree in 1496. There were many currents of thought in Paris but he was heavily influenced, as were fellow Scots such as Lawrence of Lindores by the nominalist and empiricist approach of John Buridan. (The latter's influence on Copernicus and Galileo can be traced through Majors published works). He became a student master ('regent') in Arts in the Collège de Montaigu in 1496 and began the study of theology under the formidable Jan Standonck. He consorted with scholars of later renown, some from his hometown, Robert Walterston, and his home country (David Cranston of Glasgow, who died in 1512), but mostly they were the luminaries of the age, including Erasmus, whose reforming enthusiasms he shared, Rabelais and Reginald Pole. In the winter of 1497 he had a serious illness, from which he never completely recovered. He had never had dreams before, but ever afterwards he was troubled by dreams, migraine, colic and "excessive sleepiness" (he was always hard to awaken). In 1499, he moved to the College of