ch followed, "straightway whipped the offending
Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return
from Paris became the most popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that
Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him
in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his
grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep
in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a
grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training and a
chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of
scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as
he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish student
would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its troubles;
the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long formed his
sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which
Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the
form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood
among his mathematical diagrams. "What are these?" she seemed to say; and
seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three circles
interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian
Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as the figure faded away, "thy diagrams
henceforth, my son."

[Sidenote: The University and Feudalism]

The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training,
and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the
spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old
mediaeval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so
strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local
isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from
barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of
material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of
place and social position. The University on the other hand was a protest
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European
and not local. Not merely every province of France, but every people of
Christendom had its place among the "nations" of Paris or Padua. A common
language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the
warring