tongues of Europe. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took
the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or
realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both
failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast
commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt
himself as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter round Mont St.
Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars
carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the
work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere,
but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and
Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at
any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been
brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of
national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of
the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of
Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with
Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the
fray with the legate. At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found
hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within this
strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely
democratic basis. Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on
precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical
strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on
which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room. The
University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were
admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the "master."
To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or
"ruler" in the schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy all were
equal. When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles
of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in
the final decision. Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.
It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned
every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an
officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.

[Sidenote: The Universities and the Church]

If the democratic