y
assails the intellectual innovators of his time on the ground that the
new lights of the 12th century disdained to be students of history and
affected contempt for the past. It was the old story; literary culture
found itself in antagonism with scientific culture, and the vigorous
childhood of scientific research was aggressive, insolent, and noisily
insubordinate. The old seminaries, whose homes were in the Benedictine
monasteries, refused to welcome the new learning. Its teachers settled
themselves elsewhere; at Paris, on the other side of the water, they had
a hard fight of it. Once in 1209 the Synod of Paris actually prohibited
the reading of Aristotle's 'Metaphysics.' At Oxford they seem to have
met with a more generous reception. Perhaps it was because that
reception was too enthusiastic that King Stephen at the close of his
miserable reign expelled Vacarius, the first teacher of scientific law
in England. Whereupon young men of parts and ambition crossed the
Channel, seeking and finding at Pavia and Bologna what was not to be had
at home. The monastic schools held their own, and went on in the old
groove; the intellectual revolution which soon came about by the agency
of the Mendicant Orders was not yet dreamt of. St. Alban's, Malmesbury,
and other such mighty foundations, stuck to the old studies, just as
Eton and Winchester stuck to Latin Verse as the one thing needful, and
reluctantly gave into the newfangled notion of having a 'modern side.'

Outside the Abbey precincts, a hundred yards from the great gate, and
separated from it by the _Rome land_, which may possibly have served the
boys as a playground, stood the Grammar School. Whether it offered a
different training from that which was usually supplied to the scholars
who were under training in the cloister, it is difficult to say. Within
the precincts, when the 13th century began, there stood the great
church--enriched by the accumulated offerings of centuries, and glowing
with dazzling splendour of jewels and cloth of gold, and glass that
glorified the very sunshine, and wonders of sculpture and colour and
needlework filling the heart to overflowing with inexplicable hopes and
longings for an ideal that seemed possible of realization, if only the
Church in heaven should be as far removed above the actual of the Church
on earth, as the glories of the Church on earth were removed above the
squalid life of the common workday world. All this in witness that