o Italian
priests. Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors,
the Church and the School were brought under the full control of the
revived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenous
national intellectual life was destroyed. Unity was re-established, and
the School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated in
the culture and religion of the Western Church.

As it was with the School so also with the university. The second, as
the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously
it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common
institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich
variety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its very
constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later
universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international
character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were
organized in 'nations' a system which, at least in name, still remains
in many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was and
remained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a long
apprenticeship to the study of theology. It was from the universities
that emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman as
Abelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William of
Ockham each took his part.

We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of the
Scholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated the
official education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy implied
the exclusion from all public recognition of the local and national
thought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life.
The Troubadours and the Minnesaenger, the Chanson de Roland and the
Nibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman,
each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outside
the official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it.
This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind was
directed to the highest subjects of thought. National idiosyncrasies, as
they found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, produced
results different from the established teaching of the school. To the
Church truth was always one and the same. Truth was one, error was
manifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was h