lace where each student
learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time
to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be
delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some
strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John
Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois.

This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England
(_De Recuperatione Sancte Terre_), has several most interesting and
refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always
against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression
of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his
own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at
all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction
of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by
Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the
possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary
laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all
rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward
in his scheme of education. He insists on having only lay-mistresses,
and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There
should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry,
and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are
necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be
acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these
branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and
develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to
him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation.
Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of
peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds
too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals
for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the
revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such
a fashion as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of
the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls
go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a
more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The