a burst of rage rolling on the floor, biting
straw, and gnawing a stick! "They have placed twenty-five kings over
me," he shouted in a fury; meaning the twenty-five barons who were
entrusted with the duty of seeing that the provisions of the Charter
were fulfilled.

Whether his death, one year later (1216), was the result of vexation of
spirit or surfeit of peaches and cider, or poison, history does not
positively say. But England shed no tears for the King to whom she
owes her liberties in the Magna Charta.

{51}

CHAPTER IV

For the succeeding 56 years John's son, Henry III., was King of
England. While this vain, irresolute, ostentatious king was extorting
money for his ambitious designs and extravagant pleasures, and
struggling to get back the pledges given in the Great Charter, new and
higher forces, to which he gave no heed, were at work in his kingdom.

Paris at this time was the centre of a great intellectual revival,
brought about by the Crusades. We have seen that through the despised
Jew, at the time of the Conquest, a higher civilization was brought
into England. Along with his hoarded gold came knowledge and culture,
which he had obtained from the Saracen. Now, these germs had been
revived by direct contact with the sources of ancient knowledge in {52}
the East during the Crusades; and while the long mental torpor of
Europe was rolling away like mist before the rising sun, England felt
the warmth of the same quickening rays, and Oxford took on a new life.

It was not the stately Oxford of to-day, but a rabble of roystering,
revelling youths, English, Welsh, and Scotch, who fiercely fought out
their fathers' feuds.

They were a turbulent mob, who gave advance opinion, as it were, upon
every ecclesiastical or political measure, by fighting it out on the
streets of their town, so that an outbreak at Oxford became a sort of
prelude to every great political movement.

Impossible as it seems, intellectual life grew and expanded in this
tumultuous atmosphere; and while the democratic spirit of the
University threatened the king, its spirit of free intellectual inquiry
shook the Church.

The revival of classical learning, bringing streams of thought from old
Greek and Latin fountains, caused a sudden expansion. It was like the
discovery of an unsuspected and greater world, with a body of new
truth, {53} which threw the old into contemptuous disuse. A spirit of
doubt, scepticism, and denial,