anions "that dialectics still detained on St.
Genevieve's Mount." "I found them," he tells us, "just as I had left
them, and at the same point; they had not advanced one step in the art
of solving our ancient questions, nor added to their science the
smallest proposition.... I then clearly saw, what it is easy to
discover, that the study of dialectics, fruitful if employed as a means
to reach the sciences, remain inert and barren if taken as being itself
the object of study."[247]

During this time were developing, on the borders of the Isis and the
Cam, the Universities, so famous since, of Oxford and Cambridge; but
their celebrity was chiefly local, and they never reached the
international reputation of the one at Paris. Both towns had flourishing
schools in the twelfth century; in the thirteenth, these schools were
constituted into a University, on the model of Paris; they were granted
privileges, and the Pope, who would not let slip this opportunity of
intervening, confirmed them.[248]

The rules of discipline, the teaching, and the degrees are the same as
at Paris. The turbulence is just as great; there are incessant battles;
battles between the students of the North and those of the South,
"boreales et australes," between the English and Irish, between the
clerks and the laity. In 1214 some clerks are hung by the citizens of
the town; the Pope's legate instantly makes the power of Rome felt, and
avenges the insult sustained by privileged persons belonging to the
Latin country. During ten years the inhabitants of Oxford shall remit
the students half their rent; they shall pay down fifty-two shillings
each year on St. Nicholas' day, in favour of indigent students; and
they shall give a banquet to a hundred poor students. Even the bill of
fare is settled by the Roman authority: bread, ale, soup, a dish of fish
or of meat; and this for ever. The perpetrators of the hanging shall
come barefooted, without girdle, cloak or hat, to remove their victims
from their temporary resting-place, and, followed by all the citizens,
bury them with their own hands in the place assigned to them in
consecrated ground.

In 1252 the Irish and "Northerners" begin to fight in St. Mary's Church.
They are obliged by authority to appoint twelve delegates, who negotiate
a treaty of peace. In 1313 a prohibition is proclaimed against bearing
names of nations, these distinctions being a constant source of
quarrels. In 1334 such numbers of "Sur