, and became in some
fashion a national institution. Cambridge, too young and obscure in
earlier ages to have rivalled Oxford, first began to enjoy an increasing
reputation.

[1] This was before Dec. 26, 1373. See Twemlow in _Engl. Hist.
Review_, xv, (1900), 529-530.

Hitherto culture had been not only cosmopolitan but clerical. Every
university student and nearly every professional man was a clerk. But
education was becoming possible for laymen, and there were already lay
professions outside the clerical caste. The wide cultivation and the
vigorous literary output of laymen of letters like Chaucer and Cower
are sufficient evidence of this. But the best proof is the complete
differentiation of the common lawyers from the clergy. The inns of
court of London became virtually a legal university, where highly
trained men studied a juristic system, which was not the less purely
English in spirit because its practitioners used the French tongue as
their technical instrument. There were no longer lawyers in England
who, like Bracton, strove to base the law of the land on the forms and
methods of Roman jurisprudence. There were no longer kings, like Edward
I., with Italian trained civilians at their court ready to translate
the law of England into imperialist forms. The canonist still studied
at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and
the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though
the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and
statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed
that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were
willing to make the effort. English law, in divorcing itself from the
universities and the clergy, became national as well as lay. There were
no longer any Weylands who concealed their clerical beginnings, and hid
away the subdeacon under the married knight and justice, the founder of
a landowning family. The lawyers of Edward's reign were frankly laymen,
marrying and giving in marriage, establishing new families that became
as noble as any of the decaying baronial houses, and yet cherishing a
corporate ideal and common spirit as lively and real as those of any
monastery or clerical association.

In enumerating the many convergent tendencies which worked together in
strengthening the national life, we must not forget the growing
importance of commerce. Merchant princes like the Poles