and ale. Oxford, which had had a long quarrel
with Abingdon over boat cargoes and river tolls, readily joined in the
attack, but ultimately by the king's judgment Abingdon was declared to
have had right to a "full market", and Wallingford was discomfited. A
little later its wrath was kindled afresh by the men of Crowmarsh, who,
instead of coming to the Wallingford market, actually began to make their
own bread and ale--by what warrant no one knew, said the Wallingford
bakers and brewers. Crowmarsh held out through the later years of Henry's
reign and Richard's, had a sore struggle under John, and at last under
Henry III. saw the officers of justice come down upon them a second time,
and make a general wreck of ovens and "tumbril," while the weights were
carried off to triumphant Wallingford.

But if an era of industrial activity had opened, the new intellectual
impulse of the time was yet more striking. Great forces had everywhere
worked together under the one name of the Church: the ecclesiastical
organization which was represented in Rome, in the Episcopate, and in the
Canon law; the democratic monachism; the intellectual temper with its
pursuit of pure knowledge; the religious mystical spirit which was
included in all the rest and yet separate from them. But other elements
than these were at work in the twelfth century,--the literary and historic
movement, the legal revival, the new scepticism, the spirit of wide
imperialism, the romantic impulse. Education had up to this time been
wholly undertaken by the Church. The work of teaching had been one of the
main objects of the cathedral; the school and its chancellor were as
essential parts of the foundation as dean or precentor. No rivals to the
cathedral schools existed save those of the monasteries, and education
naturally bore the impress given to it in these great institutions;
profane learning was only valued so far as it could be used to illustrate
the Bible, and the ordinary teaching was almost wholly founded on four or
five authors, who wrote when the struggle of the Empire against the
barbarians was almost over, and who represented the last efforts of a
learning which was ready to vanish. The monastic libraries show how
narrow was the range of reading. The great monastery of Bec had about
fifty books. At Canterbury the library of Christ Church, which a century
later possessed seven hundred volumes, had at this time but a hundred and
fifty. Its single Greek wor