language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and
drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens,
but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge,
by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.

But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that
one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our
literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages
men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of
other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the
universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main
under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the
Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior
Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not
normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had
spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore
with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the
Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature,
philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was
expected to know whatever there was to know.

And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of
the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature
which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators
were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the
ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in
Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in
thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of
antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John
of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance
scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable
acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained
through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature
of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write
two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This
type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I
said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the
thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor fro