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 work was a grammar; and if it could boast of a copy of the Institutes of Justinian, it did not yet possess a single book of civil law, not even Gratian’s Decretum.  The age of Universities, however, had now begun, and English scholars went abroad in numbers to study law at Bologna and the Italian universities, or to learn philosophy and the arts at Paris, or at some of the less costly schools in Gaul.  On all sides they met with the stir of political and religious speculation.  The crusades and the intercourse with the East had broken down the boundaries between Christian and Mohammedan