thought; the Jews were teaching science and medicine, and had just brought from the East the philosophy of Aristotle.  France struck the first note of a new literature in her chronicles, her national poems, and the songs of her troubadours.  All Paris was ringing with the struggle of Abelard and St. Bernard.  At its university Peter Lombard was preparing to publish his Sentences, which were to form the framework for the dogmatic theology of centuries to come.  New theories of liberty were quickened by classical studies which made men familiar with the heroes of Greece and Rome.  Abelard’s disciple, Arnold of Brescia, was preaching his theory of political and religious freedom; civil government was to return to the old republican forms of ancient Rome, and the clergy were to be separated from all secular jurisdiction.  In Lombardy the growth of wealth, population, and trade, demanded a more developed jurisprudence, and a new study had sprung up of Roman law.  Bolognese lawyers lectured on the Pandects of Justinian, and by their work the whole legal education of the day was transformed; old prejudices and old traditions lost the authority which had long hedged them about, and the new code threatened to destroy everywhere the imperfect systems of the past with which it came in contact.  The revival of the study of civil law was followed by a new scientific study of Canon law; and a recognized code was for the first time developed, as well as a minute system of legal procedure, when Gratian published in 1151 the Decretum, a great text-book of ecclesiastical law.

Amid all the intellectual activity which surrounded the English students abroad it is, curious to note what they carried home with them across the Channel, and what they left simply untouched.  The zeal for learning quickly showed itself in the growth of the Universities.  As early as 1133 Robert Pulleyn was teaching Latin at Oxford.  In 1149 Archbishop Theobald brought to it Master Vacarius, a famous Lombard lawyer, who lectured on the Civil law until he was expelled by Stephen, half fearful of the new teaching and half influenced by the pressure of the older and more conservative of the English bishops.  There was much of the foreign movement, however, which found no place in England.  Difference of tongue shut out Norman and Englishman from the influence of the new Provencal poetry, and for a century to come England owed nothing to the finished art of the South.  The strip of sea which kept aloof all European tumults shut out also the speculations in politics and government which were making their way abroad.  Even the religious movement which overran one half of France under the Albigenses, or that which counted its followers and martyrs by multitudes in Flanders never crossed the Channel, in spite of the constant intercourse between the peoples; and missionaries from Germany during the reign of Henry only succeeded in converting one poor woman in England who immediately recanted.  It was in other directions that the energies of the people found their exercise.  If Englishmen were heedless of foreign philosophers, they were quick to notice that the fruit of the vine had failed, and forthwith the unheard-of novelty of taverns where beer and mead were sold sprang up in France, probably by the help of those English traders whose beer was the marvel of Frenchmen.