On this common basis—­the Bible, the Church, and the Latin language—­was then established the education of Western Europe, and the form it then assumed it retained for over a thousand years, almost without change.  By this a common cast was given to the intellect, and the nations were disciplined by common spiritual teaching.  It was extraordinarily effective.  It kept down, and in many countries almost destroyed, the vigorous and aspiring local and national life which, in every country, was striving after self-expression.  In our own country this effect was most conspicuous.  The English, illiterate though they might be, were not without the promise of a great future.  In the remains of the Saxon poems we can see the beginnings of what under happier circumstances might have grown into a great national literature.  Its origins were deep seated in the life of the people.  It proved itself quickly able to absorb the new teaching of the Gospel, and, as the Christian Epics show, here was the basis on which might have been built a national interpretation of Christianity.  All that was required was the adoption of English as the language of the Church and the School.  The beginning was made when Alfred, during the few years which he secured from the Danish inroads, began his great work of founding an English literature in which the teaching of the Church and the works of antiquity were included.  The attempt was ruined for the time by the renewal of the Danish inroads, permanently by the Norman Conquest.  For William brought with him not only his French knights, but also Italian priests.  Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors, the Church and the School were brought under the full control of the revived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenous national intellectual life was destroyed.  Unity was re-established, and the School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated in the culture and religion of the Western Church.

As it was with the School so also with the university.  The second, as the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich variety of local life which everywhere was springing up.  In its very constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were organized in ‘nations’ a system which, at least in name, still remains in many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was and remained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a long apprenticeship to the study of theology.  It was from the universities that emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman as Abelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William of Ockham each took his part.