Even the universities were growing more national, for the war prevented Oxford students from seeking, after their English graduation, a wider career at Paris.  William of Ockham, the last of the great English schoolmen that won fame in the European rather than in the English world, died about 1349 in the service of the Bavarian emperor.  In the same year the plague swept away Thomas Bradwardine, the “profound doctor,” at the moment of his elevation to the throne of Canterbury.  Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his career in his native land.  As an English university career became more self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man of affairs as much as of the pure student.  The new tendency is illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the service of the State, though rewarded by the highest offices of the Church.  His conspicuous position as a teacher of scholastic philosophy first brought John Wycliffe into academic prominence.  But he soon won a wider fame as a preacher in London, an adviser of the court, an opponent of the “possessioner” monks, and of the forsworn friars, who, deserting apostolic poverty, vied with the monks in covetousness.  His attacks on practical abuses in the Church marked him out as a politician as well as a philosopher.  His earlier career ended in 1374, the year in which he first became the king’s ambassador, not long after proceeding to the degree of doctor of divinity.[1] His later struggles must be considered in the light of the political history of the concluding episodes of Edward’s reign.  In a few years we shall find the Oxford champion abandoning the Latin language of universal culture, and appealing to the people in homely English.  With Wycliffe’s entry upon his wider career, it is hardly too much to say that Oxford ceased to be merely a part of the cosmopolitan training ground of the schoolmen, and became in some fashion a national institution.  Cambridge, too young and obscure in earlier ages to have rivalled Oxford, first began to enjoy an increasing reputation.

    [1] This was before Dec. 26, 1373.  See Twemlow in Engl.  Hist. 
    Review, xv, (1900), 529-530.

Hitherto culture had been not only cosmopolitan but clerical.  Every university student and nearly every professional man was a clerk.  But education was becoming possible for laymen, and there were already lay professions outside the clerical caste.  The wide cultivation and the vigorous literary output of laymen of letters like Chaucer and Cower are sufficient evidence of this.  But the best proof is the complete differentiation of the common lawyers from the clergy.  The inns of court of London became virtually a legal university, where highly trained men studied a juristic system, which was not the less purely English in spirit