a student of the Oxford schools in early life.  Though he left Oxford for Paris, Edmund returned to an active career in England, when experience convinced him of the vanity of scholastic success.  Bishop Grosseteste, another early Oxford teacher of eminence, probably studied at Paris, for so late as 1240 he held up to the Oxford masters of theology the example of their Paris brethren for their imitation.  The double allegiance of Edmund and Grosseteste was typical.  A long catalogue of eminent names adorned the annals of Oxford in the thirteenth century, but the most distinguished of her earlier sons were drawn away from her by the superior attractions of Paris.  England furnished at least her share of the great names of thirteenth century scholasticism, but of very few of these could it be said that their main obligation was to the English university.  It was at Paris that the academic organisation developed which Oxford adopted.  At Paris the great intellectual conflicts of the century were fought.  There the ferment seethed round that introduction of Aristotle’s teaching from Moorish sources which led to the outspoken pantheism of an Amaury of Bene.  There also was the reconciliation effected between the new teacher and the old faith which made Aristotle the pillar of the new scholasticism that was to justify by reason the ways of God to man.  In Paris also was fought the contest between the aggressive mendicant friars and the secular doctors whom they wished to supplant in the divinity schools.

There is little evidence of even a pale reflection of these struggles in contemporary Oxford.  English scholars bore their full share in the fight.  It was the Englishman Curzon who condemned the heresies of Amaury of Bene.  Another Englishman, Alexander of Hales, issued in his Summa Theologiae the first effective reconciliation of Aristotelian metaphysic with Christian doctrine which his Paris pupils, Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, and Albert the Great, the German, were to work out in detail in the next generation.  Hales was the first secular doctor in Europe who in 1222, in the full pride of his powers, abandoned his position in the university to embrace the voluntary poverty of the Franciscans and resume his teaching, not in the regular schools but in a Minorite convent.  And at the same time another English doctor at Paris, John of St. Giles, notable as a physician as well as a theologian, dramatically marked his conversion to the Dominican order by assuming its habit in the midst of a sermon on the virtues of poverty.  All these famous Englishmen worked and taught at Paris, and it was only a generation later that their successors could establish on the Thames the traditions so long upheld on the banks of the Seine.