The establishment of the Dominicans and Franciscans at Oxford gave an immense impetus to the activity of the university.  The Franciscans appointed as the first lector of their Oxford convent the famous secular teacher Grosseteste, who ever after held the Minorites in the closest estimation.  Grosseteste was the greatest scholar of his day, knowing Greek and Hebrew as well as the accustomed studies of the period.  A clear and independent thinker, he was not, like so many of his contemporaries, overborne by the weight of authority, but appealed to observation and experience in terms which make him the precursor of Roger Bacon.  Grosseteste’s successor as lector was himself a Minorite, Adam Marsh, whose reputation was so great that Grosseteste was afraid to leave him when sick in a French town, lest the Paris masters should persuade him to teach in their schools.  Adam’s loyalty to his native university withstood any such temptation, and from that time Oxford began to hold up its head against Paris.  Even before this, Grosseteste persuaded John of St. Giles to transfer his teaching from Paris to Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The intense intellectual activity of the thirteenth century flowed in more than one channel, and Englishmen took their full share both in building up and in destroying.  Two Englishmen of the next generation mark in different ways the reaction against the moderate Aristotelianism and orthodox rationalism which their countryman Hales first brought into vogue.  These were the Franciscan friars, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus.  Bacon, though he studied at Paris as well as at Oxford, is much more closely identified with England than with the Continent.  His sceptical, practical intellect led him to heap scorn on Hales and his followers and to plunge into audacities of speculation which cost him long seclusions in his convent and enforced abstinence from writing and study.  In his war against the Aristotelians, the intrepid friar upheld recourse to experiment and observation as superior to deference to authority, in language which stands in strange contrast to the traditions of the thirteenth century.  Grosseteste, who also had preferred the teachings of experience to the appeal to the sages of the past, was the only academic leader that escaped Bacon’s scathing censure.  When his order kept him silent, Roger was bidden to resume his pen by Pope Clement IV.  A generation still later, Duns Scotus, probably a Lowland Scot, who taught at Paris and died at Cologne in 1308, emphasised, sharply enough, but in less drastic fashion, the reaction against the teaching of Hales and Aquinas, by accepting a dualism between reason and authority that broke away from the Thomist tradition of the thirteenth century and prepared the way for the scholastic decadence of the fourteenth.  After France, England took a leading part in all these movements; and even in France English scholars had a large share in making that land the special home of the Studium, as Italy was of the Sacerdotium and Germany of the Imperium.