kings’ forays along Norman or Aquitanian borders England heard little; she cared less.  Even Eichard’s crusade woke little interest in his island realm.  What England saw in her kings was “the good peace they made in the land.”  And with peace came a stern but equitable rule, judicial and administrative reforms that carried order and justice to every corner of the land, a wealth that grew steadily in spite of heavy taxation, an immense outburst of material and intellectual activity.

[Sidenote:  The Universities]

It was with a new English people therefore that John found himself face to face.  The nation which he fronted was a nation quickened with a new life and throbbing with a new energy.  Not least among the signs of this energy was the upgrowth of our Universities.  The establishment of the great schools which bore this name was everywhere throughout Europe a special mark of the impulse which Christendom gained from the crusades.  A new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more cultured East.  Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad.  In the twelfth century a classical revival restored Caesar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.  The scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools of Paris.  The Roman law was revived by the imperialist doctors of Bologna.  The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before a summer’s sun.  Wandering teachers such as Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge.  The same spirit of restlessness, of enquiry, of impatience with the older traditions of mankind either local or intellectual that drove half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together.  A new power sprang up in the midst of a world which had till now recognized no power but that of sheer brute force.  Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars who lectured in every cloister were hailed as “masters” by the crowds at their feet.  Abelard was a foe worthy of the threats of councils, of the thunders of the Church.  The teaching of a single Lombard was of note enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king.

[Sidenote:  Oxford]

Vacarius was probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald where Thomas of London and John of Salisbury were already busy with the study of the Civil Law.  But when he opened lectures on it at Oxford he was at once silenced by Stephen, who was at that moment at war with the Church and jealous of the power which the wreck of the royal authority was throwing into Theobald’s hands.  At this time Oxford stood in the first rank among English towns.  Its town