abbey of Eynsham where his father had taken refuge from the world.  His mother was a pious woman of the day, too poor to give her boy much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every Wednesday; but Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours.  He plunged at once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for knowledge, its mystical piety.  “Secretly,” perhaps at eventide when the shadows were gathering in the church of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary for his bride.  Years of study, broken by a fever that raged among the crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris; and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way as poor scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christendom.  Here a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that Edmund consented at last to an assignation; but when he appeared it was in company of grave academical officials who, as the maiden declared in the hour of penitence which followed, “straightway whipped the offending Eve out of her.”  Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund on his return from Paris became the most popular of Oxford teachers.  It is to him that Oxford owes her first introduction to the Logic of Aristotle.  We see him in the little room which he hired, with the Virgin’s chapel hard by, his grey gown reaching to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture time after a sleepless night of prayer, but gifted with a grace and cheerfulness of manner which told of his French training and a chivalrous love of knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would.  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the young tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge whence a thievish student would sometimes run off with it.  But even knowledge brought its troubles; the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long formed his sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning from which Edmund found it hard to wean himself.  At last, in some hour of dream, the form of his dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood among his mathematical diagrams.  “What are these?” she seemed to say; and seizing Edmund’s right hand, she drew on the palm three circles interlaced, each of which bore the name of a Person of the Christian Trinity.  “Be these,” she cried, as the figure faded away, “thy diagrams henceforth, my son.”

[Sidenote:  The University and Feudalism]