The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new training, and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the spirit of the Church.  The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them.  Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position.  The University on the other hand was a protest against this isolation of man from man.  The smallest school was European and not local.  Not merely every province of France, but every people of Christendom had its place among the “nations” of Paris or Padua.  A common language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the warring tongues of Europe.  A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or realm from realm.  What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did.  Dante felt himself as little a stranger in the “Latin” quarter round Mont St. Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna.  Wandering Oxford scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague.  In England the work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but even in England work had to be done.  The feuds of Northerner and Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been brought face to face in its streets.  And here as elsewhere the spirit of national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of the University.  After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls.  Irish scholars were foremost in the fray with the legate.  At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers.  And within this strangely mingled mass society and government rested on a purely democratic basis.  Among Oxford scholars the son of the noble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant.  Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room.  The University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were admitted by a purely intellectual franchise.  Knowledge made the “master.”  To know more than one’s fellows was a man’s sole claim to be a regent or “ruler” in the schools.  And within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal.  When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles of St. Mary’s all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in the final decision.  Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.  It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute.  Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.