ult still it is for the modern mind to interpret the
mediaeval!

Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by
chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that
great city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise the
processes at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little less
fortuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux (we will
say) have given Paris a certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil of
William's, springs into fame and draws a horde of students from all over
Europe to sit at his feet. These 'nations' of young men have to be
organised, brought under some sort of discipline, if only to make the
citizens' lives endurable: and lo! the thing is done. In like manner
Irnerius at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some innominate
teacher, 'of importance,' as Browning would put it, 'in his day,'
possibly set the ball rolling; or again it is suggested that a body of
scholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatisfaction has been known
even in historical times) migrated hither--a laborious journey, even
nowadays--and that so

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far!

These young or nascent bodies had a trick of breaking away after this
fashion. For reasons no longer obvious they hankered specially towards
Stamford or Northampton. Until quite recently, within living memory, all
candidates for a Mastership of Arts at Oxford had to promise never to
lecture at Stamford. A flood here in 1520, which swept away Garret Hostel
Bridge, put Cambridge in like mind and started a prophecy (to which you
may find allusion in the fourth book of "The Faerie Queene") that both
Universities would meet in the end, and kiss, at Stamford. Each in turn
broke away for Northampton, and the worthy Fuller (a Northamptonshire
man) has recorded his wonder that so eligible a spot was not finally
chosen.

I have mentioned a flood: but the immediate causes of the migrations or
attempted migrations were not usually respectable enough to rank with any
such act of God. They started as a rule with some Town and Gown row, or
some bloody affray between scholars of the North and of the South.
Without diminishing your sense of the real fervour for learning which
drew young men from the remotest parts of Europe to these centres, but
having for my immediate object to make clear to you that, whatever these
young men sought, it was