ence 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_.

This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life. Though the
university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of it were not the
less good citizens. A patriot like Grosseteste strove to his uttermost
to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris. Oxford
clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we
shall see them siding with Montfort. The eminently practical temper of
the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the
abstract pursuit of science. Eager as men were to know, to prove, and
to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it.
The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon
law, attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little
attraction. Never before was there a career so fully opened to talent.
The academic teacher's fame took him from the lecture-room to the
court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so it was that
the university influenced action almost as profoundly as it influenced
thought, and affected all classes of society alike. The struggles of
poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or Grosseteste must not make us
think that the universities of this period were exclusively frequented
by humble scholars. The academic career of a rich baron's son like
Thomas of Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a
train of chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king,
and feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as
characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging his
way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the severest
privations rather than desert his studies. Yet the function of the
_studium_ as promoting a healthy circulation between the various orders
of medieval society, must not be ignored.

Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote
themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise which
soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they lessened their
mobility and their freedom. The mendicant convents at Paris and Oxford
prepared the way for secular foundations, at first small and
insignifican