k was a grammar; and if it could boast of a
copy of the Institutes of Justinian, it did not yet possess a single book
of civil law, not even Gratian's _Decretum_. The age of Universities,
however, had now begun, and English scholars went abroad in numbers to
study law at Bologna and the Italian universities, or to learn philosophy
and the arts at Paris, or at some of the less costly schools in Gaul. On
all sides they met with the stir of political and religious speculation.
The crusades and the intercourse with the East had broken down the
boundaries between Christian and Mohammedan thought; the Jews were
teaching science and medicine, and had just brought from the East the
philosophy of Aristotle. France struck the first note of a new literature
in her chronicles, her national poems, and the songs of her troubadours.
All Paris was ringing with the struggle of Abelard and St. Bernard. At
its university Peter Lombard was preparing to publish his _Sentences_,
which were to form the framework for the dogmatic theology of centuries
to come. New theories of liberty were quickened by classical studies
which made men familiar with the heroes of Greece and Rome. Abelard's
disciple, Arnold of Brescia, was preaching his theory of political and
religious freedom; civil government was to return to the old republican
forms of ancient Rome, and the clergy were to be separated from all
secular jurisdiction. In Lombardy the growth of wealth, population, and
trade, demanded a more developed jurisprudence, and a new study had
sprung up of Roman law. Bolognese lawyers lectured on the Pandects of
Justinian, and by their work the whole legal education of the day was
transformed; old prejudices and old traditions lost the authority which
had long hedged them about, and the new code threatened to destroy
everywhere the imperfect systems of the past with which it came in
contact. The revival of the study of civil law was followed by a new
scientific study of Canon law; and a recognized code was for the
first time developed, as well as a minute system of legal procedure,
when Gratian published in 1151 the _Decretum_, a great text-book of
ecclesiastical law.

Amid all the intellectual activity which surrounded the English students
abroad it is, curious to note what they carried home with them across the
Channel, and what they left simply untouched. The zeal for learning
quickly showed itself in the growth of the Universities. As early as 1133
Ro