bert Pulleyn was teaching Latin at Oxford. In 1149 Archbishop Theobald
brought to it Master Vacarius, a famous Lombard lawyer, who lectured on
the Civil law until he was expelled by Stephen, half fearful of the new
teaching and half influenced by the pressure of the older and more
conservative of the English bishops. There was much of the foreign
movement, however, which found no place in England. Difference of tongue
shut out Norman and Englishman from the influence of the new Provencal
poetry, and for a century to come England owed nothing to the finished
art of the South. The strip of sea which kept aloof all European tumults
shut out also the speculations in politics and government which were
making their way abroad. Even the religious movement which overran one
half of France under the Albigenses, or that which counted its followers
and martyrs by multitudes in Flanders never crossed the Channel, in spite
of the constant intercourse between the peoples; and missionaries from
Germany during the reign of Henry only succeeded in converting one poor
woman in England who immediately recanted. It was in other directions
that the energies of the people found their exercise. If Englishmen were
heedless of foreign philosophers, they were quick to notice that the
fruit of the vine had failed, and forthwith the unheard-of novelty of
taverns where beer and mead were sold sprang up in France, probably by
the help of those English traders whose beer was the marvel of Frenchmen.

It was these new conditions of the national life which constituted the
real problem of government--a problem far more slow and difficult to work
out than the mere suppression of a turbulent baronage. In the rapid
movement towards material prosperity, the energies of the people were in
all directions breaking away from the channels and limits in which they
had been so long confined. Rules which had been sufficient for the
guidance of a simple society began to break down under the new fullness
and complexity of the national life, and the simple decisions by which
questions of property and public order had been solved in earlier times
were no longer possible. Moreover, a new confusion and uncertainty had
been brought into the law in the last hundred years by the effort to fuse
together Norman and English custom. Norman landlord or Norman sheriff
naturally knew little of English law or custom, and his tendency was
always to enforce the feudal rules which he pr