chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here
to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized
administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the
foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to
illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive
reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle
Ages.

* * * * *

It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this
we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle
Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider
the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle
Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr.
Rashdall's great work on _The Universities of Europe in the Middle
Ages_, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the
history and character of the intellectual movement which the
Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and
discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which
are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the
intellectual movements of the twelfth century.

The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of
the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine,
but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the
desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy
centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had
little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little
decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century
the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization,
and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a
moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the
Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and
bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy
and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German
emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and
England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end
of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being
done, and men h