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061 - 30 The Great Schools · Short History of the Christian Church

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  Speaker 1: Part two, Chapter thirty of Short History of the Christian
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  Speaker 1: Church by John Fletcher Hurst. This LibriVox recording is in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain, Chapter thirty The Great Schools. The decline
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  Speaker 1: after Alfred and Charlemagne was very marked. The latter established
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  Speaker 1: fifty great schools throughout his dominions. Alfred organized Oxford and
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  Speaker 1: spared no pains to make it the center of Anglo
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  Speaker 1: Saxon thought. He enriched the foundations by securing from the
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  Speaker 1: continent the best possible teachers and the richest literary treasures.
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  Speaker 1: But schools suffered a fearful decline throughout the tenth century.
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  Speaker 1: With the eleventh century, however, there came a revival of
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  Speaker 1: literary taste, which continued until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
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  Speaker 1: Some of the monastic schools now assumed larger proportions and became,
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  Speaker 1: like Paris and Oxford, full fledged universities. But the most
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  Speaker 1: of the universities seemed to have taken their origin independently
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  Speaker 1: of both church and state. They were the popular creation
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  Speaker 1: of a taste for learning. Great teachers appeared in certain cities,
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  Speaker 1: and their fame attracted students from every quarter and even
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  Speaker 1: distant countries. The teachers and the students were united by
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  Speaker 1: a common bond. Universitas magisterorum at Scolarum, or the community
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  Speaker 1: of masters and pupils, became the origin of the general
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  Speaker 1: word university. At first, each great school was distinguished for
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  Speaker 1: its devotion to one science, as theology at Paris and Oxford,
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  Speaker 1: law at Bologna, and medicine at Salerno. In time, the
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  Speaker 1: university divided into four great faculties of theology, law, medicine
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  Speaker 1: and philosophy. This division arose first in Paris, where the
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  Speaker 1: Mendicant orders were proscribed by the other teachers in the
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  Speaker 1: university and constituted themselves a separate faculty. This division in
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  Speaker 1: the faculties tended to increase the attendance of students, so
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  Speaker 1: great was the number that they constituted an important part
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  Speaker 1: of the population. The number ranged from ten thousand to
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  Speaker 1: twenty thousand. In some of the universities, they were divided
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  Speaker 1: not according to the studies which they pursued, but the
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  Speaker 1: nationalities which they represented and were called nations. Traces of
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  Speaker 1: this medieval division into nations and languages can be seen
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  Speaker 1: in the present German universities, especially the more provincial where
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  Speaker 1: some of the clubs of students bear the names of
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  Speaker 1: the old tribal divisions. End of Chapter thirty