Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/91

Rh taught, and suffered accordingly. The clergy who were educated in the Italian rhetorical schools formed the purely secular portion of their order, and led it into more grievous disrepute. If the training of the scholastic was associated with the function of the clerical politician, the union was but external: by the assumption of literary arms the church as a religious body lost more than it gained.

It is moreover significant that the schools of Italy preserved a tradition of Roman law possibly uninterrupted from ancient times. The special law-school of Pavia dates from the tenth century, and early the eleventh the study of law is spoken of in a way that gives the impression of its being a long-established institution in the ordinary schools. Milo Crispin records that Lanfranc, the famous archbishop of Canterbury, was trained from boyhood in the schools of liberal arts and civil law, after the custom of his country;—in scholis liberalium artium et legum saecularium ad suae morem patriae. Other circumstances too make it highly probable that law formed a regular subject of instruction in many schools from a much earlier period. It would obviously engage the attention of those churchmen who promised themselves a future of political activity. The principles of Roman law would combine themselves with their theological ideas, and it is difficult not to trace in this connexion one of the opportunities through which, in the judgement of competent lawyers, the phraseology and argumentative methods of the old jurisprudence were enabled to penetrate the theology of western Christendom.

In the north, as we have said, the state of the clergy was different. They had their professional colleges in