Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/94

 usurpation of Rome, and of the conflict excited by it up to the beginning of the fourteenth century; but it will be interesting to ascertain the exact position of Wyclif in the intellectual revolt against the obscurantism of the mediaeval Church. It would be useless to ask ourselves when and where this revolt actually began. The mind and the heart of man appear to have acted on virtually identical principles in all ages, and no doubt the first religious Reformers were contemporaneous with the first obscurers of truth and usurpers of authority. But from the eleventh century, to take no earlier date, the ever extending claims of the Papacy are associated with the protests of active and inquiring minds. It is clear that the worst errors of Rome corresponded in time with the feudal supremacies in the States, as their refutation corresponded with the establishment of schools and universities.

The schools of Charles the Great, Alfred, and Edward the Confessor were largely developed and frequented under Norman rule. They were, to begin with, under the patronage of the monarchs rather than of the Church; they taught not only theology but also law and medicine, as well as the trivium and quadrivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric; music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy); and they constituted at once a nursery and a refuge of minds which sought intellectual and moral freedom. Already in the twelfth century we find Oxford attracting her three thousand students, and Paris divided into her four nations of France, Picardy, Normandy, and England; whilst in the next century