Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/99

 canon law—and that the Church, without venturing or attempting to confine legal studies to her own decretals, still looked with suspicion on every other kind of law? Indeed this is no mere supposition; the study of civil law was long forbidden in the University of Paris, and even at Oxford the clerical authorities resisted it when it was introduced by Vacarius from Bologna in the reign of Stephen. However it may have been with the civil law, it is certain that the common law of England and the national customs and precedents of other countries were held up as correctives of the ex cathedra deliverances of the Papacy, and that their study was encouraged by perspicacious men in order to counteract the teachings of Rome in the interests of the State. The jurisprudents of Paris, as distinct from the canonists, were very serviceable to Philip the Fair in his quarrel with Boniface; and so it was with the independent lawyers in other countries. The very infatuation of the Roman usurpers helped to prepare their own defeat.

For our present purpose, however, the main thing is to observe that the most liberal-minded clerics of the eleventh and three following centuries, regulars as well as seculars, who were found principally in the schools and universities, take their place in the ranks of the Schoolmen, and link hand to hand across the later Middle Ages. They carry us forward from Roscelin, the leader of the Nominalists, through Anselm, Abelard, Peter Lombard, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Michael of Cesena and other Franciscans, Marsiglio, Bradwardine, and William of Ockham, to