[77] Crevier, Hist. de L’Univ. de Paris, vol. i.
[78] Vita Caroli Mon. Engol. an. 787.
[79] Vita S. Greg. Joan. Diac. lib. ii. 7.
[80] Quatuor Evangelia Christi in ultimo ante obitus sui diem, cum Græcis et Syris optime correxerat. (Thegani, Vita Ludovici Pii, printed in Pertz, Mon. Germ. t ii.)
[81] Vita Karoli, Eginhard, cap. 22.
[82] See Patrologie Latine, vols. xcvii. and xcviii.
[83] The interior schools were known as claustral, and the exterior for secular students as canonical. Ekhehard, in his life of B. Notker, is the first who accurately distinguishes the two sorts of schools. “Traduntur post breve tempus Marcello scholæ claustri cum beato Notkero Balbulo et cæteris monachici habitus pueris: exteriores vero, id est canonicæ, Isoni cum Salomone et ejus comparibus.” It is probable however that the law directing a total separation of the scholars under different masters, could not in all cases be carried out as rigidly as at the great abbey of St. Gall’s, where the studium was, in Notker’s time, the first in Europe; and in many monasteries both schools continued to be directed by the same scholasticus.
[84] Præfatio in IV. Sæculum, 184. Trithemius gives the names of sixteen monasteries containing these major schools; Mabillon adds eleven more, and the list might undoubtedly be yet further enlarged.
[85] He probably rested his statement on the petition presented by the Council of Paris in 829 to Louis le Débonnaire, in which they requested him, by his royal authority, to establish public schools in three chief cities of his empire, to the end that the troubles of the times might not quite destroy the good work set on foot by his father. But this was a suggestion and nothing more; the three cities were never named, and are merely spoken of as in tribus congruentissimis imperii vestri locis; and the deposition of Louis, and the civil wars that raged between his sons, effectually prevented the suggestion from being carried out. The academy founded by Charlemagne at Pavia, which was directed by the Irish Dungal, was itself attached to a monastery. This is possibly the school alluded to by Bulæus, but there is certainly nothing in its history which claims for it the least pre-eminence over the monastic schools of France and Germany. The university historians have, in general, greatly misrepresented or misunderstood the character of the monastic schools. Du Boulay talks of the public schools of Charlemagne as if they were Etons or Harrows, and in one place likens them to universities. But, in fact, the term public school meant simply that they were not confined to the use of the monks of that monastery, but were open to all comers. We find in them rather the germ of the collegiate system, which was in some sense the counterpoise of the university idea. But Bulæus and Du Boulay always write with Paris University in their mind as the normal principle of education. They seem unable to conceive of any institution for teaching which was not either its copy or its anticipation.
[86] Mab. Vet. Analecta, i. 357.