This prodigious
mental and spiritual activity was largely fostered by the schools,
colleges and universities that had suddenly appeared all over
Europe. Never was such activity along educational lines. Almost
every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as
for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of
Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students
poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many
thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries
were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would
choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even
subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live
up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. As
there was not only one religion and one social system, but one
universal language as well, this gathering from all the four
quarters of Europe was perfectly possible, and had much to do with
the maintenance of that unity which marked society for three centuries.
At the time of Abelard the schools of Chartres and Paris were at
the height of their fame and power. Fulbert, Bernard and Thierry,
all of Chartres, had fixed its fame for a long period, and at Paris
Hugh and Richard of St.
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