A Guide to the History of Physical Education

MONASTERY AND CATHEDRAL SCHOOLS.

In the cities of Northern Italy the dying out of the old Roman schools, as a result of internal decay and the inroads of the Teutonic barbarians, was not followed by the complete extinction of the race of lay teachers, and here, and throughout southern Europe generally, education therefore never became exclusively ecclesiastical; but in transalpine Europe, from the sixth till the twelfth century, the Benedictine monasteries were the chief if not the only seats of learning, and education was almost wholly in the hands of monks of that order. There were schools attached to the cathedrals, also, but they drew their teachers from the monasteries and seldom rose to more than local importance until in the course of the twelfth century intellectual activity was gradually transferred to them and they became the germ out of which the universities of the Middle Ages developed. The reform legislation of Charles the Great fixed this intimate relation between the Church and education by requiring that every monastery and every cathedral throughout his broad empire should have its school. The origin of these institutions is to be found in the need of educated ecclesiastics, and the earliest scholars were candidates for admission to the Benedictine order, or for the priesthood; but about the beginning of the ninth century "exterior schools" began to be added, open to boys who were intended for secular callings.