According to his own account, ‘not willing to hide his candle under a bushel, but to place it on a candlestick, that it might give light to all, he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and famous of the English clergy were at that time to be found.’ These recitations lasted three successive days, and the lecturer has left it on record that he feasted not only ‘all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their pupils as were of fame and note,’ but ‘the rest of the scholars,’ with many burgesses and even the poor of the city. Whether or not the schools thus frequented at Oxford were mainly founded by the Benedictines, as has been maintained, and whether or not they were mainly conducted by teachers from Paris, they assuredly existed, and constituted an University in all but the name. [Sidenote: Connection of Oxford with the University of Paris] It is no longer doubtful that, in their earliest stage, the schools of Oxford owed much to those of Paris, then in a far more advanced state of development, though not formally incorporated into an ‘University’ until early in the thirteenth century. William of Champeaux had opened a school of logic at Paris so far back as 1109. His pupil, Abelard, followed him; and the fame of Abelard himself was far surpassed by that of Peter Lombard, whose text-book of ‘Sentences’ became the philosophical Bible of the Middle Ages. Students flocked in from all parts of Europe; lectures multiplied, not only in one faculty, as at Bologna or Salerno, but in every branch of mediæval study, especially in those comprised under ‘Arts;’ a system of exercises, degrees, academical discipline, and even college life, was gradually matured; and when Philip Augustus gave the new academical guild his royal approval, it was already in a condition of vigorous activity. In this sense, the growth of the University of Paris was spontaneous. Like that of Oxford, it was originally nothing but an association of teachers united by mutual interest; but, like all mediæval institutions, it grew up under Church authority. It had originally sprung from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame; the ecclesiastical chancellor of Paris claimed a paramount jurisdiction over it, which, however, was constantly resisted by the University, not without support from the Court of Rome; and the validity of its highest degrees was derived from the sanction of the Pope himself. Considering the links which bound England to France, through Normandy and her other French provinces, as well as the intellectual ascendency of Paris over Western Europe, it is natural that Oxford should have borrowed many features of her internal regulations from this source, though it cannot be affirmed with certainty that she did so. The presumption is strongly confirmed by the undoubted fact that the ‘English nation’ was one of the four ‘nations’ into which the students of Paris were divided, the Normans forming another distinct nation by themselves.