So, in the middle ages, we had the ecclesiastical competing with the baronial interests, and the burghal or corporate with both. Nay, in these last there was a subdivision of interests, various corporations of craftsmen being subject to the authority of their own syndics, deans, or mayors, and entitled to free themselves from any interference in many of their affairs by the burghal or even the royal courts. Ecclesiastical law fought with civil law, and chancery carried on a ceaseless undermining contest with common law; while over Europe there were inexhaustible varieties of palatinates, margravates, regalities, and the like, enjoying their own separate privileges and systems of jurisprudence. But over this Babel of authorities, so complexly established in France that Voltaire complained of changing laws as often as he changed horses, what is conspicuous is the homage paid by all the other exclusive privileges to those of the universities, and the separation of these grand institutions by an impassable line of venerated privileges from the rest of the vulgar world. Thus, the State conceded freely to literature those high privileges for which the Church in vain contended, from the slaughter of Becket to the fall of Wolsey. In a very few only of the States nearest to the centre of spiritual dominion, could an exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction extending to matters both spiritual and temporal be asserted; and France, which acknowledged the isolated authority of the universities, bade a stern defiance to the claims of the priesthood. It can hardly be said that, invested with these high powers, the universities bore their honours meekly. Respected as they were, they were felt to be invariably a serious element of turbulence, and a source of instability to their respective governments. In the affairs of the League, the Fronde, and the various other contests which, in former days, as in the present, have kept up a perpetual succession of conflicts in turbulent Paris, the position to be taken by the students was extremely momentous, but was not easily to be calculated upon; for these gentry imbibed a great amount both of restlessness and capriciousness along with their cherished prerogatives. During the centuries in which a common spirit pervaded the whole academic body, the fame of a particular university, or of some celebrated teacher in it, had a concentrating action over the whole civilised world, which drew a certain proportion of the youth of all Europe towards the common vortex. Hence, when we know that there were frequently assembled from one to ten thousand young men, adventurous and high-spirited, contemptuous of the condition of the ordinary citizen, and bound together by common objects and high exclusive privileges—well armed, and in possession of edifices fortified according to the method of the day—we hardly require to read history to believe how formidable such bodies must have proved.