From the point of view of a later age there is doubtless something to be said on the other side. _Disce docendo_ remained perhaps the academic motto, but the learning and the teaching was still under the domination of monasticism, and the monastic scholar, however patient and laborious he might be and certainly was, was also for the most part absolutely uncritical. He cultivated formal logic to perfection; he reasoned from his premise with most admirable subtlety, but he had usually commenced by assuming his premise with unfaltering, because unreasoning, faith. We shall see, however, as we proceed with our history of the collegiate life of the University, in the succeeding centuries, that the critical spirit which gave force to the genius of the great Franciscan teachers, Roger Bacon and Bishop Grosseteste, in resisting the tendencies of their age, which found practical application also in the textual interpretation of Holy Writ in such writings as those of Henry of Costessey, or in the sagacious "Treatise on the Laws and Customs of England"--the oldest of our legal classics--by Ranulf Glanville, or in the "Historia Rerum Anglicanum," of the inquisitive and independent-minded Yorkshire scholar, William of Newburgh, was a factor not to be ignored in the heritage of learning bequeathed by the great men of the thirteenth century to their more enlightened and liberal successors, the theologians, the lawyers, and the historians of the future. There is a mediæval legend of a certain monkish writer, whose tomb was opened twenty years or so after his death, to reveal the fact, that although the remainder of his body had crumbled to dust the hand that had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed. The legend is a parable. Some of the lessons of that parable we may expect to find interpreted in the academic history of Cambridge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. CHAPTER IV THE EARLIEST COLLEGE FOUNDATION: PETERHOUSE "Re unius Exemplo omnium quoquot extant Collegiorum, fundatori."--_Epitaph of Walter de Merton._ The Early Monastic Houses in Cambridge--Student Proselytising by the Friars--The Oxford College of Merton a Protest against this Tendency--The Rule of Merton taken as a Model by Hugh de Balsham, Founder of Peterhouse--The Hospital of S. John--The Scholars of Ely--Domestic Economy of the College--The Dress of the Mediæval Student--Peterhouse Buildings--Little S. Mary's Church--The Perne Library--The College Chapel.