Hallam, “that with the monkish historians a knowledge of music passed for literature. The same writer calls Geoffrey Plantagenet _optime literatus_, which perhaps imports little more learning than was possessed by his ancestor, Fulk.”[103] The monkish biographer here alluded to meant nothing of the kind, but he knew, as both Fulk and Louis also knew, that at that time a knowledge of music might be taken as a tolerably satisfactory token that the musician had studied at one of the higher schools, and completed the full course of the quadrivium. And such, indeed, was the case with Fulk, who, as the same biographer tells us a few pages further on, was well read in Cicero and Aristotle. A methodical idea of the system of education which prevailed in the higher monastic schools, is given in a little manual called the “Doctrinale Puerorum,” the authority of which is beyond dispute. Though the production of the twelfth century, so little change took place in the system of studies from the time of Charlemagne to that of Lanfranc that it may be taken as equally descriptive of the method followed in the ninth and tenth. According to the writer of this manual a child as soon as he had learnt to read and write, set to work on the Latin Grammar of Donatus or Priscian, if he were so fortunate as to be able to provide himself with a book. The larger number of pupils probably had to depend on the oral instructions dictated by their master, and their own notes of his lessons. We know for certain that not only grammar, but rhetoric and the explanation of classic authors were taught orally, rules and examples being thus dictated and learnt by frequent repetition. From their ninth to their twelfth year the boys studied elementary Latin books, specially the Fables of Esop, and the poems of Christian authors, such as Theodulus, who, in the tenth century, wrote in verse the miracles of the Old and New Testaments, with the view of providing young children with suitable class-books. The _Distichia Moralia_, commonly attributed to Cato, a very old class-book, was probably the authorship of some Christian writer of the seventh century; and has found a home even in the Eastern languages. As the boys advanced in years, select portions from the works of Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, Persius, and Horace, but specially of Lucan and Statius were placed in their hands, explained and committed to memory, and these were followed by Cicero, Quinctilian, and the Latin version of Aristotle.[104]