The people of that little village on the banks of the Isar were but the owners and tillers of the barren soil. Nearly a century (1238) after Henry the Lion had surrounded it with walls, and a local magistracy had been chosen; when two parishes--those of St. Peter and St. Mary--had been already long established, we find a schoolmaster signing, doubtless by virtue of his office, a certificate of the freedom of a certain monastery from the city customs. That the school teacher must, _ex officio_, sign such papers, spoke volumes. How few could have had the learning, for it must indeed be done in Latin. And then the history of the city runs nearly a century back of this date. What was the burgher life of that first century of Munich's history? It is but the faintest echo that answers. Schools there were at that day and long before. Nay, the cloister schools were already in decay; but more than three hundred years were yet to elapse before the rise of the Jesuit schools. Three hundred years! How can we, of this age of steam, estimate what was slowly revolving in society in those years? In 1271 we find an order of the bishop of Freising requiring the parish rector to have a school in each parish of the city; half a century later than this we meet documentary evidence that school teaching had assumed a rank with other worldly occupations, and was no longer subject to the rector of the parish. If I could but set the reader down in a school room of that day, I might forego any attempt to portray the times; but, alas! I cannot. He would, however, doubtless see there groups of boys--for I half suspect that this was before girls had generally developed the capability of learning--the faces and garments clean or smutty, showing the grade of social progress which had been gained, for we may presume that the use of soap and water had been to some extent introduced, and if so, I have erred again, for the dirty and the ragged did not go to school. These could do without education. We should see, too, the beaming or the dull and leaden eye--if, indeed, the eye spoke then as now--proclaiming the master's success or failure. And then the schoolmaster, the chief figure in the group, would be found to have the _otium cum dignitate_, and especially the former, in a higher sense than is now known. And what was the staple information which circulated among the people? Of this we know more. It was made up of adventures of knights, miracles wrought by the host, by crucifixes and Madonnas, and apparitions of saints, leading some emperor or prince to found a church or monastery--a kind of history which few churches or other religious institutions want. If there was less of life in the humanity of that age than we have at present, there was as much more in other things; for even those holy pictures and statues could move their eyes and other parts. They found various ways of expressing approbation of the pious, and frowning upon scoffers.