Reference has more than once been made to the impulse given to learning at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This movement was helped forward by no one in Holland and Germany more than by Gerhard Groote, or Magnus, of Deventer, (_b._ 1326, _d._ 1370), who after studying theology at Paris, became a canon of Utrecht and Aix-la-Chapelle, and founded the Order of the Brethren and Clerks of the Common Life, generally known as the “Gemeineslebens,” or “Frères de la Vie Commune,” but sometimes confounded with the Beghards and Lollhards of an earlier time. The headquarters of the Brotherhood was at Deventer, where a College was built and inhabited by them in the year 1400. Receiving the approval of the Council of Constance, the Order was propagated throughout Holland, Lower Germany, and other provinces. “It was divided into the literary Brethren or Clerks, and the unlearned Brethren, who lived in different houses, but in bonds of the greatest friendship. _The Clerks devoted themselves to transcribing books, the cultivation of polite learning, and the instruction of youth; and they erected schools wherever they went._ The Brethren laboured with their hands, and pursued various mechanic trades. Neither were under the restraint of religious vows; but still they ate at a common table, and had a general community of goods. The Sisters lived in nearly the same manner, and the time which was not employed in prayer and reading, they devoted to education of female children, and to such labours as were suitable for their sex. The schools of these Clerks of the Common Life were very celebrated in this century, and in them were trained nearly all the restorers of polite learning in Germany and Holland; and among others the great Erasmus of Rotterdam, Alexander Hegius, John Murmelius and others.” Thus far Mosheim. Hallam, in his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe,” says, “they were distinguished by their strict lives, their community, at least a partial one, of goods, their industry in manual labour, _their tendency to mysticism_. But they were as strikingly distinguished by the cultivation of knowledge, which was encouraged in brethren of sufficient capacity, and promoted by schools, both for primary and for enlarged education. These schools were, says Eichhorn, ‘the first genuine nurseries of literature in Germany, so far as it depended on the knowledge of languages; and in them was first taught the Latin, and in the process of time the Greek, and Eastern tongues.’ Some of them, such as that of St. Edward’s at Groningen, and the one at Zwoll, presided over by Thomas à Kempis, were of considerable reputation. In the year 1430 they had established as many as forty-five houses in Germany and the Low Countries, and in 1460 they had more than thrice that number. Amongst other occupations, they busied themselves in copying and binding books.”