At five or six o’clock each morning the great cathedral bell would ring out the summons to work. From the neighbouring houses of the canons, from the cottages of the townsfolk, from the taverns, and hospices, and boarding-houses, the stream of the industrious would pour into the enclosure beside the cathedral. The master’s beadle, who levied a precarious tax on the mob, would strew the floor of the lecture-hall with hay or straw, according to the season, bring the Master’s text-book, with the notes of the lecture between lines or on the margin, to the solitary desk, and then retire to secure silence in the adjoining street. Sitting on their haunches in the hay, the right knee raised to serve as a desk for the waxed tablets, the scholars would take notes during the long hours of lecture (about six or seven), then hurry home—if they were industrious—to commit them to parchment while the light lasted. The lectures over, the stream would flow back over the Little Bridge, filling the taverns and hospices, and pouring out over the great playing meadow, that stretched from the island to the present Champ de Mars. All the games of Europe were exhibited on that international playground: running, jumping, wrestling, hurling, fishing and swimming in the Seine, tossing and thumping the inflated ball—a game on which some minor poet of the day has left us an enthusiastic lyric—and especially the great game of war, in its earlier and less civilised form. The nations were not yet systematically grouped, and long and frequent were the dangerous conflicts. The undergraduate mind, though degrees had not yet been invented, had drawn up an estimate, pithy, pointed, and not flattering, of each nationality. The English were, it is sad to find, ‘cowardly and drunken,’—to the ‘Anglophobes’; the French were ‘proud and effeminate’; the Normans ‘charlatans and boasters,’ the Burgundians ‘brutal and stupid’; the Bretons ‘fickle and extravagant’; the Flemings ‘blood-thirsty, thievish, and incendiary’; the Germans ‘choleric, gluttonous, and dirty’; the Lombards ‘covetous, malicious, and no fighters’; the Romans ‘seditious, violent, and slanderous.’ Once those war-cries were raised, peaceable folk hied them to their homes and hovels, and the governor summoned his guards and archers.