There is some uncertainty as to the locality, but a sufficient indication to impart an interest to the question. Roscelin says it was at the ‘Locensis ecclesia.’ This is easily understood if we interpret it to mean the monastery of Locmenach[2] in Brittany. The monks of St. Gildas, on the coast of Brittany, a wild band whose closer acquaintance we shall make later on, had established a branch monastery at Locmenach. As will appear in due time, they would be likely to have small scruple about increasing its revenue by erecting a chair for one of the most famous dialecticians in Christendom, in spite of his condemnation for heresy at London and Soissons. We have no special information about the manner of school-life at Locmenach, save that we know the monks of St. Gildas to have been the living antithesis to the good monks of Bec; but it is interesting to find Abélard studying dialectics under a famous rationalist, and in a monastery that was subject to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuys. The dark pages of his later history will give point to the dual circumstance. [2] Locmenach = _locus monachorum_, ‘the place of the monks.’ The older name was Moriacum. It is now called Locminé, and lies a few miles to the east of Vannes. There is one other, and less reliable, account of Abélard in his school-days. In an anecdote which is found in one or two older writers, and on the margin of an old Abélard manuscript, it is stated that he studied mathematics under a certain Master Tirricus. The anecdote is generally rejected as valueless, on the ground that it contains clear trace of the work of a ‘constructive imagination’; but Mr. Poole points out that ‘there is no reason to doubt’ the authenticity of the substance of the narrative, and it seems to me that the fictional element may be reduced to a very slender quantity. The story runs that Tirric, or Theodoric, one day found Abélard shedding tears of fruitless perspiration over mathematical problems. He had already, it is said, mastered the higher branches of knowledge, and was even teaching, but had omitted mathematics, and was endeavouring to remedy the omission by taking private lessons from Tirric. Noting his effort, the master is represented to say: ‘What more can the sated dog do than lick the bacon?’ ‘To lick the bacon’ is, in the crude Latinity of the age, _bajare lardum_, and the story pretends the phrase afforded a nickname for Pierre (Bajolard or Baiolard), and was eventually rounded into Abélard or Abailard. The construction is so crude, and the probability that Abélard is a surname needing no legendary interpretation is so high, that the whole anecdote is often contemptuously rejected. It is surely much more reasonable to read the phrase as a pun on Abélard’s name, which some later writer, to whom the name was unfamiliar, has taken in a constructive sense.[3]