While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day. Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years ...” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.