If the impulse toward religious reform in Normandy was of Burgundian origin, intellectual stimulus came chiefly from Italy. The two principal figures in the intellectual life of the duchy in the eleventh century, Lanfranc and Anselm, were Italians: Lanfranc distinguished for his mastery of law, Lombard, Roman, and canon, for the great school which he founded at Bec, and for his labors in the field of ecclesiastical statesmanship; Anselm his pupil and his successor as prior of Bec and as archbishop of Canterbury, remarkable as a teacher, still more remarkable as one of the foremost theologians of the Western Church. “Under the first six dukes,” we are told, “there was hardly any one in Normandy who gave himself to liberal studies, and there was no master till God, who provides for all, sent Lanfranc to these shores.” Teaching first at Avranches, Lanfranc established himself at Bec in 1042, and his school soon drew students from the remotest parts of France and sent them out in all directions to positions of honor and influence. Abbots like Gilbert Crispin of Westminster, bishops like St. Ives of Chartres, primates of Rouen and Canterbury, even a pope in the person of Alexander II, figure on the long honor-roll of Lanfranc’s pupils at Bec. For an institution of such renown, however, we know singularly little concerning the actual course and methods of study at Bec, and its historian is compelled to fall back upon a general description of the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ which made up the ordinary monastic curriculum. We do not even know whether Lanfranc actually taught the subject of law of which he was past master, though we can be sure that theology and philosophy had a large place under Anselm, and that the school must have felt the influence of the large part which its leaders took in the theological discussions of their time. An important form of activity in the monasteries of the period was the copying of manuscripts, a sure safeguard against that idleness which St. Benedict declared the enemy of the soul. Lanfranc sat up a good part of the night correcting the daily copies of the monks of Bec; the first abbot of Saint-Évroul had an edifying tale of an erring brother who had secured his salvation by voluntarily copying a holy book of such dimensions that the angels who produced it on his behalf at the judgment were able to check it off letter by letter against his sins and leave at the end a single letter in his favor! The monks of Saint-Évroul prided themselves on their Latin style, especially their Latin verse, and on their chants which were sung even in distant Calabria; yet the best example of their training, the historian Ordericus, freely admits the literary supremacy of Bec, “where almost every one seems to be a philosopher and even the unlearned have something to teach the frothy grammarians.”