In northern Europe the origin of universities must be sought at Paris, in the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. By the beginning of the twelfth century in France and the Low Countries learning was no longer confined to monasteries but had its most active centres in the schools attached to cathedrals, of which the most famous were those of Liège, Rheims, Laon, Paris, Orleans, and Chartres. The most notable of these schools of the liberal arts was probably Chartres, distinguished by a canonist like St. Ives and by famous teachers of classics and philosophy like Bernard and Thierry. As early as 991 a monk of Rheims, Richer, describes the hardships of his journey to Chartres in order to study the _Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates of Cos; while from the twelfth century John of Salisbury, the leading northern humanist of the age, has left us an account of the masters which we shall later have occasion to cite. Nowhere else today can we drop back more easily into a cathedral city of the twelfth century, the peaceful town still dominated by its church and sharing, now as then, the minster’s vast repose. Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff Left inland by the ocean’s slow retreat, ... patiently remote From the great tides of life it breasted once, Hearing the noise of men as in a dream. By the time the cathedral stood complete, with its “dedicated shapes of saints and kings,” it had ceased to be an intellectual centre of the first importance, over-shadowed by Paris fifty-odd miles away, so that Chartres never became a university.