It is only with the time of Charlemagne that we can begin to talk of Folk's-education and Folk's-schools. Besides the Scola Palatii, founded by him, and which was placed under the management of his friend Alcuin, he also originated and promoted in the convents the idea of a female education. He and Alfred of England are the true founders of village and country schools. National education owes to them an improvement the most excellent and rich with blessings; alas! that the age was not ripe enough to give a ready hand of co-operation to these noble reformers. Before this time, ay, from the very promulgation of the Christian religion, the priests had striven incessantly to monopolise the instruction of the people, and to throw it entirely into the hands of their order; a fact most prominently testified by the catechetical schools of the second and third centuries, the later episcopal and cathedral schools, and, after the sixth century, those most influential cloister schools. And as it had thus been their constant policy to secure the absolute possession and direction of popular instruction, this became the case again, after the death of these noble monarchs, when every thing had fallen once more into the old track, and these very institutions, which they had planned and founded, became still more effectual tools in their hands. What might and would result from such a predominating hierarchical tendency, experience has taught us. The selfish interests of a form of religion, degraded to the most crafty state-policy, were made the motives for keeping mankind in darkness. The understanding was oppressed by the diffusion of superstition; and under the hypocritical cloak of sanctity, beneath which the most unhallowed fanaticism concealed itself, the priesthood compelled humanity to wander on in blindness and error. The reforms of Charlemagne were as good as forgotten, and the proper Folk's-schools were swallowed up in the darkness of the Middle Ages. What was done in course of time through the exertions of such men as the Emperor Frederick I. took the direction of the high educational institutions, and wholly concerned the universities, which had for a long period been striving to make themselves independent, and, in fact, were so. In the fourteenth century a ruddy streak of dawn showed itself, which though but faintly pervading the darkness, yet at a later period harbingered the sun. Gerhardus Magnus first spoke out the idea of a free education with perspicuity. In 1379 he founded an educational institution at Deventer, in this spirit, and thereby led to the creation of similar institutions in the Netherlands, on the Rhine, and in North Germany. Montaigne, Bacon, and Lord Verulam, were powerful advocates of this idea, which, being only more and more stimulated by the reaction-system of the hierarchy, lead to the epoch of the fifteenth century.