It can scarcely fail to be a matter of supreme surprise to find that a century so distant as the Thirteenth, should thus equal our own vaunted Twentieth Century in the matter of opportunities for the higher education afforded and taken advantage of. It has always been presumed that the Middle Ages, while a little better than the Dark Ages, were typical periods in which there was little, if any desire for higher education and even fewer opportunities. It was thought that there was constant repression of the desire for knowledge which springs so eternally in the human heart and that the Church, or at least the ecclesiastical authorities of the time, set themselves firmly against widespread education, because it would set people to thinking for themselves. As a matter of fact, however, every Cathedral and every monastery became a center of educational influence, and even the poorest, who showed special signs of talent, obtained the opportunity to secure knowledge to the degree that they wished. It is beyond doubt or cavil, that at no time in the world's history have so many opportunities for the higher education been open to all classes as during the Thirteenth Century. In order to show how thoroughly conservative are the numbers in attendance at the universities that I have taken, I shall quote two good recent authorities, one of them Professor Laurie, the Professor of the Institutes and History of Education in the University of Edinburgh, and the other Thomas Davidson, a well-known American authority on educational {63} subjects. Each of their works from which I shall quote has been published or revised within the last few years. Professor Laurie in "The Rise and Early Constitution of the University with a Survey of the Medieval Education," which formed one of the International Educational Series, edited by Commissioner Harris and published by Appleton, said: "When one hears of the large number of students who attended the earliest universities--ten thousand and even twenty thousand at Bologna, an equal, and at one time a greater, number at Paris, and thirty thousand at Oxford--one cannot help thinking that the numbers have been exaggerated. There is certainly evidence that the Oxford attendance was never so great as has been alleged (see Anstey's 'Mon Acad.'); but when we consider that attendants, servitors, college cooks, etc., were regarded as members of the university community, and that the universities provided for a time the sole recognized training grounds for those wishing to enter the ecclesiastical or legal or teaching professions, I see no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of the tradition as to attendance--especially when we remember that at Paris and Oxford a large number were mere boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age."