A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family. Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But here again isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps only two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there was Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the Church, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language in Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, Romance was still one _idioma_--even if it were _trifarium_, according as its 'yes' was _oil_, or _oc_, or _si_.[17] Of the three branches of this _idioma_, that of _oil_, or Northern France, was easily predominant. The Norman conquest of England carried it to London: the Norman conquest of Sicily carried it to Palermo: the Crusades carried it to Jerusalem. With it you might have travelled most of the mediaeval world from end to end. It was the language of courts; it was the language of chansons; it was the language of all lay culture. It was the language of England, France, and Italy; and St. Francis himself had delighted in his youth in the literature which it enshrined.