ABSTRACT
From the middle of the eleventh century onwards the most important fact in Church history is the independence of the Papacy and its development of the monarchical organisation of the Church. Education was entirely in the hands of the Church, and designed for the training of ecclesiastics; to be a scholar, one must be a clerk and receive the tonsure. The main subjects of study were still the Seven Liberal Arts of the trivium and quadrivium, for which Boethius and Cassiodorus in the fifth century and Isidore in the sixth had written text-books which were still used. John of Salisbury had shown the right direction, and it would have been well if his contemporaries could have followed in his footsteps. But his temperance of judgment found few imitators. When the Papacy was itself reformed and seeking to make real its headship of the Church, it naturally was interested in the legal basis of its authority.
