ABSTRACT
The number of schools and scholars grew in the twelfth century so rapidly that by its close the schools had become institutions, were crystallising as schools and universities, with a pattern of syllabuses and degrees. Cathedrals had been the traditional centres of teaching; many monasteries, too, had large libraries and schools for their own child-monks; a few had schools to which outsiders came. From late Roman times until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberal arts' reigned as the basic studies of any curriculum; with the vocational studies, theology, law, and medicine, as higher subjects to which the men trained in arts' should then go on. Grammar, which included a basic knowledge of literature, rhetoric and logic, formed the solid base of education. Gratian's Decretum, the Concord of Discordant Canons, was to prove uniquely successful both as a textbook of canon law and as a corpus of its sources and authorities.
