ABSTRACT
Europe had always been a dependent civilization. In Roman times the West relied heavily on oriental capital, both intellectual and economic. The preoccupation of Rome with Germany left the emerging kingdom of France relatively untroubled with political disputes. Many cathedrals in the first millennium were modest structures, all of them depending on wood for part of their construction; even those with stone walls at least had wooden roofs. The cathedral was a magnificent symbol of the changing conditions of European life, indicating the growth of a new corporate consciousness in society. The cathedral schools, or collegiate schools as they were called in those churches which had a chapter but no episcopal seat, were completely ecclesiastical in character. The earliest schools, those of the ninth and tenth centuries, did little more than follow the encyclopedic tradition of Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus and Isidore.
