teaching institutions. By the twelfth century they had been completely
superseded as important teaching centers by the rapidly developing
cathedral schools. To these more important cathedral schools students now
came from long distances to study under some noted teacher. Says McCabe:
[11]

The scholastic fever which was soon to influence the youth of Europe,
had already set in. You could not travel far over the rough roads of
France without meeting some footsore scholar, making for the nearest
large monastery or cathedral town. Robbers, frequently in the service
of the lord of the land, infested every province. It was safest to don
the coarse frieze tunic of the pilgrim, without pockets, sling your
little wax tablets and stylus at your girdle, strap a wallet of bread
and herbs and salt on your back, and laugh at the nervous folk who
peeped out from their coaches over a hedge of pikes and daggers. Few
monasteries refused a meal or a rough bed to the wandering scholar.
Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given.

The cathedral school in connection with the church of Notre Dame [12]
became especially famous for its teachers of the Liberal Arts
(particularly Dialectic) and of Theology, and to this school, just as the
eleventh century was drawing to a close, came a youth, then barely twenty
years of age, who is generally regarded as having been the keenest scholar
of the twelfth century. His brilliant intellect soon enabled him to refute
the instruction of his teachers and to vanquish them in debate. His name
was Abelard. Before long he himself became a teacher of Grammar and Logic
at Paris, and later of Theology, and, so widely had he read, so clearly
did he appeal to the reason of his hearers, and so incisive was his
teaching, that he attracted large numbers of students to his lectures. To
assist in his teaching of Theology he prepared a little textbook, _Sic et