THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY              127

who had them easily found a place in the churches,
tribunals, and in the schools.

The University of Paris was, in the thirteenth cen-
tury, the largest school in Europe. More than twenty
thousand students came there from all countries. It
has given to Europe the outline of superior instruction.
The English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have
been copied from it; and when the German princes
wanted to have schools in their states, all founded
universities after the model of that in Paris. From it
has come the system of grades and the division into
faculties which exists intact in Germany.1

The Roman Law*—The Italians had never ceased to
apply the Roman law. In the eleventh century they
began again to make a study of the works of Justinian.2
The professors and the scholars gathered at Bologna;
there were ten thousand of them. For two centuries
they labored to explain the books of the Roman law,
commenting on them line by line; their commentaries
formed a glossary upon which other jurists of the
thirteenth century based all their new commentaries.

In France, only the provinces of the South, as far as
Auvergne, used the Roman law. The North followed
custom; the parlement of Paris judged according
to custom. But the Roman law had a great advan-
tage over custom: it was the only written law, the

1 In Germany the faculty of the arts has taken the name of
Faculty of Philosophy; in France it was divided by Napoleon
I. into two parts, Faculty of Letters, and Faculty of Sciences.

5 It has been often said that the Roman law had been com-
pletely forgotten, when in 1135 the inhabitant^ of Pisa brought
back maanuscript of the Pandects after the pillage of Amalfu
The only true clement in this legend is that there was at Pisa a
greatly venerated manuscript of the Pandects,