In the cities of Northern Italy the dying out of the old Roman schools, as a result of internal decay and the inroads of the Teutonic barbarians, was not followed by the complete extinction of the race of lay teachers, and here, and throughout southern Europe generally, education therefore never became exclusively ecclesiastical; but in transalpine Europe, from the sixth till the twelfth century, the Benedictine monasteries were the chief if not the only seats of learning, and education was almost wholly in the hands of monks of that order. There were schools attached to the cathedrals, also, but they drew their teachers from the monasteries and seldom rose to more than local importance until in the course of the twelfth century intellectual activity was gradually transferred to them and they became the germ out of which the universities of the Middle Ages developed. The reform legislation of Charles the Great fixed this intimate relation between the Church and education by requiring that every monastery and every cathedral throughout his broad empire should have its school. The origin of these institutions is to be found in the need of educated ecclesiastics, and the earliest scholars were candidates for admission to the Benedictine order, or for the priesthood; but about the beginning of the ninth century “exterior schools” began to be added, open to boys who were intended for secular callings.

The course of study, intended to prepare the way for a proper understanding of the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers, was everywhere limited to the so-called seven liberal arts. These included the fundamental trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic—and the less important quadrivium—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It was the world to come for which men were trained; theological doctrines and religious interests absorbed human thought, and the present world was deemed unworthy of attention. So long as the spirit of asceticism remained in the ascendant there could be no such thing as physical training in schools conducted by the Church. The soul was the one object of solicitude, and the body was regarded with contempt. Uncleanliness and physical neglect were not incompatible with intellectual eminence. The monastic discipline in all its severity was an essential part of school life. Other forms of punishment were common, but the rod was the favorite instrument; it was used on the least occasion, and sometimes periodically, “as a kind of general atonement for sins past and possible.” Even the humane Alcuin, Master of Charles the Great’s Palace School at Aix (782-796), would have a separate master for every class “that the boys may not run about in idleness or occupy themselves in silly play.” Their lessons were to furnish them all the play and diversion needed.