CATHEDRAL AND HIGHER MONASTIC SCHOOLS. As the song schools developed the cathedral schools were of course freed from the necessity of teaching reading and writing, and could then develop more advanced instruction. This they did, as did many of the monasteries, and to these advanced schools those who felt the need for more training went. As grammar was, throughout all the early part of the Middle Ages, the first and most important subject of instruction, the advanced schools came to be known as _grammar schools_, as well as cathedral or episcopal schools (R. 72). The cathedral churches and monasteries of England and France early became celebrated for the high character of their instruction (R. 71) and the type of scholars they produced. All these schools, though, suffered a serious set-back during the period of the Danish and Norman invasions, many being totally destroyed. On the continent, due to the greater deluge of barbarism and the more unsettled condition of society, more difficulty was experienced in getting cathedral schools established, as the following decree of the Lateran Church Council of 826 indicates:
Complaints have been made that in some places no masters nor endowment for a grammar school is found. Therefore all bishops shall bestow all care and diligence, both for their subjects and for other places in which it shall be found necessary, to establish masters and teachers who shall assiduously teach grammar schools and the principles of the liberal arts, because in these chiefly the commandments of God are manifest and declared.
These two types of advanced schools--the cathedral or episcopal and the monastic--formed what might be called the secondary-school system of the early Middle Ages (Rs. 70, 71). They were for at least six hundred years the only advanced teaching institutions in western Europe, and out of one or the other of these two types of advanced schools came practically all those who attained to leadership in the service of the Church in either of its two great branches. Still more, out of the impetus given to advanced study by the more important of these schools, the universities of a later period developed; and numerous private gifts of lands and money were made to establish grammar schools to supplement the work done by the cathedral and other large church schools.