Before attempting to say anything further it may be as well to call attention to the fact that in the original French edition the writer did not say that there was not a single monk. He said, "There was but one monk, who could read and write." Possibly it seemed to the translator to make the story more complete to leave out this one poor monk and perhaps one monk more or less, especially a medieval monk, may not count for very much to modern students of education. There are those of us, however, who consider it too bad to obliterate even a single monk in this crude way and we ask that he shall be put back. There _was one_ who could read and write and carry on the affairs of the monastery. Let us have him at least, by all means.
In the year 1291 when M. Compayré says that there was but a single monk at the monastery of St. Gall who could read and write, he, a professor himself at a French Normal School, must have known very well that there were over twenty thousand students at the University of Paris, almost as many at the University of Bologna, and over five thousand, some authorities say many more than this (Professor Laurie would admit more than ten thousand), at the University of Oxford, though all Christian Europe at this time did not have a population of more than 15,000,000 people. He must have known, too, or be hopelessly ignorant in educational matters, that many of the students at these universities belonged to the Franciscans and Dominicans, and that indeed many of the greatest teachers at the universities were members of these monastic orders. Of this he says nothing, however. All that he says is "Education was the privilege of the ecclesiastics and they did not carry it very far." This is one way of writing a history of education. It is a very effective way of poisoning the wells of information and securing the persistence of the tradition that there was no education until after the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
Meantime one can scarcely help but admire the ingenuity of deliberate purpose that uses the condition of the monastery of St. Gall to confirm his statement. St. Gall had been founded by Irish monks probably about the beginning of the Eighth Century. It had been for at least three centuries a center of education, civilization and culture, as well as of religion, for the { 69} barbarians who had settled in the Swiss country after the trans-migration of nations. The Irish had originally obtained their culture from Christian Missionaries, and now as Christian Missionaries they brought it back to Europe and accomplished their work with wonderful effectiveness. St. Gall was for centuries a lasting monument to their efforts. After the Tenth Century, however, the monastery began to degenerate. It was almost directly in the path of armies which so frequently went down to Italy because of the German interest in the Italian peninsula and the claims of the German emperor. After a time according to tradition, the emperor insisted that certain of the veterans of his army should be received and cared for in their old age at St. Gall. Gradually this feature of the institution became more and more prominent until in the Thirteenth Century it had become little more than a home for old soldiers. In order to live on the benefices of the monastery these men had to submit to ecclesiastical regulations and wear the habit. They were, it is true, a sort of monk, that is, they were willing, for the sake of the peace and ease which it brought, to accept the living thus provided for them and obey to some degree at least the rules of the monastery. It is not surprising that among these there should have been only one who could read and write. The soldiers of the time despised the men of letters and prided themselves on not being able to write. That a historian of pedagogy, however, should take this one fact in order to give students an idea of the depth of ignorance of the Middle Ages, is an exhibition of some qualities in our modern educated men, that one does not like to think of as compatible with the capacity to read and write. It would indeed be better not to be able to read and write than thus to read and write one's own prejudices into history, and above all the history of education.