We have already named Fulda, the glorious monastic centre where the monk Sturm established the Benedictine rule in 744, and where, before his death, 400 monks sang daily the praises of God, and good scholars were trained to intellectual warfare in the name of faith. In 802, "mindful of its great origin, it was one of the first to enter heartily into the revival of letters instituted by Charlemagne," and sent the monks Hatto and Rabanus to study under Alcuin. We find a most graphic description of the daily routine of this great school in _Christian Schools and Scholars_. It so well illustrates the common life of the middle ages that we do not hesitate to give it at some length: "The German nobles gladly entrusted their sons to Rabanus' care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and patience. At his lectures every one was trained to write equally well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy.... The school of Fulda had inherited the fullest share of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual activity which we have already seen working in the foundations of S. Benedict Biscop. Every variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks.... Within doors the visitor might have beheld a huge range of workshops, in which cunning hands were kept constantly busy on every description of useful and ornamental work in wood, stone, and metal.... Passing on to the interior of the building, the stranger would have been introduced to the scriptorium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good books, _and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes_. Not far from the scriptorium was the interior school ... where our visitor, were he from the more civilized South, might well have stood in mute surprise in the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil or Cicero, and that with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother-professors accuse him in good-natured jesting of ranking them with the saints. Elsewhere disputations are being carried on over the _Categories_ of Aristotle, and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers of Europe into the rival sects of Nominalists and Realists, is perfectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not altogether wedded to the study of the dead languages, you may find some engaged on the uncouth language of their fatherland, and, looking over their shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are cataloguing in their glossaries, _words, nevertheless, destined to reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe_.... It may be added that the school of Fulda would have been found ordered with admirable discipline. Twelve of the best professors were chosen, and formed a council of elders or doctors, presided over by one who bore the title of principal, and who assigned to each one the lectures he was to deliver to the pupils. In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labor, Rabanus continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and reckoned among his pupils the most celebrated men of the age.... For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works in prose and verse embraced a large variety of subjects, ... and he is commonly reputed the author of the _Veni Creator_."(54)