It is at this time that the true skill and ability of Rabanus appear before us. He was the first person to establish a school in Germany which had in it the promise of modern education. He allowed pupils to attend and be trained in the cloisters who had no vocation for a monastic life. In point of fact he was the real founder of the school system of Germany, and his fellow-countrymen have not been slow to accredit him with the achievement. His life and accomplishments have employed the pens of Buddeus, Schwarz, Dahl, Bach, Kunstmann, Spengler, Köhler, Richter, and other writers on the history of _paedagogik_.[7] It is beyond debate that the school at Fulda was a most remarkable place.
Rabanus was not the only teacher in the school. He was assisted by his faithful friend Samuel of Worms, a fellow pupil under Alcuin. Together these men developed and enlarged the minds of many of the future nobles of Germany, and laid in Bible study and in the advanced opinions which they announced, the foundations for a nation the most scholarly of any on the earth. In these classes were to be seen such disciples of the new learning as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, Einhard (who subsequently sent thither his son Wussin), and Rudolf who wrote the life of his preceptor.
Leaving the manner of that ancient school life for the present, we are struck with astonishment at the broad and liberal tone of the instruction. Rabanus followed Bede in providing an encyclopaedia of human knowledge for his pupils. He entitled it _De Universis_ and based it on the previous work of Isidore of Seville. Additionally he abridged the grammar of Priscian, a treatise which furnished, even as late as the days of Richard Braythwaite and his _Drunken Barnabee_, the suggestive line,
He also furnished a text-book in arithmetic, drawn mostly from Boethius, and an etymology in which he depends to some extent on Isidore. He utilized Bede for chronology, and Gregory for ecclesiastical forms, and Augustine for doctrine, and Cassiodorus for commentary and exegesis.
Moreover, he was free from much of the superstition of his age. He objected to giving the liver of a mad dog to one who had been bitten by it—that being then held a perfect cure. His letters show an independent and almost an audacious mind. In all religious discussion his motto was, “When the cause is Christ’s, the opposition of the bad counts for naught.” In statecraft—for ecclesiastics were chief movers in these affairs—he held with Ludwig the Pious. He wrote a great deal in the way of Scripture commentary, and his intellect was of a mystical order. He delighted in allegories, in enshrining the bones of saints and confessors, and in making the most marvellous and intricate anagrams and arrangements of verses and letters upon the subject of the Holy Cross, whose praise he has elaborately set forth. Wimpfeling may well style this production a “wonderful and highly elaborate work.” It dates from the year 815, and no modern reader can view it without dismay at its enormous expenditure of labor.