The Higher Education of Women. 89 



blended at an earlier period. Modern history would have been 

 very different from what it had been if the leaven of the East 

 had passed over to the West and entered the European mind in 

 a natural manner at the commencement of the Christian era. 

 They knew little about the position of women in England at 

 the commencement of our authentic history, but it was clear 

 that in the early Celtic nation it was on the whole a degraded 

 one. She was simply one of the household chattels, useful as a 

 drudge, or useful to the tribe as its flocks and herds were useful. 

 Its was not to the Celts but to the Saxons that they owed the 

 germs of that regard for women which (when allied with later 

 Teutonic and Norman elements) grew into a chivalrous devotion 

 to them, which had become the parent of so many virtues in 

 man. The Teutonic race, which overran the Celtic aborigines 

 of Britain, showed a regard for the women of their tribes far in 

 advance of anything they found in the most highly-civilised 

 nations of antiquity. No doubt amongst the Hebrews, the Greeks, 

 and the Romans there were exceptional instances of chivalry, 

 of rare tenderness, and high-minded devotion, but that was not 

 the same thing as the chivalry of the Saxon and the Teuton. 

 The Saxon women possessed property and land, and they could 

 transmit or bequeath it, while they often took part in the 

 Witenagemot of the King's Council. Of course the great mass 

 of the peasant women had plenty of hard work to perform, but 

 the Saxon workwomen were not compelled to undergo servile 

 toil, which the Celtic women underwent. In the schools 

 established by Benedictines girls were taught, as well as boys, 

 side by side in the Benedictine abbey, and a part of it was the 

 school where women learned Latin if they chose. The Abbess 

 Elfleda, of Whitby, and Eadburga, the Abbess of Minster, were 

 correspondents of the most erudite men of their age, and their 

 learning was as conspicuous as their charity and devotion were. 

 As time went on the new elements blended with the old, and 

 when they reached the thirteenth century they found a fresh 

 type of chivalry evolved in England, and grafted in the old 

 Saxon stem. When ,the strife between the Anglo Saxon and 



