Orléans, who succeeded Alcuin (retired to the monastery of Tours) as adviser of the emperor in educational matters at the court in 796. The document dated 797, ten years after Charlemagne's first capitulary was issued, enacts explicitly "that the priests establish schools in every town and village, and if any of the faithful wish to entrust their children to them to learn letters, that they refuse not to accept them but with all charity teach them ... and let them exact no price from the children for their teaching nor receive anything from them save what parents may offer voluntarily and from affection" (P.L., CV., col. 196). To Alcuin himself tradition has assigned the lines set up in the streets of Strasbourg in which the attractions of a school are compared with those of a nearby tavern: "Choose, O traveller; if thou wilt drink thou must also pay money, but if thou wilt learn thou wilt have what thou seekest for nothing." In these free schools the teacher was, apparently, the priest of the town or village, and, as far as we can judge, the curriculum composed what may be called the basics of general education, with an elementary course in Christian Doctrine. Actual spreading The "new learning" inaugurated at the palace school (which seems to have followed the court from place to place rather than being in a fixed place) quickly spread throughout the empire. Its first noticeable success was at Fulda, which since the days of its first abbot, Sturm, had maintained a tradition of fidelity to the ideals of St. Benedict. The man to whom the success of the schools of Fulda was largely due was Rhabanus Maurus. While still a young monk at Fulda, Rhabanus, learning of the fame of Alcuin, begged to be sent to Tours, where he listened a year to the aged teacher and imbibed some of his zeal for the study of the classics and the cultivation of the sciences. On his return to Fulda he was placed at the head of the monastic school and, amid many difficulties, continued to labour for the intellectual reform of his own monastery and his own land. What these difficulties were may be judged from the treatment which he received at the hands of his abbot Ratgar. Ratgar, believing that the monks were better employed in building churches than in studying their lessons, closed the