Every medieval cathedral had a school attached to it. These schools were initially used for training priests and later were attended by lay students, usually the sons of the nobility. The earliest cathedral schools were founded at York, Reims and Orleans. In the 12th century, the school at Chartres cathedral was one of the most distinguished, particularly during the time of Bernard of Chartres, the philosopher, who studied both the Greek and Roman classics, as well as the Bible.
Learning at that time in a cathedral school consisted of seven liberal arts: music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric and dialect.
