Medieval university

“ The Universitates of the Studium of Bologna were guilds of students; the Universitas of the Studium of Paris was a guild of masters. The great seats of learning in Medieval Europe were either universities of students or universities of masters, imitations of Bologna or of Paris, or modifications of one or the other or of both. It would be impossible to draw up (p. 012) a list and divide medieval universities into compartments. Nothing is more difficult to classify than the constitutions of living societies ”

“ Those who have known the old universities at first hand by the study of the actual books of their professors and by familiarity with their courses of study, have not been inclined to make the mistake of thinking that the medieval university neglected science. ”

“ Professor Laurie's authority for the assertion that a large number of the students at Paris and Oxford were mere boys, is a regulation known to have existed at one of these universities requiring that students should not be less than twelve years of age. Anyone who has studied medieval university life, however, will have been impressed with the idea, that the students were on the average older at the medieval universities rather than younger than they are at the present time. ”

“ College regulations in other countries add considerably to our knowledge of medieval student-life. In Paris, where the system had its humble beginning in the hire of a room for eighteen poor scholars, by a benevolent Englishman returning from a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1180, the college ideal progressed slowly and never reached its highest development. Even when most of the students of Paris came to live in colleges, the college was not the real unit of university life, nor was a Parisian college a self-governing community like Merton or Peterhouse. ”

“ The increased stringency of disciplinary regulations at Oxford in the end of the medieval period is best illustrated by the statutes which, in the fifteenth century, the University enforced upon members of the unendowed Halls. Students who were not members of a College lived, for the most part, in one of the numerous Halls which, up to the Reformation, were so important a feature of the University. ”

“ The Church and the Popes were the favorite scapegoats for human failings, so they were blamed. Now we know that there was a magnificent development of science, not only in the Renaissance period under the fostering care of the Popes and ecclesiastics, but also during the old university times. What has come above all to be recognized is that the medieval universities were scientific universities. They paid more attention to the ethical and philosophical sciences than we do, but they devoted a great deal of time to mathematics and the physical sciences. ”

“ And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does.
It would be entirely a mistake, however, to think that these great writers and teachers who influenced the medieval universities so deeply and whose works were the text-books of the universities for centuries after, only had the principles of physical and experimental science and did not practically apply them. As a matter of fact their works are full of observation. ”

“ The scholars are to proceed from Arts to Theology; four or five of them may be permitted to study the Canon Law, and the Warden may allow some of them to devote some time to the Civil Law. Two Sub-Wardens are to be appointed, one at Maldon and one in Oxford; Deans are to watch over the morals of the scholars, and senior students are to preside over the studies of the freshmen. The scholars are to be silent at meals and to listen to a reader; there must be no noise in their chambers, and a senior is to be in authority in each chamber, and to report breaches of regulations. ”

“ Moreover, it is natural, and not unprofitable, for persons under our circumstances to speculate on the forms of error with which a University of this age will have to contend, as the medieval Universities had their own special antagonists. And for both reasons I am hazarding some remarks on a set of opinions and a line of action which seems to be at present, at least in its rudiments, in the seats of English intellect, whether the danger dies away of itself or not. ”

“ Anyone who studies the works of the professors at these medieval universities can scarcely fail to become entirely sympathetic toward these scholars, who devoted themselves with so much ardor to every form of learning that interested them, and who did not fail to accomplish at least as much for future generations, as any other generation of university men in history. ”

“ Very few of those, however, who talk about the purely speculative character of medieval teaching have manifestly ever made it their business to know anything about the actual facts of old-time university teaching by definite knowledge, but have rather allowed themselves to be guided by speculation and by inadequate second-hand authorities, whose dicta they have never taken the trouble to substantiate by a glance at contemporary authorities on medieval matters. ”

“ It is not surprising, then, to find that the next school of world-wide reputation was that of law at Bologna which became the nucleus of a great university. It is only after man has looked out for his bodily needs and his property rights, that he comes to think of his duties toward himself, his fellow-men, and his Creator, and so the third of these great medieval schools, in time, was that of philosophy and theology, at Paris. ”

“ Where students legislated for themselves, their rules were neither numerous nor detailed. Our information about life in the student-universities is, therefore, comparatively small, and it is with the universities of masters that we shall be chiefly concerned. It is, however, essential to understand the powers acquired by the student-guilds at Bologna, the institutions of which were reproduced by most of the Italian universities, by those of Spain and Portugal, and, much less accurately, by the smaller universities of France. ”

“ And this had a particular importance at this particular time; for there is no doubt that the reign of Henry II is a period which saw a great development of University life, if not the very origin of University life itself, at Oxford. Before this time we hear of Vacarius lecturing in law, and, by somewhat questionable authority, of Robert Pullus lecturing on theology here; but both, or either, may have been mere teachers in the royal court, or private tutors under the Canons of S. Frideswide. But before the end of the reign there was a University with doctors and masters. ”

“ The numerous students—and none of the medieval universities attracted in their earlier history a larger concourse—were drawn from a gradually widening area, which at length included, not only all parts of Germany, but also England, France, Lombardy, Hungary and Poland. Contemporary writers, with the exaggeration characteristic of medieval credulity, even speak of thirty thousand students as present in the university at one time—a statement for which Denifle proposes to substitute two thousand as a more probable estimate. ”

“ The division into Nations was short-lived, and the two Rectors or Proctors, though still distinguished as Northern and Southern, soon became representatives elected by the whole Faculty of Arts. As at Paris, the Faculty of Arts was the moving spirit in the University, and Theology, Law, and Medicine never developed at Oxford any independent organisation. The proctors, as Dr Rashdall has shown, thus became the Executive of the University as a whole, and not merely of the Faculty of Arts. ”

“ The Parisian nations were governed by masters, not by students, and whereas, at Bologna, the artists were an insignificant minority, at Paris, the Rector became, by the end of the thirteenth century, the most powerful official of the University, and, by the middle of the fourteenth, was recognised as its Head. ”

“ The superior Faculties of Theology, Canon Law, and Medicine, though they possessed independent constitutions under their own Deans, consisted largely of men who had taken a Master's or a Bachelor's degree in Arts, and, from the middle of the thirteenth century, they took an oath to the Rector, which was held to be binding even after they became doctors. The non-artist members of these Faculties were not likely to be able to resist an authority whose existence was generally welcomed as the centre of the opposition to the Chancellor. ”

“ Most people will remember at once all the stories of roughness, of horse play, of drinking and gaming or worse that they have heard of the medieval students and will be apt to conclude that they are not to be wondered at after all, since it must have been practically impossible for the faculties of universities to keep order among such vast numbers. As a matter of fact, however, the story of the origin and maintenance of discipline in these universities is one of the most interesting features of university life. ”

“ The details of college statutes at Paris, bear a general resemblance to the regulations of Oxford and Cambridge founders, and discipline became more stringent as time went on. Attendance at Chapel (the only meeting-place of students in different Faculties in the same College) came to be strictly required. Punctuality at meals was frequently insisted upon, under pain of receiving nothing but bread. Silence was enjoined at meal times and the Bible was read. Latin was, from the first, the only lawful medium of conversation. ”

“ In the first place, our corporate strength is much greater. The History teaching in the colleges is not left to the accidental supply of teachers who have an aptitude for the subject in common with all the other subjects of the University course, but every college has its own recognised History Tutor or Lecturer; and these, or most of them, are acting together. Whether in the Board of Studies or in the meetings of combined lecturers, they are able to exert on the study itself a concentrated influence which tells very effectively on the students who are reading for the Schools. ”

“ When a benevolent donor endowed one of these halls, he invariably gave it not only money, but regulations, and it was the existence of an endowment and of statutes imposed by an external authority that differentiated the College from the Hall. The earliest College founders did not necessarily erect any buildings for the scholars for whose welfare they provided; a College is essentially a society, and not a building. The quadrangular shape which is now associated with the buildings of a College was probably suggested accidentally by the development of Walter de Merton's College at Oxford ”

“ It has been pointed out that the first modern university, that of Salerno, had for a nucleus a medical school, representing man’s interest in his body as his primary intellectual purpose in modern history. The second modern university, that of Bologna, gathered around a law school representing man’s interest in his property—his second formal purpose in life. And the third, that of Paris, developed around a school of theology and philosophy, demonstrating that man’s intellectual interests rise finally to the consideration of his relations to his fellow-man and to God. ”

“ The advancement of the study of theology was near the heart of every medieval founder, and the study of theology demanded the surrender of the best years of a man's life, and the extension of the period of education long after he might be expected to be earning his own living. A curriculum in the University which covered at least sixteen years, and might be followed by nothing more remunerative than the cure of Chaucer's poor priest, required some substantial inducement if it was to attract the best men. ”

“ The concentration of higher instruction in universities was not antagonistic to the medieval conception of the Church as the teacher of mankind. University life was modelled on that of the cloister, though the monastic ideal could not be fully realized, and the scholars not infrequently exhibited considerable licence in life. ”

“ So much, however, has changed and changed rapidly in sixteen years; so many old friends have sought new fields of work, so great changes have passed over the moral and intellectual atmosphere of Oxford, that one is prone to forget that in truth the precedent era from 1830 to 1850 was itself only a transient phase, and not to be looked on as stamping for ever the character of the University. ”

“ The regulations affecting undergraduates are more detailed than at Bologna, and indicate a stricter discipline. After eight days' attendance at a doctor's lecture, a student must not forsake it to go to another doctor; no scholar is to go to the School on horseback unless for some urgent cause; scholars are not to give anything to actors or jesters or other "truffatores" (troubadours) , nor to invite them to meals, except on the feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, or at the election of a Rector, or when doctors or masters are created. ”

“ It is not surprising, then, that one of the earliest of the medical schools of modern history around which there gradually developed a university should have come into existence in this part of the world. ”

“ Some of the colleges in later medieval times received as paying members a few wealthy pensioners, parochial priests in middle life, and even monks from distant convents, but probably the number of such favoured students was never large. With the establishment of colleges and the organization of private hostels discipline improved; inside their walls as well as in the monastic hostels it is probable that order was well maintained, but outside them, at least among the students at private hostels, discipline was left to the university authorities who did little or nothing in the matter. ”