The Medieval English Universities

Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500

Alan B. Cobban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351885799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1988, this book traces the complex evolution of Oxford and Cambridge from the twelfth through the early sixteenth centuries. In the process, the author incorporates new research on Cambridge University that has become available only recently.

Alan B. Cobban is able to give an overall view of the functioning of the English universities, touching on the development of the academic hierarchy, the various features of the curriculum and the teaching offered by these institutions. The author also addresses the social and economic circumstances of students and the relations between the universities and their respective town and ecclesiastical authorities. Cobban draws on much recent work to supply new details and altered perspectives in this single-volume reappraisal of the history of these two distinguished educational institutions.

Chapter 1
The Medieval University: The European Context

The medieval university was primarily an indigenous product of western Europe.¹ It is true that the Greek, the Graeco-Roman, the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds had produced centres of higher education in rich profusion, and that these may have prefigured features of the medieval universities, such as regular curricular arrangements, and produced tentative forms of organization among teaching staff,² but they nowhere paralleled the medieval universities as privileged corporate associations of masters and students with their statutes, seals, administrative machinery and degree procedures.³ There appears, therefore, to have been no significant organic continuity between the universities which evolved in western Europe in the twelfth century and previous institutions of advanced learning. However much the universities owed to Graeco-Roman and Arabic intellectual life, their corporative character was a novel educational development, born of the need to expand the resources for professionally oriented education in an increasingly urbanized European society.

The terminology concerning the medieval universities is a complicated issue. Only by accident did the Latin term universitas come to be specifically associated with university institutions.⁴ In the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, universitas was commonly applied in such a way as to denote several types of corporate bodies such as craft guilds or municipal councils.⁵ When used in relation to universities the term for long referred to the guild of masters or of students or of masters and students combined, that is to say, to the academic personnel and not to the university as a complete entity. It was only from the late fourteenth century that universitas began to be associated particularly with universities as distinct from other modes of corporation. And it came to be used increasingly, in less formal documentation, to designate the university structure as a whole and not merely its guild constituent.⁶ Before the fifteenth century, however, the abstract term which most frequently and formally rendered the medieval concept of a fully-fledged university was studium generale.⁷

The studium part of the expression studium generale indicated a school with organized facilities for advanced study, and the generale component referred not to the general or universal nature of the subjects taught but to the ability of the school to attract students from beyond the local region. A school lacking this drawing power and serving only the needs of a town or a limited area was, by contrast, labelled a studium particulare or ‘particular school’.⁸ There was no definitive view as to the range of attraction which a school had to exhibit before it was to be recognized as a studium generale. It is true that a studium generale would normally draw students from more than one country, and indeed it might evolve into a markedly cosmopolitan centre such as Bologna, Paris, Montpellier or Salamanca. But a studium which recruited mainly from different parts of the same country and catered for only a small number of foreign students might nevertheless be ranked as a studium generale — as was the case with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Apart from its drawing strength, a studium generale was distinguished by a regime which, in addition to or sometimes in place of arts,⁹ offered instruction in at least one of the superior faculties of law (canon or civil or both), theology or medicine, and which maintained a sufficient core of regent or teaching masters to meet its diverse academic requirements. Before legal precision in such a matter was achieved, the final arbiter of whether or not a centre was to be classified a studium generale as opposed to a studium particulare was informed educational opinion. This meant that in the early stages of the university movement, when universities were not specifically founded but arose haphazardly, the status of studium generale was of a customary nature and not of a strictly legal character. But in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, legal definition permeated the university scene. Italian jurists fashioned the term studium generale ex consuetudine (studium generale by custom) and applied it retrospectively to centres such as Paris, Bologna, Montpellier, Padua, Orleans, Oxford and Cambridge to describe their customary standing in the period before formal validations were sought.¹⁰

From the second half of the thirteenth century, the validating source thought necessary for the endorsement of a centre of learning as a studium generale was either the papacy or the emperor because they alone were deemed capable of conferring an ecumenical authority. Indeed, earlier in the century the papacy and the imperial power had helped to promote the notion of the planned as distinct from the spontaneously evolved university. Following upon what appears to have been the first university to be established by a definite act — the Castilian University of Palencia, founded by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1208–9 — the Emperor Frederick II instituted the University of Naples in 1224, Pope Gregory IX created the University of Toulouse in 1229, and Innocent IV established a studium generale in the papal curia at Rome in 1244 or 1245.¹¹ By the third quarter of the thirteenth century the idea that the authority to erect universities was vested in papal or imperial prerogative, and especially in the former, had taken such firm root that an attempt was made to rationalize the university landscape by encouraging those universities whose status was based upon custom to seek a formal authentication. Although this process of rationalization was not entirely completed or without its anomalies¹² (one such involving the University of Oxford)¹³ it is generally true that the old-established universities, in tandem with the new creations, were, from the close of the thirteenth century, brought within the orbit of a distant papal or imperial tutelage.

This move towards the creation of an international university system rooted in an ecumenical authority helped to advance the theoretical notion of the ius ubique docendi, that is, the right of a graduate of one university to teach in another without undergoing further examination.¹⁴ By the fourteenth century, the ius ubique docendi had become one of the cardinal legal hallmarks of the status of studium generale and was normally included in the foundation charters of new universities and conferred retrospectively on the old-established universities which had previously claimed this status as a prescriptive right. If the ius ubique docendi had been universally implemented, the untrammelled mobility of university teachers would have become a reality, bringing into being a European-wide academic commonwealth which transcended race and provincialism in the collective pursuit and dissemination of learning.

It would be misleading, however, to regard the ius ubique docendi as a reliable model for the actual pattern of relationships between medieval universities. In reality, university particularism tended to prevail against the supranational implications of the ius ubique docendi. It has to be remembered that the ius ubique docendi was an artificial device designed to mask the natural inequalities which existed among universities with respect to institutional maturity and degree of community recognition. It is therefore not surprising that the old-established universities were often less than willing to participate in a levelling system which detracted from their position in the upper rank of the university world.¹⁵ But it was not only between the older universities and the newer foundations that the principle of the ius ubique docendi proved difficult to operate. Even within the ranks of the former, the code requiring mutual recognition of degrees was accorded only a minimal observance. For example, while Oxford and Cambridge operated reciprocal degree arrangements, something akin to an academic tariff war raged between Paris and Oxford in the early fourteenth century, each university refusing to accept and license the graduates of the other without fresh examination.¹⁶ And Montpellier, Angers and Orleans vigorously asserted the right of examination of all potential regent masters from other universities.¹⁷ In the absence of written examinations, there were few fixed criteria by which one university could properly evaluate the academic standards of graduates of another without staging its own investigation.¹⁸ This provided an additional reason to that of the retention of status for the reluctance to honour the code of the ius ubique docendi. Moreover, in some universities, the chief motive for the repudiation of the ius ubique docendi was the desire to maintain a self-perpetuating oligarchy of teaching masters in order to maximize incomes for small circles of established lecturers.¹⁹ Although the medieval universities were indeed international institutions in terms of the common core of studies pursued and taught in Latin, the lingua franca of European scholarship, they nevertheless retreated from the full implications of a supranational university system by imposing these restrictions on the appointment of lecturing staff.

In general, and contrary to popular belief, the university ethos was antithetical to a wandering academic population in the sense in which it had existed in the pre-university age of the urban and cathedral schools.²⁰ What mobility there was on the part of students and teaching masters tended to be far more controlled and specifically directed than in the era of the transient schools which had played host to a scholarly army that was engaged in a restless quest for knowledge. This academic protectionism, which acted as a brake on the free interchange of personnel and which became such a marked characteristic of Europe’s un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Medieval University: The European Context
• 2 The English Universities: Origins and Early Development
• 3 Government and Organization
• 4 Colleges, Halls and Hostels
• 5 Teaching: University and Collegiate
• 6 Academic Concentrations
• 7 Relations with the Municipal and Ecclesiastical Authorities
• 8 The Academic Community
• 9 Student Academic and Social Life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index