Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

50. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (editor), A History of the Universities in Europe, volume 1, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pages 43ff.

51. Cobban, Op. cit., page 49–50.

52. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 127. Cobban, Op. cit., page 50. Schachner, Op. cit., page 151, says that there is some doubt that Irnerius ever existed.

53. Cobban, Op. cit., page 51.

54. Ibid., page 52.

55. Ibid., page 53.

56. Rashdall, Op. cit., page 23.

57. Cobban, Op. cit., page 54. See Schachner, Op. cit., page 153, for the ages and economic status of Bologna students.

58. Cobban, Op. cit., page 55.

59. Carlo Malagola, ‘Statuti dell’ università e dei collegii dello studio Bolognese’, 1888. In: Lynn Thorndike (editor), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, New York: Octagon, 1971, pages 273ff

60. Cobban, Op. cit., page 58.

61. Ibid., page 62.

62. Ridder-Symoens (editor), Op. cit., pages 148ff.

63. Ibid., page 157. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., page 160f.

64. Cobban, Op. cit., page 65.

65. Ibid., pages 66–67.

66. See Thorndike (editor), Op. cit., page 27, for the rules of Paris University and page 35 for papal regulations.

67. Cobban, Op. cit., page 77.

68. Ibid., pages 82–83. And see Schachner, Op. cit., pages 74ff, for the concept of the ‘nations’.

69. Cobban, Op. cit., page 79.

70. Ibid., page 96.

71. See Ridder-Symoens (editor), Op. cit., page 342, for the introduction of learning into Britain via Northampton, Glasgow and London.

72. Cobban, Op. cit., page 98.

73. Ibid., page 100.

74. Thorndike (editor), Op. cit., pages 7–19.

75. Cobban, Op. cit., page 101.

76. Pederson, Op. cit., page 225, describes early life in Oxford.

77. Cobban, Op. cit., page 107.

78. Schachner, Op. cit., pages 237–239. See also: Rubenstein, Op. cit., page 173.

79. Cobban, Op. cit., page 108.

80. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 119, Cobban, Op. cit., page 116.

81. Cobban, Op. cit., page 116. Colleges were especially a feature of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. These were usually legal bodies, self-governing, and generously endowed. Often, they were charitable and pious foundations. Colleges were also established to reflect the idea that student poverty should not be a barrier to academic progress. This was true most of all of Paris, the origin of the collegiate idea in the sense that colleges existed there first. ‘The earliest European college about which there is information,’ says Alan Cobban, ‘is the Collège des Dix-Huit which had its beginnings in Paris in 1180, when a certain Jocius de Londoniis bought the room he had in the Hospital of the Blessed Mary of Paris and endowed it for the perpetual use of eighteen poor clerks.’ The idea was soon followed but it was the foundation of the College of the Sorbonne, begun c. 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX, which really created the system familiar today. This college was intended for graduates, for established scholars who had already gained an MA, and were about to embark on the doctorate in theology. Some nineteen colleges were established in Paris by 1300, and at least three dozen by the end of the fourteenth century, ‘which was the century par excellence of collegiate expansion in western Europe’. Another eleven were founded in the fifteenth century, making sixty-six in all. The Paris colleges were suppressed in 1789 at the French Revolution, and the university was never allowed to revert to collegiate lines.

English colleges originated later than in Paris and were always intended for graduate use – undergraduates were a later innovation. Originally housed in taverns, or hostels, Merton College was first, in 1264, followed by University College c. 1280, and by Balliol in 1282. At Cambridge, Peterhouse was established in 1284. By 1300, Cambridge had eight colleges, housing 137 fellows. At Oxford, King’s Hall was the first to admit undergraduates, in the early part of the fourteenth century. The graduate colleges were gradually transformed into undergraduate ones, largely for economic reasons – tutorial fees. This process was completed, for the most part, by the Reformation. It was the (undergraduate) colleges which introduced the tutorial system of instruction, as the public lecture system was falling into disarray. Cobban, Op. cit., pages 123–141, passim.

82. Ibid., page 209.

83. Ibid., page 214. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., pages 322ff.

84. Cobban, Op. cit., page 215.