The ferment of the twelfth century revival crystallised groups of
masters or doctors into guilds called universities, with a strong class
tradition, rigid codes of rules, and intense corporate spirit. The
schools at Oxford, whose continuous history can be traced from the days
of Henry II., had acquired a considerable reputation by the time that
his grandson had ascended the throne. Oxford university, with an
autonomous constitution of its own since _1214_, was presided over by a
chancellor who, though in a sense the representative of the distant
diocesan at Lincoln, was even in the earliest times the head of the
scholars, and no mere delegate of the bishop. Five years earlier the
Oxford schools were sufficiently vigorous to provoke a secession, from
which the first faint beginnings of a university at Cambridge arose. A
generation later there were other secessions to Salisbury and
Northampton, but neither of these schools succeeded in maintaining
themselves. Cambridge itself had a somewhat languid existence
throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, and was scarcely
recognised as a _studium generale_ until the bull of John XXII.
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