224 History of Universities
on matters of law, philosophy, and theology, when once
pronounced, had almost the force of a Supreme Court de-
cision. Her efforts and influence healed the Great Schism
of the Church. She counted among her alumni the greatest
philosopher (Aquinas) and the greatest poet (Dante) of
the middle ages. Yet all this was accomplished before the
University of Paris had a penny of endowment, or owned
an acre of land or a single building; when her thousands of
students were crowded into the narrow space between the
Ile de la Cité and Mont Sainte Geneviève ; when her teachers
had literally to “hire a hall” to lecture in, and lived on
students’ fees; when students and teachers came and went
as they liked.
The medieval university was informal where we are
formal, and formal where we are informal. There were no
entrance examinations; a student merely attached himself
to a resident master who was willing to receive him as a
pupil. Of course he must be able to speak, read, and write
Latin, as that was the language of lectures and manuscript
text-books from St. Andrews to Salerno, and from Cracow
to Coimbra. The universality of Latin gave the learned
world a unity that it has never recovered since the rise of na-
tionality, and of tongues. The fame of a great master like
Abaelard reached the most distant parts of Europe; and
such was the enthusiasm for learning that students thought
little of travelling from Sweden to Bologna, or from Scot-
land to Sicily, in order to sit at the feet of some respected
master. If the student became dissatisfied he left without
formality, and found or begged his way to another university.
Let us follow a medieval student through his Arts course
at Paris, which was very much the same at any university of
northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The recens or “freshman," as he was called in England,