After discussing the student's material welfare in the last chapter, it is time to look at the more ‘academic’ side of his life, from his qualification for university as a green grammar-school boy, to when six to twelve years later he passed his final examinations. The sources for this part of the history of the universities are rather various, and far less abundant than one could wish. This is because the universities rose up on the foundations of twelfth-century schools which followed an even older tradition of learning, and one that was certainly never committed to paper in the form of syllabuses or examination decrees. By and large where this early period is concerned, therefore, we shall turn to the few autobiographical passages that are found in the writings of Peter Abelard, for example, or of John of Salisbury. Things were no better in the universities just after their foundation. The unwritten tradition reigned in this period too, until conflicts and cases of doubt made well-defined rules necessary, and thereby brought statutes regulating courses of study and examinations into being. In the case of the older universities, this took place about half way through the thirteenth century, where our information comes from documents as important as the oldest statutes of Cambridge and the very detailed regulations that were passed in 1252 and the following years in the faculty of artes in Paris, first by the English nation and then by the university as a whole. But these sources only show how the prescribed course of study proceeded.