The rise of the universities, constituting as it did the creation of a new organ in the Church, was one of the most important features of thirteenth-century church history, and one to which ecclesiastical reformers looked for the transformation of the Church. Here again therefore is a good opportunity for observing the effect of the thirteenth century upon the fourteenth. The two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge were well established by 1300; how did they continue to shape during the next hundred years?

One important development was the foundation of colleges. As Dr H. E. Salter and others have pointed out, the older historians of Oxford and Cambridge have erred in exaggerating the importance of the colleges in the medieval universities. They tended to think of the medieval university, like the modern university, as a federation of colleges. It must be emphasized that during the first and in some ways most vital and constructive century of the universities’ existence at Oxford and Cambridge, there were practically no colleges at all, and that even when they did come into existence, until the end of the Middle Ages the vast mass of both graduates and undergraduates lived and worked outside the colleges in the numerous halls and hostels and hired lecture rooms scattered about the city. The medieval colleges in fact only catered for a tiny minority of graduates, rather like the research institutes of the present day. Dr Salter estimates that even as late as 1360 the six existing Oxford colleges together only contained about forty M.A.s, twenty-three B.A.s, and ten undergraduates.