The medieval Latin word universitas has no reference to the scope of the curriculum of studies; it stands for the whole gathering, the whole body, of a particular class of persons, and indeed stands very near in meaning to the modern 'union' in the term 'trade union'. It is all but synonymous, for legal purposes, with the Latin word collegium, and for social comparisons, with the old English word guild. The universitas was first of all the whole body either of the masters or of the students, and then very naturally came to mean their self governing guild or society. The word did not acquire its local or educational connotation till the last phase of the Middle Ages. Our word 'university' would best be rendered in medieval Latin by studium generale, where studium denotes 'facilities for study' or organized school, and generale has reference, not to the subjects taught, but to the provenance of the students, as we might say 'of general resort' or 'international'. As in many such evolutions, a purely neutral descriptive term later became technical. Studium generale at first stated a fact, it did not provide a legal definition, and though the two original universities, Bologna and Paris, were from the first studia generalia above all others, there was nothing to prevent the title being applied to, or assumed by, other schools, as indeed it was. Yet gradually, towards the end of the twelfth century, two further conceptions were attached to the term: that it was a school where one, at least, of the three higher faculties - theology, law and medicine - was in existence, and that a considerable number of masters were engaged in teaching there. From c. 1200 onwards a further idea gained ground, that of the universal validity of its licence to teach - the jus ubi que docendi. This privilege, which in the case of the original universities was a spontaneous, prescriptive recognition
of fact, was later taken to be the most important feature in the recognition of a new university, and the right to issue this permission was reserved to the papacy.
Throughout the latter half of the medieval period medicine, law and theology were recognized as the only three branches of higher study, and, somewhat surprisingly to modern minds, the organized teaching in these faculties began chronologically in the order given �bove, and made of Salerno, Bologna and Paris the separate foci of celebrity.
Salerno, though its fame endured for less than two centuries and was soon challenged and eclipsed by Montpellier and Bologna, must therefore be considered first. While the ultimate, dynamic reasons for the rise of its school must be sought in the mysterious foundations of the awakening of Europe, it is possible to suggest why medicine was the subject and Salerno the site of the earliest appearance of an organized professional training. The renaissance was in every case that of a young mind working on old material, and nowhere was this available in greater profusion than in south Italy and Sicily, that Magna Graecia or Greater Greece which had remained in touch with the more civilized Eastern Empire throughout the 'dark ages', and where the four streams of Greek, Latin, Jewish and Arabic met. It is probable that Roman, that is, Greek, traditions of medical practice had never wholly died out in a region where material civilization had always lingered, and Salerno was famous for its climate and its springs. There the most notable physicians collected, and gradually a tradition of teaching grew up among them; it found, as has happily been said, 'a voice' in the translation of Hippocrates, Galen and other classics of Greek medicine from the Arabic by Constantine the African, who is by no means such a mythical source of influence as Rashdall suggests. Salerno was at the zenith of its fame c. 1 100, the date of the well-known Regimen sanitatis Salemi or 'Salerno's rules for health'; it never developed at that time into an organized university, and was not formally recognized as such till Frederick II made pronouncement in 123 1 . It never possessed other faculties in its early days and declined rapidly in the thirteenth century. Arabian medicine, combined with the rise of other medical schools in flourishing universities such as Montpellier, left Salerno high and dry, though it continued a shadowy existence till its suppression, along with other venerable millenarians, by Napoleon I.
Bologna, on the other hand, was not only the first fully-fledged university, but the first of the two types or families that spread all over Europe. Before coming to its origins, it may be well to look briefly at 140
the two kinds of law, Roman law and canon law, of which it became the exponent.
Roman law, the greatest of all historical legal systems and the sole great legacy in things of the mind that was bequeathed to posterity by the Roman people, was the outcome of a long evolution over a thousand years (753 B.C.-A. D. 300) of composition, and a further 250
years of amelioration and codification. The mass of legal declarations embodied in the final codification, and known thereafter as Roman law, and later as civil law, was a mixture of ancient Roman custom, explicit declaration (both republican, senatorial and imperial) and court decisions, together with the addition of a vast body of comment, interpretation and theoretical disquisition that was the work of the great legists of the early Empire such as Papinian and Ulpian. This enormous, unmanageable mass of material was rough-hewn into shape in the West under Theodosius the Great in 438. The Theodosian code was adapted to Germanic conditions in 506 by Alaric II in his Lex Romana Visigothorum, the so-called Breviarium
A laricianum, an unscientific and (by later and earlier standards) unintelligent epitome. Henceforward the gradual watering down of Roman law continued, along with a parallel process by which borrowed Roman principles contaminated northern folk-law. Roughly speaking the populations of central and northern Italy, and of southern France in the early Middle Ages (that is, before 1 000) were under various laws more or less predominantly Roman in origin, but with a weaker mixture as one passed from south to north. The northern parts of the Carolingian empire and its successor-states were under customary law, less technically perfect and containing a strong infiltration of Roman principles. The two regions were represented in the familiar division of Western Europe into the pays du droit coutumier and the pays du droit ecrit. Everywhere, however, the practice, familiar to Rome in the past, of personal, not national or regional, liability to a code was the rule, with the result familiar from the remark of Agobard of Lyons (d. 850) that when five men were gathered in a single room each of them might have a separate law. This intermingling was rendered still more confusing by the over riding principle that ecclesiastics everywhere were liable to Roman law.
Meanwhile in the Eastern Empire a further and far more scientific codification had been effected by commissioners appointed by Justinian in 533. Their labours resulted in four compilations, viz., the Code, or collection of statutory laws and imperial decrees; the Digest or Pandects, a substantial selection of the teaching and comments of
all the great Roman lawyers; the Institutiones or manual of general principles for students; and the Novellae or Authenticum, being additional decrees subsequent to the Code. This collection became the governing law for the Eastern Empire and for such parts of the West as owed allegiance to Byzantium, but although copies were sent by Justinian to Rome and other Western cities, it never superseded the Theodosian code in the West.
Ancient Roman law had probably ceased, several centuries before 1 000, to be taught authoritatively and from ancient texts in Italy, and had become in the manner, though not in the perfection of its transmission, like customary law or medieval English case law. Nevertheless, it continued to find a place in the educational trivium as part of dialectic, and fragments of the old codes were copied in monasteries and schools. Municipal life had never wholly died out in Italy, and when, in the general revival of the eleventh century, schools of Roman law at Ravenna and Bologna, and of Lombardic law at Milan, Verona and Pavia began to flourish, law became the crown of the modest educational curriculum in northern Italy.
Why, when and how the change came about whereby the whole of Justinian's work of codification was adopted in Italy as the authoritative legal text-book is not certain. The old story was that the Pisans, at the capture of Amalfi in 1 135, had discovered a codex of the Digest which the Emperor Lothair III had immediately enforced as a code and as a text-book. A less improbable account had it that when the law-school of Rome was broken up towards the end of the eleventh century, after the great burning of the City by the Normans in 1084, the fugitive lawyers took a Codex with them and this, added to the influx of numbers at Bologna, started the revival. The truth would seem to be that the rediscovery of Justinian's work was part of the movement everywhere in progress to return to the authentic documents of the famed and fabled past; the same movement had set the papal reformers looking for the ancient canons and decrees, the Italian monastic reformers restoring the practices of the Egyptian desert, and the early Cistercians observing the letter of St Benedict's Rule. It was, in fact, part of the critical movement to get hold of the old authentic documents and then to observe them. But it would seem certain that a single teacher was particularly connected with the revival, the great Irnerius who flourished at Bologna from c. 1 1 12 to 1 125. He was probably the first to take as his text-book the whole Justinian corpus and to normalize the commentary and glosses upon it. His notes, from being merely marginal or interlinear comments or 'glosses', became a full-sized commentary, just as had Abelard's
commentary on St Paul, and he adopted the method, already familiar in canonist circles, of giving series of texts for and against a particular opinion (the ancestor of the sic et non method), and an occasional quaestio which gave a firm decision on a doubtful point. In so doing Irnerius made of the study of law, or at least of the Justinian corpus, something more scientific, technical and professional than before, and established it firmly and finally as a subject for higher education, not merely as a part or appanage of the trivium. This had, almost immediately, a twofold practical result: it provided a basis, at once scientific and manageable, for the study, popularization and diffusion of a single code of law for the whole of continental Europe, and it increased greatly the prospects of law as a career, thus increasing also the number of law students.
At almost the same moment a different process of crystallization was taking place at Bologna in the codification of canon law. The ancient canon law of the Church, that is, the disciplinary decrees of general councils and of popes, had reached a high degree of elaboration in the age of Popes Gelasius I and Hormisdas shortly before and after A.D. 500, when higher life in the West was on the eve of
collapse, and this law had been codified by Denis the Little (early sixth century). This and similar collections based upon it had traversed the early Middle Ages in a more intact and operative condition than had Roman law, but in the middle of the ninth century the whole corpus had been contaminated by the work of a group of ecclesiastical reformers, working probably in the neighbourhood of Le Mans, who, in order to enhance papal power at the expense of the local archbishop, produced the tendentious and in part spurious collections known as the False Decretals and the False Capitularies. A little later, numerous collections appeared in Lorraine and southern Germany, and the contest between the Empire and papacy set the papalists searching for old and original sources in support of their case. In the course of this search many perfectly genuine documents were unearthed, but considerable confusion ensued as the discoveries and collections multiplied, and even the highly gifted Ivo of Chartres (d. 1 1 15), who endeavoured to give a conspectus of the law in his Panormia, was not wholly successful in
his endeavour.
What greater men had failed to do was accomplished by Gratian of Bologna, an Italian master in the canon law but not also, it now appears, a Camaldolese monk. Rashdall, writing in the 1890s, described it as 'one of those great text-books which, appearing just at the right time and in the right place, takes the world by storm'.1 This
judgement, which would have been a tolerably just estimate of the work of Peter the Lombard, is not a wholly adequate description of Gratian's. Whatever his intention, the scholar of Bologna produced both a text-book and a code, and by his treatment of the problems involved was the father of a long and distinguished succession of masters of a new branch of legal science.
The history of the origins of the university of Bologna, while it is inseparably bound up with the story of the revived study of the complete Roman law, was conditioned by the character of existing Italian education. This was, at least in most of the cities between Rome and the Alps, predominantly municipal and in the hands of laymen. It was predominantly grammatical and rhetorical in content, and was directed towards the practical ends of drawing up documents and pleading and judging in the courts. City life had never wholly perished in the peninsula, and at the beginning of the twelfth century municipal life was everywhere becoming freer and more vivid, and careers were opening to the layman to which the key was the study of law. In Italy, also, the city nobility, in contrast to the militant aristocracy of Normandy and Germany, had always been literate, and now there was a growing demand for legal knowledge, stimulated first by the need of weapons in the struggle between Empire and papacy, and then by the adoption of Roman law as the imperial code. This last fact had as a result the arrival at Bologna of a growing number of ultramontanes to study law at the fountain-head.
We may be inclined to ask why Bologna, rather than other cities, took pride of place? When Lanfranc was young, Pavia was famous for its legal studies, and so, a little later, was Ravenna, where connections with the East had been long and intimate, and where Peter Damian the papalist had a brush with the imperial lawyers. The schools of Bologna, the most Roman in north Italy, were in fact principally celebrated for their literary training, and their expertise in this persisted long after the legal revival, especially in the technique which formed a bridge between the two faculties, the dictamen or carefully regulated style for official acts and notarial work. It is natural, also, in discussing its rise to fame, to point to the situation of the town which, then as now, is the cross-roads of Italy, and one of the calling- places of most Romeward-bound pilgrims from Germany and Austria, and of many from France and the north; in the early Middle Ages it was a meeting-place of currents from north and south, as also from the Eastern Empire, while its own comparative insignificance made it naturally hospitable to students and refugees. Nevertheless, the proximate cause of its rise to fame would seem to
have been due to an influx of lawyers from Rome and, still more, to the fame of Irnerius and, somewhat later, of Gratian. Henceforward, the city was Bolonia docta, the 'mother of scholars', and her coins bore the legend Bononia docet and Bononia mater studiorum.
The stages in the evolution of the university are not easy to discover. At Bologna, in the early years of the twelfth century, there were three types of school: the episcopal and municipal schools of letters; the lay schools of Roman law; and schools of canon law at one or more of the monasteries. The second of these classes, by far the most important even in early days, fell entirely outside the control of the bishop and the Church. This fact, and still more the circumstance that a majority of the students of law were much older than the normal students of arts in the north, and were in many cases family men with means, preparing for a lucrative career, helped to influence the shape taken by the university.
This organization, of which the most striking feature was the direction of a university and the control of its teachers by the students, becomes a comprehensible and even a natural growth when looked at closely. Italy was a land of small political divisions, with rapidly multiplying communes, and citizenship was a possession of great price. Almost all the teachers of law were, by birth or permanent residence, citizens of Bologna. On the other hand, the vast majority of the substantial multitude of students were adult aliens, without any status or civic rights, and, according to contemporary ideas, they were subject to the laws of their respective countries. They were therefore interested in strengthening their position vis-a-vis the city, and in securing the right of judgement at the hands of a compatriot. In an age when guilds of all kinds were being formed, it was natural that the Bolognese students should come together to form national groups or 'universities'. In this their principal aims were: to secure exemption from the municipal tribunals and amenability to their own; to secure freedom from municipal taxation and market dues; to secure the right of fixing prices for lodgings, lecture-rooms and books; and to win the right of regulating the teaching and horarium. They therefore grouped themselves into 'nations', originally twenty or so in number. These were later amalgamated, without losing their identity, into two large groups - the Citramontani or Italians, consisting of the Tuscans and Lombards, and the Ultramontani, with thirteen or more national groups. Finally, in the thirteenth century, the two large corporations merged to form the universitas scholarium. Long before that, the nations had received recognition from the Emperor in the Authentic Habita, given to all the students of Lombardy, by which he took them
under his protection and provided that in any proceedings against a scholar the defendant could, if he wished, be cited before the bishop (if he were a clerk) or his master. Later, citation before the rector became