Very few medieval schoolboys were destined to continue to university, but some did. University was preparation for only a few careers: professor, lawyer, doctor, theologian, dropout. Dropouts tended to become tutors, stand-up comedians, magicians and alchemists.
The first university was specifically for law, at Bologna. Paris and Oxford began next, as theology schools run by the church. Salerno, Italy had an independent medical school, but at Milan and Pisa, medicine was included in a larger university. By the 1300s, most cities had a university.
The entrance exam for university was a challenging test of ability with Latin. Europe continued to pretend, for a long time, that Latin was its real language and that its native tongues were just unlettered vulgar degradations of Latin. University subjects were advanced mainly because they were taught in spoken Latin.
The early university was, at base, a small staff surrounding the Bedellus (dean), who undertook to give a challenging graduation examination in logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. It wasn’t really a university yet. Officially, students contracted privately with lecturers who could help prepare them for these exams. Collective bargaining created the university as students and scholars organized into associations (universitates) for enforcing contract terms.
Students held all of the power in the medieval university. They hired and fired lecturers at will. They forced them to start (and end) lectures on time or pay fines. Lecturers were fined for being absent or for skipping some of the curriculum. Lecturers used their bargaining power with students only to get standardized fees.
In the next few entries, I’ll cover the development of the university into something that looks like what we know today. It’s important to understand that at the start, it was merely a cluster of students who lived in rented rooms and hired lecturers to prepare them for exit exams. Hiring the lecture hall may have been up to the lecturers or the students. The university collected a nominal fee from its students until graduation. As an institution, its power consisted only of granting the diploma, so that’s when the punishingly high fees kicked in. This is why there were so many dropouts. A poor young man could afford to attend lectures, but he couldn’t afford to graduate.