It is the collegiate system which distinguishes the English universities from all others. Everywhere else in Europe students live in their own private lodgings and have complete control of their lives, subject to no supervision whatever; the university has no rights over them and no means of ensuring their good behaviour during the period in which they choose to attend its lectures. In many parts of Europe the student passes from a school curriculum in which he has been treated as a complete dependent, on whose sense of common fairplay and honour, even, no reliance can be placed, to a curriculum in which he at once becomes his own absolute master. English instinct is against this--against abandoning a young man at a critical moment of his life to his own devices, his own unsupported endeavours, as it is against ruling him by a system of espionage in his school days. It is in favour in both cases of the moral support to be found in an external guarantee for order, orderliness--and of a tacit assistance to good instincts, a tacit resistance to bad; and the result is the university college. [Sidenote: The origin of the college system.] The result, as we say, is an English result, and is the development of a scheme to which shape was first given by Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and Hugh de Balsham Bishop and formerly subprior of Ely, in the reign of Henry III.[98] An endowed house and college statutes formed part of this fine academic scheme, which, in all its amplitude and completeness, sprang Athena-like from the brain of Walter de Merton, and was destined from the first to be realised in a university. It must, nevertheless, be clearly borne in mind that the original college dwellings--and the college statutes--were designed for adult scholars, they were, in fact, the earliest training colleges for teachers, and it is only later that their advantages were extended in equal measure to the taught.[99] [Sidenote: The era of college building.] College building began in the xiii century and ended with the xvith. The first great period of building, however, belongs to the second quarter of the xiv century, and no less than seven colleges and halls were founded between the years 1324 and 1352. Ninety years elapsed before the second period, which began with the foundation of King’s College in 1441 and ended with the foundation of S. John’s in 1509. The third and last period opened a hundred years after the foundation of King’s and closed with the foundation of the first Protestant colleges fifty years later (1595): First period. Second period. Third period.