The colleges were intended for picked scholars. In the course of the fourteenth century the problem of the care of other students was taken up, and they were forbidden to live in lodgings selected by themselves and under no external supervision. To provide for them, the University licensed private hostels which were managed by masters of arts on lines somewhat similar to boarding houses in public schools to-day. Thenceforth throughout the middle ages the majority of undergraduates resided in these hostels. Caius gave the names and sites of twenty-seven private hostels which he had known and all of which closed their doors during his life, the last in 1540: Fuller enumerated thirty-four hostels and two "inns" while his editor mentioned fourteen other hostels, but some of these certainly ought not to be included under the term. Perhaps we may say that the number open at anyone time rarely exceeded thirty or fell short of twenty: some were cheap, some expensive; some were well managed, others not so. After the development of these hostels the guilds decreased in importance, and finally disappeared. With the establishment of colleges and private hostels the University was fairly launched on its career in a form which lasted till the middle half of the sixteenth century. My object was to state how, in my opinion, it originally took shape, and I do not propose here to follow its history further. [Footnote 31: Most of the known facts are given in Mullinger's excellent histories, Peacock's _Observations on the Statutes_, and Rashdall's _Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages_--but all the views of the last-named writer are not universally accepted.] [Footnote 32: See _passim_ G. Peacock, _Observations on the Statutes_, London, 1841, p. xxxv.] CHAPTER XII. DISCIPLINE. This paper contains some extracts from my notebooks on the way in which university and college discipline was maintained in former days at Cambridge. The records on the subject are scanty, but I think the facts are worth putting together in a connected form. There is no reason to suppose that the practices of different colleges varied materially, and if in the later period I have taken examples from the records of Trinity it is only because I have had easier access to them. In the history of university discipline and social customs abrupt changes are not to be expected, and none such are noticeable in the transition from the medieval period, _circ._ 1200 to 1525, through the renaissance, _circ._ 1525 to 1640, and the period of stagnation, _circ._ 1660 to 1820, to the present age of reconstruction and extension. I begin naturally with discipline in medieval Cambridge.