Outside the kingdom of England the fourteenth century was also a great period in the growth of universities and colleges, to which, all (p. 004) over Europe, privileges and endowments were granted by popes, emperors, kings, princes, bishops and municipalities. To attempt to indicate the various causes and conditions which, in different countries, led to the growth, in numbers and in wealth, of institutions for the pursuit of learning would be to wander from our special topic; but we may take the period from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century as that in which the medieval University made its greatest appeal to the imagination of the peoples of Europe. Its institutional forms had become definite, its terminology fixed, and the materials for a study of the life of the fourteenth century student are abundant. The conditions of student life varied, of course, with country and climate, and with the differences in the constitutions of individual universities and in their relations to Church and State. No single picture of the medieval student can be drawn, but it will be convenient to choose the second half of the fourteenth century, or the first half of the fifteenth, as the central point of our investigation. We have already used technical terms, "University," "College," "Student," which require elucidation, and others will arise in the course of our inquiry. What is a University? At the present day a University is, in England, a corporation whose power of granting (p. 005) certain degrees is recognised by the State; but nothing of this is implied in the word "University." Its literal meaning is simply an association. Recent writers on University history have pointed out that _Universitas vestra_, in a letter addressed to a body of persons, means merely "the whole of you" and that the term was by no means restricted to learned bodies. It was frequently applied to municipal corporations; Dr Rashdall, in his learned work, tells us that it is used by medieval writers in addressing "all faithful Christian people," and he quotes an instance in which Pisan captives at Genoa in the end of the thirteenth century formed themselves into a "Universitas carceratorum." The word "College" affords us no further enlightenment. It, too, means literally a community or association, and, unlike the sister term University, it has never become restricted to a scholastic association. The Senators of the "College of Justice" are the judges of the Supreme Court in Scotland. We must call in a third term to help us. In what we should describe as the early days of European universities, there came into use a phrase sometimes written as _Studium Universale_ or _Studium Commune_, but more usually _Studium Generale_. It was used in much the same sense in which we speak of a University to-day, and a short sketch of its (p. 006) history is necessary for the solution of our problem.