The matter of academical dress may interest for a moment. During the Middle Ages there was for the undergraduate nothing which could be properly called academic dress. In the Italian universities the students wore a long black garment known as a "cappa." In the Parisian universities every student was required by custom or statute to wear a tonsure and a clerical habit, such "indecent, dissolute, or secular" apparel as puffed sleeves, pointed shoes, colored boots, etc., being positively forbidden; and so the clothes of uniform color and material, like those worn in some of the English charitable schools, have been the result of the uniform dress of a particular color which mediæval students were supposed to wear, and which indicated that at the time they were supposed to be clerks. At one time the so-called Queen's Men in Oxford University were required to wear bright red garments, and differences of color and ornament still survive in the undergraduate gowns of Cambridge. While the students usually wore dark-hued material, the higher officials of the universities wore more and more elaborate garments, until the rector appeared in violet or purple, perhaps with fur trimmings. The hoods, which are still worn to-day, were at one time made of lamb's wool or rabbit's fur, silk, such as those which we wear, coming in as a summer alternative at the end of the fourteenth century. The birretta, or square cap, with a tuft on the top, in lieu of the modern tassel on top of the square cap, was a distinctive badge of membership, while doctors and superior officers were distinguished by the red or violet color of their birrettas. This so-called "philosophy of clothes" throws much light upon the relation of the Church to the universities, as well as on the use and misuse of the term "clericus." That a man was a _clericus_ in the Middle Ages did not necessarily imply that he had taken even the lowest grade of clerical orders. It simply implied that he was a clerk, i. e., a student. Even the wearing of a so-called clerical dress was rather in order that the wearer might enjoy exemption from secular courts and the privileges of the clerical order. The lowest of the people even took the clerical tonsure simply in order to get the benefit of clergy; and to become a clerk was at one time almost equivalent to taking out a license for the commission of murder or outrage with comparative immunity. Nevertheless, the relation between clerkship and minor orders is still quite obscure.