ABSTRACT
The European collegiate movement is a theme of seminal importance for the history of the medieval universities. Within the earliest established universities of northern Europe, at Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, the secular colleges came to be the chief supports of the students in the superior faculties — law, theology and medicine. The university collegiate system seems to have originated at Paris in so far as rudimentary colleges emerged there probably earlier than elsewhere. The English secular colleges had, as their original aim, the promotion of higher-faculty students in their universities. When the colleges began to open their doors to paying students, the position of the halls and hostels became progressively less tenable. Lacking the resources with which the colleges were able to erect their increasingly imposing buildings in the later medieval period, the insecure halls and hostels came to be overshadowed by comparison.
