ABSTRACT
The majority of noble scholars appear to have had a serious academic purpose, and, in terms of both high university offices held and successful careers pursued, their record of achievement is reasonably impressive. The majority of endowed college fellows at Oxford and Cambridge were engaged in advanced courses of study and were undoubtedly well-appointed members of the academic population. It is generally true to say that far more can be discovered about the endowed personnel of the English academic community than about those who lived in unendowed circumstances. By comparison with the notable contingents of privileged nobles at the universities of southern Europe or in the late medieval German Universities, the aristocratic involvement in pre-sixteeenth-century Oxford and Cambridge was insufficient to qualify, to any marked degree, the mainly middling social derivation of the academic population. It may be affirmed that the academic populations of Oxford and Cambridge were more stratified in 1500 than they had been in the thirteenth century.
