ABSTRACT
The task of providing a wider secular education in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been taken up by the cathedral schools, which, from their embryonic forms in the sixth and seventh centuries, had expanded rapidly to accommodate the needs of learning and scholarship in the period of intellectual and economic activity after the European revival of the tenth century. The cathedral schools, for their part, had never been conceived as fulfilling this kind of role. The pattern of organization was taken from the medieval craft guilds. In Paris the university was never officially founded; it simply grew, almost imperceptibly, out of its cathedral school. Early in the thirteenth century another form of association was evolved at Paris in addition to the residential colleges: the 'nations'. The stimulus to this kind of practical development came from the overwhelmingly commercial basis on which Italian civic life was built.
