ABSTRACT
One of the most crucial findings of the analysis of the personnel of medieval Oxford and Cambridge concerns the large number of scholars who engaged in civil law. It is an arresting fact that medieval England, a country of modest size and population, made such a prominent contribution to the early phase of European university development. As late as c. 1500, the English Universities were far from wealthy corporations, Cambridge being even less wealthy than Oxford. Sovereignty within the English Universities had initially been located in the congregation of regents. By the early fourteenth century, it had come to be vested in the regents and non-regents combined, comprising the masters and doctors in all of the faculties. By 1500, the English Universities had moved some way towards the federated collegiate structures which they progressively became in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
