ABSTRACT
Medieval university students had the satisfaction of pursuing what were considered to be socially relevant courses. Most of the evidence for the nature of the teaching in monastic colleges and in halls is available for Oxford and it is to be assumed that broadly equivalent developments occurred in the monastic colleges and the hostels of Cambridge University. Teaching and learning in medieval Oxford and Cambridge, as in the continental universities, was an innately conservative process, wherein questioning was conducted as a form of training within an accepted intellectual framework. It is true that some advantages may have accrued from a teaching contingent of young and energetic lecturers who had to compete, on a kind of commercial basis, for student audiences, upon whose fees they partly or chiefly depended for their livelihood. The English Universities circumvented the two-tier collegiate system of Paris, where the majority of colleges came to be educationally reliant upon a number of their opulent neighbours.
