ABSTRACT
The social framework within which students in the medieval English Universities pursued their university careers can only be partly reconstructed. The average age at which students in the Middle Ages entered the English Universities and those of the rest of northern Europe has probably been usually assessed at too low a level. The fact that students might interrupt their studies because of domestic pressures and resume university life at some date is a further circumstance which makes comparison with modern degree procedures a troublesome exercise. Before 1500, the English Universities were rather haphazard in their promotion of academic dress as a measure of social control. In the medieval period, the university statutes laid more emphasis upon the attire of graduates than upon that of undergraduates — upon the academic garb of the doctors, masters and bachelors in the different faculties.
