Medieval schools and universities never developed on the periphery of society, since it was society’s needs and expectations which in large measure dictated the evolution of educational institutions in the fifteenth century, as in the preceding ones. This does not mean that purely intellectual considerations were without influence. There is every reason to believe that society’s demand for competent literates and university graduates continued to grow. Superimposed on the already strong demand from those countries where universities had existed since the thirteenth century was that from areas previously marginal, but now benefiting from newly founded schools and universities.
The Church remained a prodigious consumer. Only traditional monasticism remained aloof, while the mendicant orders continued to give a solid intellectual grounding to a significant proportion of their members, thanks to the dual network of their internal studia and of their university studia, whose numbers increased through the creation of new faculties of theology. After preparatory studies in arts and philosophy, mendicants studied essentially theology. In many areas, above all in Mediterranean Europe, they more or less held the monopoly in this latter discipline, which prepared them for their roles as preachers or inquisitors. Among the secular clergy, on the other hand, canon lawyers vastly outnumbered theologians. There were, too, many clerics who possessed only a master’s degree in arts. Be that as it may, one finds that in many areas the proportion of graduates in the secular clergy as a whole attained a previously unheard-of level in the fifteenth century. In England seventy-two out of seventy-nine bishops identified for the period 1399—1485 had studied in a university and one in an Inn of Court. The same applied to canons: in fifteenth-century York, 80 per cent of the resident canons of the minster were graduates. As for France, at least in the north, the figures were comparable: the proportion of graduates among canons of Laon, which between 1270 and 1378 had been 43 per cent, by 1409 had doubled to 86 per cent (though of these almost half were mere masters of arts). Elsewhere progress may have been slower, but everywhere it was apparent. In the Danish chapter of Roskilde, for example, the proportion of former students rose from 55 per cent between 1367 and 1430 to 78 per cent between 1431 and 1493, while the percentage of graduates, above all in arts, it is true, increased from 19 to 45.4. At the end of the century the number of graduates in many places was so large that some were unable to obtain a canonry, and were forced to make do merely with a parish.
If an ecclesiastical career remained the most usual prospect for young men who had studied at school or university, demand from the lay sector made spectacular strides in the fifteenth century, although one needs to remember that during this period many secular posts could still be filled by clerics, at least by those in minor orders; one sees this in England, for instance. Generally speaking, lay graduates did not belong to princely councils, which remained the prerogative of the higher nobility. Chancelleries and sovereign courts of justice on the contrary — the king’s bench, the parlement of Paris, for example — from the early 1400s were largely in the hands of lay graduates. Even where this was not yet the case, the numbers of graduates grew very rapidly during the century: at the Council of Brabant, the duchy’s supreme court, they rose from 40 per cent to 70 per cent. Even more numerous were the posts available in the local machinery of princely administrations which supported a satellite community of attorneys and lawyers. Here, law graduates might carve out for themselves a comfortable niche. At the end of the century, however, graduates had become so plentiful, in the bailliages near Paris, for instance, that some doctors or licentiates were obliged, at the start of their careers at least, to accept subordinate posts, which in preceding generations had been filled by individuals without a university education.
Increasing numbers of towns, as well as the more or less independent city-states of the Italian peninsula and of Germany, and the bonnes villes integrated into the national monarchies of France, England and Spain were drawing upon the services of university-educated doctors and jurists. In some cases (Barcelona, Montpellier, Nuremberg), the persistent mistrust of the merchant patriciate restricted them to essentially vocational positions; elsewhere, they gained access in the end to the actual management of municipal affairs. Such promotion was obviously accompanied by significant social changes: bourgeois men of commerce began to send their sons to university and to marry their daughters to graduates. Private practice likewise offered opportunities to university graduates in law or medicine. Mere masters of arts, if they did not remain in the ranks of the clergy, could at least become school-masters.
Finally one needs to add that studying for its own sake, or at any rate studying without instant vocational prospects, was not unknown in the fifteenth century and perhaps enjoyed a certain revival. A more widespread desire for access to the world of literacy which printing, by producing an abundance of ‘popular’ books, would assuage in the second half of the century was one of the factors, among urban populations (even in artisan circles) and the nobility, conspiring to propel a growing number of young people into schools. Other influences were new demands, even from the laity, stimulated by the religious reform movements (to read the Bible), and the reputation, whether it was enjoyed for cultural or merely fashionable reasons, of Italian humanism. If the response of the tradition-loving faculties to these kinds of expectations was somewhat inadequate, the new schools (schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, humanist contubernia) were certainly more efficient, and this was one of the principal factors behind their success. In consequence of the new peregrinatio academica (precursor of the Grand Tour of more recent times) young English, German and Scandinavian nobles were beginning to venture to the Italian peninsula for a rapid excursion round the principal studia. This, too, was symptomatic of such cultural interests.
Given such conditions, in spite of a widespread demographic depression until 1450 at least, the definite increase, in both relative and real terms, in the numbers of people receiving education during the fifteenth century is easily explained; and this despite the ‘misfortunes of the period’. If some of the old university centres (such as Paris, Montpellier and Toulouse) were perhaps undergoing a period of stagnation, elsewhere progress was evident: the total strength of Oxford and Cambridge in the period 1400—1500 rose from around 2,000 to around 3,000. It was in Germany that the advance was most spectacular: about 1480, 2,500 new German students registered each year, that is five times more than a hundred years before.
Statistics alone are not enough. The progress they reveal provokes two main points. First, it must be remembered that, in spite of everything, only a small, essentially male, proportion of the population was involved. It is particularly noteworthy that although ‘learning’ was becoming increasingly important to them, many occupations remained outside the scholastic system, either through disdain or lack of awareness, and were thus limited to vocational apprenticeship or family associations — one thinks of the training of artists and architects, the beginnings of civil engineering (mines, metallurgy) and of military engineering (artillery, fortifications), or the principles of trading and shipping. Even occupations more closely related to scholastic disciplines were not really provided for by universities, which were satisfied with exercising a certain amount of jurisdictional control over them. Barbers and surgeons, notaries and scribes (soon to be replaced by printers) continued to be trained as apprentices. On a totally different level, in some bourgeois and noble circles, above all on the Italian peninsula, new types of learned associations (academies) sprang up, making it possible to economise on a traditional university education.
Secondly, one needs to enquire into the social and cultural significance of the enlarged scholastic and graduate population. Although some contemporary treatises complained of the overproduction of graduates — the first appearance of a theme destined to enjoy a long life — it would be wrong to claim that the expansion in numbers of those receiving education had reached a crisis point. While some graduates may have experienced early difficulties in their chosen careers, there was no glut of graduates. Although the shortcomings of universities, as considered above, reflected a certain lack of relevance in the courses offered, degrees none the less retained their value as social currency. One needs to substitute for the understandable, yet illusory, theory of a depreciation of knowledge and men of learning the notion of a ‘general rise in the cultural level’. This seems better to take into account those developments to be found in the fifteenth century and beyond.
For all that, should one be hailing the birth of a modern meritocracy? In spite of the declining benefits of papal patronage, the spiralling costs of study and the restrictive rules adopted in some places, education was still a means of social mobility. Well-known individual cases can be quoted: Gerson, son of Ardennes peasants, and Nicholas of Cusa, son of a Moselle boatman. One recalls that almost 20 per cent of German university students in the fifteenth century were classed as pauperes; it is true that many never progressed beyond the arts faculty and, in consequence, the lower ranks of the secular clergy. Nowhere did the nobility monopolise educational institutions: its numbers in these were proportionally no higher than they were in society at large. At the beginning of the fifteenth century nobles accounted for scarcely 5 per cent of the population of universities in the south of France; between 1380 and 1500 the figure at New College, Oxford, was less than 13 per cent, and most of those were gentry.
Yet it is clear that the majority of students came from broad social strata of the middle rank, essentially rural in England, decidedly urban on the Italian peninsula and in the Empire — sons of farmers, artisans, tradesmen, reaping the benefits of a mobility that one might term ‘oblique’ or horizontal. Access to study provided the passport from the world of shops or trade to that of the clergy and to administrative posts that no doubt guaranteed more security and prestige. From the outset they had had financial means and personal relationships (kinship, friendship, protectors) and were thus able to accomplish without too much difficulty this change in occupation, sometimes compounded by a geographical move, which study and qualifications rendered possible. In succeeding generations one sees the formation of genuine graduate dynasties: places reserved in the best colleges, reductions in examination fees, books handed down from father to son, or from uncle to nephew; all these fostered the creation of castes or sub-castes of judges, lawyers, teachers, whose culture and learning were handed down as a family tradition and a hereditary commodity.
Certainly at the end of the fifteenth century there was no question of a glut of graduates. However, the schools and universities which developed at the end of the Middle Ages, rather than provoking widespread social mobility, seem above all to have allowed society to adapt to the changing political and economic situation of the age. This does not mean — no doubt fortunately for the history of western culture — that all the consequences, both short and long term, of the surge in education and learning had been foreseen and controlled.