Picardy village,
founded[68] a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of
Castile a small house above the palace of the Thermae where he was able
to maintain a few poor students of theology. Friends came to his aid
and soon sixteen were accommodated, to whom others, able to maintain
themselves, were added. In 1269 a papal bull confirmed the
establishment of the _pauvres maistres estudiants_ in the faculty of
theology at Paris. Even when enriched by later founders it was still
called _la pauvre Sorbonne_. By the renown of their erudition the
doctors of the Sorbonne became the great court of appeal in the Middle
Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne synonymous with the
university. Some of the hostels were on a larger scale. The college of
Cardinal Lemoine, founded in 1302 by the papal legate, housed sixty
students in arts and forty in theology. Most were paying residents,
but a number of bursaries were provided for those whose incomes were
below a certain amount. Each _boursier_ was given daily two loaves of
white bread of twelve ounces, "the common weight in the windows of
Paris bakers."

[Footnote 67: The two churches still existed in the eighteenth century
and stood on the site of the southern Cours Visconti and Lefuel of the
present Louvre.]

[Footnote 68: The actual originator was, however, the queen's
physician, Robert de Douai, who left a sum of money which formed the
nucleus of the foundation.]

In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, left her mansion
near the Tour de Nesle and 2000 livres annually to found the college
of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in
philosophy, and twenty in theology. The first were allowed four sous
weekly; the second, six; the third, eight. If any were possessed of
annual incomes respectively of thirty, forty and sixty livres, they
ceased to hold bursaries. The maintenance fund seems, however, to have
been mismanaged, for we soon read of the scholars of the college
walking the streets of Paris every morning crying--"Bread, bread, good
people, for the poor scholars of Madame of Navarre!"

Some forty colleges were in existence by the end of the fourteenth
century and had increased to fifty by the end of the fifteenth; in the
seventeenth, Evelyn gives their number as sixty-five. In Felibien's
time some had disappeared, for in his map (1725) forty-four colleges
only are marked. Nearly the whole of these colleges clustered ar