aris became
continually greater; they appear, before the year 1169, to have been
divided into nations;[822] and probably they had an elected rector and
voluntary rules of discipline about the same time. This, however, is not
decisively proved; but in the last year of the twelfth century they
obtained their earliest charter from Philip Augustus.[823]

[Sidenote: University of Oxford.]

The opinion which ascribes the foundation of the university of Oxford to
Alfred, if it cannot be maintained as a truth, contains no intrinsic
marks of error. Ingulfus, abbot of Croyland, in the earliest authentic
passage that can be adduced to this point,[824] declares that he was
sent from Westminster to the school at Oxford, where he learned
Aristotle, with the first and second books of Tully's Rhetoric.[825]
Since a school for dialectics and rhetoric subsisted at Oxford, a town
of but middling size and not the seat of a bishop, we are naturally led
to refer its foundation to one of our kings, and none who had reigned
after Alfred appears likely to have manifested such zeal for learning.
However, it is evident that the school of Oxford was frequented under
Edward the Confessor. There follows an interval of above a century,
during which we have, I believe, no contemporary evidence of its
continuance. But in the reign of Stephen, Vacarius read lectures there
upon civil law; and it is reasonable to suppose that a foreigner would
not have chosen that city, if he had not found a seminary of learning
already established. It was probably inconsiderable, and might have been
interrupted during some part of the preceding century.[826] In the
reign of Henry II., or at least of Richard I., Oxford became a very
flourishing university, and in 1201, according to Wood, contained 3000
scholars.[827] The earliest charters were granted by John.

[Sidenote: University of Bologna.]

[Sidenote: Encouragement given to universities.]

If it were necessary to construe the word university in the strict sense
of a legal incorporation, Bologna might lay claim to a higher antiquity
than either Paris or Oxford. There are a few vestiges of studies pursued
in that city even in the eleventh century;[828] but early in the next
the revival of the Roman jurisprudence, as has been already noticed,
brought a throng of scholars round the chairs of its professors.
Frederic Barbarossa in 1158, by his authentic, or rescript, entitled
Habita, took these under his protection,