Like the religious orders, the universities were part of the world system and only indirectly represented the struggling national life.  The ferment of the twelfth century revival crystallised groups of masters or doctors into guilds called universities, with a strong class tradition, rigid codes of rules, and intense corporate spirit.  The schools at Oxford, whose continuous history can be traced from the days of Henry II., had acquired a considerable reputation by the time that his grandson had ascended the throne.  Oxford university, with an autonomous constitution of its own since 1214, was presided over by a chancellor who, though in a sense the representative of the distant diocesan at Lincoln, was even in the earliest times the head of the scholars, and no mere delegate of the bishop.  Five years earlier the Oxford schools were sufficiently vigorous to provoke a secession, from which the first faint beginnings of a university at Cambridge arose.  A generation later there were other secessions to Salisbury and Northampton, but neither of these schools succeeded in maintaining themselves.  Cambridge itself had a somewhat languid existence throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, and was scarcely recognised as a studium generale until the bull of John XXII. in 1318 made its future position secure.  In early days the university owed nothing to endowments, buildings, social prestige, or tradition.  The two essentials was the living voice of the graduate teacher and the concourse of students desirous to be taught.  Hence migrations were common and stability only gradually established.  When, late in Henry III.’s reign, the chancellor, Walter of Merton, desired to set up a permanent institution for the encouragement of poor students, he hesitated whether to establish it at Oxford, or Cambridge, or in his own Surrey village.  Oxford, though patriots coupled it with Paris and Bologna, only gradually rose into repute.  But before the end of Henry III.’s reign it had won an assured place among the great universities of western Europe, though lagging far behind that of the supreme schools of Paris.

The growing fame of the university of Oxford was a matter of national importance.  Down to the early years of the thirteenth century a young English clerk who was anxious to study found his only career abroad, and was too often cut off altogether from his mother country.  Among the last of this type were the Paris mathematician, John of Holywood or Halifax, Robert Curzon, cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and Alexander of Hales.  Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising the text of the Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to England but for the wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, in the fulness of his reputation and powers, to the service of the English Church.  Not many years younger than Langton was his successor Edmund of Abingdon, but the difference was enough to make the younger primate