This intellectual ferment had its results on practical life.  Though the university was cosmopolitan, the individual members of it were not the less good citizens.  A patriot like Grosseteste strove to his uttermost to keep Englishmen for Oxford or to win them back from Paris.  Oxford clerks fought the battle of England against the legate Otto, and we shall see them siding with Montfort.  The eminently practical temper of the academic class could not neglect the world of action for the abstract pursuit of science.  Eager as men were to know, to prove, and to inquire, the age had little of the mystical temperament about it.  The studies which made for worldly success, such as civil and canon law, attracted the thousands for whom philosophy or theology had little attraction.  Never before was there a career so fully opened to talent.  The academic teacher’s fame took him from the lecture-room to the court, from the university to the episcopal throne, and so it was that the university influenced action almost as profoundly as it influenced thought, and affected all classes of society alike.  The struggles of poor students like Edmund of Abingdon or Grosseteste must not make us think that the universities of this period were exclusively frequented by humble scholars.  The academic career of a rich baron’s son like Thomas of Cantilupe, living in his own hired house at Paris with a train of chaplains and tutors, receiving the visits of the French king, and feeding poor scholars with the remnants from his table, is as characteristic as the more common picture of the student begging his way from one seat of learning to another, and suffering the severest privations rather than desert his studies.  Yet the function of the studium as promoting a healthy circulation between the various orders of medieval society, must not be ignored.

Partly to help on the poor, partly to encourage men to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge, endowments began to arise which soon enhanced the splendour of universities though they lessened their mobility and their freedom.  The mendicant convents at Paris and Oxford prepared the way for secular foundations, at first small and insignificant, like that which, in the days of Henry III., John Balliol established at Oxford for the maintenance of poor scholars, but soon increasing in magnitude and distinction.  The great college set up by St. Louis’ confessor at Paris for the endowment of scholars, desirous of studying the unlucrative but vital subject of theology, was soon imitated by the chancellor of Henry III.  Side by side with Robert of Sorbon’s college of 1257, arose Walter of Merton’s foundation of 1263, and twenty years later Bishop Balsham’s college of Peterhouse extended the “rule of Merton” to Cambridge.