In a modern context, nothing would seem more natural than for an account of the provision and use of books in universities to start with an assessment of their corporate libraries, both those of the university itself and those of the constituent colleges. These surely constitute the major repositories of learning, the essential resource of both students and teachers. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, this was not always the case. An affluent scholar, at least in the sixteenth century, whether or not resident in a university for most of his career, might well, if he were so disposed, amass a collection of books larger than those that either his college or even his university could boast, and it is in the records of private rather than of public collections that shifts in academic fashion may first be detected. Nonetheless, it was in the institutional libraries that the standard texts, the embodiment of the received curricula, accumulated and it is against this background that the provision and use of books in the universities is best viewed.

While statutes for college libraries occur from the last quarter of the thirteenth century at Oxford, and Thomas Cobham had attempted to establish a common library there as early as 1320, in the event the University Library was not to open its doors until 1412. Similarly, Cambridge University was left a chest of books by Richard de Lyng, three times Chancellor, in 1355, but the first references to the ‘common library’ are not until 1416.