In very early times universities seem to have taken great interest in such geography and history as was known. As, according to a well known legend, Herodotus read his history at a panathenaic festival when young Thucydides was by, so we read that Giraldus de Barri (Cambrensis) recited his Topographia Hiberniae in the convention of the university of Oxford at the close of the 12th century, and Rolandius his chronicle in the presence of the professors and scholars of Padua.

Before the twelfth century the study of History meant reading the work of Paulus Orosius, a book founded on his master Augustine's De civitate Dei.

In later times a taste sprang up for rhyming chronicles, and mirabilia mundi; then for moral tales and anecdote, flowers of histories, illustrative of the Virtues and Vices, and (with the exception of the interesting and romantic character of their incidents) bearing scarcely higher claims to the title than the History of the Fairchild Family, or the story of Sandford and Merton. Such were the Gesta romanorum and the Speculum historiarum, printed in 1483.