Before the end of the twelfth century when the Universities came into existence, the intellectual life of Europe was centred in the monasteries. It was not an intellectual life of great vigour, breadth or profundity, for the Benedictine lectio was concerned more with devotion than with scholarship. Yet it served to keep at bay the barbarism and ignorance that threatened to engulf the Church, and contrived to make in its multiplication of manuscripts a small but precious contribution to Christian civilisation. It was insufficient, however, for the educational needs of the pastoral clergy, and for that reason the Church found herself obliged to erect Cathedral schools as training grounds for her own ministers. The immediate effect of this policy was to lessen the prestige of the monasteries as intellectual centres : and this, added to the changing economic conditions and the increasing prosperity of the towns, resulted in the final emergence of the Cathedral schools as the focal points of culture. From these schools, founded by Bishops and designed mainly as seminaries for their clergy, the universities took their rise.

Of all these Paris was by far the most celebrated. Whereas at Orleans, Bologna, Salerno and Toledo, studies were almost exclusively confined to arts, or law, or medicine or physics, at Paris no specialisation was attempted. Roman law and Canon law, Aristotle and Peter Lombard, the new Euclid and the new Ptolemy, the Greek and Arabic physicians, all these had their masters and their students. And as strict supervision over studies and scholars was very difficult, all this feverish intellectual activity, all this jostling of humanists, jurists and theologians, coud only lead to extravagance and disorder. John de Hauteville has described in his Architrenius the resulting chaos, violence and squalor of student life in Paris.