The earliest university to develop was in Italy at Salerno in the course of the ninth century. However, the university in Bologna was the first major university to arise. It was established by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa in the mid-eleventh century. Medieval universities started as scholastic guilds, and developed on an analogy with the tradesmen's guilds and the later guilds of aliens in foreign cities which sprang up in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in most of the great European cities.
The original universities were similar to workers’ unions. The term universitas itself originally could mean any community or corporation, unless qualified by the use of such expressions as universitas magistrorum et scholarium or similar. Students and teachers banded together in order to put themselves in a stronger position to bargain with the nearby townspeople for fair rents. This also gave them more protection as the people would often look upon the student body as foreigners without any civil rights.
Medieval universities were spontaneous creations which evolved in the course of the twelfth century. They first emerged in Bologna and Paris. These were the archetypes which determined the twofold pattern of …show more content…
The goal for attending school was social mobility, largely the same as entering into college in the modern day. Those who tended to enter the clergy were the men who would otherwise not inherit much in the way of worldly power, such as any younger sons of nobility and members of the quickly growing middle class. The social life at the medieval university was also not all that unlike today's system. Universities still had rules and regulations set up against gambling, flamboyant dress, staying out all hours of the night, and associating with women in a manner the Church would deem