and
if the students showed their dislike to it, by shouting, hissing,
groaning, or throwing stones, they were to be sent down for a year.
More than two hundred years later, in 1452, the statute was rescinded
by Cardinal Estoutville, but it was probably never operative.
Estoutville permitted either method of lecturing, and contented
himself with forbidding lecturers to use questions and lectures which
were not of their own composition, or to deliver their lectures
(however good) to be read by one of their scholars as a deputy. He
instructs the masters to lecture regularly according to the statutes
and to explain the text of Aristotle, "de puncto in punctum," and,
holding that fear and reverence are the life-blood of scholastic
discipline, he repeats an injunction which we find in 1336, that the
students in Arts are to sit not on benches or raised seats, but on (p. 144)
the floor, "ut occasio superbiae a juvenibus secludatur." The name of
the street in which lectures were given, Vicus Stramineus, is said to
have been derived from the straw on which the students sat. The
question whether lectures should be committed to writing or not,
troubled the masters of other universities besides Paris, and the
statutes of the College de Verdale at Toulouse accept, in 1337, the
view taken at Paris a hundred years earlier. Since study is a vehement
application of the mind, and requires the whole man, the scholars are
forbidden to fatigue themselves with too many lectures--not more than
two or three a day--and in lecture they are not to take down the
lecturer's words, nor, trusting in writings of this kind, to blunt
their "proprium intellectum." In the Schools, they must not use
"incausta" or pencils except for correcting a book, etc. And what they
have been able to retain in their memory they must meditate on without
delay.

The insistence on meditation was a useful educational method, but as
teaching became more organised, the student was not left without
guidance in his meditations. The help which he received outside
lectures was given in Repetitions or Resumptions. The procedure at
Repetitions may be illustrated from the statutes of the College of
Dainville at Paris: "We ordain that all bursars in grammar and (p. 145)
philosophy speak the Latin tongue, and that those who hear the same
book ordinarily and cursorily shall attend one and the same master
(namely, one whom the master [of the College] assigns to them), and
after the