solemn oaths is one of the features of European history
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the students of Bologna
took no unusual or extra-ordinary step when they formed their
Universitates.

The distinction of students into "Nations," which is still preserved
in some of the Scottish universities, is derived from this
guild-forming movement at Bologna at the end of the twelfth and the
beginning of the thirteenth century. No citizen of Bologna was
permitted to be a member of a guild, the protection of which he did
not require. The tendency at first was towards the formation of a
number of Universitates, membership of which was decided by
considerations of nationality. But the conditions which had led to the
formation of these Universitates were also likely to produce some
measure of unification, and the law-students at Bologna soon ceased to
have more than two great guilds, distinguished on geographical
principles as the Universitas Citramontanorum and the Universitas
Ultramontanorum. Each was sub-divided into nations; the cis-Alpine (p. 015)
University consisting of Lombards, Tuscans, and Romans, and the
trans-Alpine University of a varying number, including a Spanish, a
Gascon, a Provencal, a Norman, and an English nation. The three
cis-Alpine nations were, of course, much more populous at Bologna than
the dozen or more trans-Alpine nations, and they were therefore
sub-divided into sections known as Consiliariae. The students of Arts
and Medicine, who at first possessed no organisation of their own and
were under the control of the great law-guilds, succeeded in the
fourteenth century in establishing a new Universitas within the
Studium. The influence of Medicine predominated, for the Arts course
was, at Bologna, regarded as merely a preparation for the study of Law
and, especially, of Medicine; but this third Universitas gave a
definite status and definite rights to the students of Arts. In the
same century the two jurist universities came to act together so
constantly that they were, for practical purposes, united, so that, by
the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Studium Generale of
Bologna contained virtually two universities, one of Law, and the
other of Arts and Medicine, governed by freely-elected rectors. The
peculiar relations of Theology to the Studium and to the universities
is a topic which belongs to constitutional history, and not to our (p. 016)
special subject.

The universities of