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Nowadays the worst part of being the youngest child is the hand-me-down clothes. But in the early Middle Ages, the youngest child couldn't inherit land and often faced a life of hard labor as a serf. As the population grew, these landless serfs began to look for a better life beyond crowded feudal estates. Many took to the road as merchants.

Beginning in the eleventh century, the burgeoning merchant class created a market for education that went beyond learning about Scripture. While theology remained the "queen of the sciences," merchants needed other skills: reading and writing, for communication with suppliers, and mathematics, for balancing books. As supply met demand, the university was born.

Universities became central to life in the Middle Ages. In addition to training and educating merchants, they also educated clergy, shaped public opinion on important theological issues, helped settle ecclesiastical disputes (including the Great Schism of the fourteenth century), and were alternately courted and threatened by power-seeking popes. Although largely unnoticed at the time, the universities also had a leveling influence in that they allowed poor men and youngest sons to gain power and status through education.

Medieval universities quickly gained popularity. By 1250, about 7,000 students attended the University of Paris. Oxford University, located in a much smaller city, boasted a very respectable 2,000 students. All told, 81 universities operated throughout Europe prior to the Reformation.

Western Europe's first schools were begun in the sixth century by Benedictine monks who wanted to teach young men to read and write. Because these schools were associated with monasteries, they tended to be in remote locations. Students spent most of their time learning Scripture and copying texts.

In 1079, Pope Gregory VII issued a decree requiring the creation of cathedral schools, controlled by local bishops, for the purpose of educating the clergy. These cathedral schools grew more influential than the older monastic schools, partly because they were located in growing cities, such as Paris and Orléans.

Universities arose from established cathedral schools, especially in France. Peter Abelard (1079-1142), a leading teacher in Paris, taught in a cathedral school on the bank of the River Seine. His enormous popularity attracted other teachers to Paris, and by the turn of the century the University of Paris had been founded.

The University of Salerno, begun in the ninth century as a medical school, is perhaps the oldest university in the Western world. Like other universities, it offered advanced instruction in subjects beyond the typical course of theological study in cathedral schools. The earliest ivies also included the University of Bologna (founded in 1084), Oxford University (1170), and the University of Paris (1200).

The University of Paris distinguished itself as the theological epicenter of Western Christendom, and its reputation attracted the best and the brightest. Albert the Great and his disciple Thomas Aquinas received theology degrees from the University of Paris in the 1240s. Nine future popes also studied there.

Up until the beginning of the thirteenth century, students from throughout Europe traveled to centers of learning, such as Cologne, Paris, or London, and sought out a master, or teacher. A student would arrive in the city, look for a place to live, and then attempt to hire a master to teach him.

Alexander Neckham, for instance, traveled from a small town near London to Paris in the 1170s. He studied under a fellow Englishman named Adam dou Petit Pont—French for "Adam of the Little Bridge," because Adam taught in a house on the bridge across the Seine near Notre Dame.

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