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 were designed more especially for the secular clergy, as the monastic and mendicant orders were already so amply endowed. We must remember that the multitude of students at a mediaeval University was a fluctuating and often turbulent mass. The great value of the Collegiate system, when it first came in, lay not so much in the pecuniary assistance which it gave, as in the security which it afforded for discipline and good order. It was an element of permanence and cohesion for the whole academic body. The teaching function, it may be added, did not belong to the original idea of a College, except in so far as the older residents might be expected to aid or guide the studies of the younger; a College teaching-staff was a later development, due to the altered status of the University schools.

While the Universities, as such, long continued to be identified with the moribund scholasticism, the Colleges, from the fifteenth century onwards, were more especially identified with the new learning,—with the classical revival. At the time of Wyclif's death, that revival was passing, in Italy, through its earliest phase, under the immediate followers of Petrarch, who felt the new delight of discovery. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the groups gathered around Cosmo de' Medici at Florence, or Nicholas V. at Rome, were busied in arranging the discovered materials; and before 1500 criticism had been carried further, chiefly by Italian societies and academies. In due time this new humanism spread to England. But we observe a striking difference