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Hello, there are 115 universities in Britain today, but 800 years ago that number was just 2, Oxford and Cambridge.

There were the first examples of a new type of educational institution, which had first appeared in Italy and France in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Within a few generations, universities were finding a similar education in Latin to people all over Europe.

The medieval universities offered a rigorous training in subjects including law, medicine and above all theology.

Their influence was tremendous and forever altered the intellectual landscape of the continent.

The university model of further education proved so durable that it changed little in the following 7 centuries.

And it seems as students don't change much either. At one point the teachers and students of Paris went on a two-year strike.

With me to illustrate and to discuss the medieval universities and their influence are Miner Rubin, professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary University of London.

In way, senior lecturer in medieval European history at the University of Bristol and Peter Denney, reader in history also of Queen Mary University of London.

The story begins about a thousand years ago, but before those first universities, what institutions as it were breaded them?

Well, around the year 1000 in Europe there would have been probably four places where you might get as a sort of adolescent growing man, some sort of refinement in education.

One of them would be in courts. So for example, the Holy Roman Emperor around him in his court would have chaplains who would train men of court, maybe aristocrats, maybe priests to be in writing and reading and poetry.

Then there were of course cathedrals because every bishop absolutely has to have a working administration around him, training priests for his diocese, but also just clocks and people to run the services in the cathedral.

So cathedrals were always very important folk-ite places where you had to provide education of some sort.

And then there were of course monasteries. Monasteries where children were truly offered at a very, very young age at that period.

So just the basic question of training them into adulthood, let alone of course giving them a Christian education.

And then there's a fourth venue, I think, which is as important, which is really training as a form of apprenticeship.

Perhaps lawyers in Italian cities or doctors in Italian cities would take up young men who want to career in those areas and train them almost like a pupillage would be today.

So those four places, and although they're very different in terms of the social setting, one thing they all share, which is really important, is a commitment to a curriculum that by then, say around 1000, is already hundreds and hundreds of years old.

And that is the classical Greek Roman system, which is known as the system of the liberal arts.

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