University in 1269

Studying at a university during the Middle Ages was not for the faint-hearted. The congregation of so many young men in a single town without parental authority was a recipe for trouble. Drunkenness, violence and prostitution were facts of life, with the students acting as both the victims and the instigators. The records show frequent complaints about riotous students from the put-upon townsfolk. In 1269, we hear that

a frequent and continual complaint has gone the rounds that there are in Paris some students and scholars...who under the pretence of leading the scholarly life, more often perpetrate unlawful and criminal acts relying on their weapons, by day and night, to atrociously wound or kill many persons, rape women, oppress virgins, break into inns, also repeatedly commit robberies and other enormities hateful to God.[2]

[2]Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 78

Hannam, James, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, Icon Books Ltd, 2009, p. 154.