ABSTRACT
It is generally true to say that far more can be discovered about the endowed personnel of the English academic community than about those who lived in unendowed circumstances. This is so because stabilized living in permanent institutions in a medieval university was normally more productive of archival material than was the case with transient residence. For this reason, the problems of determining the social status and conditions of life of the mass of students and masters domiciled in the unendowed halls and hostels and, before attachment to a hall, hostel or college became compulsory, in private lodgings in the houses of townspeople or in taverns are among the most intractable of the problems inherent in the study of the English academic community in the Middle Ages. Other such problems — those relating to the changing dimensions of the populations of the English Universities in the later medieval period and to the geographical areas of recruitment — have been explored in chapters 3 and 4 respectively, and need not be further examined here.
