he needed extra help. Some men, but almost no women, worked their way up to
master status. They were the ones who dominated the offices and set guild policies.
The codification of guild practices and membership tended to work against
women, who were slowly being ousted from the world of workers during the late
twelfth century. In Flanders, for example, as the manufacture of woolen cloth shifted
from rural areas to cities, and from light to heavy looms, women were less involved
in cloth production than they had been on traditional manors. Similarly, water- and
animal-powered mills took the place of female hand labor to grind grain into flour—
and most millers were male. Nevertheless, at Paris, guild regulations for the silk
fabric makers assumed that the artisans would be women:
No journeywoman maker of silk fabric may be a mistress [the female
equivalent of “master”] of the craft until she has practiced it for a year
and a day.... No mistress of the craft may weave thread with silk, or
foil with silk.... No mistress or journeywoman of the craft may make a
false hem or border.^17
By contrast, universities were all-male guilds. (The word universitas is Latin for
“guild.”) Referring at first to organizations of masters and students, the term
eventually came to apply to the school itself. At the beginning of the thirteenth
century, the universities regulated student discipline, scholastic proficiency, and
housing while determining the masters’ behavior in equal detail. At the University of
Paris, for example, the masters were required to wear long black gowns, follow a
particular order in their lectures, and set the standards by which students could
become masters themselves. The University of Bologna was unique in having two
guilds, one of students and one of masters. At Bologna, the students participated in
the appointment, payment, and discipline of the masters.
The University of Bologna was unusual because it was principally a school of
law, where the students were often older men, well along in their careers (often in
imperial service) and used to wielding power. At the University of Paris, young
students predominated, drawn by its renown in the liberal arts and theology. The
universities of Salerno (near Naples) and Montpellier (in southern France) specialized
in medicine. Oxford, once a sleepy town where students clustered around one or two
masters, became a center of royal administration; its university soon developed a
reputation for teaching the liberal arts, theology, science, and mathematics.
