High Middle Ages · Europe · Culture

1209

Cambridge scholars flee Oxford to found a university

1209

After a townsman killed a student in Oxford and two scholars were hanged in reprisal, masters fled up the fen road to a small market town. At Cambridge they opened their schools among the willows and began tutoring boys in Latin grammar and logic. The rivalry between the two universities, born in violence, would become the defining intellectual axis of English-speaking civilization.