The original town, LUTETIA PARISIORUM, was on the Island now call the Île de la Cité. There were several other islands, but too low and marshy to build on. As the town grew, the island became too small. Towns develop along their roads, and the main road here was the one which crossed the Seine at the easiest place – the island – on its way from Soissons to Orléans and so on to the South. The South being the way to Rome, it was on that side that the expansion took place. After a time the road grew so crowded with traffic that a parallel one – now the

Boul’Mich – was built, and a one-way system introduced. There’s nothing new under the sun. Each road was thirty feet wide and paved with sandstone on a bed of concrete. The forum, or market-place, was between the two roads where the Rue Soufflot is now. The theatre was just down the street on the side where we are now, and the baths – very important to Romans – were originally two in number, one on each street. The smaller baths survive, and can be inspected as part of the Musée de Cluny, down towards the river. The larger baths, on the Rue Saint-Jacques, have disappeared. Barbarians destroyed the Roman town in 280 AD, and the stones were used for building right through the Dark Ages. In those trouble times, the town once more retreated into the Island.

The Emperor CHARLEMAGNE was crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800, the easiest of all dates to remember. He ruled the Empire of the Franks from farther North, at Aix-la-Chapelle, now Aachen in Germany; but he made Paris a centre for Education by founding a number of schools. Not nursery-schools or neighbourhood comprehensive, but Theological Colleges, the Universities of his day.

Early in the 12th Century one of the Masters, PIERRE ABÉLARD, fell out with his fellow-theologians and moved off the Island to set up his own School. This caused a tremendous academic row, with the student population gleefully taking sides with Abélard or the Bishop, who claimed that nobody had the right to do such a thing. This quarrel Abélard won. The other main argument of his life he lost, but it is for that one that he is chiefly remembered. He fell in love. The girl in question was call Héloise, and lived with her uncle in the house where Abélard lodged.

Now, the problem was that to be a Scholar in those days you had to be a priest, and therefore theoretically celibate. Under the rather peculiar customs of the time, it was considered all right for a scholar-priest to have a mistress, even a considerable family; but marriage itself was a deadly sin. When Uncle discovered that Abélard’s  had not only got his niece pregnant, but also secretly married her, he sent two thugs round to Abélard’s room to make sure, with the aid of a sharp knife, that such a thing would never happen again. After which Héloise retired to a convent and Abélard went back to lecturing, just as before, but in a rather higher voice.

During the rest of the century the students gradually drifted to the Left Bank, and in 1215 the Pope granted them the right to form themselves into Corporations, with their own rules, separate from the law of the land. The students continued to live in lodgings if they could afford them, in the streets if they couldn’t and to hold classes in the open air. In 1253 Robert de Sorbon, Confessor  to Saint Louis who was King at the time, invented a new idea. He told the King (during one of those brief moments when Saint Louis was in France and not off crusading) about the hard lives the students led, and suggested building a large house with classrooms and dormitories. ‘We can call it a college’, he said. So the King coughed up the money and the College was built and more followed quickly; but that original one founded by Robert de Sorbon has always been called the Sorbonne. It was the centre of theological study in France right up to the Revolution. Nowadays the University of Paris has ten enormous sections, but the Sorbonne, in buildings dating from the 17th and 19th centuries, houses two of them.

Students nowadays, especially in France where they have a lot to grumble about, are a rowdy, ill-disciplined lot; but try for a moment to imagine what they must have been like in the Middle Ages. Some were rich enough to pay their own fees; some, though poor, won scholarships which paid the fees but no living expenses; most lived in total poverty and picked up money where they could – mostly out of other people’s pockets. One of the first great French poets, François Villon, lived a student life, alternating between lecture-hall and the slums, entirely on the proceeds of burglary. And all these students were      . They were Clerks in Holy Orders, and subject only to the discipline of the Church. A Church court could hand them over to the Civil arm for punishment, but they had to be caught first, and the Church had no Police Force. They literally terrorised the whole town. In 1407 there was a riot in which a dozen or so people were killed by students, and the King’s Provost rounded up a few of the ringleaders and hanged them on the spot. The Church kicked up a fuss, and the poor Provost was forced to cut the corpses down and bury them with his own hands before asking the University for Pardon on his knees.

When the students weren’t rioting or thieving, they had to work ferociously hard. Classes, and finally exams, lasted all day. For your Doctorate of Theology Finals you had to maintain and justify a thesis, orally, before twenty examiners, all trying to catch you out, from six in the morning until six at night, during  which time you weren’t allowed to eat, drink or leave the room. One finalist, called Buridan, maintained – brilliantly and successfully – the thesis that it was lawful to kill a Queen of France. History does not record what arguments he used to support this, but it does record the Queen’s answer. The next day Buridan was tied up in a sack and thrown in the river. He got out and went on with the argument. What’s more, he did the whole thing in Latin. All lectures and disputations were in Latin; that’s why the University area is called the Latin Quarter.