While popular imagination might envision Medieval Europe as a simple society with strict class distinctions, this was most certainly not the case. Nowhere was this more evident in Italy, my own area of interest, where the political elite contained a segment of prosperous urban professionals, some of which were educated in institutions whose modern descendants are still active today.

Of course, that is not to say Medieval Europe was not a place beset by stark inequality, or that the professional service industry was the largest component of the economy. Medieval Europe was indeed a very unequal society, and most people's economic activity was agriculture. While towns and cities did exist, many more people lived in small country hamlets. In many regions, large landowners could indeed unfairly exploit their tenants ("Help help, I'm being oppressed!"). However, in other regions small landholders were the majority, with few large magnates renting plots of land. In other regions still, a mix of small and large landowners coexisted with renters and serfs. But each individual region of Europe was characterized by its own social distinctions, shaped by their individual history and institutions. To again offer the example of Italy, while the North was characterized by many small landowners who participated frequently in the economic life of nearby cities and towns, in the South landed magnates were much more powerful. This, along with other factors, allowed for the creation of a single unified state in the South (whose main threat to stability came from internal upheavals) while the North experienced political fragmentation (whose existential threats were instead characterized by external rivalries). Not only did political organization develop different shades, but so did social organization. Across the Western Mediterranean and beyond, landowners could establish presences in cities and invest in commercial enterprises, while prosperous urban professionals, merchants, and artisans could purchase estates in the countryside. In some cities, like Florence, membership in a Merchant Guild was an important part of political enfranchisement, even if the member in question did not practice their guild's trade themselves (investment in an enterprise, or mere association with someone who did, was enough). In other cities, like Milan, land ownership remained an important component of political enfranchisement. Many times, prosperous urbanites could clash with suburban landowners, as could small landowners with large landowners, or the urban poor pit themselves against the urban rich.

It is also important to keep in mind that Europe dramatically changed over the centuries called "the middle ages." In the eighth century, Italy was torn apart by war pitting the Byzantine Empire against the Lombard Kingdom, while in modern France the Carolingian Dynasty was founding an Empire, and England was divided amongst seven competing kingdoms. Two centuries later, Italy and Germany would experience an intellectual reawakening under the Ottonian dynasty, while in France the monarchy was experiencing a resurgence after a steep decline, and England was divided in two between the Danes and Anglo-Saxons.

The role of universities changed over the centuries as well. The earliest Universities, and I'm using the word in the broadest possible sense, were documented as early as the tenth century. But the inclusion of more modern courses of study like engineering (just as an example) would only really begin in earnest in the 19th century as Polytechnic Universities emerged offering courses adapted to industrialized society. Indeed for much of the Medieval period and beyond, in many professions training and certification would have been regulated by individual guilds, who set rules for apprenticeship and mastery of their respective arts. While having a family relative in a guild was seldom an explicit prerequisite for membership (prosperous artisans and professionals were often on the lookout for fresh manpower to take on as apprentices) having a trusted family member who knew the ropes could be a valuable boost when navigating the complex world of Medieval Guilds.

In the broadest sense, the earliest western european universities were collections of practitioners in law and theology. This is what was being taught at the time of the medieval founding dates of the oldest universities in Europe, like Bologna or Oxford. But while there is indeed evidence of students being taught by master practitioners in the eleventh century (indicating that teaching was probably already well established) it would be an enormous stretch to assume these lessons world have born resemblance to modern institutions of higher learning.

In this earliest period (prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) a university education would have been entirely religious in nature, geared to preparing a student for a life in the clergy. Nearly other professions would have been managed by an apprenticeship system, with degrees of formalization varying from place to place. It is also true that, in Italy at least, the destructiveness of the Lombard Wars had favored a social system where disproportionately wealthy individuals with time and resources could dedicate themselves to studying things like law and architecture on their own, developing mastery across multiple topics (think along the lines of designing their own palaces and castles, while also concocting legal arguments against their political enemies; an early Doge of Venice, Pietro Orseolo, was one such polymath). But in a society with a close relationship between religion, politics, and law, centers of religious teaching soon also became centers of legal study. Under the Ottonian Empire, the collection of scholars in the town of Pavia became one such center, validated by monarchs preferring Pavia it to the larger but more unruly city of Milan nearby. Pavia's status was later formalized in the 14th century by the rulers of Milan, and remains the seat of a University to this day. Universities could also spring up where there was the opportunity to exchange ideas: Padua and Bologna, for example, were longstanding Byzantine outposts in Italy, where Imperial Laws were still rigorously enforced and aspiring scholars could easily recover religious and legal texts. Thus Padua and Bologna had been welcoming students for centuries long before their universities were formally founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively. There were also many other cities in Italy where renowned practitioners resided who could also offer students a instruction deemed valid; some of these were later recognized and formalized, while others were not. And finally, in many of these places concentrated knowledge of Latin and Greek facilitated the outgrowth of additional topics of study, like philosophy and medicine.

The kind of person which would move to Bologna, Padua, or Pavia in order to study would have been a person of means aspiring for a career in the law, in the church, and in later centuries, as a medical practitioner (but not a surgeon; that was considered a separate, more tradesman-like profession). But the great dynasties of Medieval Europe, however, could afford tutors to come to them and prepare their children for the rigors of political life, even if their children were to enter a career in the clergy. So the profile of the average university student, such as we can attempt identify, would be wealthy, but not too wealthy. And it's also important to keep in mind that while the kinds of students in universities were upper-middle-class (or lower-upper-class) not all upper-middle-class youngsters learned their trade in universities. Prosperous moneychangers, wool merchants, and other tradesmen whose guild education was considered just as formal could indeed inherit or develop large and lucrative enterprises. Through their guilds, they could even develop political influence and connections, all without an education from the universities.