Around 500 AD Boethius influenced the content of a ‘liberal education’, which he determined was to include the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, as well as the mathematical quadrivium. This curriculum survived as the course of study at the new universities of Oxford and Cambridge around the end of the fourteenth century. Such learning was cultivated for its own sake. However,it also provided access to status and power, as the graduates of these universities achieved highest offices of church and state (Howson,1982).