The history of education, like all other branches of history, is based
upon documents. Historical documents are, in general, "the traces which
have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former times"; the
term commonly refers to the original records or _sources_ from which our
knowledge of historical facts is derived. The documents most generally
used by historians are written or printed. In the history of education
alone these are of the greatest variety; as is shown in the following
pages, among them are university charters, proceedings, regulations,
lectures, text-books, the statutes of student organizations, personal
letters, autobiographies, contemporary accounts of university life, and
laws made by civil or ecclesiastical authorities to regulate university
affairs. Similar varieties of records exist for other educational
institutions and activities. The immense masses of such written or
printed materials produced to-day, even to the copy-book of the primary
school and the student's note-book of college lectures, will, if they
survive, become documents for the future historian of education.

The known sources for the history of education in western Europe since
the twelfth century--to go no further afield--are exceedingly numerous,
and widely spread among various public and private collections; the
labor of a lifetime would hardly suffice to examine them all critically.
Nevertheless many printed and written documents have been collected,
edited, and published in their original languages; and in some instances
the collections are fairly complete, or at least fairly representative
of the documents in existence. Assuming that they are accurate copies of
the original records, many are now easily accessible to students of the
subject, since these reproductions may be owned by all large libraries.

These records, rightly apprehended, have far more than a mere