I have recently discovered that you live dissolutely and slothfully

From The Invention of News: How The World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree.

And what do students in medieval Europe write home about? Just what you would think.

The examples that survive of student correspondence are undoubtedly only a tiny proportion of the anxious communications that shuttled back and forth between universities and home. But the letters were sufficiently numerous for us to hope to discover in them some informed commentary on current affairs. Universities were placed in some of Europe's most vibrant cities, close to the ebb and flow of political life. Yet for all this the harvest of insights and comment on the great events of the day is decidedly meager. Students writing home had two things uppermost in mind: to impress their parents with their progress in the art of letter writing, and to ask for cash. The medieval epistolary style was formal and highly structured, and students, often destined for a career as an official or a clerk, were keen to demonstrate their progress in mastering this art. If they happened to be less diligent in the attending of classes of masters who taught these skills, there were copy-books and manuals with model letters to draw on as shortcuts. The formal salutations over, the writer cut to the chase: money had run out; it was hard for family back home to realise how expensive a university could be; send more. This letter from Oxford University written around 1220 could stand for thousands in a similar vein:

This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands: I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun.

Few parents found it easy to resist the pleas of a starving child even if the presentations of ceaseless industry were treated with healthy skepticism. "I have recently discovered," wrote one exasperated parent from Besancon to his son at Orleans,

that you live dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint and play to work, and strumming a guitar while the others are at their studies, whence it happens that you have read but one volume of law while your more industrious companions have read several. Wherefore I have decided to exhort you herewith to repent utterly of your dissolute and careless ways, that you may no longer be called a waster, and that your shame may be called to good repute.