Embarking on the compilation of a universal history, the Polychronicon, sometime shortly after 1327, Ranulph Higden opened the work with some consideration of the reasons for reading about history: ‘In historico namque contextu chronographorum nobis diligentia delegato relucet clarius norma morum’ (in John Trevisa's later fourteenth- century English translation, ‘in þe makynge and bookes of stories, þat is to vs i-sent and byqueþe by grete besynesse of þe writers of cronicles, blaseþ and schyneþ clerliche þe ri3t rule of þewes’). In other words, through reading accounts of past history we can learn how to live properly (‘þe ri3t rule of þewes’). Some paragraphs further on Higden returned to the desirability of cultivating learning that would equip people to understand history:

To fully comprehend what you read, he suggests, you need not just a properly informed understanding of history, but to know something about places and cultural difference (‘dyuerste [sic] of liuynge’) too. For these reasons Higden began the Polychronicon with a description of the known world, which takes up the first book, calling this section of the work a ‘mappa mundi’, a term sometimes used by later readers of the whole of the Polychronicon. While Higden advanced ethically aspirational reasons for learning about the world, other late medieval authorities drew attention to the more practical advantages such knowledge might confer. A very short English account of world geography, surviving in its earliest form in a printed edition from c.1502, was to be recommended to sixteenth-century readers as ‘Uery necessary for all Marchauntes and Maryners And for all such as wyll labour & traueyle in the countres of the worlde’: knowledge of the world around you helps you to get your work done and make some money.