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Title: Cambridge

Author: M. A. R. Tuker

Illustrator: William Matthison

Release date: October 2, 2014 [eBook #47019]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAMBRIDGE
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Contents
List of Illustrations
(In certain versions of this etext, in
certain browsers, clicking on this
symbol will bring up a larger
version of the illustration.)
A Bibliography
Index Names of Persons and of
Cambridge Families referred to
in the Text
General Index
(etext transcriber's note)

CAMBRIDGE
AGENTS
America The Macmillan Company
64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Australasia The Oxford University Press
205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Canada The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
St. Martin’s House, 70 Bond Street, Toronto
India Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
Macmillan Building, Bombay
300 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
Indian Bank Buildings, Madras

THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
This Bridge joins the Third Court with the Fourth or New Court.
The building on the right, seen through the bridge, is the Library,
and dates back to 1624.

CAMBRIDGE
BY
M. A. R. TUKER
AUTHOR OF PARTS II. AND III. AND JOINT-AUTHOR OF PARTS I. AND IV. OF THE
HANDBOOK TO CHRISTIAN AND ECCLESIASTICAL ROME, AND
JOINT-AUTHOR OF ‘ROME’ IN THIS SERIES

PAINTED BY
WILLIAM MATTHISON

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1907
Published May 1907

Preface
“OF making many books there is no end.” When I set about writing this
book I was ready to believe that the University had not its fair share of the
literary output. Cambridge indeed does not appear to suggest, does not lend
itself to, the numberless little brochures or hymns of praise which
accompany the honoured years of the sister university; in weighty tomes
and valuable collectanea of MSS., however, it possesses works (such as
Cooper’s Annals, the Cole and Baker MSS., and Willis and Clark’s
Architectural History) not possessed by Oxford and unrivalled, perhaps, by
any English town.
In the middle of last century the invaluable Fuller was the most readily
accessible authority, but the last thirty years have seen the publication of the
monumental work of Messieurs Willis and Clark, and of the History of the
University by Mr. J. Bass Mullinger, while at the same time the slighter
literature of the subject has not been neglected.
Nevertheless there is room, I hope, for a short book on the present lines.
It is, I believe, the first time that a chapter on the women’s colleges has
anywhere appeared, and certainly the first time that such a chapter forms
part of an account of the University. I have taken pains to authenticate the
description here given, for events which occurred thirty—even twenty—
years back are now fading out of remembrance and some of those who took
part in them are no longer with us.
A first and last chapter on the origin of universities and on the sister
universities have been omitted for the purposes of this volume.
The pleasantest part of my task still remains to be performed—to thank
all those, both in and out of Cambridge, who have kindly afforded me
facilities, have obtained information on innumerable points, or lightened my
labours by lending books. In addition to this welcome assistance my thanks
are specially due to Mr. J. Willis Clark, late fellow of Trinity, and Registrary
of the University, for sparing time to read the proof sheets of Chapters I.
and II.—for sparing time and not sparing trouble; to the Master of
Peterhouse and to Dr. A. W. Verrall (fellow and late tutor of Trinity) for
reading the proof sheets of portions of Chapter II. and portions of Chapter

III.; to Mr. C. W. Moule fellow and librarian of Corpus Christi, Mr. Ellis H.
Minns assistant-librarian, and late fellow, of Pembroke, to Miss M. G.
Kennedy, and to the Mistress of Girton; to the Assistant Keeper of MSS. at
the British Museum, and the Librarian at Lambeth; to Lord Francis Hervey
and Sir Ernest Clarke who kindly supplied some annotated references to the
school at Bury from the Curteys Register, and last but not least to the Rev.
H. F. Stewart (chaplain of Trinity) and Mrs. Stewart, the former of whom
has been good enough to read portions of the proof sheets of Chapter IV.
For any opinions expressed I am, of course, alone responsible.
M. A. R. T.
February 1907.

Contents
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The northern schools—legends—the town—the river—the fen
monasteries—the school of glomery—the religious orders—the
jurisdiction of Ely—the clerk and the religious.
School and university—Stourbridge fair—the university in the xiii 1-
century—foundation of endowed scholars—hostels 51
CHAPTER II
THE COLLEGES
The university and the colleges—the collegiate system—eras of college
building—Peterhouse—Michaelhouse—collegium and aula—Clare—
college statutes—architectural scheme of a college—Pembroke—
founders of colleges—Gonville—Trinity Hall—Corpus Christi—
Cambridge in 1353—Chaucer at Cambridge—the schools, library, the
university printers and the Pitt Press, the senate house—King’s—
King’s College chapel—Cambridge college chapels—Queens’—
English sovereigns at Cambridge—S. Catherine’s—Jesus—Christ’s—
Lady Margaret and Bishop Fisher—S. John’s—Magdalene—King’s
Hall and Trinity College—college libraries—gateways—Caius—
monks in Cambridge—Emmanuel—Sidney Sussex—Downing—
public hostels—nationality of founders and general scope of their 52-
foundations—university and college revenues 156
CHAPTER III
THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY
Meaning of a degree—the kinds of degrees—the bachelor—the ancient
exercises of the schools called acts, opponencies, and responsions—
the sophister—questionist—determiner—master—regent master—the
degree of M.A.—introduction of written examinations—the tripos.
The subjects of study and examination: the trivium and quadrivium—
grammar—Aristotle’s logic—rhetoric—the three learned faculties—
the doctorate—development in university studies—the development
of the mathematical tripos—the senior wrangler—the classical tripos
—Greek at Cambridge—the moral sciences tripos—philosophy at
Cambridge—the natural sciences tripos—science at Cambridge—the
language triposes—lists of the triposes—changing value of the
examination tests—the double tripos—present conditions for the B.A.
degree—modern changes in the examinations—standard of the
ordinary and honour degree, examples.
Method of tuition at Cambridge—the lecture—the class—the weekly
paper—the professorial chairs—readerships—lectureships—Lambeth 157
degrees—degrees by royal mandate—honorary degrees—the “modern -20
subjects”—and the idea of a university 1

CHAPTER IV
COLLEGIATE AND SOCIAL LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY
University and college officers:—chancellor and vice-chancellor—the
senate—graces—proctors—bedells—the master of a college—the
vice-master or president—the fellows—unmarried and married
fellows—the combination room—dons’ clubs—‘Hobson’s choice’—
the dons of last century—classes of students:—scholar—pensioner—
fellow-commoner—sizar—age of scholars—privileges of peers—
position of the sizar—college quarters and expenses—‘non-colls’—
early discipline—jurisdiction of the university in the town—present
discipline:—the proctors—fines—‘halls’—‘chapels’—town lodgings
—expulsion—rustication—‘gates’—the tutor—academical dress—
cap and gown—the undergraduates’ day—the gyp—the college
kitchen—‘hall’—‘wines’—teas—the May term—idleness—rioting—
modern studies and tripos entries—athletics—the Union Society—
Sunday at Cambridge—scarlet days—academic terms and the long
vacation—multiplication of scholarships—class from which the
academic population has been drawn and careers of university men:—
the Church—the rise of an opulent middle class—the aristocratic era
—English conception of the benefits of a university—examples of the
classes from which the men have come—recruiting grounds of the
university—popularity of colleges—numbers in the colleges— 202
religion at Cambridge—Cambridge politics—university settlement at -24
Camberwell—married dons and future changes 9
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS
Men who owe nothing to a university—40 great Englishmen— 250
Cambridge men: the scientists, the poets, the dramatists, other literary -30
men, the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers, and physicians, the 9
statesmen.
National movements: King John and the barons—the peasants’ revolt—
York and Lancaster—the new world—Charles and the Parliament—
James II. and the University—the Declaration of Indulgence—the
Nonjurors—William and Mary and Cambridge whiggery—Jacobitism
and Toryism at Cambridge in the reign of Anne—George I. and
Cambridge—modern political movements.
Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question of the
divorce, Lutheranism at Cambridge, later reformers and the
Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge
martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the
Latitudinarians, the Deists, the evangelical movement, the Tractarian
movement, anti-calvinism.
Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of Elizabeth—
the Royal Society—the Cambridge Platonists—modern science.
Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the university
—early Cambridge names—a group of great names in the xiii and xiv
centuries—Cambridge men in the historical plays of Shakespeare—

genealogical tables of founders—Cantabrigians from the xv century to
the present day—Cambridge men who have taken no degree
CHAPTER VI
GIRTON AND NEWNHAM
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York with
the monastery of Ely—English women and education—the four
“noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at Cambridge—the
rise of the movement for university education—two separate
movements—Girton—Newnham—rise of the university lecture
movement—Anne Clough—the Newnham Halls and Newnham
College—the first triposes—the “Graces” of 1881—social life at the
women’s colleges—character and choice of work among women—the 310
degree—status of women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford—and -36
status elsewhere 0

List of Illustrations
1. Frontispiec
The Bridge of Sighs, S. John’s College
e
FACING
PAGE

2. Norman Church of the Holy Sepulchre 4
3. Market Square 10
4. The Old Gateway of King’s College 16
5. S. John’s College Gateway and Tower from Trinity Street 24
6. Oriel Window of the Hall, Trinity Great Court 34
7. The Old Castle Inn 50
8. Peterhouse from the Street 56
9. Peterhouse—The First Court 58
10
Peterhouse from the Fellows’ Garden
. 62
11 Clare College and Bridge from the Cam—Autumn
. Evening 64
12
Clare College and Bridge from the Avenue
. 66
13
The Hall of Clare College
. 68
14
The Old Court, Pembroke College
. 72
15
A Court and Cloisters in Pembroke College
. 74
16
Trinity Hall
. 78
17 S. Botolph’s Church and Corpus College from the Steps of
. the Pitt Press, Trumpington Street 80
18
The Old Court, Corpus Christi College
. 82
19
S. Benedict’s Church from Free School Lane
. 84
20
King’s College Gateway and Chapel—Twilight Effect
. 90

21
Gateway of King’s College, King’s Parade
. 98
22 King’s College Chapel and the Entrance Court, from the
. Fellows’ Buildings 100
23
King’s College Chapel and the Fellows’ Buildings
. 102
24
King’s College Chapel Interior from the Choir
. 104
25
The Hall of King’s College
. 106
26
Entrance Gateway, Queens’ College
. 108
27
An Old Court in Queens’ College
. 110
28
Queens’ College from the River Front
. 112
29
Gateway of S. Catherine’s College
. 114
30
Gateway of Jesus College
. 116
31
The Gateway of Christ’s College from S. Andrew’s Street
. 118
32
The Fellows’ Building in Christ’s College
. 120
33 Milton’s Mulberry Tree in the Fellows’ Garden, Christ’s
. College 122
34
The Gateway and Tower of S. John’s College
. 124
35
Entrance to S. John’s College Chapel from the First Court
. 126
36
The Second Court of S. John’s College
. 128
37
The Combination Room, S. John’s College
. 130
38 The Library Window, S. John’s College, from the Bridge
. of Sighs 132
39
Old Gateway and Bridge
. 134
40
Pepys’ Library, Magdalene College
. 136

41
The Gateway of Trinity College
. 138
42
The Great Court, Trinity College
. 140
43
The Hall of Trinity College from Nevile’s Court
. 142
44
Nevile’s Gate, Trinity College
. 144
45 Trinity College Bridge and Avenue, with Gate leading into
. the New Court 146
46 Caius College and the Senate House from S. Mary’s
. Passage 148
47
The Gate of Virtue, Gonville and Caius College
. 150
48
The Gate of Honour, Caius College
. 152
49
The First Court of Emmanuel College
. 154
50
The Old Court in Emmanuel College
. 156
51
The Lake and New Buildings, Emmanuel College
. 158
52
The Cloister Court, Sidney Sussex College
. 160
53
Downing College from the Entrance in Regent Street
. 162
54
Trumpington Street from Peterhouse
. 172
55
Peashill
. 180
56 Old Houses near S. Edward’s Church and S. Edward’s
. Passage 184
57
Market Street and Holy Trinity Church
. 192
58
Great S. Mary’s, from Trinity Street
. 196
59
The Lake in Botanic Gardens
. 210
60
Parker’s Piece
. 216

61
Trinity Bridge, King’s College Chapel in the Distance
. 224
62
The Tower of S. John’s College Chapel from the River
. 238
63
University Boat-houses on the Cam—Sunset
. 244
64
Ditton Corner, on the Cam
. 248
65
The Fitzwilliam Museum—Evening
. 256
66
University Church of Great S. Mary
. 270
67
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Trumpington Street
. 290
68
The Great Bridge—Bridge Street
. 312
69
View of Cambridge from the Castle Hill
. 316
70
Girton College—Evening
. 320
71
The Boathouse on Robinson Crusoe’s Island
. 324
72
Queens’ Lane—the Site of the old Mill Street
. 326
73
Merton Hall
. 328
74
Newnham College, Gateway
. 338
75
The Granary on the Cam
. 342
76
Grantchester Mill
. 346
77
Madingley Windmill
. 352
Map at end of Volume.

A Bibliography
Ackermann.—— History of the University of Cambridge. 2 vols.
1815.
Anstey, H.—— Munimenta Academica. Rolls Series.
London 1868.
Atkinson, Thomas Dinham.—— Cambridge Described & Illustrated, with an
introduction by John Willis Clark, M.A.
1897.
Baker MSS.
42 vols. collected & compiled by Thomas Baker fellow of S. John’s College, 19
of which are preserved at the University, the others at the Brit. Mus.
Baker—Mayor.—— History of the College of S. John the Evangelist.
Cambridge 1869.
The Baker MSS. (Harl. MS. 1039) relating to S. John’s edited by J. E. B. Mayor.
Ball, W. W. Rouse.—— Trinity College, Cambridge.
London 1906.
In the College Monograph series.
Barnwell Chartulary.—— Brit. Mus. Harl. MSS. No. 3601.
Bentham, James.—— History & Antiquities of Ely.
Norwich 1812.
Bentham, James.—— Stevenson.—— A supplement to the 2nd ed. of Mr.
Bentham’s History & Antiquities of Ely.
Norwich 1817.
Caius, John.—— De Antiquitate Cantebrigiensis Academiae.
Londini, in aedibus Johannis Day 1574.
Cambridge Antiquarian Society’s publications.
Cambridge Portfolio.—— Edited by Rev. J. J. Smith, fellow & tutor of
Gonville & Caius.
1840.
Carter, Edmund.—— History of the University of Cambridge to 1753. 2
vols.
London 1753.
With MS. notes by Cole, in the Bodleian Library. (Containing the list of the
chancellors.)
Clark, John Willis.—— Cambridge. Brief historical & descriptive Notes.
Illustrated.
1890.
Clark, John Willis.—— The Observances in use at the Augustinian Priory
of S. Giles & S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire. Edited with a translation
& glossary.
Cambridge 1897.
Cole MSS.—— (Harleian MSS.)
60 vols., bequeathed by William Cole of King’s College to the British Museum.
Cooper, Charles Henry.—— Annals of Cambridge. 4 vols.
Cambridge 1843.
An additional pamphlet gives the Statutes of Victoria.

Cooper, Charles Henry.—— Memorials of Cambridge. 3 vols.
Cambridge 1860-66.
The edition of 1880 is enlarged from the work of Le Keux.
Cooper, Charles Henry.—— Memoir of Margaret Countess of Richmond &
Derby.
Cambridge 1874.
Cooper, Charles Henry. & Thompson Cooper.—— Athenae
Cantabrigienses.
Cambridge 1858-1861.
Vol. i. 1500-1585. Vol. ii. 1586-1609.
Dyer, George.—— The Privileges of the University of Cambridge. 2 vols.
London 1824.
The Statutes of Elizabeth are printed in vol. i. 1559.
Dyer, George.—— History of the University & Colleges of Cambridge. 2
vols.
1814.
Everett, William.—— On the Cam.
London, S. O. Beeton, 1866.
Fuller, Thomas, D.D.—— The History of the University of Cambridge (to
the year 1634). Edited by Marmaduke Prickett, chaplain of Trinity, & Thomas
Wright, of Trinity.
Cambridge 1840.
Hare, Robert, of Gonville & Caius.—— Register of Charters, Liberties, &
Privileges of the University & the Town.
The nucleus of Dyer’s Privileges. The original is in the public chest of the
University, & there is a copy, made by Hare, in the Registry.
Hobhouse, Edmund, Bishop of Nelson, N.Z.—— Sketch of the Life of
Walter de Merton.
Oxford 1859.
Humphry, G. M., M.D., F.R.S. (late Professor of Anatomy).—— Guide to
Cambridge, the Town, University, & Colleges.
Cambridge 1883.
Hundred Rolls (for Cambridge).—— Rotuli Hundredorum, temp. Hen. III.
et Edw. I. in Turr. Lond. &c. asservati.
Record Commission. 1812-1818.
Loggan, David, S.P.D.—— Cantabrigia Illustrata.
1690.
Containing the University costumes of the xvii century.
Masters—Lamb.—— History of the College of Corpus Christi in the
University of Cambridge. (With additional matter & a continuation to the present
time, by John Lamb.)
Cambridge 1831.
“Mind,” a quarterly review of Psychology & Philosophy. Vol. i.
Williams & Norgate 1876.
Mullinger, J. Bass.—— History of the University of Cambridge from the
earliest times to the Royal Injunctions of 1535.
University Press 1874.
Mullinger, J. Bass.—— History of the University of Cambridge from the
Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles I.
University Press 1884.

Parker, Matthew.—— Academiae Historia Cantabrigiensis.
Parker, Richard, B.D., fellow of Caius (1622).—— History & Antiquities of
the University of Cambridge.
London, printed at the Hat & Star, 1721.
Peacock, George, D.D., Dean of Ely, V.P.R.S.—— Observations on the
Statutes of the University of Cambridge.
London & Cambridge 1841.
Peacock, George, D.D., Dean of Ely, V.P.R.S.—— Appendix to Observations
on the University Statutes.
1841.
Searle, W. G.—— Ingulf & the Historia Croylandensis—an investigation
attempted. Camb. Ant. Soc. Pub. xxvii.
Cambridge 1894.
Stokys, Matthew, & John Buck.—— The Bedells’ Books.
In Cole MSS. & in Peacock.
Taylor, Richard.—— Index Monasticus. The Abbeys & other Monasteries
formerly established in the diocese of Norwich & kingdom of East Anglia.
London 1821.
Thompson, Alexander Hamilton.—— Cambridge & its Colleges. Illustrated
by E. H. New. (Little Library.)
1898.
Tulloch, Principal.—— Rational Theology in England in the xvii Century. 2
vols.
1872.
Venn, John, Sc.D., F.R.S.—— Biographical History of Gonville & Caius
College (1349-1897). 3 vols.
Cambridge 1897-1902.
Willis, Robert, and Clark, J. W.—— The Architectural History of the
University of Cambridge & of the Colleges of Cambridge & Eton. 4 vols.
University Press 1886.
Wordsworth, Christopher, fellow of Peterhouse.—— Scholae Academicae.
University Press 1877.
Wordsworth, Christopher—— Social Life at the English Universities in the
xviii Century.
Cambridge 1874.
To the above must be added the College Histories, published by F. E. Robinson
London.
Peterhouse (Walker) 1906. S. Catherine’s (Bp. of Bristol) 1902.
Clare (Wardale) 1899. Jesus (A. Gray) 1902.
Gonville and Caius (Venn) 1901. Christ’s (Peile) 1900.
Trinity Hall (Malden) 1902. S. John’s (Mullinger) 1901.
Corpus Christi (Stokes) 1898. Magdalene (Preston) 1904.
King’s (Austen Leigh) 1899. Emmanuel (Shuckburgh) 1904.
Queens’ (J. H. Gray) 1899. Sidney (Edwards) 1899.
Downing (Pettit Stevens) 1899.
No complete bibliography of the subject—of the MSS. or printed matter—has
been attempted. The above is a list of some Cambridge documents and books
most of which have been consulted personally by the writer of the present
volume.

CAMBRIDGE

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

I. pp. 1-30.
The northern schools—legends—the town—the river—the fen monasteries—the school of
glomery—the religious orders—the jurisdiction of Ely—the clerk and the religious.

IN Saxon times our schools of learning were grouped round York the
Roman centre of Britain, which represented not only the Roman tradition
but the vigorous Christianity of the north. It is this auspicious combination
which nourished for over a hundred years the university spirit before
universities, carried through Alcuin this spirit to the Continent, and
eventually brought learning hand in hand with Christianity to Germany.
Whatever may be true as to the distribution of talent in England later in its
history, in the vii and viii centuries our great school was to be found at
York, and England’s learned men hailed from the kingdom of Northumbria.
The School
The School of York originated in the school established by
of York. Hild for the Celtic clan community over which she presided; and
York and
Rome. Caedmon the first English poet, John of Beverley, Wilfrid of
York, Bede the father of English learning, and the
scholar Alcuin who has been called “minister of Public A.D. 657.

Instruction to Charlemagne” were the noble fruit it put forth.
Its history was determined at the Synod of Whitby where A.D. 664.
Hild appears as the link between the Celtic Aidan and the
Roman Wilfrid, a representative figure of the genius of English religion.
She had been baptized by Paulinus but her sympathies were with the
Scottish Church. The victory of Wilfrid did not destroy that dual character
of English Christianity which accompanied its mind and its liturgy to the
last days of the religious domination of Rome in the realm; but through this
victory York again entered the hegemony of Latin civilisation, was bound
afresh to the overshadowing tradition of Rome, and thenceforth sealed with
an European character its schools of learning.
And through York Rome again takes possession of England. In
York and
Canterbury. the vii century Christianity in Kent had ceased to be the

Christianity of Augustine; with the fall of Edwin Northumbria forgot the
Christianity of Paulinus; but the immediate result of the Roman victory at
York was the mission of Theodore to Canterbury, where the episcopal
school he inaugurated shared the honours though it never rivalled the
learning of the School of York.
York and
The legends which relate that Bede came to study at
Cambridge. Cambridge in 682, that Alcuin was one of its first doctors in
theology, and that Alfred of Beverley, “the Treasurer,” studied
there, legends already known in the time of Chaucer, symbolise the spiritual
relationship between the School of York and Cambridge. Those large
elements which had operated at York—that combination of the shaping
power of Rome with the insular force of Angle, Celt, and Saxon—had in
them the promise of the English genius and the English character; and one
seems to trace the same wide tradition, the operation of similarly large
elements, in the future seat of learning at Cambridge. The university of
Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, of Fox, Fisher, and Langton, of Ascham,
Bacon, Newton, Whewell, and Lightfoot, may well be regarded as the
spiritual descendant of the School which first held the torch of English
learning never again to be entirely extinguished in this country.[1]
Further down, in the east of England, there in fact existed a
Early
legends of still earlier school than the schools at York, established in 635 by
the origin of
Cambridge. Siegebert king of East Anglia. The site of this school was very
probably Seaham or Dunwich; but legend connects it with
Cambridge, and the memory of King Siegebert is kept green in the annual
commemorations of the university.[2] A legend referring to the same period
connects Cambridge with Canterbury. According to this, Ethelbert of Kent
by the command of Gregory the Great assigned a residence at Cambridge
for some learned men from “the village of Canterbury” (598-604).
Legend also relates that Edward the Elder founded the Cambridge
schools
when he was repairing the ravages of the Danes in East
A.D. 910.
Anglia, and gave to them a charter of incorporation.
The fact not only that the neighbourhood of Cambridge, like Canterbury
and York, was the site of an early Anglo-Saxon school, but that Cambridge
was itself a Roman station, gave rise in its turn to another legend of the
origin of the university. According to this it was founded by Cantaber the

son-in-law of King Gurgentius and brother of Partholin the Spanish king of
Ireland, who gave his name to it, a name, no doubt, formed from the
Cantabri, the Spanish auxiliaries mentioned by Caesar. Lydgate’s panegyric
of the university shows us that a tradition of its antiquity made up of both
Roman and School of York elements received credence in the xiv century;
nay, remembering that Cambridge had been a Roman town, men found no
difficulty in supposing that Caesar had carried off a supply of Cambridge
dons to the capital of the world.

NORMAN CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
Believed to be the oldest of the four round Churches in England,
built about 1120-40.

The town of
The Roman fortress lay on the left bank of the river, at the
Cambridge.hamlet of Grantchester (Granta, castrum); the town of Cambridge
proper, on the same bank, being called Grantabrigge. Here it was
that William the Conqueror’s castle was built on the site of a British
earthwork still known as Castle Mound, and here British as well as Roman

coins and other Roman remains have been discovered. The British town of
Cair-Graunth has been identified with both sites; while the Roman station
marked in Saxon maps as Camboritum or Camboricum has hitherto been
confounded with the site of the Norman fortress. We do not know where
Camboricum was, but we no longer identify it with Cambridge.[3]
In the time of Bede, and earlier, Grantchester was a desolate ruin,[4] but
Grantabridge was a place of some importance at the time of the Domesday
survey, and we find that nearly thirty of its four hundred houses were
destroyed to make room for William’s castle.[5] The town which is still
called Grantabridge in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in Domesday, and in
Henry I.’s charter, becomes Cantebruge before the middle of the xii century,
and Cantebrigge in Chaucer.[6]
Two great Roman roads met near the Castle Mound, the one
Roman
roads. being the only way across the pathless fens, running from the
coast of Norfolk through Ely to Cambridge and thence on to
Cirencester and Bath; the other—via Devana—was the great highway
(along the site of the present Huntingdon road) which led from Cambridge
out of the fen country, stretching from Chester[7] on the north-west to
Colchester on the south-east. This road crossed the only high ground in the
flat country round Cambridge—the low range of hills called the
Gogmagogs and Castle Mound itself.
The river Granta gave its name to the British and Roman
The river.
towns (Cair-Graunth, Grantchester), to the university city, and to
the whole shire. The Granta or Cam, for it is now called by both names, is
made by the confluence of two small streams which meet beyond
Grantchester; the eastern branch, the Granta, rising in Cambridgeshire, the
western, the Rhee, in Hertfordshire. What other river in England can boast
that it has been celebrated by our poets in every age? For Milton it is
Camus, for Byron Granta, both names serve the muse of Gray; it is
Wordsworth’s Cam, but Spenser calls it Guant, and also Ouse, the name it
takes before reaching Ely, although the waters of the “plenteous Ouse” join
the Granta much lower down.[8]
The important thing about the river, which determined the
The ford.
history of the town on its banks, was that between Grantabridge
and Grantchester it was fordable, and here only could it be traversed by
those going to and from the east of England and the Midlands. Near

Trumpington, indeed, a part of the Via Devana had been carried by the
Romans right through the water.[9]
In the ix century the province of Cambridge—the Flavia Caesariensis of
the Romans—formed part of the Danelagh.[10] Throughout the middle ages,
writes Mr. J. W. Clark, the town “was a frontier fortress on the edge of the
great wild ... which stretched as far as the Wash”: and no place suffered
more from invasion and fire. The Danes completely destroyed it in 870,
after the capture of York; and the fortunes of the two cities were again
linked two hundred years later when William, fresh from the reduction of
the northern capital, turned
his steps to Cambridge and made it the centre of his operations
A.D. 1068-1070.
against the outstanding isle of Ely. A second destruction at the
hands of the Danes occurred in 1010, and in 1088 Cambridge was again
devastated with the rest of Cambridgeshire by Robert Curthose. This,
however, led to a vigorous re-instatement of the city by Henry I. who
showed it many marks of favour.
In the second year of his reign he ordered the townsmen to
A.D. 1102.
pay their dues to the bedells, and about this time the ferry
which had hitherto been “a vagrant ... even anywhere where passengers
could get waftage over,”[11] was established at Cambridge, bringing traffic
in its train. In 1106 the first signs of returning prosperity were seen in the
settlement of the Jews. The Cambridge Jewry was near the market-place,
and the Cambridge Jews were noted for their “civil carriage,” none of the
customary outrageous charges
being brought against them there.[12] Twelve years later, the
A.D. 1118.
king gave a charter to the burgesses.
Cambridge was at no period of its history a great or even a prosperous
commercial centre. East Anglia has always been a corner of England to
itself, not on the direct line to anywhere, and offering very few points of
vantage to the statesman or the merchant. The course of a river determines
the history of a town, as it first determines its site. This is well exemplified
in the histories of the Granta and the “Isis.” The “Isis” is a reach of the
Thames,[13] and this fact with its moral political and commercial
implications has coloured the whole history of the town on its banks—
everything came to Oxford by the river from London, and dignified
alderman or humble bargeman shared with the lesser centre the life of the

greater. The Granta and Ouse have a history in every sense the opposite of
this. Through the centuries, long before Oxford was a town at all,[14] the
sounds we hear are the thud of the Ely barge as it strikes the bank of
deserted Grantchester, and Sexberga’s messengers borrow from the
neighbourhood of the future university the sepulture for the founder of Ely
—the gift of a civilisation still older than hers.[15] Or, three hundred and
fifty years later, the chant of the Ely monks is wafted out upon the water as
Canute bids his men rest a moment on their oars to listen
Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Canute the king rowed by.

The convent messenger, the Danish king, the Norman conqueror, may
come up the water, but they make the stir they find, and the river leaves no
trace behind them.
So the university town owes nothing to adventitious causes; makes no
bid for public favour, and has no tentacles to put forth to obtain it. But the
river has, nevertheless, determined its activities as well as its reticences. It
will give rise to a fair, and Stourbridge fair will become one of the greatest
fairs in the kingdom. The fish market was another source of traffic. Ely and
Cambridge fish were celebrated—Bede, indeed, derives “Ely” from the
abundance of its eels, although helyg (the willow) seems the more

MARKET SQUARE
This picture represents what is called Half Market, which takes

place on Wednesday. Market day, properly speaking, is on
Saturday, when the square is filled with stalls. The church is Great
St. Mary’s, and King’s College Chapel is seen in the distance on
the left.

probable original.[16] The kings of England patronised this market, Henry
III. sending for his fish to Cambridge even when he was staying at Oxford;
and Chaucer is careful to note that the Cambridge miller was an angler,
skilled in mending his nets.[17] The isle of Ely, so-called because cut off by
river and mere from the rest of Cambridgeshire, was proverbial for the
turbulence of its population, and the men of Ely drew the men of
Cambridge into their quarrels, or harried them on their own account.
Cambridge Castle was built as an outpost against the English earls who
with Hereward resisted the Conqueror at Ely; it was at Ely that another
determined stand was made by Simon de Montfort’s followers after
Cambridge had been regained for John; and Henry III. had to bring relief to
the university town when its neighbours burnt and plundered it during the
years 1266-1270. The two centres were inseparable for weal or woe, and the
intellectual as well as the political life of Cambridge was coloured for
centuries by the activities of its neighbour.
The fen
The proximity of the great fen monasteries must be reckoned
monasteries. as the chief factor in the earlier scholastic—the pre-university—
history of Cambridge. Ely, Crowland, Bury-St.-Edmund’s and
Peterborough were among the most important and the most ancient
religious houses in the country. Crowland and Bury both had abbey schools
influenced, as we shall see, in the early xii century by the famous school at
Orléans; Ely had besides an episcopal school, and as monastery, school, and
cathedral, was in constant domestic relations with her neighbour of
Cambridge.[18]
Crowland.
Among these famous houses, surrounded by undrained
marshes, like islands, forbidding and yet inviting access, none
was more isolated than Crowland which, reared as Venice upon piles and
stakes driven into the marshy ground, shone like a beacon out of the
mysterious silence and solitude.
The story that abbot Joffred of Crowland sent four Orléans
A.D. 1109.
monks full of new learning to his Cambridge manor of
Cottenham[19] early in the xii century, who held disputations in a large barn,
has been shown to be entirely legendary. Yet the moment chosen by the

self-styled continuator of Ingulph is singularly felicitous.[20] We know
nothing of any sources of information which may have been open to a xiv
century forger; but it is certain that some such scholastic movements were
fermenting in Cambridge in the xii century. Joffred had been prior at
Orléans which was a flourishing school, and we have evidence that this
school actually influenced the university of Cambridge. The abbey house of
Crowland was burnt in 1091 and the rebuilding was not undertaken till
1113. It was likely enough that the abbot should look out for something for
his learned monks to do, and should make use of an outlying manor near to
such a centre as Cambridge as a promising field for activities restricted
through the disaster to his house. Moreover the energies of the lecturers, we
are told, were directed against Jewish doctrines, and the Jews, as we have
seen, had come to Cambridge three years before. The town was rising in
prosperity, and the charter of 1118 points to the conclusion that people and
trade had been attracted to it since Henry’s first rescript sixteen years
earlier.[21]
Whether among those attracted to Cambridge we are to count the large
influx of scholars who are said to have listened to the Crowland monks, or
not, it is certain that Cambridge became once more in 1174 the
theatre of great disaster, and a destructive fire was only stayed
A.D. 1174.
when it could find no more fuel to feed it.[22]
Soi-disant Peter of Blois declares that the monks when they set
The school
of glomery. about teaching “took the university of Orléans for their
pattern.”[23] The earliest school we come across at Cambridge is a
“school of glomery” under the patronage of the bishops of Ely. The
archdeacon of Ely nominated the “master of the glomerels” and one of the
chief acts of Hugh de Balsham was to limit the authority which the
archdeaconry had thus come indirectly to exercise in university matters.
From thenceforward the master of glomery is to have the same authority to
compose disputes between glomerels as other regent masters had towards
their scholars; but in disputes with scholars or with townsmen as to
lodgings or in grave matters affecting the jurisdiction of the university, the
glomerels were to plead before the chancellor. There were thus two classes
of students in the early days at Cambridge, ‘glomerels’ and ‘scholars.’ The
former were subject to the magister glomeriae who in his turn was subject
to the archdeacon of Ely; the latter had grown up under the aegis of the
regent masters and chancellor.

Now the school of glomery was nothing else than the time-honoured
Cambridge school of grammar.[24] The word has been for centuries a local
term known only here, and it is therefore the more interesting to find that
the students of Orléans were called ‘glomerel clerks’ (clers glomeriaus) and
that they resisted the invasion of their grammar schools by Aristotle’s logic
in the xiii century.
Paris et Orliens ce sont ij:
C’est granz domages et granz deuls
Que li uns à l’autre n’acorde.
Savez por qui est la descorde?
Qu’il ne sont pas d’une science:
Car Logique, qui toz jors tence,
Claime les auctors autoriaus
Et les clers d’Orliens glomeriaus.[25]

There were also ‘glomerels’ at Bury-St.-Edmund’s and Abbot Sampson’s
doings as regards the grammar school there in the xii century bear a strong
resemblance to Balsham’s doings at Cambridge in the xiiith.[26] The
persistence of the glomery school at Cambridge and the equally remarkable
persistence of this school at Orléans goes far to justify the conjecture that it
was Orléans which influenced Cambridge, not Paris: for Crowland had
certainly been influenced by the same school, and Cambridge and Bury
were both familiar with ‘glomerels’; the former under the jurisdiction of the
diocesan the latter under that of the abbot.[27]
Cambridge presents us with an excellent example of the
The
religious relations which secular and religious learning bore to one another
orders. The
canons. in the foundation of universities. Ecclesiastically it was of no
importance whatever; it was not the seat of a bishop nor the fief
of abbot or prior—the one monastic house was the nunnery of S.
Rhadegund, founded before the middle of the xii century—and at no time in

THE OLD GATEWAY OF KING’S COLLEGE
This gateway now forms the entrance to the Library from Trinity
Lane. The North door of King’s Chapel is seen in the distance.

its history was the fate of the university determined by the learning of the
cloister or its fortune raised by a doctrine of the schools. Ely, the outside
influence which played the largest rôle, introduced no monastic elements,
and within Cambridge itself the communities which had most part in its
development were the canons, and canons always represented a half-way
house between clerk and monk. If their contribution to European learning
be altogether inferior to that of the Benedictine, they at no time showed any
desire to impose a tradition or to stamp with their own hall mark the
scholars who willingly attached themselves to canonical houses. The
earliest community of canons in Cambridge was founded by a Norman,
Hugolina wife to Picot Sheriff of the county, in 1092, in gratitude for her
recovery from sickness.
It was a foundation for six secular canons serving her
A.D. 1092
church of S. Giles by the Castle, and the little community was
transformed, twenty years later, by

another Norman, Pain Peverel standard-bearer to the Duke of
A.D. 1112.
Normandy, into the Canons Regular of Barnwell under the
rule of S. Augustine.[28] The six canons became thirty, and Barnwell Priory,
on the other side of the river, became a house of considerable importance,
and gave hospitality to Richard II. during the Cambridge parliament of
1388. It continued to exist till the Suppression. About 1135 a second
canons’ house was established on the present site of S. John’s College. This
was a hospital, or travellers’ hospice, designed by a Cambridge burgess,
Henry Frost, who gave the plot of land and endowed “a master and poor
brethren of the rule of S. Austin” to dispense the charity of the house.[29] If
the Barnwell canons of S. Giles were among the earliest friends of the
scholars, the canons of the hospice of S. John were to play the most
important part in their history.[30] S. John’s and the other xii century
foundation of S. Rhadegund were dissolved under similar circumstances
within thirteen years of one another, the latter in 1497 the former in 1510.
[31]

There was a third community of Canons Regular at
The
Gilbertine Cambridge. The Lincolnshire community founded by S. Gilbert
canons of
Sempringha of Sempringham in the xii century settled near Peterhouse in
m.
1291. Their hostel “S. Edmund’s” took its name from the old
chapel dedicated to the martyr-king enshrined at Bury-St.-Edmund’s, and a
licence of Edward III.’s permitting the canons to acquire houses and lands
in the town styles them “the Prior and Canons of the chapel of S. Edmund.”
We hear of these possessions early in the xiv century when (in 1417) the
Prior of S. Edmund’s leases land; and again in 1474 when the community
sell land to William Bassett. Of the 26 houses of this Order—the only Order
of English origin—there were two in the isle of Ely,[32] while a fourth was
established near Hitchin. The Barnwell Memoranda announcing their
arrival in Cambridge
say: “The canons of Sempringham first came to dwell at the
A.D. 1291.
chapel of S. Edmund, and earnestly set about hearing lectures
and attending disputations.”
The four orders of friars were all represented in Cambridge,
Friars.
Carmelites. and all settled there in the course of the xiii century. The
Carmelites or Whitefriars were the first to arrive, settling in 1200
at

Chesterton near the town, then at Newnham, and finally in A.D. 1249.
Mill Street (1291). For nearly a hundred years the Carmelites
took no part in the academic life of Cambridge. They refused to graduate,
and showed no desire to display the insignia of a secular doctorate over the
peculiarly sacred habit of their Order. It was, indeed, at Cambridge that S.
Simon Stock had had, in 1251, his vision of the Blessed Virgin, and had
received from her hands the celebrated “scapular of Our Lady of Mount
Carmel”; and it was not till forty years after this that the Carmelite
Humphrey Necton, at the urgent instance of the then chancellor of the
university, consented to take the degree of Doctor in Theology.[33] In the
reign of Richard II. this was the richest religious house in Cambridge, and
Edmund Langley Earl of Cambridge and Courtney Archbishop of
Canterbury lodged there during the parliament of 1388. The Cambridge
Carmelites put forth several eminent men: Bale, the historian, had been a
Carmelite at Norwich before proceeding to the university; Walter Diss, a
zealous opponent of the Lollards, was confessor to that friend of Cambridge
John of Gaunt; Nicholas Cantilupe (1441) wrote the Historiola
Cantabrigiae,[34] and friar Nicholas Kenton was chancellor of the university
as late as the middle of the xv century.
The Franciscans, or Greyfriars, came to Cambridge soon after
Franciscans.
their arrival in England, and during the lifetime of S. Francis.
Among the nine friars who landed in 1224 there were three Englishmen,
Richard Ingworth (the only friar in priest’s orders), who was accompanied
probably by another East Anglian, and by Richard of Devon. This East
Anglian element among the first Franciscans is noteworthy, for the first
Franciscan readers in divinity at both universities hailed from our Eastern
counties. The Cambridge burgesses established the friars at the Jewish
synagogue next to the prison.[35] These uncomfortable quarters were
exchanged later for a site in the present Sidney Street, where Edward I. built
them a friary. Here they took part and share in the life of the university: the
novices and younger brethren studied and graduated, the elder taught; while
the church of the Franciscans, which was one of the finest buildings in the
town, served the purposes of a university church before the rebuilding of
Great S. Mary’s.
The Dominicans, or Blackfriars, did not reach Cambridge till
Dominicans.
about the last quarter of the xiii century,[36] fifty years after the
Franciscans. A strange destiny decreed that a house which had once been

under the patronage of the seraphic Francis should nurture Oliver Cromwell
and become the first Protestant college; and that the house of “the Lord’s
Watchdogs” (Dominicanes) should become the front and centre of
Puritanism in the university.[37]
The last to arrive were the Austinfriars, who entered
Austinfriars.
Cambridge in 1290, at the same time as the Sempringham canons,
just as the first Carmelite took his university degree, and as the Jews were
expelled from the town. The priory was behind the present college of
Corpus Christi, occupying part of the site of the Botanical Gardens, where
the new museums now stand. Here was nurtured Miles Coverdale whose
reforming principles were imbibed from its prior Barnes afterwards burned
as a heretic.[38] Like the other Cambridge friars, the Austinfriars were
dissolved at the Reformation.[39]
There were other friars in Cambridge. The friars of the
Other friars
at Sack[40] or De poenitentia Jesu, were established in S. Mary’s
Cambridge.
parish in 1291, then in the parish of S. Peter. This was one of the
spurious orders of Franciscans suppressed, as a result of the Council of
Lyons, in 1307. The Barnwell Chartulary, however, has recorded for us that
“these brethren of the Sack gathered together many scholars and good, and
multiplied exceedingly until the time of the Council of Lyons.”
The Bethlemite friars came over here in 1257, and appear to
Other
religious have had only one house in England, that in Trumpington Street.
houses at [41] Our-Lady-friars (Fratres de Domina) are first heard of about
Cambridge.
thirty years later (1288). They were settled near the castle (and
are hence called in the Barnwell Chartulary: Fratres beatae Mariae ad
Castrum) and are only heard of at Cambridge and at Norwich where they
arrived before 1290 and were there established at the time of the plague.[42]
The Cambridge burgesses had an ancient leper hospital at Stourbridge,
under the dedication of “S. Mary Magdalene for lepers.” In the closing
years of the xiv century Henry Tangmer, alderman of the Guild of Corpus
Christi, founded the Hermitage of S. Anne and Hospital of Lazars. About
the same time (1395) the Benedictine nuns of S. Leonard of Stratford-le-
Bowe granted a curtilage in Scholars’ Lane to the university.[43] The
Priories of Anglesey S. John of Jerusalem and Tyltey and the abbeys of
Crowland (p. 12) and Denney all held land in Cambridge.

The prior and convent of Anglesey, a Cambridgeshire house of Regular
Canons, owned land here as early as 1278-9, and were of some importance
in the town in the xiv century.[44] The land held by the knights of S. John
was not part of the confiscated Templar property, all of which escheated to
the Order, but was purchased by them early in the reign of Edward I.[45] It
lay in the university centre between Mill Street and School Street
(“Milnestrete alias Seynt Johnstrete”) and was a parcel of open land on
which was their patronal church of S. John Baptist, and Crouched or S.
Crosse’s Hostel.[46] In 1432 William Hulle, preceptor of Swenefeld,
Templecombe, and Quenyngton, and prior of the English Langue, sold this
ground to the university for the schools quadrangle, and the New Schools of
Canon Law were built upon it.[47] The

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE GATEWAY AND TOWER FROM
TRINITY STREET
Trinity Chapel is seen on the left behind the trees.

knights’ property was on the west of the schools quadrangle, the property of
the nuns of Stratford-le-Bowe on the east. Denney and Tyltey both owned
land on the site of Christ’s Pieces and elsewhere in the xv century. The
former was a Franciscan nunnery founded by Marie de Chatillon Countess
of Pembroke (p. 69) on land which was claimed from her by the knights of
S. John as part of the sequestrated Templar property. It lay on the borders of

the fen between Cambridge and Ely. The latter was a Cistercian house in
Essex.[48]
The rôle reserved for these houses and congregations in the earlier
history of the university was subordinate. By the time that every
Benedictine house was required by the Constitution of Honorius III. (1216-
1227) to send some of its students to the universities, learning had already
passed from the monastery to the university, and the monks’ hostel at
Cambridge[49] signalised the change. The part taken by the friars is not less
instructive. The refusal of the Carmelites (throughout the xiii century) to
pursue the academic course is valuable evidence of the conflict between
secular and religious studies at the rise of the university. The Franciscans
were the most important of the mendicants in England, and as such took a
paramount place at both Cambridge and Oxford; but at the former their
action was inconspicuous, and there is nothing to indicate that they were at
any time or in any sense “nursing fathers” to Cambridge university
whatever they may have been elsewhere.
The moment when they made their appearance was at least as propitious
historically as it had been at Oxford, and the independent growth of
Cambridge, its escape from the intellectual thraldom of that scholasticism
of which the Franciscans were the chief exponents, are hence doubly
significant. The quarrels which arose in the early xiv century between the
officials of the university and the friars prove that the religious societies
which shared its academic life did by no means act in permanent harmony
with it. Thus in 1303 the chancellor quarrelled with the Franciscans and
Dominicans and excommunicated two of the friars, and later in the century
the university had to prohibit novices in the Cambridge friaries from
proceeding to their degrees under eighteen years of age. Then, as now, the
Franciscans were accustomed to recruit very little lads for the noviciate, all
of whom probably received their education at the public Cambridge schools
of grammar and theology, and might be seen strutting about as full-fledged
“masters of arts before they were masters of themselves.”[50]
Before the xiii century closed—from the date of Hugh de Balsham’s
death—the university ceased to receive any help from monastic learning,
for the monks avoided Cambridge, and even Norwich priory sent its
students to Oxford.[51] Less than a hundred years elapsed, and we find
Gaunt, Pembroke, and Scrope—the court party—opposing the pretensions
and the temporalities of the clergy in the company of Cambridge men.

Pembroke—the representative of the house of Valence[52]—is their
spokesman, and it is Scrope
and Sir Robert Thorpe, Master of a Cambridge college, who
A.D. 1371.
take the Purse and the Seals from the hands of their episcopal
holders Brantingham and William of Wykeham. This movement, as Stubbs
points out, was independent of Wyclif’s; and it is remarkable that while
William of Wykeham was influencing Oxford the theories for which he
stood were being repulsed at Cambridge.
There remains the relation of the university to the see of Ely.
Cambridge
and the The episcopal jurisdiction of Ely in the university did not long
jurisdiction
of Ely. survive the building of colleges. The scholars refused to plead in
the archdeacon’s court, and Balsham upheld them—their statutes
already provided as much.[53] Bishop Montacute also set limits to diocesan
authority.[54] In 1317 John XXII. withdrew the university from the spiritual
jurisdiction not only of the diocesan but of the provincial archbishop; but it
was the friction arising from the failure of some of the bishops of Ely to
recognise the spiritual independence of the chancellor which resulted in the
celebrated court held at Barnwell priory at the instance of Martin V., in
1430, under the presidency of its prior. Two forged bulls of Honorius and
Sergius[55] were cited as vii century evidence of the spiritual liberties of
Cambridge, and the Pope in a third bull set the question for ever at rest in
favour of the university. The solemn visitation of the colleges which had
taken place under the auspices of Archbishop Arundel in 1401 was probably
the result of the temporary victory obtained by the Primate when the
chancellor refused to take an oath of obedience to him.
The early college statutes were as eager to repel the religious as the rule
of Benedict, the father of western monasticism, was to repel the clergyman.
[56] The statutes of Michaelhouse (1334), the earliest which have reached us
intact, provide that neither monk nor friar should obtain admittance to the
college. The statutes of Peterhouse enact that no one deciding to enter a
religious order can remain on the foundation. It must at the same time be
clearly realised that some of the earliest colleges were little more than
clerical seminaries.[57] What is peculiar to Cambridge is that there a monk
made the earliest attempt to endow learning for the secular clergy—a monk
who was also a bishop, the ever-memorable Hugh Balsham. The non-
monastic direction taken was by no means as yet an anti-monastic one; but
at the rise of both universities, as soon as scholars were endowed and

endowed houses began to be built for them, the monastic and the academic
careers were regarded as incompatible vocations. It was the separation of
the clerk from the religious, the recognition by Balsham of the secular
scholar and of an endowed foundation for such scholars which was neither
a religious house nor an episcopia, that transformed a more or less
fortuitous concourse of students and teachers—a mere amplification, as at
Oxford, of the school system of other great centres—into a chartered
corporation of scholars—a university.[58]
II
School and university—Stourbridge fair—the university in the xiii
century—Foundation of endowed scholars—hostels.
Both our universities doubtless count a school life of eight centuries at
least: but a school life, the activity of teachers and scholars, is not the same
thing as a university life. We have already said that Oxford owed its history
to the constant communication between it and London, to its accessibility
from the capital which made it the frequent resort not only of our kings but,
what is more to our purpose, of scholars European and English.[59] The
ferment created by their lectures no doubt kept alive the desire for
knowledge and the spirit of enquiry among the motley population of the
town; a moral atmosphere which in its turn attracted students. At
Cambridge everything was the opposite of this. S. Frideswide’s at Oxford
was a poor religious house, but it was in the heart of the town; the
monastery at Ely was a great religious house, but its school was many miles
from the university. Cambridge, as we have seen, was accessible to no great
centre, there was nothing to attract the traveller who if he visited it almost
certainly went out of his way to do so. Nevertheless some influences were
at work in the xii century which determined the transformation of
Cambridge into a studium generale, a university. The river near the town, as
I have already said, gave rise to one of the greatest fairs in England, and Mr.
J. W. Clark is disposed to see in the concourse of people brought together
by Stourbridge fair the determining factor in our university history. The fair
was called after the Stour a stream lower down the river, and was held in a
large cornfield near Barnwell. It began on the feast of S. Bartholomew,
August 24, and lasted till the fourteenth day after the feast of the Exaltation
of the Cross (September 14). These five weeks of revelry proved more
disturbing to Cambridge studies than the May term of to-day; xiii century

scholars spent their money at Stourbridge fair as Isaac Newton spent his in
the xviith; there he acquired his prism in August 1661 and a book on
“Judicial Astrology” the geometry and trigonometry of which were then as
‘Greek’ to him. Sea-borne goods which had probably always been brought
inland up the river to this point, formed the nucleus of the fair at
Stourbridge. It is generally agreed that three other English fairs exceeded
the Cambridge fair in importance, those at Bristol, Bartholomew’s in
London, and Lynton. Defoe however describes it as the largest in Europe,
greater than that at Nuremberg or than the Frankfort mart. It
was already highly prosperous when King John made over its
A.D. 1211.
dues to the leper hospice of S. Mary Magdalene; and it has
been suggested that this was the ancient fair to which Irish merchants
brought their cloth in the time of Athelstan.
Why so uncommercial a district became the site of one of the greatest
fairs in Europe, and why a studium generale became established there, are
problems both of which we cannot resolve. There always remains at the
bottom some virtue in the apparently unpropitious city on the banks of the
Granta which as an Italian would say fece da sè. But Mr. J. W. Clark’s
suggestion has at least placed the two problems in juxtaposition: the
growing importance of the schools and the growing importance of the fair
both meet us in the opening lustres of the xiii century; the fair, that is, has
its roots in the preceding century when the fate of the embryo seat of
learning lay in the balance. How should a fair, how should an extraordinary
concourse of people, help to consolidate a university? Simply because this
was the age of peripatetic teaching, because it was the custom all through
the middle ages for wandering scholars to find themselves where men
gathered together, and to claim for a theorem of Roscellinus or a doctrine
from Araby brought by the crusaders the ear of a crowd which had just been
entertained by the Norman jongleur.
Earliest
Our first glimpse of the Cambridge schools shows us an
references to immigration of the scholars of one university to the other. In
Cambridge
university. 1209,
in consequence of an unjust retaliation upon the
students, Oxford was depleted and its scholars found their way A.D.of1209 10th
John.
to Cambridge.[60] Nine years later we have a rescript of Henry
III.’s (1218) ordering all those clerks

who had adhered to Louis to depart the realm. In the eleven A.D. 1218 2nd
years which elapsed between this and 1229 the Franciscans of Henry III.
had established themselves at Cambridge, and in that year as a
result of Henry’s invitation to
Paris students to settle in England there was a considerable
A.D. 1229 13th
influx or foreigners to the university, the echo of which may of Henry III.
be traced in two interesting rescripts of the year 1231. In one
of these the king charges the mayor
and bailiffs of the town to deal fairly with members of the
A.D. 1231 15th
university in the matter or lodgings, and enjoins them to of Henry III.
establish according to “university custom” two masters and
two liegemen of the town to act as “taxors.”[61] Dating the rescript from
Oxford on the third day of May the king writes: “It is already sufficiently
known to you that a multitude of scholars has gathered to our town of
Cambridge, for the sake of study, both from the regions near home and from
beyond the seas; the which is most grateful and acceptable to us, because it
gives an example of no small convenience to our whole realm, and our
honour is thereby increased; and you especially, among whom these
students are loyally dwelling should feel it matter of no little gratulation and
rejoicing.”[62] In the second rescript, dated from Oxford on the same day,
the king enjoins that no clerk shall live in the town (quod nullus clericus
moretur in villa) who is not under a magister scholarum.[63]
These letters patent addressed to the mayor and burgesses of
Charters and
Bulls. the town by Henry III. in 1231 are the earliest existing document
Charter of [64] At
Hen. III. A.D. which can be regarded in the light of a university charter.
1231. Bull
of John
the same time it appears by no means certain that royal letters had
XXII. A.D.
1317.
not been addressed earlier to Cambridge in which the

ORIEL WINDOW OF THE HALL, TRINITY GREAT COURT
In the nearer part of the picture is the Master’s Lodge, and in the
far distance two turrets of King’s Chapel stand up against the
evening sky.

academic society there was treated as a moral entity. In the following reign
the jury of Cambridge made oath to the effect that “the Chancellor and
Masters of the university had appropriated to themselves more ample
liberties than were warranted in the charters granted them by the king’s
predecessors”;[65] and in the same way when, at the request of Edward II.,
John XXII. erects Cambridge into a studium generale in the second year of
his pontificate, he reaffirms and confirms the privileges with which his
predecessors in the apostolic chair and the English kings had adorned the
university: omnia privilegia et indulta praedicto studio ... a pontificibus et
regibus praedictis concessa.[66] In this instrument he refers to Cambridge
university as studium ab olim ibi ordinatum, “the university from old time
there established.” Cambridge and Oxford, however, like the earliest centres
of learning in Italy and France—Bologna and Paris—grew into universities;
papal authorisations follow instead of preceding their institution. In other
cases universities were definite creations which make their first appearance
with a bull of institution and inauguration attached to them.[67]

Henry III.’s writs in behalf of Cambridge begin in the second and cover
the fifty years of his reign. In the 45th and again in the 50th year he repeats
and confirms his previous rescripts. The scholastic prosperity of Cambridge
dates from this reign as its civil prosperity dates from that of Henry I.; and
the traditions that Cambridge was Beauclerk’s alma mater and that Henry
V. was a student at Oxford probably both derive from the signal favours
shown to the two by these monarchs respectively.[68] Cambridge however
was greatly reduced in the reign of John, especially about the year 1214 in
spite of the recent immigration from Oxford.
But from the accession of Henry III. onwards the university
The Henrys
and the city became the special care of the Henrys and the Edwards.
Edwards.
Edward I., while still Prince of Wales, visited the town in 1254
and undertook the pacification of the quarrels in which scholars and
townsmen were engaged.[69] A document sealed with his own seal and those
of the university and the borough ordained that henceforth 13 scholars and
10 burgesses should be chosen to represent the interests of both parties.
Five of the former were to be Englishmen, 3 Scotchmen, 3 Irishmen, and 2
from Wales. The proportions are interesting.[70] It was soon after Edward’s
accession that the refusal of Cambridge
students to obey summonses to the archidiaconal courts led to
4th Edw. I.
A.D. 1276. Balsham’s judicious settlement of the point.[71]
Edward II. continued the interest shown in Cambridge by his
father and grandfather; not only obtaining for it the status of a studium
generale but maintaining a group of scholars there at his own
charges—“king’s scholars” who were to rank with Ely and
A.D. 1317.
Merton scholars in historical importance. The favour shown to
the university by the magnificent king his son was perhaps the one instance
in which he took pains to fulfil the intentions of his murdered father.[72]
In the long reign of Henry III., in the year 1257, Hugh de
Foundation
of endowed Balsham,[73] subprior of Ely, was made tenth bishop of the
scholars.
Hugh de diocese; and it was then that he placed and endowed at S. John’s
Balsham
hospital a group of secular students known as “Ely scholars,” who
were the object of his anxious care until his death in 1286. His scheme and
its results are described in the next chapter.[74] At this time there were no
endowed houses at Cambridge, no school buildings, no endowed scholars.
[75] It was some thirty years after the arrival of the Franciscans, the

Carmelites had as yet taken no part in the academic life, and many years
were to elapse before the Dominicans made their appearance. It was fifty
years since the Oxford immigration, and thirty since the king had invited
over the students from Paris. The distinction that was now made between
the clerk-canon, or the clerk-friar, and the scholar in arts or theology who
would remain a secular, converted, as we have said, the university
corporation into something more—a studium generale, and led, as we shall
see, to the building of the first endowed colleges.
Walter de
Contemporaneously with Balsham there lived and toiled
Merton. another college legislator, Walter de Merton, Chancellor of
England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester. His prime
importance in developing the collegiate conception will be seen in the next
chapter; here we are concerned with him as a founder of endowed scholars.
Merton had eight nephews to educate, and he set about designing an
academic scheme the far-reaching effects of which endure to this day,
although the steps of the scheme are involved in an obscurity which
responds to his own hesitations. He first assigned his manor of Malden,
adjoining Merton in Surrey, as a chef-lieu and endowment for
A.D. 1264.
“poor scholars in the schools” who are living under a code of
rules prescribed by himself. During the next five years he acquired lands
both in Cambridge and Oxford; his chief acquisition at the former being in
1269, when he purchased an estate lying under the shadow of the
Conqueror’s castle which included the Norman manor house known as the
School of Pythagoras. This property had been in the possession of the
Dunnings since the Conquest, and was afterwards known as the Merton
estate. In the same year William de Manfield, who held a mortgage on this
property, states that he had given his lands in Cambridge to the house,
scholars, and brethren of Merton—domui et scholaribus et fratribus de
Merton.[76] Meanwhile Walter de Merton had been buying land at Oxford,
[77] and in 1274 he definitely moved the hall at Malden and refounded it as
Merton College in the sister university; the formula hitherto maintained in
his charters and statutes (see ii. p. 68) being now changed, and “poor
scholars who are studying at Oxford or elsewhere where a studium generale
exists” (Oxoniae, aut alibi, ubi studium viget generale) becomes “who are
studying at Oxford where there is a university” (Oxoniae ubi universitas
viget studentium).

The scheme thus crowned in 1274 had had its birth twelve years before
when in 1262 Gilbert de Clare Earl of Gloucester allowed the manor of
Malden to be assigned to the Austin priory of Merton or to some other
religious house for the sustenance of clerici in scholis degentes (poor clerks
in the schools) who were living according to Merton’s prescriptions.[78]
This vesting of endowments in a religious house was already familiar at
both universities. The Bishop of Ely (Kilkenny) had vested his exhibitions
for divinity students in the prior of Barnwell in 1256, and it appears that this
was Merton’s first intention. Two years later, however, we find him
assigning Malden and other manors to his nephews, the beneficiaries being
still described as “poor scholars in the schools.”
Any scholars maintained at either university by these endowments were
“Merton scholars.” This is again made perfectly clear when the charter (and
statutes) of 1270 were issued, in which Walter de Merton settles the
Cambridge estates as part of the Malden endowments for “scholars studying
in Oxford or elsewhere.” It was part of his plan to acquire local
endowments at both universities, and also that vast clerical patronage in the
different shires which was obviously destined to ensure the future of his
scholars. This was the scheme eventually concentrated in the foundation of
Merton, Oxford: and when Bishop Hobhouse is inclined to anticipate the
date at which Merton scholars were established there, we may entirely
agree with him, only adding that if there were certainly Merton scholars at
Oxford before 1274, there were no less certainly Merton scholars at
Cambridge also before that date. Merton’s scholars had their chef-lieu at
Malden, but were studying at these two universities, and possessed
endowments at both during the decade 1264-1274.
The Hundred Rolls furnish us with ample references to the Cambridge
scholars. In the Rolls for the borough and town of Cambridge, the 2nd year
of Edward I., they are accused of poaching on the
fishing rights of the townsmen. “A servant of the House of the
A.D. 1274.
Merton scholars[79] had appropriated to his masters’ use a
certain foss common to the whole town.” In the later inquisitions of the 7th
of Edward I.
we find them figuring among the most considerable
A.D. 1278-9.
Cambridge landlords, one entry showing them to us as
purchasers of land from Manfield: Item scolares de Merton tenent unum

mesuagium cum quadraginta et quinque acris terre ... quas emerunt de
Willelmo de Manefeld.[80]
Three of these entries point to tenure of no very recent
A.D. 1278-9.
date. Thus Eustace Dunning sold to Walter Howe a messuage
with a croft which Eustace had inherited from his father Hervey Dunning,
and for which the Howes, in accordance with an assignment made by
Eustace Dunning, gave twelve pence a year to the clerks of Merton (per
assignationem praedicti Eustachi clericis de Merton xiid).[81] The
declaration is made by John son and heir of Walter Howe, so that Eustace
Dunning’s appointment in favour of the
Merton clerks refers to some time back. Again, Agnes
A.D. 1278-9.
daughter of the tailor Philip inherited a messuage in the parish
of S. Peter which her father “had held of the Merton scholars.” In the last
place the Cambridge jurymen affirm that two annual attendances should
have been made at the court of Chesterton for a holding of Eustace
Dunning’s, but that the scholars of Merton had failed to put in an
appearance for the past six years.[82]
These transactions cannot be held to relate to an estate managed for the
Oxford college founded in 1274, and to a period covering not more than
four or five years. From 1274, which is also the date of the earliest Hundred
Rolls, the Merton scholars were definitely and finally established at Oxford;
and when John Howe and Agnes Taylor gave their evidence it is probable
that there were no longer Merton scholars in Cambridge: what their
depositions seem to indicate is a concurrent antiquity for Merton scholars at
both universities. If these scholars had not been settled among them when
these land transactions occurred the references would certainly have been to
scholares de Merton Oxoniae,[83] and it is well worthy of notice that the
only two instances in the Cambridge Hundred Rolls where “the Merton
scholars at Oxford” are referred to are two instances where Walter de
Merton is said to have “alienated” land in Cambridge for the use of the
scholars in Oxford.[84]
No doubt it had always been part of Merton’s design to found a
residential college for his scholars at one of the universities; and he had
perhaps strong reasons for establishing this at Cambridge. His great patron
was Chief-Justice Bassett, and the Bassetts were Cambridge landowners.
His patron in the original assignment of Malden manor was Gilbert de Clare

whose family gave its name in the next century to the eponymous college at
the same university. Was the domus de Merton of “the scholars and
brethren” (p. 39) in fact at one time such a residence? where poor scholars,
some of them perchance from Merton priory school itself, lived under the
auspices of the Merton brethren? Certain it is that a prior of Merton intrudes
himself and his affairs into the Cambridge Hundred Rolls.[85] It is also
certain that the House of Scholars of Merton is first heard of not at Oxford
but at Cambridge. Mr. J. W. Clark has pointed out in another connexion that
the words domus and aula were employed when a building was
“appropriated by endowment as a fixed residence for a body of scholars.”
Our domus scholarium de Merton on which Cambridge lands were
bestowed—to which Cambridge lands were confirmed—in 1269, could not
have been either in Surrey or at Oxford.
Whether there was a house of Merton scholars at Cambridge before there
was a house of Merton scholars at Oxford, or not, it would appear that a like
antiquity must be claimed for the scholars themselves at both universities.
[86]

Universities
One of the odd things about Merton’s movements is that
though he began buying land in Oxford the year after the Malden
in other
towns. The
foundation (1265), he made his chief acquisition in Cambridge as
licence to
found a
late as 1269, and that a year later when he issued a revised set of
university at
Northampto
n.
statutes (1270) he still makes no allusion to any change of
locality. It is possible that in 1265 when he wrote “at Oxford or at
any other university” he had in mind the tentatives then being made to
found an English university in some other town. It was in fact in 1262, the
45th year of the reign of Henry III., that Cambridge students had migrated
to Northampton with the king’s licence to found a university. The traditional
bickerings between southerners and northerners three years previously had
been the cause of the exodus, and the Cambridge scholars found many
Oxonians already there who had migrated from Oxford after their quarrel
with the papal legate in 1238 but had obtained no licence to institute a
university. The licence accorded to the masters and scholars of Cambridge
university was withdrawn four years later on a representation being made to
Henry III. that a university at Northampton must prove prejudicial to
Oxford.[87] Migrations of students to other towns took place throughout the
xiii century. They begin in 1209 when there was a general exodus from
Oxford not only to Cambridge but to the town of Reading. Thirty years later
the Oxonians migrated to Northampton and Salisbury, being followed to the
former in 1262 as we have just seen by many Cambridge “masters and
scholars.” These migrations certainly indicate that Oxford and Cambridge
were not yet regarded as such permanent homes of English scholarship that
other sites could not be substituted. The event which most impressed the
popular imagination occurred when both universities had attained to
European fame—the exodus in the reign of Edward III. from Oxford to
Stamford which caused the king in 1333 to issue his royal letters forbidding
any one to teach there. It had been prophesied that the studies pursued at
Oxford would be transferred to Stamford, and the Cambridge floods gave
rise to another prophecy, recorded by Spenser, which showed that the
Stamford incident still occupied men’s minds. The flat Lincolnshire country
would, it was said, become completely flooded, and Stamford then would
—— shine in learning more than ever did
Cambridge or Oxford England’s goodly beames.

No migration took place from Cambridge after the foundation of its first
college. But before we enter upon this period of its history, and find
ourselves in the brilliant epoch which was so soon to overtake the
university in the xiv century, let us see what arrangements were made for
the accommodation of the scholar population previous to the existence of
colleges.
At first—in the xii and the early part of the xiii centuries—scholars lived
each at his own charges; perhaps groups of three and four would club
together, but every scholar was then, as Fuller expressively has it, “his own
founder and his own benefactor.”[88] The rescript of the early years of
Henry III., already cited,
introduces us to the town hostels—hospitia locanda; and
A.D. 1231 15th
establishes the taxing of lodging house charges by the of Henry III.
taxatores, a usage probably rendered the more necessary
owing to the great influx of students two years before, when the demand for
lodgings must have been very much in excess of the supply.[89] These town
hostels, the result of town enterprise, were subject to the four “taxors” only,
and were under no other academic supervision.[90] It seems highly probable,
however, that the king’s rescript gave rise to the university hostels, some
thirty of which were in existence fifty years later. In any case the rescript
leads us to conclude that the town hostels were in existence in the previous
century, and supplies us with a date before which we cannot suppose that
any university hostel existed.
The university hostelries or inns for the accommodation of
The
university scholars who lived there at their own charges were intermediate
hostel.
between the town lodging house and the college, which they both
anticipate and supplement. A number of scholars joined together, elected
their own principal, and paid him at a fixed rate for board and lodging. At
first, therefore, the university like the town hostel was a private enterprise,
scholars undertook the charge of them in their private capacity. The head of
the hostel was called the Principal. Later on these institutions changed their
democratic character. The government passed entirely into the hands of the
principal, certain oaths were exacted of him, and he kept a list of the
scholars in his house.[91] The principal collected a rent from the inmates,
though in some hostels the accommodation appears to have been free. All
these changes, we may imagine, belong to the time when some of the
hostels were affiliated to colleges, becoming thenceforward subject in all

respects to the customs and discipline of the endowed foundation. Thus S.
Mary’s hostel, where Matthew Parker studied, was affiliated to Corpus,
Borden’s belonged to S. John’s hospital, then to Ely, and in 1448 was
affiliated to Clare; S. Bernard’s belonged first to Queens’ then to Corpus; S.
Austin’s to King’s. The hostels took their name sometimes from the
neighbouring church or chapel, or other saintly patron, and sometimes from
their proprietor. “Newmarket” and “Harleston” hostels must have served for
students from these neighbouring towns. The monks who first came to
study in Cambridge lived in lodgings; but these were soon exchanged for
the monastic hostel, hence “Ely hostel” and “Monks’ hostel.”[92] Those
zealous learners the friars of the Sack had Jesu hostel, dismantled in 1307,
the Sempringham canons had S. Edmund’s hostel, the Barnwell canons had
a hostel in the town called S. Augustine’s, and the hospitaller knights of S.
John owned Crouched and S. John’s hostels in School Lane and Mill Street.
[93] Rud’s offers a good example of a xiii century Cambridge hostel, and
Physwick of one of the xivth. The former is mentioned in 1283 and was part
of the compensation allowed in that year to S. John’s for the alienated
hostels at Peterhouse,[94] it still exists, almost unaltered, and forms part of
the Castle inn in S. Andrew’s Street. Physwick was the private residence of
an esquire bedell of that name who bequeathed it for the purposes of a
hostel in 1393. It was affiliated to Gonville and was in use until absorbed in
the buildings of Trinity College in the xvi century.
Cambridge hostels were highly important foundations. The 8 jurists’
hostels housed eighty and a hundred students apiece, and the large hostels
of S. Bernard, S. Thomas, S. Mary, and S. Augustine sometimes housed
twenty and thirty regents without counting the non-regents and students.[95]
A large proportion of men whose names are not to be found on the books of
any college received their education in these houses. The Inns, of which
there were three at Cambridge—Oving’s, S. Zachary’s, and S. Paul’s—were
smaller and less important hostels and appear to have been frequented by
the richer students. Hostel and hall or college existed side by side through
the xiii, xiv, and xv centuries. Indeed until the college system was well
established the hostels greatly exceeded the endowed halls in number, and
they continued to supplement the latter until the completion of the large
colleges at the renascence. Some twenty were erected as late as the xv and
the opening years of the xvi centuries. During the xiv and xv centuries

many hostels were destroyed to make room for the colleges; and in the
xvith those which remained were abandoned, Trinity

THE OLD CASTLE INN
Now styled “Ye Olde Castel Hotel.” The Baptist Church and the
Police Courts are seen just beyond, and the Roman Catholic
Church in the distance. The near trees are in the grounds of
Emmanuel College.

hostel, as Fuller testifies, being the only one remaining in use till 1540.[96]

CHAPTER II

THE COLLEGES

The university and the colleges—the collegiate system—eras of college building—Peterhouse
—Michaelhouse—collegium and aula—Clare—college statutes—architectural scheme of a
college—Pembroke—founders of colleges—Gonville—Trinity Hall—Corpus Christi—
Cambridge in 1353—Chaucer at Cambridge—the schools, library, the university printers and
the Pitt Press, the senate house—King’s—King’s College chapel—Cambridge college chapels
—Queens’—English sovereigns at Cambridge—S. Catherine’s—Jesus—Christ’s—Lady
Margaret and Bishop Fisher—S. John’s—Magdalene—King’s Hall and Trinity College—
college libraries—gateways—Caius—monks in Cambridge—Emmanuel—Sidney Sussex—
Downing—public hostels—nationality of founders and general scope of their foundations—
university and college revenues.

THE college is an endowed foundation providing for the residence and
maintenance of teachers—masters or graduates, and for the free education
of a certain number of poor scholars, to whose company are added,
according to the capacity of the building, other students who are able to live
at their own charges.
Much has been said about the relation of the college to the
Relation of
the college university. By some it is supposed that the latter is nothing but the
to the
university. aggregate of the former; that somewhere in the time of the
Georges “the university” arrogated to itself a separate existence,
and that since that time university offices have taken precedence of
collegiate offices.[97] The universitas, the corporation of scholars, must and
did precede any college foundation: at the same time we cannot distinguish
the development of either of our universities from the rise of these
foundations, whose history has, ever since, been the history of the academic
society. Each college is independent and autonomous, and though the
aggregate of colleges does not constitute the university, each collegiate
foundation forms part and parcel of it in virtue of its union with the
incorporated society of Chancellor Masters and Scholars which formed at
first and still forms “the university.”
It is the collegiate system which distinguishes the English
The college
the universities from all others. Everywhere else in Europe students
distinguishin
g live in their own private lodgings and have complete control of
characteristi
c of
their lives, subject to no supervision whatever; the university has

Cambridge
and Oxford no rights over them and no means of ensuring their good
behaviour during the period in which they choose to attend its
lectures. In many parts of Europe the student passes from a school
curriculum in which he has been treated as a complete dependent, on whose
sense of common fairplay and honour, even, no reliance can be placed, to a
curriculum in which he at once becomes his own absolute master. English
instinct is against this—against abandoning a young man at a critical
moment of his life to his own devices, his own unsupported endeavours, as
it is against ruling him by a system of espionage in his school days. It is in
favour in both cases of the moral support to be found in an external
guarantee for order, orderliness—and of a tacit assistance to good instincts,
a tacit resistance to bad; and the result is the university college.
The result, as we say, is an English result, and is the
The origin
of the development of a scheme to which shape was first given by
college
system. Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England and afterwards Bishop
of Rochester, and Hugh de Balsham Bishop and formerly
subprior of Ely, in the reign of Henry III.[98] An endowed house and college
statutes formed part of this fine academic scheme, which, in all its
amplitude and completeness, sprang Athena-like from the brain of Walter de
Merton, and was destined from the first to be realised in a university. It
must, nevertheless, be clearly borne in mind that the original college
dwellings—and the college statutes—were designed for adult scholars, they
were, in fact, the earliest training colleges for teachers, and it is only later
that their advantages were extended in equal measure to the taught.[99]
College building began in the xiii century and ended with the
The era of
college xvith. The first great period of building, however, belongs to the
building.
second quarter of the xiv century, and no less than seven colleges
and halls were founded between the years 1324 and 1352. Ninety years
elapsed before the second period, which began with the foundation of
King’s College in 1441 and ended with the foundation of S. John’s in 1509.
The third and last period opened a hundred years after the foundation of
King’s and closed with the foundation of the first Protestant colleges fifty
years later (1595):
First period. Second period. Third period.
Peterhouse 1284
(28 years) (68 years) (50 years)
Michaelhouse 1324 King’s College 1441 Magdalene 1542

Clare 1326-38 Queens’ 1448 Trinity 1546
King’s Hall 1337 S. Catherine’s 1473 (Caius 1557)
Pembroke 1347 Jesus 1495 Emmanuel 1584
Gonville Hall 1348 Christ’s 1505 Sidney Sussex 1595
Trinity Hall 1350 S. John’s 1509
Corpus Christi 1352

There were therefore 8 colleges in Cambridge by the middle of the xiv
century; when the xvi century opened there were 14, and at its close 12 of
the previous buildings remained and 4 new had been added. Downing
College (built 1805) must be added to these, making at the present day a
total of 17 colleges.

Peterhouse was founded by Hugh de Balsham[100] for his Ely
Peterhouse.
scholars whom he had in vain attempted to unite, with a separate
endowment of their own, under the same roof as the canons of S. John’s
Hospital.[101] In 1284 he removed the Ely clerks to two hostels by S. Peter’s
church at the other end of the town, and at his death two years later left
three hundred marks for the erection of a hall. This was built in 1290 on the
south-west and formed with the scholars’ chambers the only collegiate
building at Peterhouse till the close of the xiv century. Here then were the
primitive elements of a college; the hostel or scholars’ lodging house to
which was added a common meeting and dining room, or hall. The little
parish church of S. Peter served for prayers and gave its name to the
college. College chapels were not built till considerably later: the example
first given by Pembroke College in the next century not being followed for
another hundred years. The quadrangle was not begun till 1424. A
combination room[102] opening out from the hall, and a library, were added
along the south side. Over the former was the master’s room, over the latter
the students’ quarters; and all looked upon the ancient lawn, the meadow
with its elms beyond and, stretching to the right, with its water gate, Coe
fen.
Ye brown, o’er-arching groves,
That contemplation loves,
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight!
Oft at the blush of dawn
I trod your level lawn
..........
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy.[103]

PETERHOUSE FROM THE STREET
The Tower of the Congregational Church in the distance.

Hostels and church, facing the Trumpington road, were just without
Trumpington gate. In 1309 the college area was extended southwards, over
the ground occupied by Jesu hostel.[104] The property of the Gilbertine
canons was added in the xvi century. The college area covers the space
between Trumpington Street and Coe fen, and Little S. Mary’s church and
Scroope Terrace; two-thirds of the site of the Fitzwilliam Museum being
ground purchased from Peterhouse. The new Gisborne building (1825) is
built on the west beyond the hall. The frontage of Peterhouse on
Trumpington Street is unpromising; nothing suggests the charm of the
buildings on the south side or the open country beyond, stored with
historical memories. From the hall, a site unrivalled in the university, opens
the panelled combination room,[105] the “Good Women” of Chaucer limned
in one of its bays, recalling
The chambres and parlers of a sorte
With bay windowes

described by the poet’s contemporary.
Above the xvi century library (of which Balsham’s own books were the
nucleus, enriched by Whittlesey, Bottlesham, Arundel, Warkworth, Gray,
Perne, and Cosin)[106] a charming corner room in the students’ quarters has

been set apart by the present Master for evening study, a veritable solarium
where the readers are surrounded by the portraits of the great sons of
Peterhouse.
The chapel
Old S. Peter’s church was perhaps burnt down in 1338-1340
A.D. 1628. by a fire which is supposed to have also destroyed the chapel of
S. Edmund. On its site rose the present church of Little S. Mary.
[107] But in the early xvii century a movement was set afoot at Peterhouse
which resulted in the erection of a college chapel. It now stands in the midst
of the college buildings, and one of the two ancient hostels, “the little
ostle,” was demolished to provide a site. Matthew Wren, uncle of Sir
Christopher and then Master of the college, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was
the builder. The desire of the fellows of Peterhouse for a chapel of their own
coincided with the movement in the English Church for an elaborate ritual.
As it stands it is a perfect specimen of a xvii century chapel, with its dark
oak stalls, and its east window spared from Commonwealth marauders by
the expedient of removing the glass piece by piece and hiding it till the

PETERHOUSE—THE FIRST COURT
The entrance to the chapel faces the spectator. On the right is seen
the Combination Room (1460) and the Hall. Through the Cloisters
we get a view into the street. This is the oldest college in
Cambridge.

iconoclastic fever had spent itself. But still we have only the shell of the
original chapel, the roof of which was adorned with figures of a hundred
and fifty angels the statue of S. Peter presiding from the west. Nine years
later all this was pulled down by the Commonwealth men and the ritualist
movement it embodied came to an end.[108]
Peterhouse hall, in common with the halls of all other colleges,
Hall
portraits. contains the portraits of its great men: here, however, they look
down upon us not only from the wall above the high table but
from the stained glass of the windows. Holbroke Master of the college,
chancellor of the university during the Barnwell process, and an early
student of science; Cardinal Beaufort scholar of the house who represented
Henry V. at the Council of Constance, and was himself, perhaps, papabile;
Warkworth writing his Lancastrian Chronicle—are in their doctor’s scarlet:
here also are Whitgift, Cosin, and Crashaw, who is depicted as a canon of
Loreto; the poet Gray, the third duke of Grafton chancellor of the university
and Prime Minister, and Henry Cavendish the physicist. The panel portraits
were removed here from the Stone parlour. The painting of Bishop Law by
Romney (?) reminds us that many of the Laws were at Peterhouse,
including the first Lord Ellenborough. Over the high table is Lord Kelvin
the latest famous son of the house. Among these must also be noted Thomas
Heywood “a prose Shakspeare,” Hutchinson “the regicide” one of the first
Puritan gentlemen and one of the best, Peter Baro, Markland the classical
critic, and Sherlock who measured himself against Bossuet.
Peterhouse owes nothing to royal endowments but it has not lived
outside the stir of national movements either political or religious. There
were fervent Lancastrians within its walls in the xv century, fervent
partisans of the Stuarts in the xviith. It was, second to none in England, the
anti-Puritan college, numbering among its masters Wren and Cosin, and
that Doctor Andrew Perne who was among its most munificent benefactors.
[109] Perne was a Petrean first and a theologian afterwards, and, as vice-
chancellor, was to be found burning the remains of Martin Bucer and Paul
Fagius[110] in order to ingratiate the university with Mary, and signing the
Thirty-nine Articles on the accession of Elizabeth. The letters AP AP on the
weather cock of his college are said to mean: Andrew Perne, “a Papist” or
“a Protestant,” as you will; and in Cantabrigian language a coat that has
been turned is a coat that has been perned, and pernare signifies to change
your opinions with frequency.

Since the xvii century Peterhouse has been connected with no great
movements. In the xv century and again in the early xixth it produced
eminent physical and mathematical students; and in the xviii century Sir
William Browne, President of the College of Physicians, learnt here his
science. Scotchmen have a predilection for the college; and a nucleus of
history men is being formed under the present Master’s guidance.
The patronage of the historical church which was for three or
Little S.
Mary’s. four centuries the chapel of Peterhouse remains in the hands of
the college. It is indeed an integral part of Peterhouse for every
Petrean. But its interest does not end here; it reaches across the Atlantic and
binds the new continent to the home-hearth of learning in England. A
monument in the chapel to Godfrey Washington who died in 1729 bears the
arms argent two bars gules, in chief three estoiles—the origin of the Stars
and Stripes. The Washington crest is an eagle issuant from a crown—
affirming sovereignty or escaping from a monarchy?[111]
The Rectory of Cherry Hinton two and a half miles south-east
Cherry
Hinton. of Cambridge, on the way to the village of Balsham, is no less
important in the history of the Ely scholars. In the xiv century the
endowment of the college was not sufficient for their maintenance all the
year round: the college nevertheless had made rapid progress since its
separate existence at Peterhouse began, and Fordham Bishop of Ely (1388-
1426) decided to confirm to them the greater tithes of Cherry Hinton of
which the college is to this day rector; but which had indeed been first
assigned them by Bishop Simon Langham as early as 1362.[112]
A visit to this interesting church completes our picture of the college
which “his affection for learning and the state of the poor scholars who
were much put to it for conveniency of lodging” persuaded Balsham to
endow.
The lodge of Peterhouse is on the opposite side of
Peterhouse
lodge. Trumpington Street, and is the only example of a lodge outside
the college precincts in the university. The house belonged to
Charles Beaumont, nephew of the metaphysical poet Joseph Beaumont who
was Master of Peterhouse, and was bequeathed by him for the college lodge
in 1727.
Peterhouse has always been one of the small colleges. Balsham founded
it for a master, 14 fellows, and a few Bible clerks.[113] In the time of Charles

I. (1634) it maintained 19 fellows, 29 Bible clerks, and 8 scholars, making
with the college officers and other students a total of 106. Sixty years
earlier, when Caius wrote, there were 96 inmates, and in the middle of the
xviii century, 90. To-day there are 11 fellowships, and 23 scholarships
varying from £20 to £80 a year in value.

PETERHOUSE FROM THE FELLOWS’ GARDEN
On the right is the Combination Room (1460), while farther back
in the picture is the Hall, a continuation of this range of most
ancient and picturesque buildings.

The bishops of Ely have never ceased to be the visitors of the college.

Michaelhous
Nearly forty years elapsed before a second college was
e. projected. On September 27 1324 Hervey de Stanton, who like
other founders in both universities—like Merton, Alcock,
Wykeham, and Wolsey—was a notable pluralist,[114] opened Michaelhouse
on the present site of Trinity. His purchases for the site had been made in
1323-4, and as was the case with the foundations preceding and succeeding
it, Michaelhouse was an adaptation of edifices already existing. It remained
one of the principal collegiate buildings until the xvi century and was
successively enlarged by absorbing both Crouched and Gregory’s as
students’ hostels.

As Peterhouse was called “the House-of-Scholars of S. Peter,”
Domus aula
collegium.so was Michaelhouse called “the House-of-Scholars of S.
Michael.” It will be seen that domus and aula were the earliest
appellations. As hospitia or diversoria literarum signified the unendowed
house, so domus or aula scholarium signified the endowed house. Such
compound titles as “house of S. Peter or hall-of-scholars of the Bishop of
Ely” precede, as they explain, the later title college. A college denotes not a
dwelling but a community: precisely the same distinction is to be drawn
between domus and collegium as between monasterium and conventus.
Every university domus was intended for a college of scholars, as every
religious house was intended for a convent of religious; the transition was
easy, though not logical, from “college of the hall of Valense-Marie” to
Valence-Marie College, and to-day the word is used indiscriminately to
mean both the building and the community.[115]

Clare Hall was erected on the site of University Hall, a house
Clare Hall
1326-1338.for scholars founded during the chancellorship of Richard de
Badew who obtained the king’s licence for it on February 20
1326, when he was lodged at Barnwell.[116] In the next reign (1344, 18th of
Edward III.) it is referred to as “the hospice belonging to Cambridge
university.” This hall, like Peterhouse, originated in two hostels purchased
for the university in the street running parallel to the High Street, from the
present site of Queen’s to the back gate of Trinity.[117] Twelve years later
Elizabeth de Burgh[118] sister and co-heiress of

CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE FROM THE CAM—
AUTUMN EVENING

Gilbert Earl of Clare founded her college and in 1340 she obtained
possession of University Hall,[119] and decreed in 1359 that it should
thenceforth be known as the “House of Clare.”[120]
The scheme of building of Clare Hall was quadrangular; but no college
was longer in the building. A hall, combination room, and Master’s room
were on the west, while the chapel at the north-east angle was not built till
1535.[121] The scholars had till then kept their prayers in the parish church
of S. Zachary and in the south chancel aisle of S. Edward’s. The present
chapel was not begun till 1764. As we see it now Clare is a homogeneous
piece of work of the time of Charles I., and in its classical beauty is one of
the finest in Cambridge. This complete rebuilding occupied twenty-six
years—from 1635 to 1661. There is no record of the architect, though an
unsupported tradition points to Inigo Jones.
When one pictures Clare Hall it is to recall “the Backs,” the
characteristic feature of Cambridge scenery which rivals the beauty of “the
gardens” in the sister university. The grounds of the succession of collegiate
buildings fronting the ancient High Street, with sloping lawns, bowling
green, and fellows’ garden, extend along the backs of the colleges beyond
the narrow river over which each college throws its bridge, and beyond
again runs the well known road and the college playgrounds.
Clare is supposed to have been the “Soler hall” of Chaucer’s Tale.[122] It
has enjoyed the reputation of a fashionable college, and indeed of a
“sporting college.” It no doubt enjoyed the former reputation from the first,

as a foundation under the patronage of the great house of Clare, and
furnished some of the overdressed dandies who flocked to Cambridge in
Chaucer’s time, as well as his “pore” Yorkshire “scolers” or others like
them. Ralph Cudworth was Master of the college; Tillotson Archbishop of
Canterbury, the martyr bishop Latimer, and Whiston the successor of
Newton were its fellows; and Nicholas Heath primate of York, Sir George
Downing, Cole the antiquary, Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the
first Marquis Cornwallis, Brodrick Archbishop of Cashel, and Whitehead
the laureate were its alumni. It was founded for 20 fellows or scholars, 6 of
whom were to be in priests’ orders. In 1634 there were 15 fellows and 32
scholars, in all 106 inmates. In the time of Caius there had been 129, and in
the middle of the xviii century there were about 100. There are

CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE FROM THE AVENUE
King’s College Chapel is seen through the trees.

now 18 fellowships and 31 scholarships ranging in value from £20 to £60.

College
The statutes of Clare Hall were written by the founder in 1359,
statutes. a year before her death. The statutes of Peterhouse[123] and of
Pembroke do not exist in their original form—and those of
Hervey de Stanton for Michaelhouse and of Elizabeth de Burgh for Clare
must be held to be the two types of Cambridge college statutes. Of these the
latter rank as the most enlightened original code framed for a Cambridge

college. Stanton’s contain little more than directions for the conduct of a
clerical seminary, and this type was followed by the framers of the statutes
of Corpus Christi and in their general intention by Gonville in statutes
afterwards modified by Bateman. The statutes of King’s Hall framed for
Richard II. reverted to the Merton type; Henry VI.’s statutes for King’s
follow, as we shall see, the type already laid down by William of Wykeham,
while Lady Margaret Countess of Richmond, and John Fisher Bishop of
Rochester framed statutes which contain some original elements.
Elizabeth de Burgh’s originality consists in her realisation of the value of
learning and of general knowledge for all kinds of men and for its own
sake. “In every degree, whether ecclesiastical or temporal, skill in learning
is of no mean advantage; which although sought for by many persons in
many ways is to be found most fully in the university where a studium
generale is known to flourish.”[124] Thence it sends forth its “disciples,”
“who have tasted its sweetness,” skilled and fitted, to fill their place in the
world. She wishes to promote, with the advancement of religious worship
and the welfare of the state, “the extension of these sciences”; her object
being that “the pearl of knowledge” “once discovered and acquired by study
and learning” “should not lie hid,” but be diffused more and more widely,
and when so diffused give light to them that walk in the darkness of the
shadow of ignorance.[125]
The statutes of Marie Valence were written twelve years earlier and even
in the form in which they have come down to us have a character of their
own and conform to none of the three types of Merton, Michaelhouse, or
Clare.[126]
Merton’s statutes were issued in 1264, 1270, and 1274, and the 1274
statutes exist in the university library in a register of the Bishops of Lincoln.
Mr. J. Bass Mullinger has printed Hervey de Stanton’s in Appendix D. to
his “History of the University of Cambridge”; they are contained in the
Michaelhouse book in the muniment room of Trinity.

For King’s Hall, founded in 1337, see page 131.

THE HALL OF CLARE COLLEGE
The notable features of this interior are the plaster ceiling and the
large oak figures over the fireplace, the latter designed by Sir M.
Digby Wyatt 1870-72.

Pembroke Hall was founded in 1347 by Marie daughter of
Pembroke
College A.D. Guy de Chatillon comte de Saint-Paul and of Mary grand-
1347.
daughter of Henry III. She was of the blood of that Walter de
Chatillon who in the retreat from Damietta during the 7th crusade, held a
village alone against successive assaults of the Saracen; and having drawn
forth their missiles from his body after each sally, charged afresh to the cry
of Chatillon! Chevaliers!—and the widow of Aymer de Valence Earl of
Pembroke the inexorable enemy of Robert Bruce in Edward’s wars against
the Scottish king. Pembroke stands opposite Peterhouse and several hostels
were destroyed to make room for it. It was called by the founder the hall of
Valencemarie, and in Latin documents aula Pembrochiana.
With Pembroke the first college foundation stone was laid in
Architectura
l scheme of Cambridge. Here for the first time we have a homogeneous
a college.
collegiate house and not a mere adaptation of pre-existing
buildings, and may therefore enquire what was the architectural plan of a
college. The principle of the quadrangle, although it underwent
considerable architectural development, was recognised with the first
attempt at college architecture.[127] The special collegiate buildings at first
occupied one side of the court only. Here, facing the gateway, were to be
found the hall with its buttery and kitchen, above the hall the Master’s
lodging, with perhaps a garret bedroom above it—the solarium. The

combination room attiguous to the hall makes its appearance in the next
century, and at right angles or parallel to this main block stretch the
students’ chambers and studies. A muniment room or treasury is over the
gate; the library, occupying a third side,[128] and the chapel, come later; and
last of all the architectural gateway is added.[129] Meadows and fields and
the Master’s plot of ground are soon developed into the Master’s garden,
the fellows’ garden, the bowling green, and tennis court. By the xv century
the buildings round a courtyard easily assume the plan of the new domestic
dwelling of that epoch, of which the type is Haddon Hall Derbyshire and, in
Cambridge, Queens’ College: the college domus of the xiv century becomes
the quadrangular manor-house of the xvth and xvith. In such a scheme of
public buildings only a few scholars could be lodged in the main court, and
smaller quadrangles for their accommodation were therefore added.
University Hostel formed one side of such a second court in Pembroke;
Clare and Queens’ had also second courts, and their example was followed
at Christ’s and S. John’s.
Here then we have a scheme of building which is neither monastic nor
feudal. It may with propriety be called scholastic but it is also essentially
domestic architecture. The college quadrangle as we see it evolved in
Cambridge is the earliest attempt at devising a dwelling which should
resemble neither the cloister nor the castle, should suggest neither enclosure
nor self-defence—a scholastic dwelling. The college is the outcome of that
moment in our history when feudalism had played its part and monasticism
was losing its power; it represents what the rise of the universities
themselves represents and its architectural interest is unique. No monastic
terms are retained; the hall is not a refectory, the one constant monastic and
canonical feature, the church, has no part at all in the scheme—the scholars
were men not separated from their fellows and they used the parish church.
The first collegiate dwelling houses, like the English manor-house,
consciously or unconsciously followed one of the oldest house-plans known
to civilisation—the scheme of dwelling-rooms round a court was that of the
Roman house. The aula seu domus scholarium had moreover as its starting
point—like the earliest domus ecclesiae—a hall in a house; the hall is the
nucleus of the college.[130]
Marie de Saint-Paul, like her predecessor Elizabeth de Burgh,
The site of
Pembroke. purchased university property for the site of her college.
“University hostel” which stood here formed one side of the

narrow quadrangle the building of which was at once begun, and a
messuage of Hervey de Stanton’s formed the other. Within five years the
complete area had been acquired, and it is probable that the south side was
also partly built before the founder’s death in 1377. On the west were the
hall and kitchen, on the east, abutting on the street, was the gate with
students’ chambers on either side of it. With the hostel the founder bought
an acre of meadowland which she converted into an orchard—“the orchard
against Pembroke Hall” it is called in her lifetime. She also obtained
permission from two of the Avignon popes—Innocent VI. and Urban V.—to
erect a chapel and bell tower, and these were built, after the middle of the
xiv century, at the north west corner of the closed quadrangle. This
interesting site was used later as a library and is still a reference library and
lecture room. Traces of fresco remain under the panelling, and the
chaplain’s room with its hagioscope for the altar is on the east. The lower
part of the bell tower also still exists.
In 1389 the college acquired Cosyn’s Place, and later Bolton’s, and in
1451 a perpetual lease of S. Thomas’s hostel. University hostel retained its
name till the last quarter of the xvi century, and it was only pulled down in
1659 to make room for the Hitcham building which now forms the south
side of the second court. There is nothing left of the xiv and xv century
structures. The present lodge, hall, and library and the other new buildings
in stone and red brick have all been erected since 1870. The chapel occupies
part of the site of S. Thomas’s hostel, and was built by Matthew Wren,
Bishop of Ely and Master of

THE OLD COURT, PEMBROKE COLLEGE
The Dining Hall is seen on the right of the picture.

Peterhouse, at his own charges; the architect being his nephew
Christopher Wren. The bishop had already built Peterhouse chapel and this
new work was undertaken in fulfilment of his intention to make some pious
offering if he were ever liberated from the Tower, where the Parliament kept
him between the years 1642 and 1658. The fine combination room is
panelled with the oak from the xvii century hall. The portrait of Marie de
Saint-Paul presides in the present hall with that of Henry VI. flanked by
busts of Pitt, Gray, and Stokes.
Two spiritual relationships were bequeathed by the founder to the
college. One with the Franciscan friars, the other with the Minoresses of
Denney. The former connexion ceased almost as soon as it was devised, for
the existing edition of the statutes (made after the founder’s death) omits all
mention of it.[131]
No college but Trinity outshines Pembroke for the fame of its scholars
and none for the antiquity of its fame. Henry VI. in a charter granting lands
speaks of it as “this eminent and most precious college, which is and ever
hath been resplendent among all places in the university.”[132] The king so

favoured it that it was called his “adopted daughter”; and when Elizabeth
rode past it on her way to her lodging at King’s she saluted it with one of
those happy phrases characteristic of the Tudors: “O domus antiqua et
religiosa!” words which sum its significance in university history.
Pembroke is the alma mater of Edmund Spenser,[133] of Gray,[134] of the
younger Pitt,[135] of Thixtil, fellow in 1519, whose extraordinary erudition
is praised by Caius, of Wharton the anatomist, Sydenham the xvii century
physician, Gabriel Harvey the “Hobbinoll” of the Shepherd’s Calendar,[136]
Sir George Stokes the mathematician, and Sir Henry Maine.[137] *Grindal
and *Whitgift[138] of Canterbury, *Rotherham and *Booth of York,
*Richard Fox Master of the college, Bishop of Winchester, and founder of
Corpus Christi Oxford, the two Langtons Bishops of *S. David’s and
Winchester, *Ridley the martyr Bishop of London, *Lancelot Andrewes
Bishop of Ely, then of Winchester, with

A COURT AND CLOISTERS IN PEMBROKE COLLEGE
This represents the First or Entrance Court of the College. Beyond
the Cloisters is the Chapel designed by Sir Christopher Wren and
completed in 1664.

Felton and *Wren of Ely, are on its honour roll. The second Master was
Robert Thorpe of Thorpe-next-Norwich, knighted by Edward III. and
afterwards Lord Chancellor.[139] The old college garden, loved by Ridley, is
much despoiled, but “Ridley’s walk” remains. Pembroke gave two other

martyrs for their religious opinions, Rogers and Bradford.[140] Two fellows
of the college[141] in the reign of Edward III. died in Rome where they had
gone to obtain from Innocent VI. possession of part of the original
endowment of the college; a statute prescribes that mass shall be said for
them each July.
In the library are Gower’s Confessio Amantis and the Golden Legend,
printed by Caxton. It is this last book which brought him the promise of “a
buck in summer and a doe in winter” from the Earl of Arundel, for its great
length had made him “half desperate to have accomplished it.” There, too,
is Gray’s MS. of the “Elegy.” The college also possesses Bishop Andrewes’
library. Matthew Wren is buried in the chapel, and his staff and mitre are
preserved in the college, the latter being a solitary specimen of a post-
reformation mitre; it was worn over a crimson silk cap.
The college was founded for 30 scholars, if the revenues permitted.[142]
In the time of Caius it housed 87 members; in Fuller’s time 100 (including
20 fellows and 33 scholars); in the middle of the xviii century the number
of students averaged 50 or 60. There are now 13 fellowships and 34
scholarships of the value of £20 to £80.

The Cambridge colleges are remarkable for the large
Founders of
Cambridge proportion of them founded and endowed by women. Of the 16
colleges.
colleges built between the xiii and xvi centuries, now in
existence, 6 are due to the munificence of women—Clare, Pembroke,
Queens’, Christ’s, S. John’s, and Sidney Sussex. Next as college builders
come the chancellors of England, the bishops, and the kings who have each
endowed the university with three colleges. Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor
of the Exchequer in the reign of Edward II., Thomas Lord Audley
chancellor to Henry VIII., and Sir Walter Mildmay Chancellor of the
Exchequer to Elizabeth, all founded colleges, two of which still remain—
Magdalene and Emmanuel.[143] Hugh Balsham of Ely, Bateman of
Norwich, and Alcock of Ely founded three existing colleges—Peterhouse,
Trinity Hall, and Jesus.[143a] The kings of England account for some of the
finest work in the university, King’s Hall, King’s College, and Trinity
College.[144]
In the series of Cambridge colleges the 3 foundations of the
The early
series of early xiv century which followed Peterhouse were all merged in

colleges.
other colleges. Pembroke which was the sixth foundation was the
first piece of collegiate building to be carried through in Cambridge, and
Corpus Christi must rank as the second.
The colleges from Peterhouse to Pembroke:—
Peterhouse 1284
Michaelhouse 1324 (Gonville 1348 )
{University Hall 1326 (Trinity Hall 1350)
{Clare 1338
King’s Hall 1337 Corpus 1352
Pembroke Hall 1347

Michaelhouse and King’s Hall went to swell the greatness of Trinity;
University Hall became the foundation stone of Clare: and all of them, with
Gonville and Trinity Hall, were incomplete adaptations of earlier buildings
at the time when Pembroke and Corpus were finished.

We now come to two colleges which formed an East Anglian corner in
the university.
Within a month of the licence granted to Marie de Saint-Paul,
Gonville
Hall 1348. Edmund Gonville obtained his for the erection of the hall which
is called after him. Gonville was an East Anglian parson, rector of
two Norfolk parishes and sometime vicar-general of the diocese of Ely. In
one of these parishes his elder brother Sir Nicholas Gonville of Rushworth
had already established a college of canons, and Edmund Gonville himself
was a great favourer of the Dominicans. Edward III.’s licence enabled him
to found a hall for 20 scholars in Lurteburgh (now Free school) Lane,
between S. Benet’s and great S. Mary’s, in 1348. In 1352 this site was
exchanged with Benet College for another on the other side of the High
Street,[145] the present site of Gonville and Caius. The Hall was dedicated in
honour of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and enjoyed a great
reputation among East Anglians and various proofs of papal favour up to
the eve of the Reformation.[146] Like Corpus its object was the education of
the clergy and theology was to be their study. Alexander VI. (1492-1503)
licensed annually two of its students to preach in any part of England,
apparently a unique permission.[147] Humphrey de la Pole—who resided for
many years—and his brother Edward, sons of the second Duke of Suffolk,

were students here; so was Sir Thomas Gresham. Gonville was refounded
as Gonville and Caius by Doctor Keys (Caius) two hundred years later.[148]
Edmund Gonville left William Bateman Bishop of Norwich
Trinity Hall
A.D. 1350. his executor in the interests of his new foundation. Bateman, a
notable

TRINITY HALL
The nearer building seen in the picture is the old Library, and
beyond it are the Latham Buildings.

figure in the xiv century, set forth as Edward’s ambassador to the King of
France in the month that the Black Death made its appearance in East
Anglia (March 1350), and died at Avignon on an embassy from the king to
the Pope. In 1350 on his return from France,[149] he founded Trinity Hall,
near Gonville, on the site of the hostel of the monks of Ely[150] which he
obtained for that purpose.[151]
If Gonville’s foundation was intended for the country parson, Bateman’s
was intended for the prete di carriera. Both were designed to repair the
ravages in the ranks of the clergy left by the plague, but while Gonville’s
clerks were to devote their time to the study of theology Bateman’s were to
study exclusively civil and canon law. The college was built round a
quadrangle,[152] and the religious services were kept in the church of S.
John the Baptist (or Zachary) and afterwards in the north aisle of S.

Edward’s church; these two churches being shared with the students of
Clare. Indeed it was owing to Gardiner’s policy and Ridley’s advice that
Trinity Hall escaped incorporation with Clare College in the reign of
Edward VI. The library remains as it was in the early years of Elizabeth’s
reign, and was founded by Bateman with the gift of his own collection. The
Norfolk men were famous litigants. Doctor Jessopp has shown that neither
the Black Death nor any lesser tragedy could hold them from an appeal to
the law on every trivial pretext. That the first college of jurists should have
been founded by a native of Norwich is certainly therefore a fitting
circumstance.
Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England was
Master of Trinity Hall in the reign of Edward VI. and again in the first year
of Mary. He used to say “if all his palaces were blown down by iniquity, he
would creep honestly into that shell”—the mastership of Trinity Hall. Other
distinguished Masters were Haddon,[153] Master of the Requests to
Elizabeth, and Sir Henry Maine who had been fellow and tutor. Bishop
Sampson, a pupil of Erasmus, Thirlby, Glisson,[154] Bilney, one of the early
reformers, Lord Chesterfield, Bulwer Lytton, and Leslie Stephen were all
members of Trinity Hall, which is still the college of the larger number of
Cambridge law students. There are 13 fellowships, and about 12
scholarships varying in value from £80 to £21 a year, besides exhibitions of
the same value.

In the middle of the xiv century there were two important guilds in
Cambridge, the one under the invocation of Corpus Christi “keeping their
prayers in S. Benet’s church,” the other dedicated to the

ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AND CORPUS COLLEGE FROM
THE STEPS OF THE PITT PRESS, TRUMPINGTON STREET
King’s College is seen in the distance.

Blessed Virgin “observing their offices in S. Mary’s church.” These
guilds or confraternities—which existed all through the middle ages as they
had existed in classical Rome with precisely similar features—were to be
found, as we know, especially among the artisan class, and took the place of
our modern trades unions and mutual insurance societies. Like every
enterprise of the ages of faith they had a semi-religious character, were
usually attached as its “sisters and brethren” to some church, and owed their
members not only material assistance but spiritual, paying for masses to be
offered for the repose of the souls of all deceased brethren.
It was two such guilds which forgetting their differences and
Corpus
Christi A.D. laying aside all emulations, joined together in the middle of the
1352.
xiv century in order to found and endow a college in their town.
The brethren of the guilds had been planning this enterprise since 1342, and
in the following years those who possessed contiguous tenements in the
parishes of S. Benet and S. Botolph pulled them down “and with one accord
set about the task of establishing a college there.”[155] “By this means they
cleared a site for their college square in form.”[156] Here then, as in the case
of King’s Hall and Pembroke, the earliest collegiate buildings designed as
such, the plan was quadrangular. Sometimes, as in the case of Trinity Hall,
the adjacent buildings for completing the court could not be at once
obtained, in others, as at Corpus itself and Clare, the courts are irregular,

owing to the same difficulty of getting the foursquare space. Corpus Christi
college presents us, indeed, with the unique and perfect example in
Cambridge of the ancient college court. By March 1352 a clear space, 220
feet long by 140 wide, had been cleared, and the guilds worked with so
much good will that they had nearly finished the exterior wall of their
college in the same year. “The building of the college as it appears at the
present day,” writes John Jocelyn, “with walls of enclosure, chambers
arranged about a quadrangle, hall, kitchen, and Master’s habitation, was
fully finished in the days of Thomas Eltisley, the first Master [1352-1376]
and of his successor” [1376-1377]. This original court is what we see also
to-day: the buildings are in two floors, the garrets were added later. The hall
range contains the Master’s lodging with a solarium above it, a door and
passage leading thence to the hall. The three other sides were devoted to
scholars’ chambers. S. Benet’s served as the scholars’ church, and the gate
was on this side of the court.
Before the reign of Henry VIII. there was but little glass or panelling in
either story of the building. But in Jocelyn’s time the Master’s and fellows’
rooms were “skilfully decorated” with both. The fellows and scholars
together panelled, paved, decorated, plastered, and glazed the public rooms
of the college, in one case

THE OLD COURT, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
This is the oldest court in Cambridge. The Tower of the old Saxon
Church of St. Benedict is seen in the background.

“the college paying for the material and the scholars for the labour.”
Thus was this college born of the democratic spirit and the sentiment of
union nurtured in the same spirit. The college was called “of Corpus Christi
and the Blessed Virgin” but was familiarly known from the close of the xiv
century to modern times as Benet College. It lay in the heart of the Saxon
town, between the Saxon church of S. Benet and the church of the Saxon
Botolph which also served the scholars for their prayers. The former was
used until the year 1500, when a small chapel communicating with the
south chancel of the church was built. In 1579 Sir Nicholas Bacon gave the
college a chapel; and the modern chapel is on its site. Sir Francis Drake was
the largest contributor next to Bacon. The queen gave timber, and the
scholars of the college again toiled side by side with the workmen.
On March 21, 1353 the guilds made over to their college Gonville’s
house in Lurteburgh Lane which they had exchanged with his executor
Bateman. More ground was purchased facing the street and in time two
large neighbouring hostels S. Mary’s and S. Bernard’s were acquired for
students. The second court has all been built since 1823, and contains the
modern hall, lodge, library and chapel, and muniment room, and the Lewes
collection. The ancient hall serves as the present kitchen.
In the Library is one of the most valuable collections of MSS. in the
country, the spoils of the dissolved monasteries gathered together by
Archbishop Parker. Here is the oldest or “Winchester” Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (to A.D. 892), and Jerome’s version of the four gospels sent by
Gregory to Augustin—“the most interesting MS. in England.” Here is the
splendid Peterborough psalter and “bestiary”; a penitentiale of Archbishop
Egbert’s (A-S. translation); a Pontifical, probably written before 1407; a xv
century MS. Homer rescued by Parker from the whilom baker of S.
Augustine’s Abbey; Matthew Paris’ own copy of his history; the Sarum
missal of 1506, and a copy of the great English bible of 1568. Here also is
the first draft (1562) of the Articles of Religion, 42 in number, scored over
by Matthew Parker’s red chalk; the 3 articles which were finally omitted
(dealing with the state of the departed, the last containing the statement
“That all shall not be saved”) are here struck out by Parker. The clause
concerning the transubstantiation of the eucharist he has similarly
overscored.
Corpus also houses some of the most interesting plate in the university.

Candle
The college was the chief sufferer in the peasant revolt of 1381
rents. principally on account of the wealth which accrued to it from
Corpus
Christi “candle rents,” a tax chargeable on the tenants of all houses which
procession.
College
had been guild property.[157] On the festival of Corpus Christi—
arms. the

ST. BENEDICT’S CHURCH FROM FREE SCHOOL LANE
Its Saxon tower is the oldest building left in Cambridge, and close
by is the oldest piece of College building, the wall of Corpus
Christi.

Thursday in the Octave of Trinity—a great procession which included
the officers of the united guild, the civic dignitaries, and the university
authorities, perambulated the town from Benet Church to the bridge, the
Master bearing the pyx under a rich canopy. Even after the dissolution of
the guild the Master of Corpus continued the procession until it was
abolished by Henry VIII. in the 27th year of his reign (1535/6). The ancient
arms of the college consisted of the shields of the two guilds—the emblems
of the Passion for Corpus Christi; the triangle symbol of the Trinity for the

guild of the Blessed Virgin, above, Christ crowning the Madonna and
below, the guilds dedicating their college. Exception was taken to them in
Parker’s time as too papistical, and he got the heralds to change them. The
new arms still however recorded the two guilds: quarterly, gules and azure,
in the first and fourth a pelican, with her young, vulning herself; in the
second and third three lilies proper
Signat avis Christum, qui sanguine pascit alumnos;
Lilia, virgo parens, intemerata refert.

Among its great names Corpus counts Sir Nicholas Bacon the father of
Francis Lord Bacon, Matthew Parker who was Master of the college and its
great benefactor in later times, Christopher Marlowe and Fletcher,
Archbishop Tenison, Sir William Paston and a group of xvii century
antiquaries, and Boyle ‘the great earl’ of Cork. Roger Manners was a
considerable benefactor. In the time of Henry VII. Elizabeth Duchess of
Norfolk founded a bible clerkship and a fellowship, and placed the
buttresses of the college.[158]
The college soon maintained 8 fellows, 6 scholars, and 3 bible clerks. All
the inmates were destined by the founders for priests’ orders, this being one
of the four foundations in Cambridge due in whole or in part to the dearth
of clerks consequent on the black death.[159] In the time of Caius Corpus
held 93 persons and in Fuller’s time 126. In the xviii century about 60.
There are to-day 12 fellowships, about 15 scholarships varying from £80 to
£30 in value, 3 sizarships worth £25 each, and 6 exhibitions for students
from S. Paul’s school, Canterbury, and the Norwich Grammar school
varying from £18 to double this sum.[160]

The building of Corpus Christi marks an historical and closes an
architectural epoch at Cambridge. The university had indeed two golden
ages—the reign of Edward III. and the reign of the Tudors. It has not been
sufficiently realised that Cambridge had no European rival in scholastic
activity in either period. In Edward’s reign six colleges were built there—
King’s Hall, Clare, Pembroke, Gonville, Trinity Hall, and Corpus; only one
college—Queens’—was founded at Oxford during the same time. Three of
these six foundations signalise local enterprise, but the three earlier are a
record of the affection of Edward’s house for the university; and it is their

preference for Cambridge in the xiv century and the preference of the
Tudors for it in the xvth and xvith which marks its two great epochs.
Let us look at the university as it was in the middle of the xiv
Cambridge
in 1353. century, and let it be the year 1353. It is 250 years since Henry I.
began to reign; 150 before Erasmus lived here, and 550 before
our own time. It is the eve of that great change in the mental and moral
venue of humanity which ushered in the modern world. The Oxford friar
Occam, and with him scholasticism, had died four years before, Petrarch
was mourning Laura, and Chaucer was walking the streets of Cambridge
the man who was to be our link with the early Italian renascence and to
clasp hands across the century with Erasmus. Lastly, it was at this moment
in our history that the final adjustment of Norman and Saxon elements went
hand in hand with the creation of an English language—a period of which
Chaucer is our national representative. The town and university were just
emerging from the havoc wrought by the “black death,” but the royal and
noble foundations which had sprung up on all sides before the appearance
of the scourge had already attracted the youth round Edward’s court to
Cambridge; necessitating in 1342 Archbishop Stratford’s injunction against
the curls and rings of the young coxcombs studying there.
Cambridge had in fact the reputation of the fashionable university, while
its fame is extolled by Lydgate—a younger contemporary of Chaucer who
had himself studied at Oxford—in words which show that at this date it was
believed also to be the older university.[161] Let us suppose that Chaucer is
returning from his first walk to Grantchester, along the Trumpington road,
past the scene he describes in the Reeve’s Tale, and let us follow him up the
Saxon High street. He skirts Coe fen and reaches Peterhouse, its greater and
its “little ostle” on the street, with Balsham’s hall behind; and as he
proceeds he sees on either hand conspicuous signs of the love of the
Edwards for Cambridge—to the right the narrow quadrangle of Pembroke,
beyond it, off the high road, past S. Botolph’s and two hostels, lay the
limestone walls of Corpus which had just passed under the protection of
Henry of Lancaster;[162] its old court, then the newest of new courts at
Cambridge, nestling against the Saxon church of S. Benet. Behind lay the
Austinfriars, and across the road the Whitefriars from which Austin’s Lane
led to Austin’s hostel, occupying with Mill street the site of the future
King’s College and King’s College chapel. To the north of S. Benet’s he
sees the university church of Great S. Mary’s, just rebuilt after the fire, and

opposite are the schools begun a few years previously, with University,
Clare, and Trinity Halls behind, and “le Stone house” of Gonville. Then still
to his left, where now we see the buildings of Trinity, he beholds the “gret
colledge” King’s Hall which Edward III. has just built, Michaelhouse with
Crouched hostel which passed into its possession in the February of this
year, and its satellite hostels Ovyng’s and Garret’s.
Just beyond King’s Hall is the building which forms the nucleus of the
university in the Norman town—the hospital of S. John, bordering on
Bridge street. As soon as this road is reached, which leads to the Great
Bridge, we see the crusaders’ round church of S. Sepulchre, and following
the road to the right we come to the Greyfriars, to the site of the future
God’s House, and past Preachers’ street to the Friars Preachers or
Blackfriars. On our left, across in the Greencroft, we have left the
Benedictine nunnery of S. Rhadegund. Returning past S. Sepulchre’s we
cross the river and come to the heart of the Norman town—the Conqueror’s
castle with the Norman manor house bought by Merton in its shadow, and
the churches of S. Giles and S. Peter.
Many of the hostels had recently disappeared to make room for the
colleges, but they were still as regards these latter nearly in the proportion
of three to one—and these latter, with the sole exception of Peterhouse, had
all arisen in the previous thirty years.
The sights and sounds in the streets suggested a new epoch—something
already achieved and something about to be achieved. Something of stir
before an awakening. The English language which was to prove in the
hands of its masters one of the finest vehicles of literary expression began
everywhere to be heard in place of the French of Norfolk and Stratford-atte-
Bowe. The softer southern speech prevailed over

KING’S COLLEGE GATEWAY AND CHAPEL—TWILIGHT
EFFECT
The Gateway and Screen on the left hand, and beyond it the
Chapel. In the distance the Senate House, Caius College, and the
Tower of St. John’s College Chapel.

the northern, but the dialects of East Anglia and the Ridings of Yorks were
perhaps most frequently heard. The canons of S. John and S. Giles, from the
Norman side of the town, might be met in their black cloaks, the Gilbertine
canons, from the Saxon side, all in white with the homely sheepskin cape.
The Carmelites had already exchanged their striped brown and white cloak
—representing Elijah’s mantle singed with fire as it fell from the fiery
chariot—for the white cloak to which they owe their name of Whitefriars.
The Romites of S. Austin wore a hermit’s dress.[163] Benedictine monks
from Ely and Norwich could certainly be seen in the streets of Cambridge,
[164] and the Benedictine nuns of S. Rhadegund rode and walked abroad in
the black habit as it was the universal custom in that great order for nuns to
do. The Dominicans looked like canons in their black cappa, the
Franciscans like peasants in their coarse grey tunic roughly tied with cord.
Besides the Carmelites and Austinfriars there were the Bethlemite friars
in Trumpington street and Our-Lady friars by the Castle; the former could
be distinguished at a distance by the red star of five rays on their cloaks
with a sky blue circle in its centre—the star of Bethlehem; but both these
communities wore the habit—black over white—of the Dominicans.
Scholars poor and rich jostled each other in the schools and in the public
ways, wearing the long and short gowns of the day, the cote which had just
come into fashion, or the habit of their order. There were doctors in the

three faculties wearing scarlet gowns and the doctor’s bonnet or camaurum,
and there was a sprinkling of doctors and of students from Orléans, Padua,
Pavia, and Paris.
A large number of the inmates of the colleges round, and of the scholars
walking the streets, wear the clerical tonsure, many scores have the coronal
tonsure of the friar—yet the feeling in the air is secular. Cambridge has
always suggested a certain detachment; neither zeal—perfervid or sour—
nor the pressure of tradition upon living thought has had its proper home
there. It has not represented monastic seclusion nor hieratic exclusion, and
it did so at this moment of its history less than ever. The dawn of the
coming renascence shone upon the walls at which we have been looking.
The modern world has been born of the birth-pangs which have since
convulsed Europe, and the walls which were then big with the future are
now big with the past. But it is the greatness of Cambridge that amidst the
multiple suggestiveness of its ancient halls of learning, tyranny of the past
has no place. About it the dawn of the renascence still lingers; and the early
morning light which presided at its birth still defines the shadows and
seems to temper the noon-day heat, as light and shade alternate in its
history.
Chaucer at
We have taken it for granted that Chaucer was walking the
Cambridge. streets of Cambridge with us. We have no direct evidence as to
where Chaucer studied; but our indirect evidence is sufficient. In
the “Canterbury Tales” Chaucer introduces us to two Cambridge scholars
and to a clerk of Oxenforde; and if one considers what would nowadays be
called the internal evidence of the Reeve’s Tale it is difficult to resist the
conclusion that Chaucer was at Cambridge. How else should he know
Trumpington so well? Its brook, its bridge, its mill, its fen? He knows about
the “gret colledge” which had risen a few years previously; he knows that
its Master is called “the warden,” that its scholars are also its “fellaws.” He
has learnt there the dialect of Yorkshiremen, and reproduces not only their
turns of speech but characteristic terms—as bete, kime, jossa—in the East
Anglian dialect. If we turn to the Miller’s Tale all this local colouring is to
seek. A “clerke of Oxenforde,” indeed, was no unfamiliar figure in the xiv
century, especially to a Londoner. Familiarity with the aspect of Cambridge
and its neighbourhood was a very different matter.
Chaucer was probably himself of East Anglian origin. His grandfather
Robert and John his father were both of Ipswich and London, and when he

was kidnapped by his mother’s family “Thomas Stace of Ipswich” is the
kidnapper. There are two events of his young life known to us, and both
suggest that he was at Cambridge. One of these we hear about from his
evidence in the famous Scrope and Grosvenor suit in 1386. An upstart
knight—Sir Robert Grosvenor—whose name Chaucer had never heard
before, had displayed the arms of the Scropes, and Chaucer testifies in the
Court of Chivalry action which ensues that he had often seen Henry le
Scrope use the proud armorials “azure, a bend or” in the French wars where
they had been companions in arms twenty-seven years before (1359). Now
this great Yorkshire family were connected with Cambridge from Chaucer’s
time: Richard le Scrope, the son of his old comrade, was chancellor of the
university in 1378.[165] Two members of the same family were chancellors
in the next century, and the intermarriage of the Scropes with the Gonvilles
is recorded there to this day in Scrope or “Scroope Terrace.”[166] Is it not
probable that Geoffrey Chaucer knew Henry Scrope at Cambridge and
formed there the friendship which moved him to testify in his behalf thirty
years later?
This conjecture does not become less probable when we turn to the other
incident in his early life, which came to light in 1866 with a fragment of the
household accounts of the wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence. Here the name
of Geoffrey Chaucer is mentioned (in 1357) as that of a junior member of
her household. His early connexion with the house of Edward is therefore
an historical fact like his later friendship with John of Gaunt. Now in 1352
Lionel Plantagenet had married Elizabeth de Burgh the grand-daughter and
namesake of the founder of Clare Hall Cambridge. The “gret colledge”
about which Chaucer tells us in the Reeves Tale is called “Soler Hall” and
“Soler Hall,” so Caius records, was the ancient name for Clare.
Remembering, however, the incomplete condition of Clare and of other
foundations at this date the present writer supposes the “gret colledge” to
have been King’s Hall, the first imposing architectural undertaking in the
university and the building which must par excellence have attracted
attention in the middle of the xiv century.[167] It may also have been
Chaucer’s own college, and in this connexion it is worthy of notice that
with the exception of the half-dozen “minor scholars” at Pembroke, King’s
Hall was at this time the only college which educated lads in their teens.
Assuming the year of the poet’s birth to have been 1340 he would have
been going to the university, according to the custom of those days, about

the year 1353, and his place in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household was
probably already assured him when he went to Cambridge.[168] He was
back in her service in his seventeenth year and therefore could not have had
time to study at both universities: and we may add to this that although his
general knowledge, which he had no time to acquire in later life, suggests
that he received a university education, there is not a tittle of evidence to
support the idea that Chaucer went to Oxford.
One more conjecture: had he got his information about prioress’s French
from the religious of the convent of S. Leonard of Stratford-atte-Bowe
whom we find owning land in Cambridge from the days of Edward I.?

It is to this period of the history of Cambridge that the first
The Schools.
The High university buildings as distinguished from collegiate buildings
Street and
School belong. During the chancellorship of Robert Thorpe, Knight,
Street.
Master of Pembroke (1347-64) and Lord Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas, afterwards Chancellor of England, the “schools
quadrangle” was projected in that street of colleges, unrivalled in Europe,
which prolonging the Trumpington Road as King’s Parade or Trinity Street
or S. John’s Street was anciently known as the “School street” of the
university. It was also the high street of the Saxon town of which S. Benet’s
tower was the nucleus, but whether the original Saxon town lay on this side
of the river, or whether, as frequently happened in the xi century, the Saxon
population retreated here leaving the Castle district to their Norman
conquerors, we have no means of determining.[169]
There were, then, no public buildings up to the xiv century. The
Greyfriars or the Austinfriars gave hospitality to the university on public
occasions, and the only brick and mortar evidence of a university lay in the
hostels and colleges. The “Schools” now erected were halls for lecturing
and scholastic disputations; the north, west, and east sides were completed
by the middle of the next century, the south side being added in accordance
with a decision taken in 1457 to build “a new school of philosophy and civil
law, or a library.”[170] This was erected on university ground (on the south)
next to the school of canon law (west). Over this last was the original
library room (the “west room” 1457) and “a chapel of exceeding great
beauty.” The quadrangle contained the Divinity school (north) with the
Regent and non-regent houses; opposite was the Sophisters’ school with the

libraria communis or magna; on the entrance side were the Chancellor’s
(Rotherham’s) Library, Consistory court and Court of the Proctors and
Taxors; and facing this the Bachelors’ school and the school of Medicine
and Law; the old “west room” having been converted into a school, by
grace of the Senate, in 1547.[171]
The schools remained untouched till the opening years of the
The
university xviii century when the Regent House was pulled down to build
library.
the present university library. This is the oldest of the three great
English libraries, and stands on ground which has always been university
property. The early xv century library which was lodged in the Schools
quadrangle originated in gifts of single volumes by private donors until 52
had been collected; and books which were bequeathed in 1424 are still
preserved. Fifty years later (1473) the proctors Ralph Sanger and Richard
Tokerham made a catalogue of 330 books.[172] Rotherham Archbishop of
York next presented 200 tomes, and Tunstall Bishop of Durham was
another donor: many of these last gifts

GATEWAY OF KING’S COLLEGE, KING’S PARADE
This is one of the most picturesque views in Cambridge. On the
right are the Gateway and Screen and other portions of King’s
College; on the left are some ancient houses.

were “embezzled” by “pilferers” before the middle of the xvi century,[173]
and the libraries of three successive Cambridge archbishops of Canterbury,

Parker, Grindal, and Bancroft, formed the chief treasure of the university
until 1715 when George I. purchased and presented the library of Moore
Bishop of Ely which is the nucleus of the modern collection.[174]
There are 400,000 volumes on open shelves among which the student
can wander at will and get his own books without applying to the library
officials; a convenience which Lord Acton, the late Professor of Modern
History, used to say made this the only serviceable library in Europe.
Another privilege, which is possessed by all masters of arts, is that books
may be taken home. Undergraduates, if in academic dress, have also free
access. The university library is one of the three copyright libraries in
England.[175]
A printing press was set up at Cambridge, early in the xvi
The Pitt
Press. century, by Siberch who said of himself that he was the first in
England to print Greek—7 small volumes in the Greek character
were printed by him at the university. Carter, however, tells us that an
Italian Franciscan, William of Savona, printed a book at Cambridge in
1478, four years after Caxton had printed the first book in England. Lord
Coke pointed out that this university enjoyed before Oxford the privilege of
printing omnes et omnigenas libros, “all and every kind of book” (1534).
This included the right to appoint 3 stationers or printers.
Siberch’s printing place was on the present site of Caius. In 1655 the
university obtained from Queens’ College a lease of the ground at the
corner of Silver street and Queens’ lane—the historic Mill street district—
now the site of the lodge and garden of S. Catherine’s. In 1804 the present
site was obtained for the university press, with a further “messuage fronting
upon Trumpington street and Mill lane”; the remaining properties in
Trumpington street, between Silver street and Mill street, being bought in
1831-3. The Pitt Press, a church-like structure, stands opposite to Pembroke
(Pitt’s) College, and owes its name to the fact that the surplus funds of the
Pitt monument in Westminster abbey were a donation to the university
towards defraying the cost. The building also contains the offices of the
university Registrary.[176]
The Senate House was not founded till 1722, and lies on the north of the
library.[177]

Ninety years passed after the building of Corpus before Henry
King’s
College. A. D. VI. founded King’s College, and Margaret of Anjou, his consort,
1441.
founded

KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL AND THE ENTRANCE COURT,
FROM THE FELLOWS’ BUILDINGS
A portion of the Chapel is seen on the left of the picture with Great
St. Mary’s tower in the distance. The Screen and Gate are on the
right.

Queens’. It was in 1443 that the charter of the double foundation of Eton
at Windsor and King’s College at Cambridge was signed—the one “our
royal college of S. Mary of Eton,” the other “our royal college of S. Mary
and S. Nicholas”; for Henry dedicated his college to his patron saint
Nicholas “of Bari” the patron of scholars. The king laid the foundation
stone himself (p. 112) in the presence of John Langton chancellor of the
university, the keeper of the Privy Seal, the chancellor of the Exchequer,
and the bishops of Lincoln and Salisbury.[178] The king’s father had
intended to build a college at Oxford; Henry VI. carried out his intention in
endowing a college but decided that the university should be Cambridge. A
small college called God’s House which had just been founded,[179] together
with Mill Street (acquired in 1445) and Augustine’s hostel (in 1449) and the
church of S. John Zachary, were pulled down to clear a space: but the
original plan for the college was never carried out, and the buildings we

now see were erected in the first quarter of the xviiith and in the xixth
centuries.[180]
The only portion of the original plan executed was the chapel.
The chapel.
The importance of King’s College chapel is not only
architectural; is due not only to the fact that it was begun before the Italian
classical revival as a monument of English Gothic, and completed in the
full blaze of the renascence, but that it marks a chapter in the history of
English religion. The church built for the old worship was consecrated for
the new; the first stone was laid by Henry VI. in the presence of great
catholic prelates, the oaken screen—perhaps the finest woodwork in the
country—bears the monogram of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn[181] twined
with true lovers’ knots. In the third place “this immense and

KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL AND THE FELLOWS’
BUILDINGS
The South door of the Chapel is seen to the right in the picture,
and the Fellows’ Buildings, constructed in 1723, are on the left.
The Fountain with a statue of the founder, Henry the Sixth, was
designed by H. A. Armstead, R. A.

glorious work of fine intelligence,” as Wordsworth calls it, remains one of
the very finest monuments of Perpendicular architecture; and that beautiful
English feature the fan-vaulting, which is to be seen in the Tudor chapel at

the Guildhall, in Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster, and at S. David’s (now
ruinous), is here carried out over a larger area than anywhere else.[182]
That branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die—
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.

So writes Wordsworth; and the stained glass windows, the most ‘complete
and magnificent series’ in the country says Carter, probably inspired
Milton’s
—storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full voic’d quire below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.

On the death of the Lancastrian monarch, Edward IV. sequestrated the
building funds, but returned a thousand pounds later, and Richard III.
contributed £700; but it is Henry VII. who brought the work to completion.
King’s is the only college in the university which receives only those
students who intend to read for honours, and until 1857 its members could
claim the B.A. degree without presenting themselves for examination.[183]
The college was, almost immediately upon its foundation, exempted not
only from archiepiscopal and episcopal control but also from the general
jurisdiction

KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL INTERIOR FROM THE CHOIR

of the university. It was endowed for the accommodation of a Provost, 70
poor scholars, 10 secular priests, 16 choristers, and 6 clerks—a total of 103.
Eton was designed for 132 inmates.[184] 24 of the 48 scholarships of King’s
are now open. Each of these scholarships is of the annual value of £80.
There are also 46 fellowships. The most celebrated Etonians have not
however been educated at King’s, among whose eminent sons have been
Croke, Cheke (of S. John’s) Provost, Woodlark the founder of S.
Catherine’s, third Provost of the college and also its benefactor, Sir John
Harrington, Robert and Horace Walpole, Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe, Conisby, Haddon, Giles Fletcher, Waller, Fleetwood,
Oughtred an Etonian on the first foundation, Whichcote (of Emmanuel)
Provost, Upton, Cole, and Charles Simeon who was a life fellow. Nicholas
Close (1551) and Aldrich (1537) both bishops of Carlisle, the former one of
the original six fellows, the latter the intimate of Erasmus, Rotherham of
York (1467) a fellow and a donor to the chapel fund, Fox of Hereford
(1535), William and George Day bishops of Winchester and Chichester, one
provost of Eton the other of King’s, Wickham of Lincoln and Winchester,

[185] Nicholas West (Bishop of Ely 1515) the friend of Fisher and More and
Richard Cox (1559) both scholars of the college, Oliver King of Exeter,
then of Bath and Wells (1492), Alley of Exeter, Guest of Rochester and
Salisbury (1559), Goodrich of Ely (1534), Pearson, and Sumner, are among
its prelates. Henry and Charles Brandon, heirs of their father the Duke of
Suffolk, and nephews of Henry VIII. and both proficient scholars, died of
the sweating sickness while in residence here in the reign of Edward VI.
Cardinal Beaufort was a princely benefactor to the college, and John
Somerset, physician to Henry VI., who came to Cambridge as an Oxford
sophister and here graduated, was one of the chief instruments in its
foundation, and drew up its statutes.[186]
The college has produced several great schoolmasters, and is now
gradually acquiring a reputation for historical studies, about one third of the
students being history men. The dedication to S. Nicholas is only retained in
formal descriptions: King’s College has been by common consent regarded
as the fitting title for this truly royal foundation, and it recalls that still older
King’s Hall which is now merged in Trinity.[187]

THE HALL OF KING’S COLLEGE
This was built by Wilkins 1824-28. On the walls are several
portraits by Sir Hubert Herkomer, R.A.

The importance of King’s College chapel in university history
The
Cambridge since the xv century leads us to consider the rôle played in

College
chapels. Cambridge by collegiate chapels. Every college chapel, and every
church which has an historical connexion with the university, has
served—as all early Christian edifices have served—other purposes than
those of religious worship. What we have to remark in Cambridge is that
this ancient custom continued there longer than elsewhere. The
“Commencements” which took place later in the Senate House used to be
held, as we have seen, in the famous church of the Greyfriars or in that of
the Austinfriars. The University church—Great S. Mary’s—was used by the
university for its assemblies in the xiii century and was the scene of all
great civic functions; disputations were held in it on Elizabeth’s visit in
1564. The college chapels were everywhere used for the transaction of
important business; the Provost of King’s and other Masters are still elected
in the chapel, documents are still sealed in the chapel of King’s and Trinity,
and the Thurston speech is still pronounced in the chapel of Caius. The
choir of King’s was used for degree examinations as late as 1851, and
declamations are even now held in the chapel at Trinity. Indeed the
“exercises of learning” “used” in the chapels was the reason given by the
Corpus men to Lord Bacon’s father when asking for a church to themselves;
and Queen Elizabeth witnessed the Aulularia of Plautus in King’s chapel on
Sunday August 6th 1564, as the abbess and her nuns had assembled for
Hrostwitha’s play in the abbey church of Gandersheim six hundred years
earlier. The building of colleges adjoining a parish church is a feature
peculiar to Cambridge. Merton is the one exception at Oxford, and
Pembroke is, as we have seen, the only early exception to this rule at
Cambridge.[188]
List of pre-reformation colleges built with chapels:—

1. Pembroke 1355-63 (the existing chapel is xvii c.)
2. King’s 1446-1536 (the existing chapel).
3. Queens’ 1448 (defaced at the reformation and restored. But a xix c. chapel is now used).
4. Jesus 1495 (The then existing xii c. monastic chapel was rebuilt by the founder.)
5. S. Catherine’s 1475 (the existing chapel is xvii c.)
6. Magdalene 1483 (completely restored in the middle of the xix c.)

Existing pre-reformation chapels:—

King’s xv c.
Queens’ xv c. (restored).
Jesus xv c.
Trinity Hall xv c.
Magdalene (restored) xv c.

Colleges built without chapels and with (generally) post-reformation chapels:—

1. Peterhouse (xvii c.) [188a]
2. Michaelhouse (none).
3. King’s Hall (chapel built temp. Edw. IV., and Ric. III. The site of the present chapel of Trinity
College).
4. Clare (1535. The existing chapel is 1764). [188b]
5. Gonville. [188c]
6. Trinity Hall 1474.
7. Corpus 1500, and 1579 (the existing chapel is on the site of the latter, and was erected 1823).

Existing xvi c. chapels:—
Christ’s 1505 (the original chapel, but defaced); Trinity, completed 1564-7.
At Caius, the present chapel is on the site of the xvi c. chapel; and at S. John’s a xix c. structure
replaces the xvi c. one, near the same site.

ENTRANCE GATEWAY, QUEENS’ COLLEGE
This old gateway forms the principal entrance to the College from
Queens’ Lane.

The oldest ecclesiastical site and building incorporated with a
Cambridge college is therefore the chapel of Jesus (but cf. S. John’s p. 126);
the site of the earliest college chapel is at Pembroke—but it is a site merely;
the oldest existing college chapel is King’s.

The charter for the foundation of Queens’ College is dated 15
Queens’
College. A.D. April 1448, but by this date its north and east ranges were already

1448.
built. Queen Margaret of Anjou had been so impressed with the
beauty and majesty of the plans for King’s College that she could find no
rest till she had projected her own foundation—Queens’; to endow and
perfect which she set to work with holy emulation; dedicating it in her turn
to her patron saint, Margaret the legendary Virgin and Martyr whose body is
shown at Montefiascone, and to Bernard of Citeaux. Two years previously
the principal of S. Bernard’s hostel had founded a college of S. Bernard, the
site of which he changed in 1447 to the present site of Queens’. This
formed the moral nucleus of the queens’ college; but she obtained the larger
part of the ground, near King’s, from the Carmelites. This is one of the three
colleges in Cambridge built of red brick, S. John’s and S. Catherine’s being
the others. The Queens’ quadrangle is, as Messieurs Willis and Clark tell us,
the earliest now remaining which claims attention for its architectural
beauty. It is 99 feet east and west by 84 north and south.[189] The plan is not
only a very perfect example of college architecture, but is a model of the xv
century English manor-house, of the type of Haddon Hall;[190] so that
Queens’ College is as homogeneous a structure as King’s is heterogeneous.
The hall is on the west, adjoining it is the combination room, above, the
President’s lodging with a bedchamber over it. The north side is kept for the
chapel and for the library which is on the first floor. The chambers are on
the east and south sides, the gateway being in the former. As in other
colleges the passage to the grounds (or, as in this case, to the second court)
is between the hall and the butteries. The west side of the quadrangle which
was gradually cloistered forms the east side of the second court, and is
washed by the Cam. The beautiful gallery on the north has formed part of
the lodge since the xvi century,[191] and connects the old

AN OLD COURT IN QUEENS’ COLLEGE
This is the Cloister Court. In the quaint sixteenth century
buildings on the left is the Gallery, and facing the spectator is the
doorway into the First Court. The Hall is seen on the right of this
doorway.

president’s lodging with a set of rooms on the west side, among which is the
audit room now used as a dining room.
Queens’, like King’s, was originally built with a chapel, and in both
instances the foundation stone of the chapel was that of the college. A new
chapel and buildings now lie beyond the President’s garden on the north.
There is a small court on the south of the cloister court which contains the
rooms occupied by Erasmus, overhanging the college kitchen. Besides
Erasmus, who lived here for at least four years, Fisher was there as
President of the college until 1508, and Old Fuller was another of its
worthies. Henry Bullock, the opposer of Protestantism and friend of
Erasmus, was a fellow, so was Sir T. Smith; Bishop Pearson[192] and Ockley
alumni. Henry Hastings Earl of Huntingdon, whose portrait hangs in the
audit room, Manners Earl of Rutland, George Duke of Clarence, Cecilia
Duchess of York, and Maud Countess of Oxford, were among its
benefactors. But its chief benefactor was Andrew Doket, a friar (of what
order is not known) and its first President, who saved the fortunes of the
college after the fall of the House of Lancaster.[193] The picture of principal
interest is also to be found in the lodge—Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus
which was painted during a visit made at the scholar’s request to England.

The college was originally endowed for a president and 4 fellows, and
their principal study was to be theology. There are now 11 fellowships, and
about 18 scholarships which vary in value from £30 to £60.
Queens’ College is a monument of peace. The Yorkist queen Elizabeth
Woodville continued Margaret of Anjou’s work, and the two queens are the
co-founders of the college. It is Elizabeth Woodville whose portrait looks
down upon us in the hall, and it was she who changed Queen Margaret’s
dedication and called their joint work Queens’ College.[194] It is also a
monument to the unambitious but well-defined revival of learning that
marked the reign of Edward IV., of which Woodville Earl Rivers, the
queen’s brother, Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, and Caxton himself are the
representatives.

Kingly
Both King’s and Queens’ Colleges have offered hospitality on
several occasions to English sovereigns. Henry VI. came to lay
visitors to
the
the foundation stone of King’s in 1441 and was at King’s Hall in
university.
1445-6 (when he laid the foundation stone of his second
college?), in 1448-9 and in 1452-3.[195] Edward IV. visited the university in
1463 and 1476.

QUEENS’ COLLEGE FROM THE RIVER FRONT
On the left is seen the garden front of the President’s Lodge. The
wooden bridge designed by Etheridge (1749) is known as the
Mathematical Bridge. In the distance are the two old mills—the
King’s Mill and the Bishop’s Mill.

Henry VII. paid five visits to Cambridge and stayed at Queens’ in 1498
and again in 1506 when he occupied a chamber near the audit room. It was
on this occasion that he attended the service for the eve of S. George’s day
in King’s College chapel clad in the robes of the Garter. Henry VIII. was by
his father’s side during this visit, and came again in 1522. Mary came as far
as Sir Robert Huddleston’s when Jane Grey was proclaimed. Elizabeth was
entertained in the Provost’s lodge of King’s, and it was when repairing to
her rooms there after the solemn service in the chapel that she thanked God
“that had sent her to this university where she was so received as she
thought she could not be better.” James I. visited Cambridge twice in 1615
and was again at Trinity College in 1623 and 1624; Charles I. (who had

been Nevile’s guest in 1613) was entertained there in 1632 and 1642; and
Charles II. in the long gallery at S. John’s in 1681. Anne was there in 1705,
George I. in 1717, and George II. in 1728. Queen Victoria came in 1843 and
again in 1847 when the Prince Consort was installed as Chancellor; and
Edward VII. visited the university in February 1904.
John had been in Cambridge the month before his death, September
1216; Henry III. was there in the second year of his reign (1218); Edward I.
was there as Prince of Wales in 1270, and lodged again in the castle in
1294. Edward II. was the guest of Barnwell priory in 1326. Edward III. was
there in September 1328. Richard II. was also lodged at Barnwell in 1388.
The Conqueror had been at Cambridge in 1070.
Matilda is the first queen-consort whom we can picture visiting the
university town; Eleanor of Castile was frequently at Walsingham with
Edward,[196] and she gave as we shall see a “chest” to the university.
Margaret of Anjou was never there, but Elizabeth Woodville came in 1468.
The mother of Henry VII. also came to see her college in 1505 and again
with the king in 1506. Elizabeth of York accompanied Henry VII. in 1498;
Catherine of Aragon slept at Queens’ in 1519; and Henrietta Maria was with
the king in 1631-2.

The erection of King’s and Queens’ Colleges opened a period of college
building which lasted sixty years, and closed with the foundation of S.
John’s (in 1509).
In 1473 Robert Woodlark chancellor of the university and third
S.
Catherine’s provost of King’s, and one of the original scholars of that
College,
1473. foundation, built a small college dedicated to the Glorious Virgin
Martyr S. Catherine of Alexandria, with the object of extending
“the usefulness of Church preaching, and the study of theology, philosophy,
and other arts within the Church of England.” The present red brick
structure was erected two hundred years later, this being the only college
except Clare which has been entirely rebuilt since its foundation. S.
Catherine’s, or “Cat’s” as the

GATEWAY OF ST. CATHERINE’S COLLEGE
This is a view of the old Renaissance Gateway (1679), being the
entrance to the College from Queens’ Lane.

undergraduate familiarly calls it, is remarkable for the number of bishops
it has educated, among whom were Archbishop Sandys, May of Carlisle,
Brownrigg of Exeter, all of whom were Masters of the college, as was
Overall of Norwich who migrated from S. John’s: John Lightfoot, the
orientalist, was its 16th Master, and Strype (who came here from Jesus),
James Shirley the last of the dramatists,[197] Ray the naturalist, and
Addenbrooke the founder of the well known hospital of that name at
Cambridge, were also educated here.
The hall[198] was founded for a master and 3 fellows, and now maintains
6 fellows and 26 scholars.

The next college is a solitary instance of the adaptation of
Jesus
Collegemonastic architecture to collegiate purposes in Cambridge.
1495.
Alcock Bishop of Ely and joint lord chancellor with Rotherham
obtained from Alexander VI. (1496/7) the dissolution of the ancient
Benedictine nunnery of S. Rhadegund, and founded there a college which

he dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, S. John Evangelist, and the
glorious Virgin S. Rhadegund. Its name of Jesus College records the
growing cult of the name of Jesus, and the substitution was approved by the
founder himself.[199]
If at Queens’ we are in a xv century manor-house, at Jesus we are in a
monastery; and might well imagine ourselves for a moment back in one of
the busiest centres of old Cambridge if we pace the cloisters just before hall
time when the stir is suggestive of the life of a great monastery. Even the
legend “Song Room” over a doorway falls in with the illusion. James I. said
that if he lived in the university he would pray at King’s, eat at Trinity, and
study and sleep at Jesus.
The chapel is the original conventual church[200] as rebuilt by Alcock. It
contains xii century work, and represents the transition from Norman to
Early English. The character of the college has been consistently
evangelical in spite of the fact that Bancroft the Laudian archbishop before
Laud, was here, and that he migrated here from Christ’s on account of the
latter’s reputation for Puritanism. Cranmer was scholar, and fellow until his
marriage, and was readmitted fellow when his wife died a year later.
Archbishops Bancroft and Sterne, Laurence Sterne, Bale Bishop of Ossory,
Strype, Fulke Greville, Fenton, Fawkes (the poet), Hartley, and S. T.
Coleridge were members. The college which was founded for 6 fellows and
6 scholars, now maintains 16 fellows and some 20 scholars. The statutes

GATEWAY OF JESUS COLLEGE

were indited by James Stanley Bishop of Ely, stepson of Lady Margaret,
and modified by his successor Nicholas West. Jesus College scholars were
commended by the founder to the perpetual tutelage of the bishops of Ely,
who when they lie there are said to lie in their own house.[201]

Ten years later a most interesting foundation was made. A
Christ’s
college called God’s House had, as we have seen, been founded
College A.D.
1505.
in the reign of Henry VI. and was appropriated by that monarch
as part of the site of King’s College. The foundation was a far-off echo of
the plague in the previous century, and when the king took possession of the
site he appears to have intended to endow a considerable college in its place
in the parish of S. Andrew where he erected another God’s House.[202] It
was this design, left unfulfilled (for the house only supported four of the
sixty scholars whom Henry VI. had himself proposed to maintain there) that
John Fisher, chancellor of the university and Bishop of Rochester, brought
to the notice of Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of the first Duke of
Somerset, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the wife of Edmund Tudor
and mother of Henry VII.; and on the site of God’s House she erected her
own Christ’s College, and made John Sickling its Proctor first Master. The
quadrangle was encased in stone in the xviii century, but the gateway with
its statue and armorials of the founder, and the oriel over the entrance to the
Master’s lodge recall the founder’s time. Facing the gateway are the hall,
the old combination room, and the lodge, and above were a set of rooms
reserved for the founder’s own use; a turret staircase led therefrom to both
hall and garden, as was the custom in a master’s lodge. On the east of this
“Tree court” is a building in the renascence style, thought to be one of the
finest examples in England, and to have been the work of Inigo Jones
(1642). The gold plate of the college was a bequest of Lady Margaret’s and
there is none finer in the university. Christ’s is also noted for its gardens.
No college has been richer in great men. Milton was here for seven
years, Henry More the Platonist, Latimer the scholar-bishop and martyr,
Leland the antiquary, Nicholas Saunderson, Paley of the “Evidences,”
Archbishops Grindal and Bancroft, Bishop Porteous,

THE GATEWAY OF CHRIST’S COLLEGE FROM ST.
ANDREW’S STREET
The Gateway is coeval with the founding of the College, and dates
from the first decade of the sixteenth century.

Sir Walter Mildmay,[203] Charles Darwin, and Sir John Seeley. Lightfoot
the great Hebraist of his century, and Cudworth, were both Masters in the
xvii century; and in the previous century Exmew the Carthusian martyr
(1535) and Richard Hall (afterwards Canon of Cambray), Fisher’s
biographer, were inmates. Here Milton wrote his hymn on the Nativity, and
here he formed his friendship with Edward King—fellow of the college—in
whose memory Lycidas was written.
The college was endowed for 12 fellows at least, half of whom were to
hail from those northern counties in which both Lady Margaret and Fisher
were interested; the total endowment was for 60 persons. There are now 15
fellowships, 30 scholarships (£30 to £70) and some 4 sizarships of the value
of £50 a year.[204]
Grammar, the original study of God’s House,[205] and arts were to be
studied in addition to theology, but excluding law and medicine; and for the
first time in college statutes lectures on the classical orators and poets are

provided for, an attention to polite letters for their own sake which is
supposed to have been due to the influence of Erasmus.
The Lady Margaret, for with this title alone her memory is
The Lady
Margaret. preserved at both universities, has, perhaps, no rival in Cambridge
as both an interesting and an important figure in its history. She
appears to have been one of the first in that age to understand that the
university was to replace the monastery as the channel of English learning,
and to endow colleges rather than religious houses. The two splendid
foundations which owe their existence to her bear upon them a stronger
personal impress than others. Alone of non-resident founders she retained
for her own use a lodge in the college she founded. An anecdote when she
was staying at Christ’s, preserved for us by Fuller, comes across the
centuries vivid with her personality. There is no episode in any university to
compare with the scholastic partnership of Lady Margaret and Bishop
Fisher, her chaplain, perpetual chancellor of the university, and Master of
Michaelhouse. Both were in their measure “reformers before the
reformation,” both joined to the spirit of piety an abounding appreciation of
the spirit of knowledge. At Cambridge and Oxford she founded those
readerships in theology known as the Lady Margaret Professorships, and at
Cambridge she instituted the Lady Margaret preachership. She died on 29
June 1509, and Erasmus wrote her epitaph in Westminster Abbey.[206]
Fisher lived many years after her, and completed the
Cardinal
Fisher, foundation of S. John’s. He pronounced that discourse at her
Bishop of
Rochester, obsequies which is our chief source of information about her.[207]
and
perpetual
Fisher was imprisoned, like Thomas More, for refusing to admit
chancellor
of the
the
university.

THE FELLOWS’ BUILDING IN CHRIST’S COLLEGE
This building is in the Second Court. The design is attributed to
Inigo Jones. Through it we pass into the Fellows’ Garden, where
we shall find the famous mulberry tree sacred to Milton.

royal supremacy in things ecclesiastical; covered with rags, and worn with
neglect and ill-treatment, but consoled by a filial and courageous letter from
his sons at S. John’s, he was led out to die on June 22, 1534, the New
Testament in his hand open at the words: “This is eternal life, to know Thee
the only true God.” He stands alone among the bishops of England to give
his life for the principle for which the layman Thomas More laid down his.
Pole in a letter to Charles V. narrates that Henry VIII. had said he supposed
“that I” (Pole) “had never in all my travels met one who in letters and virtue
could be compared to the Bishop of Rochester.”

We next come to the most splendid foundation hitherto
S. John’s
realised at Cambridge. The site chosen for a college which held
College, A.D.
1509.
its place through the xvi century as the first and most brilliant
society in the university, could not have been more appropriate. It was that
of S. John’s Hospital, the first home of Cambridge students, the nucleus of
the university, erected soon after the Conquest in the heart of the Norman
town, and whence the first endowed scholars in christendom set forth to
found a college.[208]
The whole history of the university is epitomised in the street which has
S. John’s at one end of it and Peterhouse at the other: the bishops of Ely
have firm hold of either end, and lying against S. John’s is that Pythagoras

House which Merton bought from the Dunnings when he was planning his
famous foundation in the xiii century. We have seen that it was at S. John’s
Hospital that Balsham introduced secular scholars in the same century, who
should become unum corpus et unum collegium with the canons. The
experiment did not succeed, and the canons saw the scholars depart with
great relief to the other end of what was to prove the great street of colleges,
whose limits were determined by this early conflict between seculars and
religious.
In what year the Ely scholars were settled at S. John’s remains uncertain,
although there is no more important date in Cambridge history. Simon
Montacute, Bishop of Ely, “who knew very well” as the historian of S.
John’s observes, says that the scholars had continued there per longa
tempora, and Baker

MILTON’S MULBERRY TREE IN THE FELLOWS’ GARDEN,
CHRIST’S COLLEGE King James I. is said to have introduced
the culture of the mulberry tree, and it is probable that the one in
this garden is the last survivor of a number bought in 1609. Milton
was admitted to this College in 1625.

considers that in no construction of words can this be understood otherwise
than as referring to the beginning of Hugh Balsham’s prelacy at Ely.[209]
The licence permitting the seculars to be engrafted on the old stock with
their own endowment, is dated the ninth year of Edward I. (1280)[210] and

the transference to Peterhouse took place three years after; but the date of
the royal licence is no proof that the work to which it refers was initiated
rather than completed and crowned in that year; Margaret of Anjou, for
example, obtained her licence when three sides of the quadrangle at
Queens’ were nearing completion.[211] In any case the few months
intervening between December 23, 1280 and the decision to remove to
Peterhouse could not be described as a “long time,” and as Balsham had
become bishop of the diocese in 1257 it is most probable that he at once set
about what it must certainly be supposed he had at heart while still subprior
of Ely.
With S. John’s we have the first of the large colleges. Henceforth Trinity
and John’s are “the big colleges” the others are “the 14 small colleges.” It
now consists of four large courts, three of which are of brickwork. The first
court was erected between 1509-1616 on the pattern of the quadrangle at
Christ’s. The founder’s grandson Henry VIII., whose coronation she lived to
witness, not only sequestrated a large part of the funds she had destined for
the building, but fifteen years later beheaded Fisher her executor. The latter
himself subscribed to the fund and was able before he died to erect a
college for a Master and 21 fellows—the original design being for 50
fellows. But what thus fell short of the spirit of the earlier design has since
been amply repaired, and a series of benefactors have made the college one
of the most useful in England, with that large influence on the nation and
large power of helping poorer students which its founders had so greatly at
heart.
The Second Court was built chiefly at the expense of Mary Countess of
Shrewsbury in 1595-1620. The Third Court was begun in 1623, with funds
provided by Williams then Bishop of Lincoln, and finished by benefactors
some of whom remained anonymous. The last Court was built in 1826 and
is joined to the college by the “Bridge of Sighs.” Beyond this is the
beautiful “wilderness” commemorated by Wordsworth.
—— Scarcely Spenser’s self
Could have more tranquil visions in his youth

he tells us, than he had had loitering in Cambridge nights under a “fairy
work of earth,” a certain lovely ash, wreathed in ivy. This is the site of the
infirmary of the canons, the only portion of whose Hospital to be preserved
was adapted as a college infirmary and was at the north side of the First

Court: it was destroyed in 1863 when the present large chapel was built,
which is the work of Gilbert Scott, and is 193 feet long. The large hall

THE GATEWAY AND TOWER OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE The
Kirke White memorial is seen in the foreground, and behind it are
the Divinity Schools; to the left is the Gateway of St. John’s, with
the Tower behind it. The enclosed space in the foreground was
formerly the site of All Saints’ Church, pulled down in 1865.

measures 108 feet, and the portrait of Lady Margaret presides over the high
table. The new combination room, which is now entered from the second
court, was built in 1864, and is 93 feet long. The west side of the Third
Court is cloistered, and from here leads the covered bridge, called from its
resemblance to the bridge at Venice “the Bridge of Sighs.” The stone bridge
near it supplanted the old timber bridge in 1696. As at Queens’, there is a
long gallery on the first floor of the Second Court. Nowhere has the original
modest “master’s lodging” undergone more change than here. The lodging
—two rooms over the old combination room, with an oriel, on the first
court—was gradually extended, again as at Queens’, along the gallery, and
ran along part of the next court. Finally Scott built the present lodge,
outside the courts altogether.
Christ’s and S. John’s are both profusely ornamented with the Tudor and
Beaufort badges of the founder, and with her name-device the marguerite.
[212] The ancient gateway has a canopied statue of the Evangelist. To the

north and south of the new chapel porch are statues of Lady Margaret and
of Fisher, and 16 statues of the benefactors and great members of the
college: Mary Cavendish Countess of Shrewsbury, Sarah Alston Duchess of
Somerset, Williams Archbishop of York, and Linacre who founded the
Physics lecture here and at Merton Oxford, appear among the former.
Among the latter are Roger Ascham (fellow) (those asterisked are effigied);
Sir John Cheke (fellow); *Bentley; *Cecil Lord Burleigh; *Lucius Lord
Falkland[213]; Fairfax, the parliamentary general; *Wentworth Lord
Strafford; *Stillingfleet, *Overall,[214] *Gunning, and Selwyn, prelates;
*William Gilbert; *Brook Taylor the naturalist; *Clarkson the opponent of
the slave trade; Cave the ecclesiastical historian; Metcalfe the most brilliant
of its masters[215]; Matthew Prior, Grindal the classic, Cecil Lord Salisbury,
Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, Kirke White, Rowland Hill, Henry Martyn the
missionary, Horne Tooke, Castlereagh, Palmerston, Wilberforce, Erasmus
Darwin, Colenso, Herschell, Liveing, Adams the discoverer of Neptune,
Benjamin Hall Kennedy, and *Baker the historian of the college. Fisher
arranged a small chapel leading from the college chapel for his own resting
place.[216] The site of S. John’s chapel is as old an ecclesiastical site as
Jesus chapel: the xvi century edifice was constructed close to the xii century
canons’ church, and the fine modern chapel is on the same site.
The licence for the college dates from 1511; the building was opened in
1516; and the statutes were drawn up by Fisher.

ENTRANCE TO ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL FROM THE
FIRST COURT In the corner on the right is seen the Doorway of
the Chapel, with the tower rising above it. On the left is part of the
Hall with a fine oriel window.

There are now 56 fellowships, 60 foundation scholars each receiving £50
annually, and 9 sizars £35 annually.

The next college which claims our attention must rank among the more
interesting foundations on account of its origin rather than of its subsequent
history.
Near S. John’s Hospital there was a site traditionally connected
Magdalene
College, A.D. with the lectures of Abbot Joffred’s monks in 1109, and which in
1542.
fact was afterwards Crowland Abbey property. When a monastic
order possessed no convent in a university town, the monks were obliged to
reside in lodgings, and this led, as we have already seen (i. p. 49) to the
foundation of monastic hostels for their reception. There were two such
hostels at Cambridge—Ely hostel and Monks’ hostel. Ely hostel was the
direct outcome of Benedict XII.’s Constitution in 1337[217] which
reconfirmed an earlier injunction of Honorius III. 1216-27 requiring the
Benedictines and Augustinians to send students in rotation from the

monastery to the university, and provided that monks should live at the
universities under a prior of Benedictines. It was purchased in 1340 (or
earlier) by John de Crawden prior of Ely for the Ely monks and was made
over to Bateman Bishop of Norwich seven years later for his foundation of
Trinity Hall.
Ely then had been the pioneer in providing this accommodation, which
served for Ely monks alone, and which, as we see, was speedily abolished.
Those few Houses which still elected to send their monks to Cambridge[218]
maintained them there thenceforth under the care of “the prior of students”;
and it was owing to the energy of one of these Cambridge priors that
Monks’ hostel was projected in 1428, at a time when, as is then stated, no
house existed for Crowland or other Benedictine monks, and the religious
either shared the hostels with seculars or lived in lodgings in the town. The
site for Monks’ hostel consisted of two messuages granted in that year to
the abbot of Crowland by the Cambridge burgesses. Crowland, Ely,
Ramsey, and Walden each built portions for their own students.[219] Nearly
a hundred years later, on the eve of the Reformation, Edward Stafford Duke
of Buckingham refounded this hostel as Buckingham College. It was not

THE SECOND COURT OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE The
doorway on the right leads into the First Court. The Dining Hall is
in the building on the right and the Combination Room on the left
of the picture. In the background is the Chapel Tower with the
sunset light upon it

completed at the time of his attainder two years afterwards (1521) and the
property escheated in due course as a cell of Crowland Abbey to the crown.
[220]

How soon Monks’ hostel became “the monks’ hostel of Buckingham” is
by no means clear. That the Dukes of Buckingham were early patrons must
be admitted on the evidence; for even if the house was not known as
Buckingham College in 1465, it was known as “the hostel called
Bokyngham college” in 1483 while it was still Crowland property, and both
hall and chapel were probably the gift of “deep revolving, witty
Buckingham” the second Duke Henry.
“I have in this world sustained great damage and injury in serving the
king’s highness, which this grant shall recompense.” So wrote Lord
Chancellor Audley in a letter begging for a share of the plunder when Henry
had determined on the suppression of the monasteries. The share he wanted
and got was Walden Abbey in Essex on the borders of Cambridgeshire, and
here he established himself on the site which his son was to transform into
the mansion of Audley-End. He did more; he proposed to himself,
apparently, some sort of expiation to balance the “recompense,” and in 1542
changed Buckingham into Magdalene College which he re-endowed. We
have seen that Walden Abbey was itself one of the builders of Monks’
hostel.
The mastership of the college is in the gift of the owner of Audley-End
(now Lord Braybrooke). Nothing of the xv century building remains. A
window of Pugin’s adorns the chapel[221] replacing the old altar-piece
which is now in the library. The combination room leads from the
musicians’ gallery of the pleasant hall, the only instance of this arrangement
in Cambridge.[222] In the time of Fuller, Magdalene was a college of reading
men: “The scholars of this college, though farthest from the schools, were
in my time the first to be observed there, and to as good purpose as
any.”[223] Twenty years ago it was the fashionable college, and its members
lived in private lodgings, attending neither hall nor chapel. Magdalene is in
the parish of S. Giles, and it has been conjectured that it occupies the site of
the house of the canons of S. Giles before they removed to Barnwell. There
is however no evidence for this, and there are no documents at Magdalene
earlier than Stafford’s time.[224]

Archbishop Grindal,[225] Robert Rede chief justice in 1509, Cumberland
Bishop of Peterborough, and Kingsley were educated here. So was Pepys,
the diarist, who bequeathed to the college his extraordinary collection

THE COMBINATION ROOM, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE This
Gallery is used by the Fellows and is 93 feet long. It contains
portraits of many College worthies. The approach to it is by a
Turret Staircase in the Second Court. Its panelled walls and rich
plaster-work ceiling make it one of the finest specimens of its kind
left in England.

of books, engravings, maps, and plans. The Pepysian library is now
preserved in a separate hall, in the donor’s own bookshelves constructed
after a plan of his own. It is by far the most interesting thing in the college,
and would be unique anywhere. It is to be hoped we may soon have an
official catalogue of its contents.
Magdalene is a small college, it has about 40 inmates, of whom 5 are
fellows. In Fuller’s time it held 140 persons, 11 being fellows and 22
scholars, the rest being as usual the college officers, domestics, and
students.

Trinity
With Trinity College are joined together in indissoluble
College A.D. matrimony the two great periods of college building, and the
1546.
culminating point of the renascence is reached: so that Trinity,

alone, represents Cambridge architecturally and morally in its historical
character of a university of the rebirth from its dawn to its meridian.
King’s Hall
When Henry VIII., whose effigy adorns the great gate,
A.D. 1337. proposed to make a vast college on this site, he was proposing to
expand the “great college” built by Edward III. whose effigy
graces the older gateway within the court. Edward II. had maintained
thirteen students at Cambridge as early as 1317 and the number was
increased later to thirty-two: it was however left to his son to carry out the
design of a “House-of-Scholars of the King.”[226] We have already had
frequently to refer to this building, in which new interest has been
awakened since the restoration (in 1904-6) of part of the old Hall lying
behind King Edward’s gateway towards the bowling green, and presenting
architectural features fully justifying its xiv century fame as the most
considerable collegiate enterprise thitherto undertaken. The Hall lay to the
north west of the present quadrangle, covering the space now occupied by
the ante-chapel,[227] Edward’s gate, and the Master’s lodge. The acquisition
of the site affords a most interesting glimpse into contemporary Cambridge
history: for no site represented such various interests and recalled so many
of the great local names. The first plot of ground obtained was a messuage
of Robert de Croyland’s in 1336. Eight years later Edmund Walsyngham’s
house was purchased; the house of Sir John de Cambridge who was knight
of the shire and alderman of the guild of S. Mary was sold to the college in
1350 by his son Thomas; and the next year saw the purchase from Thomas
son of Sir Constantine de Mortimer, of a waste parcel of land next the river
and S. John’s Hospital, called the Cornhythe, which abutted on the last
named property. Croyland’s and Walsyngham’s houses were first adapted,
and formed a small irregular quadrangle. Later in the xiv century a new
(irregular) court was constructed on the north of the present chapel. The
original entrance was situated where the sundial now is; here stood the
Great Gate, the present

THE LIBRARY WINDOW, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, FROM
THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS
From this spot beautiful views are obtained up and down the river.

Entrance Gate being built as late as 1535 to give King’s Hall a frontage
on the High Street. The Hall rebuilt in the later xiv century and added to in
the xvth was however only the nucleus of Henry VIII.’s college. To the
south west stood Michaelhouse; this too was absorbed in the new building,
and its second dedication to the holy and undivided Trinity was retained in
Henry’s college. Seven other buildings—all university hostels—were also
absorbed—Gregory’s, Crouched, Physwick, S. Margaret’s, Tyled, Gerard’s,
and Oving’s. The present kitchen occupies part of the site of Michaelhouse;
Physwick stood between the Queen’s Gate and Trinity Street; and the other
hostels were grouped round these in S. Michael’s and King’s Hall Lanes.
[228]

The work which had been begun by Lady Margaret at Christ’s and S.
John’s—the final substitution of the college for the monastery school—was
now completed by her grandson, the great despoiler of the monasteries, who
appears to have designed Trinity College as a splendid atonement for the
destruction of so many homes of learning. It was largely endowed with

abbey lands, and Henry’s undeniable interest in erudition seems to have
found its ultimate satisfaction in a foundation into which there entered
every element of that “new learning” which was humanistic before it was
Protestant. That provision was here to be made for a wider field of
knowledge than any hitherto contemplated in or out of a university, seems
amply proved by the words of the founder; who, after declaring that the
college is intended for the “development and perpetuation of religion” (a
well-chosen form of words?), continues thus: “for the cultivation of
wholesome study in all departments of learning, knowledge of languages,
the education of youth in piety, virtue, self-restraint, and knowledge; charity
towards the poor, and the relief of the afflicted and distressed.” The
programme was so liberal that Mary herself endowed the college with
monastic property, and Elizabeth completed the chapel which her sister had
begun.
No building, indeed, in either university suggests in the same way and in
the same degree that delightful mental combination of form and space
which is the mark of the “Cambridge mind” in science if it is not so in
literature. As we pass into the great court the buildings we see neither shut
out the light nor hem in the thoughts. The enclosure they suggest is that
formal enclosure of point and line which enables us to make propositions
about infinity. Of all scholastic buildings in the world the great court of
Trinity is that which best suggests the majesty and spaciousness of learning.
Here one receives an impression of adequacy, balance, clearness,
spaciousness, elevation, serenity, a certain high power of the imagination—
the mathematical qualities, the qualities of the seeker after truth: an
impression of the simple force of what is simply clear, the simple grandeur
of that which can dispense with the mysterious; of the dignity which
accompanies those who have looked upon things as

OLD GATEWAY AND BRIDGE
These buildings form part of St. John’s College, and look on to the
river. The Tower of the College Chapel is seen in the background.

they are in themselves, and have nothing adventitious to offer, yet what they
offer holds a curious power of satisfying.
Does a man see all this as he walks into Trinity and learn from it the
lesson which Cambridge spreads before him, or does he take it with him
under the gateway and let Trinity Great Court represent for him what he
already knows of Cambridge? What does it matter whether it suggests so
much or is allowed to represent so much?
Trinity Great Court covers more than 90,000 square feet—an area of
over 2 acres—and is the largest in any college. The building, carried out
under Edward VI., received considerable modification during the
mastership of Nevile (1593-1615) dean of Canterbury, who arranged the
court on its present plan, erected the “Queen’s gateway” and the fine
renascence fountain, enlarged the original lodge, and built the hall and
kitchen. On the west side, facing us as we enter, is the hall (1604) which
was modelled on that of the Middle Temple. Next it are two combination
rooms—the centre for generations of Cambridge fellows who first had their

assembling room in King’s Hall hard by[229]—but the façade here was
spoiled in the xviii century when the oriel and frontage of the old hall of
Michaelhouse were removed. A Jacobean porch leads us into the lodge,
which occupies the site of King’s Hall lodge. The great scholar Bentley,
Master from 1700 to 1742, built the staircase and otherwise left his mark
here. His excursions into the classical were, however, curtailed during the
mastership of Whewell (1840) when Alexander Beresford Hope subscribed
to restore the Gothic character of the front and built the picturesque oriel.
[230] The inscription stating that he had restored its ancient aspect to the
house during the mastership of Whewell gave rise to the following amusing
paraphrase:—
This is the House that Hope built.
This is the Master, rude and rough,
Who lives in the House that Hope built.
These are the seniors, greedy and gruff,
Who toady the Master, rude and rough,
Who lives in the House that Hope built.[231]

The chapel, on the north, was built by Mary, and A.D. 1555-1564.

PEPYS’ LIBRARY, MAGDALENE COLLEGE
This range of old buildings houses the Pepysian Library. The style
is seventeenth century.

is one of the few churches erected in her reign, as Trinity College is itself
one of the few places where her name is held in affection. Though it has
none of the greatness of King’s chapel, it yields to none in interest. The site
is that of the chapel of King’s Hall built for the scholars by Edward IV., the
materials of which, with stone from the Greyfriars’ house, the fen abbey of
Ramsey, and Peterhouse, and lead from the Greyfriars and Mildenhall, were
used in the construction. Elizabeth completed it nine years later (1564). The
ante-chapel contains the statue of Newton,
—— with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

a work of Roubiliac’s considered by Chantrey to be the noblest of English
statues. Bacon, Barrow, Macaulay, and Whewell have also statues here,
while Richard Porson is commemorated by a bust. Along the wall which
faces us as we enter are sixteen memorial brasses chiefly to remarkable
fellows of the college who have died within the last twenty years.
The great court leads in the usual way, by hall and butteries, to Nevile’s
court, another work of Dr. Nevile’s, and here the library—to the building of
which Newton contributed—was erected by subscription, the foundation
stone being laid on February 26, 1676. The architect was Wren who also
designed the bookcases of the “stately library” as those who had determined
on its foundation had called it in anticipation. The wood of the cases is
Norway oak which has been stained to imitate cedar. The building is very
rich with decoration inside and out; the length is 194 feet as compared with
the chapel 210 feet and the hall 100 feet. The staircase and pavement are of
marble. Pedestals with busts of members of the college line the room on
either side. The library contains 90,000 volumes, with 1900 MSS. including
a Sarum missal on vellum of 1500, Milton’s rough draft notes of “Paradise
Lost,” the Codex Augiensis of Paul’s Epistles, four MSS. of Wyclif’s bible,
and the Canterbury psalter.[232]
A New Court, to which George IV. contributed, was erected in the first
quarter of the xix century and Dr. Whewell built, at his own expense, the
Master’s Court. Upon the site of Garret’s hostel, the then bishop of
Lichfield erected in 1670 a small building known as “Bishop’s hostel”
which is used as students’ quarters, and the proceeds of letting it are spent

according to the founder’s direction in the purchase of books for the library.
Macaulay “kept” here when he first went up to Cambridge.

THE GATEWAY OF TRINITY COLLEGE
The Great Entrance Gate, constructed about 1518-35. The panels
over the arch commemorate King Edward the Third and his six
sons. The Master’s lodge is seen in the distance through the
gateway.

The
The Mastership of Trinity has been, ever since the
Reformation, one of the most important offices in the university;
Mastership.
but it is rendered still more distinguished by the great men who
have successively filled it. The last Master of King’s Hall became the first
Master of Trinity and has had among his successors Isaac Barrow, William
Bill, Whitgift, Wilkins, Bentley, and Whewell. Its chief benefactor Nevile
was eighth Master.
Trinity has been equally great in literature and science, and has effected
more for both in the three hundred and fifty years of its existence than any
other centre of learning. Among its fellows it counts Newton, Adam

Sedgwick, Ray, Barrow, Porson, Roger Cotes, Macaulay, Whewell,
Westcott, Airy, Clerk Maxwell, Cayley, Hort, Thirlwall, Jebb. Among
lawyers Bacon, Coke, and Lyndhurst; among prelates Tunstall,[233]
Whitgift, Lightfoot. Among other famous alumni are Robert Devereux,
Cotton, Spelman, Thackeray, Granville (M.A. 1679), Peacock, Kinglake,
Trench, De Morgan, F. D. Maurice, and the late Duke of Rutland (Lord
John Manners). Among poets, Byron, Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Tennyson,
Donne, Cowley, George Herbert, Monckton-Milnes. Another historic
friendship like that between Spenser and Kirke at Pembroke, Milton and
King at Christ’s, and Gray and Walpole, grew up in the shadow of Trinity—
the friendship of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam commemorated in In
Memoriam.
There are 60 fellowships, 74 scholarships worth each £100 a year, and
16 sizarships of the value of £80 each. The students of Trinity number one-
fourth of the undergraduate population. The college is not only the largest
but the most important scholastic institution in the world: “being at this
day” writes Fuller, “the stateliest and most uniform college in Christendom,
out of which may be carved three Dutch universities.” Among the college
livings are the university church of S. Mary’s, S. Michael’s (the old church
attached to Michaelhouse) Chesterton Vicarage and several rectories and
vicarages in the dioceses of Ely, York, Lincoln, Lichfield, London,
Peterborough, and Carlisle, which include most of those belonging to
King’s Hall and Michaelhouse, with the exception of the Norwich
benefices.[234]
The gateway of Trinity with its four towers, the two interior
Gateways.
being the larger and furnished with staircases, reminds us that the
ornamental gateway was the last architectural addition to the college
quadrangle. The first ornamental archway was the great gate built for
King’s Hall in 1426.[235] It was copied in the turreted gateway of Queens’
College, and afterwards in the old gateway of King’s,[236] and in the present
gateways of

THE GREAT COURT, TRINITY COLLEGE
The largest at either University or in Europe. We see the Great
Gate in the picture on the right, facing us—the Chapel. To the left
of the Chapel is seen King Edward’s Gate, fourteenth century. The
beautiful Fountain in the middle of the picture is in the
Renaissance style, and was built by Nevile in 1602, and rebuilt in
1716.

Christ’s and S. John’s, and even in that second gateway of King’s Hall
which is the present entrance gate of Trinity.[237] The only gateway in
Cambridge which varies completely from these models is Alcock’s at Jesus,
which is much lighter in character. The xvi century gateways of Caius are
“the first specimens of the revival of stone work.”[238] The ornamental
gateway is a distinctive feature of Cambridge college architecture. The
room over the gate was used as a muniment room; in S. John’s the chamber
in the tower serves this purpose.

Caius
In 1557 Doctor John Keys (whose name was Latinised as
Caius) built and incorporated with Gonville Hall a college for
College A.D.
1557.
scientific research and medical studies—the illustrious society
which has since been known as Gonville and Caius College.
Keys or Caius was one of the great physicians of the xvi century;
physician to Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, and President of the College
of Physicians. He was a Yorkshireman by race but a native of Norwich, and
had been Principal of Physwick hostel which was at that time attached to
Gonville Hall. Italian universities had turned his mind from the study of

divinity to that of medicine and he became a doctor in that faculty at Padua
in 1541, two years after leaving Cambridge. At Padua he lived with one of
the earliest anatomists—Vesalius; and he himself lectured for twenty years
on anatomy to the surgeons in London, at the request of Henry VIII.[239] He
was Master of the college of which he was co-founder, but regularly spent
the emoluments on fresh buildings at Caius. He was not only a great
naturalist, the first English anatomist, a great physician, and an eminent
classic,[240] but also a distinguished antiquary, and to him we owe one of the
most valuable histories of the university. He had withal “a perverse stomach
to the professors of the gospel,” and clung like Metcalfe of S. John’s and
Baker of King’s to the old religion and the old ways of worship.[241] He is
buried in the college chapel, and the simple words Fui Caius are inscribed
over him. The foundation-stone of Caius he had himself inscribed:
Johannes Caius posuit sapientiae; “John Caius dedicated it to knowledge.”
He built his college in two parallel ranges, east and west; a chapel and
the Master’s lodge occupying the north side. On the south was a low wall
with a gateway. “We decree,” he writes in the statutes of Caius, “that no
building be constructed which shall shut in the entire south side of the
college of our foundation, lest for lack of free ventilation the air should
become foul.” This appreciation of the all-importance of air and sun to
living organisms was more than three hundred years in advance of his time.
If his instructions be not carried out, he says, the health of the college will
be impaired, and disease and death will ensue. Closed quadrangles had been
built in Cambridge ever

THE HALL OF TRINITY COLLEGE FROM NEVILE’S
COURT
This is sometimes called the Cloister Court, and was built at the
expense of Dr. Nevile about 1612. The principal building in this
picture is the Dining Hall with its beautiful oriel window. Passing
up the steps and through the passage we enter the Great Court,
where we get another fine view of this Hall. Lord Byron occupied
rooms in Nevile’s Court.

since the erection of Pembroke College, but no more were built there after
the time of Caius.[242] Andrew Perne of Peterhouse was a contemporary
stickler for hygienic conditions in the colleges; he saw to it that only pure
water should be available “for the avoiding of the annoyance, infection, and
contagion ordinarily arising through the uncleanness” of King’s Ditch “to
the great endammaging” of health and welfare.
The college founded by Gonville is still known as Gonville Court in the
joint college; but the other buildings are entirely new and make a modern
show at the corner of King’s Parade not necessarily justified by the
modernness of the science pursued within their walls.
In the xv century Gonville was peopled with monastic students: it is said
that when Humphrey de la Pole and Gresham were studying there the other
scholars were nearly all religious. If the monks of Ely, Crowland, Ramsey,
and Walden lived at Monks’ hostel, the monks of Norwich priory had been
allowed by a special papal exemption to continue to frequent Gonville and
Trinity Halls, as they had done since Bateman’s time.[243] The Suffolk
monks of Butley, black Benedictines from Bury, Cistercians from Lewes,
and Austin canons from Westacre in Norfolk were also to be found there.

[244] Gonville Hall was always regarded as the papal favourite at
Cambridge; yet by 1530 Nix Bishop of Norwich in a letter to the primate
Warham asserts that not one of the clerks at Gonville but “savoured of the
frying pan.”
Caius has always been a doctors’ college; Harvey, Glisson the anatomist,
and a long roll of eminent surgeons and physicians here received their
education. Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Gresham the only one of the
Merchant Adventurers known to have been at a university, and founder of
the Royal Exchange, were also sons of this house; as was Samuel Clarke (b.
Norwich 1675) the metaphysician, “the lad of Caius.”
There are 22 fellows and some 36 scholars and exhibitioners, the value
varying from £100 down to £20. There are also two chapel-clerkships (£38
for one year), and the Tancred medical studentships each worth £100 a year.

We now come to the last two colleges to be founded in the xvi
Emmanuel
1584. century. Emmanuel was founded by Sir Walter Mildmay,
Chancellor of

NEVILE’S GATE, TRINITY COLLEGE
To the left are the College kitchens and on the right is Bishop’s
Hostel. The buildings on the left are among the most ancient in this
college. Through the picturesque old gateway we see up the lane
into Trinity Street.

the Exchequer to Elizabeth, in 1584, his object being to plant the seed of
Puritanism in the university. The site he chose was the suppressed house of
the Dominicans, and Ralph Symons, the architect who worked with so
much skill and judgment at S. John’s and under Nevile at Trinity, converted
the friary buildings into the Puritan college. The friars’ church is now the
college hall and the library which at one time served as a chapel was it is
said the convent refectory. The college chapel was built, from Wren’s
designs, by Sancroft Archbishop of Canterbury (1668-78); and the college
itself was rebuilt in the xviii and xix centuries. Emmanuel has preserved an
evangelical character, the relic of its original Calvinism in doctrine and
Puritanism in discipline; and the clerical students of Ridley Hall are
recruited chiefly from here. “In Emmanuel College they do follow a private
course of public prayer, after their own fashion”; the chapel used was
unconsecrated, the communion was received sitting. The contrast must have

been all the greater at this time—the beginning of the xvii century—when
incense was burning and Latin was sung in other Cambridge chapels.
The name of Emmanuel College recalls the movement with which it was
connected later in that century: when Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith, and
Culverwell of Emmanuel, and More of Christ’s led the van of philosophic
thought.[245] Besides Cudworth, Emmanuel has nurtured at least four
eminent representatives of learning and science, Flamsteed, Wallis, Foster,
Horrox; and one great statesman, Sir William Temple; and as a
representative churchman, Sancroft who was also Master of the college.
Samuel Parr was here; and William Law, the author of the “Serious Call,”
was a nonjuring fellow. Harvard went from Emmanuel to America where he
founded the university which bears his name.
There are 16 fellowships, 30 scholarships, and 4 sizarships.

Sidney Sussex, the last of the xvi century colleges, was also
Sidney
Sussex built in Elizabeth’s reign, on the site of the Greyfriars’ as
1594.
Emmanuel rose on the site of the Blackfriars’ house. Frances
Sidney, daughter of Sir William Sidney and wife to the third Earl of Sussex,
bequeathed the money for the foundation, and her executors purchased the
property from Trinity College. The ubiquitous Ralph Symons was the
architect; but the college was modernised in the early xix century. There are
two courts: the hall and lodge in one, the chapel and library in the other. In
this last is a x century pontifical from a northern diocese, probably Durham.
The character of the college has always remained Protestant, this and
Emmanuel being the first Protestant foundations in the university. Oliver
Cromwell was enrolled a member the day of Shakespeare’s death, and
Fuller the ecclesiastical historian was here for many years. Sterne the
founder of the

TRINITY COLLEGE BRIDGE AND AVENUE, WITH GATE
LEADING INTO THE NEW COURT
The Bridge was built in 1763 by Wilkins. The trees in the Avenue
in foreground were planted in 1671-72.

Irish College of Surgeons, Archbishop Bramhall, Henry Martyn,[246]
May the poet, and Seth Ward are among its worthies. Edward Montague,
Earl of Manchester, of whom the historian writes that he “loved his country
with too unskilful a tenderness” was a member of this college, and carried
out Cromwell’s destructive programme at his university. No one mentions
the founder of Sidney Sussex without saying that she was aunt to Sir Philip,
and it is a title of honour even for the founder of a college: did not Fulke
Greville have himself described in his epitaph as “Frend to Sir Philip
Sidney”?
There are 10 fellows and 36 scholars on the foundation, besides
sizarships of the value of £27 a year.

One college has been built at Cambridge in modern times. The
Downing
1803. founder, who bequeathed his property for the purpose, was Sir
George Downing of Gamlingay Park, Cambridgeshire, whose

father was a graduate of Clare. Wilkins (the architect of the modern portions
of King’s and Corpus and of the New Court of Trinity) began the structure
in 1807, but he only completed the west and east sides. The town has since
grown up to the college, which has large pleasure grounds. A “Downing”
professorship of law and another of medicine were also endowed by the
founder. Six of the 8 college fellowships must be held by students of law or
medicine; and there are 10 scholars on the foundation.
Taking the place of the older hostels, but inversely as regards their
relative proportion to the colleges, there are now 6 hostels, colleges in all
but university status, with resident students reading for the usual university
examinations. There are also two post-graduate hostels. The oldest of these
are Newnham (1871) and Girton (1873) which are described in another
chapter. Cavendish College on the Hills Road was opened in 1876 by the
County College Association and admitted students from sixteen years old. It
was recognised as a public hostel (November 9, 1882) but was closed nine
years later.
Ridley Hall was erected in 1880 for theological students who have taken
their degree. Its object is the maintenance of Reformation principles.
Selwyn College was founded in 1882, by subscription, in memory of
Bishop Selwyn, and for the maintenance of Church of England principles,
to whose members it is restricted. This institution occupies a somewhat
anomalous position in the university, for it is the only hostel on avowedly
“denominational” lines publicly recognised by and therefore forming part of
the academic society. Cambridge has set its face against the recognition of
colleges intended to meet the interests of one religious section of the
community to the exclusion of others, on the ground that members of all
religious communities may now receive instruction in any of the colleges,
and suffer no interference with their religion, and also in pursuance of the
main principle that a university education is of greater use

CAIUS COLLEGE AND THE SENATE HOUSE FROM ST.
MARY’S PASSAGE
On the left is the Senate House, built 1772-30. The building facing
the spectator is the South Front of Gonville and Caius College by
Waterhouse (1870). Through the railings on the right is the Tower
of Great St. Mary’s. The street is King’s Parade.

and value when young men are not classed and separated according to their
religious divisions. Thus when the Catholic hostel of S. Edmund applied for
recognition in 1898, the “grace” was refused, in spite of the fact that many
members of the university unconnected with any religious denomination,
voted in its favour. S. Edmund’s House was founded by the Duke of Norfolk
in 1897, and is for clerical students working for a tripos or other advanced
work recognised in the university. It ranks as a licensed lodging house. A
Benedictine hostel, Benet House, was founded in the same year, and
supported by the father of the present abbot of Downside. A few professed
monks, who are entered as members of Christ’s or some other college,
pursue there the usual university course.
Westminster College is a post-graduate college for the Presbyterian
Church of England, founded in Cambridge in 1899 (removed from
London).
Cheshunt theological College, founded by the Countess of Huntingdon
in 1768, has just been removed to Cambridge, and is there lodged in
temporary premises. Undergraduate and post-graduate students are
received, the former being non-collegiate members of the university.
Students and staff must be of the Evangelical Reformed faith, but are free to

enter the ministry of the established or any Free Church responding to that
description.
These four last are the result of the abolition of the test act (1871) which
kept our universities closed both to catholics and nonconformists: but Benet
and S. Edmund’s houses were projected when the prohibition to catholics,
maintained by Cardinal Manning, was withdrawn.
A note on
Hugh de Balsham, founder of Peterhouse, 1284, Cambridge. Ob. 1286, bur. before the
the high altar, Ely.
nationality Hervey de Stanton, founder of Michaelhouse, 1324. Ob. York 1327, bur. in S.
of
Cambridge
Michael’s church near his college.
founders. Richard de Badew, founder of University Hall, 1326, Chelmsford, Essex.
King’s Hall, Edward II. and Edward III., 1337.
Elizabeth de Clare, founder of Clare Hall, 1338 b. at Acre of Norman settlers in
England, Wales and Ireland; married to two Irishmen. Ob. 1360, bur. Ware, Herts.
Marie de Chatillon, founder of Pembroke Hall, 1347. French, married a Welsh earl.
Ob. 1377, bur. in the choir of Denney Abbey.[247]
Edmund Gonville, founder of Gonville Hall, 1348. East Anglian. Ob. 1351.
William Bateman, founder of Trinity Hall, 1350, East Anglian (b. Norwich). Ob. 1354,
bur. Avignon.
Two Cambridge guilds, founders of Corpus Christi College, 1352.
William Byngham co-founder with Henry VI. of God’s House, 1439, 1448 (Rector of
S. John Zachary, London; Proctor of the university in 1447) (Fuller pp. 150, 161).
King’s College, Henry VI., 1441.
Margaret of Anjou, founder of Queens’ College, 1448, French. Ob. 1482, bur. at the
cathedral of Angers.[248]
Elizabeth Woodville, co-founder of Queens’. Northants. Ob. 1492, bur. at Windsor,
near Edward IV.
Robert Woodlark, founder of S. Catherine’s, 1473, b. Wakerly near Stamford,
Northants. Ob. 1479.
John Alcock, founder of Jesus College, 1495, b. Beverley, Yorks. Ob. 1500, bur. at Ely.
Margaret Beaufort, founder of Christ’s and S. John’s Colleges, 1505, 1509, b. Bletsoe,
Beds.[249] Ob. 1509, bur. Westminster Abbey, in the south aisle of Hen. VII.’s chapel.
John Fisher (her coadjutor) b. Beverley, Yorks. Beheaded 1534, bur. in the Tower.
Magdalene College [first founded by the Fen abbeys and Walden 1428] Henry and
Edward Stafford 2nd and 3rd Dukes of Buckingham, then Thomas first Baron Audley
of Walden 1544. The two former (whose family came from Staffordshire) were
beheaded 1483 and 1521, and bur. at Salisbury, and Austinfriars, London.[250] Lord
Audley b. Essex, ob. 1544, bur. Saffron Walden.
Trinity College, Henry VIII., 1546.
John Caius, founder of Caius College 1557. Yorks, but b. Norwich, ob. 1573, bur. in
the college chapel.
Sir Walter Mildmay, founder of Emmanuel College, 1584, Chelmsford, Essex. Ob.
1589, bur. at S. Bartholomew the Great, London.
Frances Sidney, founder of Sidney Sussex College, 1595, Kent (the family came from
Anjou with Henry II.). [Her father and husband were both Lords deputy for Ireland,

and her father also President of Wales.] Ob. 9th March 1589, bur. Westminster Abbey.
Sir George Downing, founder of Downing College, 1803, Cambridgeshire. Ob. 1749,
bur. Croydon, Cambridgeshire.

THE GATE OF VIRTUE, GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE
This picture represents the Court built by Caius, who refounded
the College. The Gate of Humility faces the spectator. This is the
west side, and over the gate are the words Io CAIVS POSVIT
SAPIENTIAE 1567. These words are taken from the inscription
on the foundation stone.

It will be seen that the university owes most to Cambridge itself and East
Anglia; and next to two counties which have always been in strict relation
to it, Yorkshire and Essex. Two of the founders of colleges were French.
Both Welsh and Irish names have been from the first represented, but
Cambridge owes nothing to Scotland.[251] Even as late as 1535 when Henry
issued the royal injunctions to the university during the chancellorship of
Cromwell, there were students from every diocese and district of England,
and from Wales and Ireland, at Cambridge, but Scotland is not mentioned.
[252] Of the 4 countesses who founded colleges, one was twice married to
Irishmen, and two married Welshmen.
Of the 14 (non-royal) men founders (including the third Duke of
Buckingham and Fisher) 5 were East Anglian (3 Cambridgeshire), 3 were
East-Saxons, 3 Yorkshiremen, one a Northamptonshire man, and one came
from Staffordshire. To Beverley the university owes Fisher and Alcock, to
Chelmsford Badew and Mildmay, to Norwich Bateman and Caius.

Of the 6 women founders, two were French (Chatillon and Queen
Margaret) one was of French extraction (Sidney), the Clares were Normans,
Elizabeth Clare and Chatillon were Plantagenets through Henry III. and
Edward, Margaret Beaufort and Buckingham by descent from Edward III.;
Elizabeth Woodville was half French through her mother Jaquetta of
Luxembourg, daughter of Peter Comte de Saint-Paul. Thus, curiously
enough, two of the women founders hailed from Anjou (Margaret and
Frances Sidney) and two from Saint-Paul (Chatillon and Elizabeth
Woodville).
The colleges they founded favoured different provinces.
Scope of
Marie Valence, wished French fellows to be preferred to others of equal merits, and,
their failing these, scholars from the college rectories.[253]
foundations.
Gonville wished to benefit East Anglian clergy.
Bateman wished chiefly to benefit clergy of the diocese of Norwich.
Henry VI. decided that failing scholars from the parishes of Eton or King’s,
Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire should have the preference.
Margaret of Anjou’s college was, by Andrew Doket, allied with the Cambridge
Greyfriars.
Margaret Beaufort and Fisher favoured the northern districts of Richmond, Derby,
Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, York, Lancashire, and Nottingham,
from which half at least of the scholars were to come.
Sidney Sussex College was, by its “bye-founder” Sir Francis Clerk, endowed for
students from Bedfordshire.

The special character given to Peterhouse by Balsham was the studious
pursuit of letters, arts, Aristotle, canon law or theology. There were to be 2
scholars for civil and canon law, and one for medicine; and poor bible-
clerks were to be instructed in grammar.
Hervey de Stanton founded Michaelhouse for clergy, and for the study of theology.
Marie Valence founded Pembroke for the study of arts as well as theology.
Elizabeth de Burgh founded Clare for general learning. Three poor boys were to be
instructed in grammar, logic, and singing.
Edmund Gonville made the 7 Arts the foundation for a theological training. (Bateman
abolished its theological character.)
William Bateman founded Trinity Hall for the study of law only.
The two Guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin founded their college for
scholars in sacred orders, and for the study of theology and canon law.
William Byngham established God’s House for the study of grammar among the clergy
of the north-eastern counties.
Henry VI. required all the scholars of King’s to be candidates for sacred orders, and
made theology and arts the principal but not the exclusive faculties.
Margaret of Anjou made theology the principal study at Queens’, and in her college
law was only tolerated. The master of arts must either teach the trivium and

quadrivium for 3 years, or devote the same time to the liberal sciences or Aristotle.
Robert Woodlark made his fellows restrict their studies by vow to “philosophy and
sacred theology”—his college of S. Catherine was founded to promote Church
interests exclusively.
John Alcock required that the scholars of Jesus College when they had graduated in
arts, should devote themselves to the study of theology. Canon law was prohibited,
but one out of the 12 fellows might be a student of civil law.
Margaret Beaufort founded Christ’s for the study of grammar, arts, and theology, but
law and medicine were excluded.
Edward III. and Henry VIII. founded King’s Hall and Trinity College for general
learning.
John Caius founded his college for the pursuit of science.
Sir Walter Mildmay founded Emmanuel for clergy who should maintain the principles
of the Reformation.
Sir George Downing founded his college for the study of law and medicine.

THE GATE OF HONOUR, CAIUS COLLEGE
In the background on the right appear the buildings of the
University Library, one of the Turrets of King’s Chapel in the
distance, and the Senate House is seen on the left.

Hence Michaelhouse, Gonville, Corpus, God’s House, King’s,
Catherine’s, Jesus, and Emmanuel were destined for a clerical curriculum
only.

Bateman contemplated the union of the diplomatic career with the
clerical; and although there were many jurists’ hostels his is the only college
founded and endowed for the exclusive study of law. Caius is the only
college founded and endowed for the natural sciences and medicine; but in
the xiii century Balsham, in the xvith Caius, and in the xixth Downing, all
provided for medical studies. Similarly in the xiii, xiv, and xvi centuries
Balsham, Edward III., Elizabeth de Burgh and Henry VIII. each founded a
college for the pursuit of general knowledge.[254]

Throughout the xiiith, xivth, and xvth centuries the university
Wealth of
the was certainly a very poor corporation. It took a hundred years to
university.
build three sides of the Schools quadrangle, and the money for the
Sources of
revenue.
important schools of Philosophy and Civil Law collected by
Chancellor Booth in the xv century was only got together by taxing the
university.
The university as distinguished from the colleges has never been a
wealthy society, and its sources of revenue are now much the same as they
have always been. There are the capitation fees of members of the
university. Fees for matriculation, for the public examinations, and for
graduation, and proctors’ fines.

THE FIRST COURT OF EMMANUEL COLLEGE

The income of Burwell rectory and of a farm at Barton, The trading
profits of the University Press; and one new source of income—the annual
contribution from each of the colleges, in proportion to its revenues,
provided for by statute in 1882. The vice-chancellor delivers an annual
statement of expenditure, which includes the upkeep of the Senate House
and Schools, of the University church, the Registrary’s office, the
observatory, museums and lecture rooms, and a yearly contribution to the
library: the salaries of professors and public examiners, and the stipends
and salaries of university officers and servants.[255]
The original property of colleges was in land, benefices, and
College
wealth and plate. The portable property was laid by in a chest kept in the
property.
muniment room: here title deeds, charters, rare books, college
plate, and legacies in specie were treasured; the last being drawn upon for
the purpose for which they were bequeathed until exhausted. Benefactors to
a college presented it with a “chest,” and hence the “University Chest” is
still the name for its revenue. Queen Eleanor presented a “chest” of a
hundred marks to the university in 1293 (“The Queen’s Chest”); and
Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, enriched the public treasury with a thousand
marks in the reign of Henry VII. when the “chests” had been “embezzled to
private men’s profit”; a gift “which put the university in stock again.”[256]
The “Ely Chest” was given in 1320 by John sometime Prior of Ely and
Bishop of Norwich, and the other principal givers were country parsons,
university chancellors, a “citizen of London” in 1344, and Thomas
Beaufort, Duke of Exeter (“Exeter’s Chest”) in 1401.
The wealth of the colleges differs greatly. Trinity college has a gross
income of over £74,000 and the next richest college is S. John’s. The poorer
colleges have gross incomes varying from 4 to £9000.[257] The proportion
contributed at Cambridge and Oxford for the royal loan of 1522 is
interesting. At Oxford, New College and Magdalen contributed most, more
than eight times as much as Exeter and Queens’ (£40) which gave least.[258]
At Cambridge, King’s College and King’s Hall were the richest
corporations and contributed the same sums as New College and Magdalen
Oxford.

THE OLD COURT IN EMMANUEL COLLEGE
The large stained-glass window of the Hall is seen on the right, and
beyond that the window of the Combination Room. The Dormer
window of Harvard’s room is seen on the extreme left.

CHAPTER III

THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY

[pp. 157-164] Meaning of a degree—the kinds of degrees—the bachelor—the ancient exercises
of the schools called acts, opponencies, and responsions—the sophister—questionist—
determiner—master—regent master—the degree of M.A.—introduction of written
examinations—the tripos.
[pp. 164-189] The subjects of study and examination: the trivium and quadrivium—grammar—
Aristotle’s logic—rhetoric—the three learned faculties—the doctorate—development in
university studies—the development of the mathematical tripos—the senior wrangler—the
classical tripos—Greek at Cambridge—the moral sciences tripos—philosophy at Cambridge
—the natural sciences tripos—science at Cambridge—the language triposes—list of the
triposes—changing value of the examination tests—the double tripos—present conditions for
the B.A. degree—modern changes in the examinations—standard of the ordinary and honour
degree, examples.
[pp. 189-201] Method of tuition at Cambridge—the lecture—the class—the weekly paper—the
professorial chairs—readerships—lectureships—Lambeth degrees—degrees by royal mandate
—honorary degrees—the “modern subjects”—and the idea of a university.

A UNIVERSITY differs from other scholastic institutions in conferring
“degrees.” Having taught a man his subject it offers him a certificate that he
in his turn is able to teach it: the “degree” originally signified nothing more
nor less than the graduate’s competence to profess the faculty in which it
was obtained. This certificate of proficiency referred to the “three faculties”
of theology, law, and medicine, to which was added later “the liberal arts.”
The titles of “master,” “doctor,” and “professor” were at first synonymous.
A master was a doctor in his subject, capable of professing it. The title of
“master,” however, clung to the faculty of arts, that of “doctor” to the three
liberal or learned professions.
The following degrees are now conferred: in arts, the bachelor and
master (B.A., M.A.); in divinity, the bachelor and doctor (B.D., D.D.—
formerly S.T.P., sacrae theologiae professor); in laws, bachelor, master and
doctor (LL.B., LL.M., LL.D.[259]); in medicine, bachelor and doctor (M.B.,
M.D.); in music, bachelor, master, and doctor (Mus.B., Mus.M., Mus.D.); in
surgery, bachelor and master (B.C., M.C.). Besides which a doctorate in
science (Sc.D.), and a doctorate in letters (Litt.D.), are conferred on
graduates in laws or in either of the last four faculties who have made some
original contribution to the advancement of science or learning.[260]

THE LAKE AND NEW BUILDINGS, EMMANUEL COLLEGE
The building is known as the Hostel, and was erected between
1885 and 1894.

The title of bachelor originally marked the conclusion of a
The
period of study; it was not a degree, and bestowed no faculty to
bachelor and
exercises of
teach. Here, as elsewhere, a bachelor was an apprentice or
the schools.
aspirant to another status or position; and he remained in statu
pupillari as he still is in theory to-day.[261]
It is only in modern times that the conferring of a degree follows upon a
set written examination. For six hundred years the aspiring bachelor and
master obtained their status by public disputations in the schools. Public
exercises, called “acts, opponencies and responsions,” were regularly held
during the period of probation, and the student advanced to the degree of
master by steps which recall the rites of initiation in the catechumenate.
After his first year the “freshman” became a “junior sophister”[262] in one of
the faculties, and began to attend the school disputations, without however
taking part in them. In his fourth year, as senior sophister, he qualified to be
“questionist,” and presented himself as such at the beginning of Lent with
ceremonies which turned him into a bachelor; ceremonies in which the
Cambridge bedell figures as a veritable deacon. The procession was formed
on Ash Wednesday and introduced into the arts schools by the bedell, who
exclaimed: “Nostra Mater, bona nova, bona nova!” and “the father” (the

presiding college senior) having proceeded to his place, the bedell
suggested to him the stages of the ceremony: Reverende pater, licebit tibi
incipere, etc. After this day the new bachelor was no longer a questionist
but a “determiner” who determined in place of responding to the
propositions raised in the schools. This status continued through Lent, and
hence the incepting bachelor was described as stans in quadragesima.[263]
In due course the bachelor “commenced master of arts,” the
The master
of arts. inception taking place in Great S. Mary’s church on the day of the
“Great Commencement” the second of July. This is the traditional
time of year for the granting of degrees, and the ceremony is still called
“Commencements” in Cambridge and in universities which, like Dublin,
are derivative institutions. The status now attained was that of regent
master, i.e. a junior graduate whose

THE CLOISTER COURT, SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE
The new buildings on the left of the picture were designed by Mr.
J. L. Pearson and erected in 1890. In the distance we see the large

mullioned window of the Hall, which is part of the old college
building begun 1596.

business it was to teach the subjects he had himself been taught, for a period
of five years; after which he became a non-regent, or full master.[264] The
obligation to teach was part of the university theory of studies; so that when
a Cambridge professor of our own time astonished his hearers by declaring
“I know nothing of political economy, I have not even taught it” he was
speaking in the spirit of the university maxim disce docendo. It was the
scholar who had taught who was called magister and doctor in old times,
not the men who, as is the case nowadays, “go down” with no other
qualification than that of the bachelor and are nevertheless allowed in due
time to write M.A. after their names. For the degree of M.A. has virtually
ceased to exist: no one now “commences master,” and the master of arts is
simply the bachelor who has spent three years away from the university, in
which he has had time to forget what he once knew. Indeed as between the
master and the bachelor the case is often inverted, and if the former is an
ordinary degree man and the latter an honours man, it is the latter who is the
master in his subject while the former is little else than a tyro. That the
degree of master carries with it not one iota more of scholarship or
experience is certainly not understood by the public, but the fact that it is
understood elsewhere supplies the reason why such a small proportion of
men now proceed to take it.[265]
It was not till the xviii century that written examinations were
Written
examination introduced, and from the day of their introduction the practice
s.
grew and flourished. Originally teaching and tests had both been
oral, it was only as books became cheaper that the book in a measure
supplanted the teacher, the written examination came to supplant the public
acts and disputations, and the writing down of knowledge became the
characteristic feature of Cambridge training. “Then know, sir, that at this
place, all things—prizes, scholarships, and fellowships—are bestowed not
on the greatest readers, but on those who, without any assistance, can
produce most knowledge upon paper.” “Read six or eight hours a day, and
write down what you know,” is a tutor’s advice ninety years ago.
The tripos.
The tripos, although it did not take shape till the middle of the
same century derives its name from a custom of the xvith. On the
day when the bachelor obtained his public recognition he had as his

opponent in discussion one of the older bachelors who posed as the
champion of the university. He sat upon a three-legged stool “before Mr.
Proctor’s seat” and

DOWNING COLLEGE FROM THE ENTRANCE IN REGENT
STREET
These buildings are in the classical style and are all nineteenth-
century work.

disputed with the senior questionist. This stool or tripod was eventually to
provide a name for the great written examination of succeeding centuries—
the tripos. The champion bachelor was addressed as “Mr. Tripos,” and his
humorous orations were called “tripos speeches.” Tripos verses were next
written, and on the back of these the moderators, in the middle of the xviii
century, began printing the honours list:[266] from this tripos list of names
the transition was easy to tripos as the name of the examination itself—the
tripos examination. These disputations degenerated in Restoration times to
buffoonery, but the principle of examination made steady progress,[267] and
there were probably no tripos speeches after the Senate House was built. In
the xvi and xvii centuries, however, great personages had acts and
disputations performed for their entertainment; and the tastes of Elizabeth
and her Scotch successor were consulted when “a physic act” was kept
before the former, while “a philosophy act” was reserved for James.

There were declamations, which did not escape Byron’s ridicule, in the
xix century, but the last general public “act” was kept in 1839. The viva
voce examination in the “Little go” which was only discontinued 14 years
ago, and the viva voce and the “act” for the medical degree[268] are the only
survivals to our day of that oral examination by which the scholar in the
public acts constantly responded to the living voice of the magister. For the
first time in their long history silence settled down upon the schools, and
the eye replaced the ear as the channel of knowledge.[269]
The subjects in which university students were from the first
Subjects of
study. exercised, were those of the Roman trivium and quadrivium, and
Trivium and
Quadrivium. the three faculties of theology law and medicine. A special
importance must be assigned to the school of grammar—the first
member of the trivium—at Cambridge. There is every reason to believe that
it flourished there not only in the xiii century, under the patronage of the
bishops of Ely, but also in the xiith. It was called the school of glomery
(glomery, glamery, grammery)[270] and continued to be of importance till
the xvi century, the last degree in grammar being granted in 1542.[271]
Degrees in grammar were, nevertheless,
considered inferior to those in arts. To begin with, grammar
xii-xiii c.
was only studied for three years, arts for seven; grammar
made the clerk, arts the professor. The introduction of the “new art,”
Aristotle’s
analytical logic, increased the importance of the second member
A.D. 1712.
of the trivium: the name of Aristotle was a name to conjure with,
but no new texts came to light to add lustre to the acquirements of the
classical grammarian. As to the third member of the trivium, public rhetoric
lectures were delivered in Cambridge by George Herbert (1620); but a
century later Steele complains that both universities are “dumb in the study
of eloquence.” There were still however rhetoric lectures in the xviii
century, but they were not about rhetoric, and the public declamations in the
senate house must be regarded as the last homage to this most ancient of
arts, whose modern successor is the Union debating society.
If the original Cambridge schools were grammar schools after
The three
liberal or the pattern of Orléans and Bury-St.-Edmund’s, then the
learned
faculties. introduction of the arts faculty—the trivium and quadrivium—
was the first step towards the formation of a universitas; and its

appearance in the xii century would account for the university status of
Cambridge in the opening years of the xiii century.[272] The first of the three
learned faculties to take its place in the university was divinity, and with the
rise of the earliest colleges provision was made for the study of the two
faculties of theology and law. The faculty of medicine was the last to gain a
footing. Cambridge never became famous as a school of any of the faculties
in the sense in which Paris represented divinity, Bologna law, Montpellier
medicine. The study of the civil and canon law was, however, prominent in
the xv and early xvi centuries, but was shorn of its ecclesiastical moiety
during the chancellorship of Thomas Cromwell when Peter Lombard and
Gratian were banished the Cambridge schools.[273] Of the two universities
Cambridge alone retains a recognition of canon law in the title of its
bachelors masters and doctors of laws, LL.B., LL.M., and LL.D., a title
commuted at Oxford into ‘bachelor and doctor of civil law,’ B.C.L. and D.C.L.
The medical progress of the early xvi century which had been marked by
the foundation in 1518 of the Royal College of Physicians reached
Cambridge by means of two great men, Linacre from Oxford and its own
distinguished son John Caius. Peterhouse had been the first college to admit
medical studies, but our naturalists and physicians of later times, not
content with the fare provided for them in England, took their degrees at the
continental schools. Medicine, the last to obtain recognition, is now the
most prominent representative of the learned faculties at Cambridge. Until
1874 when a theological tripos was formed, admitting to a degree in that
subject only, theology was studied as part of the mathematical tripos. Law
was taken as an additional subject, and degrees in divinity and law were
proceeded to separately, as now. Satisfying the examiners in the theological,
law, or natural sciences tripos does not admit the student to any but the arts
degree. Medical students need not, however, graduate in arts, but may
proceed at once, after taking the Previous Examination, to read for the M.B.
degree.[274] In addition they must keep an “act,” which consists in reading a
thesis previously approved by the Regius Professor of Physic. Having read
the thesis (of which public notice is given) in the schools, the candidate is
orally examined by the presiding Regius Professor of Physic. After this he
becomes an M.B.[275]
A candidate who has obtained honours in Parts I. and II. of the law tripos
or honours in Part I. in addition to an arts degree, is eligible for the degree
in laws and may proceed to take the LL.B., the B.A., or both. Any candidate

may “incept in law” (LL.M.), without further examination, who has taken a
first class in both parts of the law tripos. If he has not this qualification he
must have attained an honours standard in one part of the tripos, or be a
qualified barrister or solicitor, or their equivalent in Scotland. In this case he
must submit a dissertation on law, its history, or philosophy. The doctorate
of laws is obtained after making an application in writing and sending in an
original written contribution to the science of law. The LL.M. cannot incept
till six years have elapsed from the end of his first term of residence, and
five years must elapse between the master’s and the doctor’s degree.
A master of arts or of laws becomes a bachelor of divinity after
The
doctorate. subscribing certain declarations required by statute and preaching
a sermon in the University church. Four years later he must “keep
an act” or print a dissertation, in Latin or English, upon some matter of
biblical exegesis or history, of dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical history or
antiquities, or on the evidences of Christianity. The “act” is kept in the same
way as that for the medical degree, and includes a viva voce examination.
To proceed to the D.D. the same preliminary formalities as for the B.D. must
be observed,[276] and a dissertation be printed on one of the same subjects.
Five years must elapse between the two degrees, except in the case of a B.D.
who is also an M.A. of at least twelve years’ standing. In fact the lapse of
time is all that remains of incepting and proceeding to the higher degrees.
Until hard upon the close of the xv century there was no
Developmen
t of development in university studies. Erasmus in 1516 describes
university
studies. them as having consisted until thirty years previously in nothing
but Alexander (the grammar text-book at Cambridge) the “Little
Logicals,” the old exercises from Aristotle, the quaestiones from Duns
Scotus. The study of mathematics, the new Aristotle, a knowledge of Greek,
had all come within the last few years.[277]
Gradually the study of these “arts” yielded to the mathematical
The
development tripos. The subjects which had been intended to embrace a
of the [278] those which dealt with
mathematica general education dropped out,
l tripos.
mathematics or mathematical physics encroached more and more,
till in 1747 the historic tripos with which the name of Cambridge is
identified was fully established. The conviction of the paramountcy of
mathematical reasoning had been emphasised at the university by the
discoveries of Newton, and when its mathematical studies were
consolidated in the xvii century under the influence of Newton’s tutor, Isaac

Barrow, “philosophy” was understood to mean the mathematical sciences,
and continued to mean this and this only in English mouths till the threshold
of our own times.[279] “By the study of the great relations of form,” writes
an old Trinity student from the other side of the Atlantic, the Cambridge
man acquired that “breadth of reasoning,” that power of generalisation, and
perception of analogy “in forms and formulae apparently dissimilar,” which
characterise the scientific mind. A study which bestows accuracy of
scholarship, the perception of order and beauty, and “inventive power of the
highest kind,” was that “in which for two hundred years all, and now more
than half of the Cambridge candidates for honours exercise
themselves.”[280]
Euclid and Newton filled the Cambridge horizon, and
Wranglers.
summed, as we have seen, all philosophy and all “arts.” Theology
itself ceased to rival the mathematical disputations which became the
business of the schools par excellence, and which were of such importance
that the name of wranglers was exclusively applied to those most proficient
in them, and “the senior wrangler” held the first position in the university.
To attain this place it was necessary to have “fagged steadily every day” for
six or eight hours. The quality of a man’s work would tell for nothing in the
final result if he had neglected, with this end set before him, to practise that
mere mechanical “pace” which would serve him in the great week.[281]
In 1822 the classical tripos was added. The history of classical
The classical
tripos. studies at Cambridge is of special interest. The introduction of
Greek into this country was a movement due directly to our
universities: students of Oxford first learnt the language in Italy, but
Cambridge as a university first gave it an academic welcome. The last
echoes among Englishmen of the most wonderful idiom the world has heard
resounded in the school of York, when John of Beverley, Wilfrid, and Bede
could be described as Grecians, and where Alcuin taught Greek. More than
seven centuries later the efforts of Fisher chancellor of the university of
Cambridge with the co-operation first of Erasmus and then of Croke, re-
established Greek in an English seat of learning.[282]

TRUMPINGTON STREET FROM PETERHOUSE
Part of the new buildings of Pembroke College are seen on the
right, and the Tower of the Pitt Press, commonly called by
undergraduates “The Freshers’ Church,” is seen in the distance.
The entrance to Peterhouse is behind the tree on the left of the
picture.

Erasmus had given up his dream of studying Greek in an
Greek at the
Italian university and had settled down three years before the
universities.
close of the century at Oxford on hearing that Grocyn was
teaching there.[283] He had known some Greek before he went to Oxford,
and he knew but little when he left, for its acquisition was still his great pre-
occupation when he accepted Fisher’s invitation and went to Cambridge.
The work of Grocyn and Linacre left no trace in their own university. When
Colet introduced the study of Greek into his new school, Oxford showed
itself hostile; when the Greek of Erasmus and Croke had taken permanent
hold in Cambridge, the Oxford students rose up in arms against the
Cambridge “Grecians,” and dubbing themselves “Trojans” sought street
brawls with the “Greeks.” Finally, Sir Thomas More himself wrote a protest
to his old university, which, he wrote, was engaged in casting ridicule on
those who “are promoting all the interests of literature at your university,
and especially that of Greek.” “At Cambridge, which you were always

accustomed to outshine, even those who do not learn Greek are so much
persuaded to its study in their university that they praiseworthily contribute
to maintain a salaried professor who may teach it to others.”[284]
Colet took Greek into our public schools, in face of the hostility of his
university; it was the Cambridge Grecians settled by Wolsey at Cardinal
College who established it at both universities, and it was men like Ascham,
Sir Thomas Smith, and Cheke who introduced it as Cambridge learning to
the world outside. It has been well said that classics “kept a firm hold on the
Cambridge mind.” The mantle of Erasmus Croke and Cheke fell upon
Bentley and Porson who had no rivals among English classics and critics,
and the services rendered by Cambridge as a university in this direction
have been maintained by the present generation of scholars.[285]

Colloquial
By order of Thomas Cromwell “two daily public acts one of
Latin and Greek the other of Latin” were to be held in all the colleges.[286]
Greek.
The Commonwealth Committee tried to revive the colloquial use
of Latin and Greek in 1649, but the use of Latin in halls and walks ceased in
this century, though it lingered in the college lectures, the declamations, and
the “acts and opponencies.” It lingered also in the college chapels, but the
only relic now remaining is the Latin grace in hall. The study of the classics
themselves declined at Cambridge during the reign of Charles II. and Gray
laments, while Bentley was still living, that these studies should have
“fallen into great contempt.”[287]
It was the introduction of the classical tripos which gave a
The moral
sciences foothold for mental and moral philosophy. Occupation with
tripos.
Greek metaphysics, contact with the Greek mind, brought into
relief the one-sidedness of the mathematical mind. It also placed the two
methods in sharp contrast. For hitherto a fundamental antagonism between
mathematical and metaphysical method had been unsuspected. It was not
till the dispute between Whewell and Hamilton that the idea was pressed
home that there were two philosophical methods, not one; that not only the
reasoning which begs but the reasoning which questions the premiss has a
right to be heard; that there was a philosophy of formal proof and one of
philosophic doubt; that axiomatical reasoning lay on the one side, and the
enquiry into the validity of the reasoning process itself on the other.
It was indeed by way of psychology that this other philosophy
Psychology.
gained a foothold in the university. It was the contact with the
scientific temper of Cambridge of psychology and psycho-physics—the
modern science par excellence, the point of contact between the
experimental method and mental philosophy, the fine flower of science
since Darwin, its complement, its interpreter—which ensured the
introduction of a moral sciences tripos. This it was which won recognition
for an organon other than the mathematical. Metaphysics captured
Cambridge based upon psychology, and here the two have never been
divorced.
The problem of education at Cambridge before 1851 had been entirely
concerned with the mutual relations of mathematics, physics, and classics.
The two historic triposes had between them ousted even Locke and Paley,
the relegation of which to the ordinary degree work nullified, for all serious

philosophic purposes, the “grace” of 1779 which had devoted a fourth day
to examination in “natural religion, moral philosophy, and Locke.”[288]
Whewell who had lectured in 1839 as professor of casuistry on moral
philosophy, was chiefly instrumental eleven years later in forming the new
tripos. The college which took the leading part was S. John’s, where the
Rev. J. B. Mayor was fellow and afterwards examiner; and the first man
admitted to a fellowship for his attainments in this direction was a Johnian
who came out senior moralist in 1863. When the tripos was framed, within
twenty-five years of the final disappearance of all mental philosophy from
the higher schools at Cambridge, it included papers on logic and
psychology, on metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and political
economy. The political subjects now form a tripos to themselves, the
Economics tripos created in 1903. Hort was a candidate in the first
examination (1851) and L. B. Seeley in the third: until 1861, when Whewell
and Leslie Stephen were among the examiners, the tripos was taken in
addition to one of the others, and did not confer a degree.[289]
That vampire of the Cambridge schools, mathematics, had absorbed not
only philosophy and the arts but also the natural sciences. It had been
however through one of the great metaphysicians, Robert Clarke, that
Newton’s physics had taken their place in the Cambridge curriculum, and
Locke and Newton were there side by side, and had entered there together.
It seemed, then, a simple revival and continuance of these traditions when
the natural sciences tripos was formed in the same year as the moral
sciences.
Empirical science at Cambridge dates from Linacre and Caius.
Empirical
science at The Puritan masters of the university discountenanced science,
Cambridge.
discouraged the university’s higher mathematics, but were led by
their liking for the open bible greatly to favour the study of Greek. It is a
remarkable fact that the natural ally of the reform movement was “Greek”
not natural science.[290] Greek and “heresy” were equivalents; Caius, the
ardent champion of medicine and empirical science in Cambridge, was one
of the last to cling to the old “popishe trumpery.”[291] Just two hundred
years before the publication of the “Origin of Species,” someone writes to
Sir Thomas Browne the author of Religio Medici, from Darwin’s college at
Cambridge, saying that there were then (1648) “so few helps” at the
university for the student of medicine and science. With the Restoration
scientific interests were revived, London setting the fashion to the seats of

learning. But even at the close of the xviii century—that dark age of the
universities—there was a professor of anatomy and there were lectures on
“human anatomy and physiology” at Cambridge.[292] A few years later there
was no physiology and the only physical study was astronomy.[293] Such

PEASHILL
The Chancel of St. Edward’s Church is seen behind the stalls in
the roadway, and the Tower of Great St. Mary’s in the distance.
On the right is the Old Bell Inn and the old town pump is in the
foreground.

was the state of affairs two or three decades before the creation, in 1851, of
a tripos which included physiology, comparative anatomy, chemistry,
geology, botany, and mineralogy. The examination now comprises papers in
8 subjects, and is divided into two parts: chemistry, physics, mineralogy,
geology, botany, zoology and comparative anatomy, human anatomy, and
physiology. In the second part the last paper is upon human anatomy and
vertebrate comparative anatomy. Cambridge owes its present prominent
position as a teacher in the scientific world to the remarkable development
of its scientific laboratories and equipment. For the purposes of the natural
sciences tripos it possesses some of the finest laboratories and museums in
the kingdom. The great Cavendish laboratory was built in 1874, the
chemical in 1887, the engineering in 1894-9, the new medical school in
1904 with the museum of geology, while the same year saw the erection of
the most complete botanical laboratory in England. Cambridge therefore

which is “the most ancient scientific school in the country” is also among
the best equipped.
The study of
Within a century of the decay of Norman French in England, a
modern knowledge of modern languages began to assume value.
languages.
Throughout the Tudor epoch it was those ecclesiastics and
lawyers who were also linguists to whom the diplomatic posts and the
secretaryships of state were entrusted. Latin did not cease to be the common
official medium, but the growth of national dialects gave to a knowledge of
these the importance which they must always possess for the diplomat and
the trader. “Esperanto” will not take its place until nothing is spoken
anywhere but Esperanto.
Some progress was made in these studies in both the universities in the
xvi century:—“Petrarch and Boccace in every man’s mouth—the French
and Italian highly regarded: the Latin and Greek but lightly,” writes Gabriel
Harvey to Spenser: but the xixth opened at Cambridge barren of anything
linguistic, ancient or modern, eastern or western, except the uncouth Latin
of the schools.[294] The first languages tripos was formed in 1878 for the
Semitic languages; the Indian languages tripos (1879) now forms part, with
the Semitic tripos, of the Oriental languages tripos created in 1895. In 1886
the “medieval and modern languages” tripos came into being.
The complete list of Cambridge triposes with the date of their
List of the
triposes. introduction is as follows:—(1) Mathematical 1747.[295] (2)
Classical 1822. (3) Moral Sciences 1851. (4) Natural Sciences
1851. (5) Law 1858.[296] (6) Theological 1874. (7) Historical 1875.[297] (8)
Medieval and Modern Languages 1886. (9) Mechanical Sciences 1894. (10)
Oriental Languages 1895. (11) Economics 1903.
The value of the tests to which degrees have been attached in
Changing
value of the past has varied considerably, and the same is true of the
examination
tests. present. The M.A. degree in the xvi and following century was
obtained with little or no examination; the disputations, as we
have seen, were often idle forms, but the improvement in methods dates
from 1680 when the proctors were replaced by moderators as overseers in
the sophisters’ school. Fifty years later the building of the Senate House
opened the new era, and the next twenty years (1730-50) saw rapid
progress; so that the Cambridge degree was still something better than the
Oxford when at the end of that century aspirants for degrees at both

universities were adequately described as “term-trotters.”[298] The
conspicuous university learning of the xvii century was untested and
unstimulated by any adequate examination test; but earlier still the sheer
number of years passed at a university must have had a value which is now
lost. Seven years was the rule at Cambridge in the xv, xvi and xvii
centuries, and the early history of the oldest of Cambridge colleges shows
us the Peterhouse students residing all the year round.[299] Nowadays the
standards of the honour and “poll” degree[300] are so wide apart that the
terms bachelors and masters of arts applied equally to all degree work, are
misleading. “He only wanted to take his degree, he did not work much”
someone said to me a short time ago, and one felt one knew that degree.
The honours class standard is also variable, and “a good year” raises the
first class standard unduly.
The condition which characterised Cambridge studies before
The double
tripos. 1850 was that the mathematical tripos was obligatory on all
candidates for honours. Between 1823 therefore and 1850 every
classic was obliged to pass in one of the three classes of the mathematical
tripos—he had, that is, to satisfy the examiners in two triposes. The results
were often curious. Men like Macaulay, who became fellows of their
college, were “ploughed” in the tripos, and professors of classics wrote M.A.
after their names in virtue of a “poll” degree. The native repugnance to
mathematical method in some men’s minds was constantly shown and at all
stages of the university curriculum; Stratford Canning was “sorely puzzled”
and indeed “in an agony of despair” over the study for which he was a
“volunteer” at King’s, and Gray refused to graduate rather than pursue it.
On the other hand the Cambridge “double first” meant a degree unrivalled
in any part of the world.[301]

OLD HOUSES NEAR ST. EDWARD’S CHURCH AND ST.
EDWARD’S PASSAGE
This Passage leads from the Market into King’s Parade. Part of
the South side of St. Edward’s Church is seen on the right. The
Reformers Bilney, Barnes, and Latimer preached here. The three
Tuns Inn, praised by Pepys for its good liquor, formerly stood in
this passage.

The present conditions for obtaining the B.A. degree are (a) residence for
nine terms within the precincts of the university[302] (b) satisfying the
examiners in one of the examinations, or groups of examinations to which a
degree is attached. One may satisfy them in one of four ways: (1) by
reading for and obtaining ‘honours’[303] (2) by taking the Previous, General,
and Special examinations of the ordinary degree[304] (3) by being ‘allowed
the ordinary degree,’ which may happen when a man fails to be placed in
any class of a tripos, but when his work is allowed to count as tantamount
to the examinations of the ordinary degree. (4) by being “excused the
General,” which happens when a man has failed in the tripos examination,
but his work is counted as putting him half way towards the ordinary
degree. The aegrotat is a fifth way. If a man who has read for honours or for
the ordinary degree falls sick, he is allowed to answer one or two of the

examination papers only, and if he shows adequate knowledge of these is
granted a degree, but is not placed in any class.[305]
There have been frequent changes and regroupings in all the
examinations described, and other reforms are in contemplation. In 1850
the Universities Commission led to radical changes at both universities. It is
now proposed to simplify greatly Part I. of the mathematical tripos, placing
the candidates in divisions in alphabetical order, and thus abolishing the
senior wrangler.[306] This classification is the rule in the second parts of all
the large triposes, all of which have been divided since their formation. The
abolition of compulsory Greek in the Previous Examination is bruited and
re-bruited, but for the moment the question has been set at rest (May 1906)
by a decided negative vote of the senate.
The method of tuition at Cambridge consists of the lecture, the
The lecture
and class. class, the weekly paper, and the examinations. “Reading” has,
naturally, taken the place of oral teaching to a large extent, but the
lecture still holds its place in the university. In the view of many of the
seniors that place is still too large a one: the lecture at which copious (often
verbatim) notes are taken is, no doubt, in many instances thrown away,
especially in those subjects in which the lecturer simply goes over ground
covered by the existing text-books. The class permits of lecturer and student
discussing difficulties, and here the college tutor’s rôle is also of first
importance;[307] the weekly paper (usually a “time paper,” to be answered in
three hours) tests progress in the subject, and teaches a man how to “write
down what he knows,” and to do so in a certain given time.
There was no salaried professorship in the university until
Professorshi
ps. Lady Margaret founded her chair of divinity in 1502. Before this,
tuition in each faculty had been assigned to its doctors, the tuition
in arts was left in the hands of the masters of arts. The next three
professorships to be founded were also in the 3 faculties: the Regius of
Divinity by the king in 1540, the Regius of Civil Law in the same year, and
the Regius of Physic.[308] Henry also founded Regius professorships of
Hebrew and Greek. In 1632 Sir T. Adams founded the Arabic, and in 1663,
Henry Lucas, M.P. for the university, the Lucasian of Mathematics; the
Knightbridge of Moral Philosophy was founded by a fellow of Peterhouse
in 1683. Between that date and 1899 (when the professorship of Agriculture
was founded) 35 professorships have been endowed, 16 of which are in
natural sciences and medicine, 5 for languages, 4 for history and

archæology, 2 more for law, 1 for mental philosophy and logic, and 3 more
for divinity, one of which, the Norrisian, is tenable, and is now held by a
layman. Fisher and Erasmus were the first holders of the Lady Margaret
professorship, and Selwyn, Lightfoot, and Hort held it between the years
1855 and 1892. Bentley and Westcott held the Regius professorship (1717,
1870). Sir T. Smith was the first to hold the Regius of Civil Law, which was
also held by Walter Haddon, and by Sir Henry Maine when he was twenty-
five years old, Glisson of Caius was one of the distinguished holders of the
Regius of Physic (1636), Metcalfe of S. John’s and Cudworth both held the
Hebrew professorship, Sir J. Cheke was the first to sit in the chair of Greek
following on three such great predecessors and professors of Greek at
Cambridge as Erasmus, Croke, and Sir Thomas Smith. Isaac Barrow
(1660), Porson (1792) and Sir R. C. Jebb (1889-1906), all Trinity men, have
also held it. The Lucasian of Mathematics was held by Barrow, then by
Isaac Newton, then by his deputy Whiston of Clare, then by Sanderson of
Christ’s, and the chair was filled in the xix century by Airy and Sir George
Stokes. Roger Cotes was the first to hold the Plumian of Astronomy (1707)
founded three years previously by the Archdeacon of Rochester, who
endowed it with an estate at Balsham. Professor Adams, the discoverer of
Neptune, held the Lowndean of Astronomy and Geometry (1858-1892).
The Regius of Modern History (George I. 1724)[309] was held by the poet
Gray, by Sir J. Stephen, Charles Kingsley, Sir J. Seeley, and Lord Acton: the
Cavendish professorship of Experimental Physics (founded by Grace of the
Senate 1871) was first filled by Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh; F. W.
Maitland (ob. Dec. 1906) held the Downing of Law; and the new Quick
professorship of biology has just been offered to an American graduate.[310]
Next in dignity to professors are the Readers in the different subjects,
who act as a sort of suffragans and assistants to professors; and next to these
come the lecturers in branches of knowledge which range from comparative
philology to electrical engineering, from medical jurisprudence to
ethnology.[311]
The Pope was the fountain of graduate honour in the middle
Lambeth
degrees and ages and conferred degrees in all the faculties, and he does so
degrees by
royal still. Doctors and masters from Rome would receive
mandate.

MARKET STREET AND HOLY TRINITY CHURCH
In this picture Holy Trinity Church (of which Charles Simeon was
incumbent) with its spire may be seen on the left. The cool grey
building in the middle of the picture is the Henry Martyn Hall, a
modern structure. In the distance is seen the Tower and North side
of Great St. Mary’s.

incorporation at Cambridge, and Englishmen without a degree would be
given, on occasion, a degree by the Pope.[312] The general statute of Henry
VIII. conveying
to the primate all licences and dispensations which had
A.D. 1534.
heretofore “been accustomed to be had and obtained from
Rome,” transferred the faculty of conferring degrees in England from the
Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury. This faculty had, until the date of the
statute, formed part and parcel of the legatine powers, and had been
exercised as such by Wolsey. It was among the more important powers
transferred under the statute, relating to licences of the taxable sum of £4
and over, and required confirmation by Letters Patent under the great seal,
or enrolment in Chancery. The right was exercised by successive
archbishops, and every faculty so granted rehearsed the authority of
parliament by which authority the said power was now vested in the see of

Canterbury. In the reign of George I. the power was for the first time
disputed. The then Bishop of Chester refused to induct a Lambeth B.D. and a
law suit followed, as a result of
which a prescriptive and statutable right was made out for the
A.D. 1722.
practice. The matter was then carried by appeal to the King’s
Bench and decided in favour of the archbishop, three years later, in 1725.
From the accession of Charles II. till the end of the century
A.D. 1660-1700.
the usual recipients were members of one or other of the
universities, and when this was not the case incorporation in Cambridge
university was granted with the proviso that no precedent was thereby
created. Between 1539, when Cranmer created a D.D., and the accession of
Charles II., only seven instances of archi-episcopal degrees are recorded.
[313] Over 450 were conferred between 1660 and 1848, and some 334 have
been conferred since.[314] A Cantabrigian primate confers the Cambridge
hood, an Oxonian the Oxford. There have been many instances of the
incorporation of men who were recipients of the ‘Lambeth degree’ in one or
other of the colleges. The Lambeth M.A. does not include membership of the
Senate or of Convocation.[315]
During Stuart times there were several examples of the conferring of
degrees by royal mandate; a custom commuted to the now traditional
compliment, when a sovereign or prince receives a degree, of conferring
degrees on any persons he may wish associated with him in the honour.
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whose studies at Cambridge were interrupted
by diplomatic missions, was created M.A. by royal mandate.
Ad eundem degrees, admitting a graduate to the same degree
Ad eundem.
which he already enjoys elsewhere, are granted by all
universities; but such degrees are no longer granted at Cambridge as a
simple right.[316]
The university confers other “complete” or “titular” degrees on
Honorary
degrees, and certain persons who have not qualified for them by residence and
the idea of a
university. examination at Cambridge. A list of those on whom this honour
has been bestowed since 1859 is printed in the Cambridge
Calendar. The complete degrees are conferrable upon members of the royal
family, privy councillors, bishops and bishops designate, peers,[317] the
judges of the High Court, the deans of Westminster, of the chapel royal
Windsor, and of Cathedral churches; and also upon heads of colleges in the

university, and other distinguished persons who already have a Cambridge
degree and are either conspicuous for merit or holders of university office.
Titular degrees may be conferred on Englishmen or foreigners of
conspicuous merit.
A propos of a recent list of ‘birthday honours’ a weekly literary
newspaper reminded us “that commerce, politics, and retired generals are
not the only vitalizing forces in this country”; it blamed a public which it
described as “increasingly illiterate and sheepish,” and adjured the
universities to make no “concessions to popular prejudice” but “to confine
the honours they are able to give to those who deserve them.” It is in fact
ludicrous and absurd that the universities should be expected to come in
with their blessing in cases of non-academic success, and that degrees
should be mere acclamations of popular verdicts. The public should have
every reason to regard these as the blue riband of academic attainment in
contrast with the attainments of successful ignorance or successful
vulgarity, or indeed with all those kinds of success which are sufficiently
rewarded by the vox populi, and in other ways. It is expected that a
university should set a limit to the assumption that every good and perfect
thing is at the beck and call of the mere plutocrat, and should confer its
honours and seat in its rectorial chairs only those persons who present
academic qualifications. When one sees with what punctilious assiduity
every mark and brand of tradesman and tradesmen’s interests receives
recognition nowadays, one turns with anxiety to the Cambridge list of
honorary degree men. The university’s awards have not yet however been
assigned to people who have grown rich on “Trusts,” business ‘slimness,’ or
industries like the canned meat industry; whose title to recognition is that
they have been successful speculators. How very nice it would be if instead
of installing gasometers in the leper colonies or sending the latest pattern of
trichord overstrung grand piano to the deaf and dumb schools of Europe
and America, some rich man, with a less pretty taste for publicity, should
endow the university with a million pounds

GREAT ST. MARY’S, FROM TRINITY STREET
Here we only get a glimpse of the Tower of the Church with King’s
Parade in the distance. In the foreground on the right is Caius
College.

sterling! Should he be the recipient of an honorary degree? Would it not be
churlish to refuse it? If anything could increase one’s respect for the
benefactor it would be his refusal of this kind of recognition of his services.
However there is no harm in very occasional exceptions, because these
shout the exceptional circumstances and confuse no one. It is different
altogether when to create an honorary degree list Mr. Anybody and Mr.
Nobody are called upon to step up. It seems a simple programme that
periods marked by dearth in merit should also be marked by dearth of
awards, but when did a simple programme ever prove attractive from the
days of Naaman downwards?
When we say that neither the elementary nor the advanced studies of a
university exist simply with a view to providing the members of the
community with a profession or the means of making their living, we say
what is a little less obvious, and trench on ground which is hotly debated.
Thousands upon thousands, it may be urged, have always gone to a

university to learn a profession, and thousands who have not had this end in
view have yet gone up there with no intention of acquiring learning. The
university has always prepared for the professions, why not for the
industries; why should it not comprise technical colleges? Hitherto,
however, the universities have prepared men for the learned professions,
and there is a difference between learning philosophy, theology, biblical
exegesis, jurisprudence and political philosophy, or physiology and
comparative anatomy for the purposes of a life profession, and learning
agriculture, forestry, military tactics, or mining engineering. The growth of
great branches of industry has however been as great as the growth of
knowledge and the sciences; the conditions of modern life are entirely and
altogether changed, competition extends far beyond the industrial world, to
the universities themselves, and to the struggle for existence of knowledge
for its own sake. Without supposing that this last condition will be
permanent, one may still think that the universities could not refuse to teach
what are called “the modern subjects,” which means industries like
scientific agriculture or electrical engineering that have more money in
them than the professions. In a way, too, it is only a turning of the tables;
when the learned professions were studied it was because they promised the
profitable careers.
It need not by any means be competition which urges the university to
undertake the ‘modern subjects’; it may be, and it is, the persuasion that its
rôle does not end with creating a career, that a university possesses
advantages extrinsic to the degree taken, or even the work done at it. The
truth perhaps is that the present conditions of life afford an object to
universities as far-reaching as has ever been allotted to them since their
foundation. In these days of haste, and unchewed cuds of learning, they can
suggest the value of leisure—and when a man is now sent to Cambridge or
Oxford this fact alone is some security that he and his are content not to put
haste and quick results above and before everything else. The lazy man we
have always with us, the man in a hurry is a modern product, and suffers
from a modern disease with which a university is better able, by latent
influence and tradition, to deal than any other institution. And when it has
taught the value of intellectual digestion, the number of those things which
can only be well learnt by being gradually learnt, and in due season, has the
university nothing more to teach? Our modern malady of haste, of quick
methods, and quick results has a commercial basis, a certain standard of

values and returns which is best so described. The academic spirit is the
antagonist of this spirit, of the love of publicity, the self-advertisement, the
liking for cheap and unearned rewards. Even as a business maxim it is
being preached again that work done for its own sake is the only lasting
work. The university may be a bulwark against false values in life, against
the restlessness which is confounded with action, the constant change which
is not the same thing as adaptation, against the prejudice that certain good
things are not always and everywhere ends in themselves. And there is
another conspicuous service which a university can perform. The
commercial standard is the root of our social vulgarity, and the academic
life has been in all ages that ‘simple life’ of which we hear so much. It is not
necessary for generations of Englishmen to grow up to regard ‘poverty as a
crime,’ or to subscribe to the worship of mere prosperity and success. A
university may always be a protest against these and other mental
vulgarities, against even that debasing of the good coin of the King’s
English in which Milton saw the incipient undoing of a nation. What better
place for combating the last ridiculous refuge of English mauvaise honte—
the shamefacedness which prefers to speak one’s own language incorrectly?
Something every man at least who reads for a tripos must learn about the
uses of work, about its respect, something about breadth of view and
accuracy of detail—and also about the legitimate support which such work
is in life. It will be said that a man’s personal character and his home life
inculcate all these things and give him the means to meet the shafts of
outrageous fortune. But what the university can give him which his own
personal character and probably his home surroundings cannot, is the way
to set about making of learning a possession for ever. Some nice person said
“mathematics is such a consolation in affliction,” and there is much to be
said for the point of view.
A university can teach these things because, unlike technical colleges or
seminaries for the professions, it exists first and foremost for the
advancement of learning. Traditionally inseparable from this is its other
object—education; and together they provide the tests it applies to all such
questions as ‘how far it shall adapt itself to a commercial standard.’ For a
university is not only a place of higher studies, it is the nursery of study;
and to instil the love of learning for its own sake will always be required of
it. In the words of Elizabeth of Clare: “When skill in learning has been
found, it sends out disciples who have tasted its sweetness.” In the last

resort universities must stand for these things; the day when they cease to
do so the idea of a university will have oozed out of them. Like all good
things the university will bring forth from its treasure things new and old.
We shall not look for degrees in cricket, but there may be degrees in
agriculture, degrees in engineering, degrees in forestry. Why not, if a degree
signifies a diploma of competence? But there should be degrees and
degrees. There should be licentiates in the technical arts by the side of
bachelors and masters in the liberal arts: the university must claim to mete
with its own measure, and to teach its own lesson to all sorts of men. Hinc
lucem et pocula sacra——

CHAPTER IV

COLLEGIATE AND SOCIAL LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY

University and college officers:—chancellor and vice-chancellor—the senate—graces—
proctors—bedells—the master of a college—the vice-master or president—the fellows—
unmarried and married fellows—the combination room—dons’ clubs—‘Hobson’s choice’—
the dons of last century—classes of students:—scholar—pensioner—fellow-commoner—sizar
—age of scholars—privileges of peers—position of the sizar—college quarters and expenses
—‘non-colls’—early discipline—jurisdiction of the university in the town—present
discipline:—the proctors—fines—‘halls’—‘chapels’—town lodgings—expulsion—
rustication—‘gates’—the tutor—academical dress—cap and gown—the undergraduates’ day
—the gyp—the college kitchen—‘hall’—‘wines’—teas—the May term—idleness—rioting—
modern studies and tripos entries—athletics—the Union Society—Sunday at Cambridge—
scarlet days—academic terms and the long vacation—multiplication of scholarships—class
from which the academic population has been drawn and careers of university men:—the
Church—the rise of an opulent middle class—the aristocratic era—English conception of the
benefits of a university—examples of the classes from which the men have come—recruiting
grounds of the university—popularity of colleges—numbers in the colleges—religion at
Cambridge—Cambridge politics—university settlement at Camberwell—married dons and
future changes.

WE have seen that it is of the essence of a university that it should be both a
learned and a learning body, and that from the first the academic group
consisted of “masters” or licensed teachers, and of scholars maintained on
the college foundations. Contemporaneously with the growth of the college
we find at the head of the university a chancellor, and at the head of the
college its principal or “Master.”[318]
A chancellor was originally a cathedral officer whose business
The
chancellor. it was to grant licences to teach.[319] His connexion with schools
of learning seems to be due entirely to the authority which
diocesans exercised in the granting of these licences, especially in the
faculties of theology and canon law. It is then as a bishop’s officer that he
makes his appearance at our universities; at Cambridge as the local officer
of the Bishop of Ely, at Oxford as the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln.
“The chancellor and masters” of the university of Cambridge are first heard
of together in Balsham’s rescript, in the year 1276;[320] but Henry III.’s
letter to the university written six years earlier is addressed to A.D. 1275-6.
“the masters and scholars of Cambridge university.” It may
A.D. 1270.
then be assumed that before this date the chancellor was still

an episcopal emissary rather than an academic chief, but that from about
this time he began to be chosen by themselves from among the regent-
masters of the university, although with the approval of the Bishop of Ely.
This approval was not dispensed with until in 1396 a member of the noble
family of Zouche became chancellor; and the chancellor’s independence of
the Bishop of Ely for confirmation of his title was made absolute by
Boniface IX. six years later.
A.D. 1402.

The office was annual. The same man, however,
Vice- was often appointed again and again, and Guy de Zouche himself
chancellor.
had been chancellor in 1379 and again in 1382. Bishop Fisher
who retained the chancellorship until his death in 1534 was the first
chancellor appointed for life.[321] As soon as it became customary to elect as
chancellor of the university some personage who would be able to represent
its interests in the world outside, a vice-chancellor performed all those
functions which before fell to the chancellor, and the position and functions
of the present vice-chancellor are exactly equal to those of the old academic
chancellor.[322] The first political chancellor succeeded the greatest of what,
for distinction, I have called the academic chancellors of the university.
Thomas Cromwell took the post left vacant by Fisher’s martyrdom and held
it till his own downfall in 1540. The chancellorship is now held by the
owner of a traditional Cambridge name, Spencer Cavendish 8th duke of
Devonshire.
The chancellor is appointed “for two years” or such further time “as the
tacit consent of the university permits.” Under this proviso the appointment
is practically for life. The vice-chancellor is appointed from among the
heads of houses, and the office is annual. In each case the appointment is in
the hands of the senate, or legislative body of the university which consists
of all resident masters of arts and of those non-resident M.A.’s who have kept
their names upon the university register.
The meetings of the senate take place in the Senate House and
Senate and
graces. are called congregations. In these, degrees are conferred and
“graces” are considered; a “grace” being the name for all acts of
the senate, or motions proposed for its acceptance.
Resident members of the senate form the “electoral roll,” and elect the
council.[323] Lastly the executive body consists of the chancellor, the high
steward,[324] the vice-chancellor, a commissary appointed by the chancellor,

and the sex viri who adjudicate on all matters affecting the senior members
of the university, are elected “by grace of the senate,” and hold their office
for two years.
The university has sent two members to parliament since A.D. 1603.
the first year of James I. The exercise of the parliamentary
suffrage belongs to the whole senate and is the one exception to the rule
which obliges every member to record his vote personally in the Senate
House.[325] The total number of members of the senate is 7192; the total
number of members of the university is 13,819, this latter including all
bachelors of arts and undergraduates in residence, and all B.A.’s whose
names are on the books pending their proceeding to the degree of M.A.
After the vice-chancellor no officers are so much in evidence
Proctors.
as the proctors. Their duties are twofold: they conduct the
congregations of the senate, and they maintain discipline among the
undergraduates. There are 2 proctors elected annually, to whom are joined 2
pro-proctors, and 2 additional pro-proctors. The pro-proctors have not the
standing of the proctors as university officials, but they exercise the same
authority over the men.[326] Other executive officers are the public orator,
who is “the voice of the senate”[327]; the university librarian, the registrary,
the university marshal (appointed by the vice-chancellor) and the bedells.
If the proctor is the procurator of the academic society, the
Bedell.
bedell is the executor of its mandates. The bedells attend the
(chancellor or) vice-chancellor on all public occasions, bearing silver
maces, and, like the beadles of all guilds and corporations, they summon
members of the senate to the chancellor’s court.[328] For bedel or bedell is
an obsolete form of beadle retained in the ancient corporations of Oxford
and Cambridge. As a town or parish officer the beadle brought messages
and executed the mandates of the town or parish authority. The apparitor of
a trades guild was also called a “bedel,” and it is, no doubt, as a guild
officer that he appears in our universities and has taken so firm a footing
there.
The bedell was the servant of a faculty, and also of a “nation” in the
continental universities: hence at Cambridge one was the bedell of theology
and canon law, the other of arts. They arranged and announced the day and
hour of lectures. For many centuries Cambridge had an esquire and a
yeoman bedell; but the latter was abolished in 1858. Apparently the yeoman

bedell was not a member of the university, and he may have been a
townsman.[329] The two esquire bedells of the present day are nominated by
the council of the senate, and elected by the latter body.[330]
Distinct from the university authorities are the college
The Master.
authorities. The foremost of these is the Master of each college.
This officer used to be primus inter pares, the senior among the fellows or
teaching body of his house. The change to the later “splendid isolation” of
the “Head” is expressed architecturally in the relative positions of the
Master’s lodging, as we can see it to-day in the old court of Corpus—the
simple room leading to the dining hall and the college garden with a garret
bedroom above it—and the palatial dwellings which in one or two of the
colleges no longer form part of the main buildings. It is one which has a
curious chronological parallel with the change that took place in the relative
positions of a cathedral dean and chapter after the Reformation. The old
college Master, like the old university chancellor, and the cathedral dean,
was, officially and residentially, part and parcel of the body he represented.
After the Reformation all these positions were shifted. The college Master
became in appearance, what the cathedral dean had become in fact, “a
corporation sole,” while the university chancellor was translated to supra-
academic spheres, and no longer resided even in the university city. “Sixty
years since,” writes a present member of the university, “society at
Cambridge was divided broadly into two classes—those who were Heads
and those who were not.” Ludicrous stories are told of the pride which
inflated “the Heads,” who at times resented being accosted not only by the
inferior undergraduate but by the fellows of their own college. The provost
of King’s of just a hundred years ago was referred to familiarly by his
irreverent juniors as ‘Tetoighty.’[331]
Heads of colleges have not only the statutory powers conferred on them
by their college, but as assessors to the vice-chancellor they join with him
in the government of the university. Their powers were largely increased by
the statutes of 1570 which Whitgift procured from Elizabeth; and in 1586-7
it was decided that the vice-chancellor should always be chosen from their
number.[332] The modern “Head” emulates the old academic Master, is
primus inter pares amongst his fellow collegians, and is no longer dreadful
to his juniors.
There are only two exceptions to the title of Master held by all heads of
colleges. The head of King’s College, like the head of Eton, is styled

Provost, and the head of Queens’ College is styled President.[333]
The vice-master is called the president. His position is like that of a prior
under an abbot, or a subprior in a priory: the one representing the college
outside and ruling over the community, the other ruling in the house and
having the authority in all which concerns its management.
With the Master and vice-Master are associated the fellows, the dean, the
tutors, lecturers, chaplains, and the bursar.[334]

THE LAKE IN BOTANIC GARDENS
Many different kinds of trees surround this winding water, the
banks of which are lined with a variety of rushes and reeds, and
are inhabited by many sorts of water-fowl.

“I can never remember the time when it was not diligently
Fellows.
impressed upon me that, if I minded my syntax, I might
eventually hope to reach a position which would give me three hundred
pounds a year, a stable for my horse, six dozen of audit ale every Christmas,
a loaf and two pats of butter every morning, and a good dinner for nothing,
with as many almonds and raisins as I could eat at dessert,” writes
Trevelyan in his “Life and Letters” of Macaulay whose appreciation of a
Cambridge fellowship fell nothing short of reverence.
The fellows are the foundation graduates, as the scholars are the
foundation undergraduates of a college. They are more; they are,
corporately, its masters and owners. Financially, a fellowship is represented

by the dividend on the surplus revenue of a college.[335] As this surplus
revenue varies while the fellows are a fixed number, the value of
fellowships varies, but may not now exceed £250 a year. A fellow enjoys as
a rule other emoluments, as tutor, lecturer, librarian, bursar, of his college,
so that his pecuniary position is by no means represented by the value of the
simple fellowship. All fellowships are now bestowed for a term of years;
life fellowships being held by those only who are on the staff of their
college, who have served it, that is, in a tutorial or other official capacity.
Until the last quarter of the xix century fellows had to be
Married and
unmarried bachelors. The rule against married officials was first relaxed,
fellows.
after the Reformation, in favour of heads of houses; Dr. Heynes,
President of Queens’ in 1529, having been the first married Master.[336]
Fifty years later the fellows of King’s complained that the wife of their
provost had been seen taking the air on the sacred grass of the college court,
where, nevertheless, her husband declared she could not have set her foot
twice in her life. Early in George III.’s reign a movement was afoot among
the fellows of a different character: in 1766 Betham of King’s writes to
Cole that the university had been in a most violent flame: “young and old
have formed a resolution of marrying”; “the scheme is—a wife and a
fellowship with her.” In the “sixties” certain colleges began to admit
married fellows, while in others a fellow might marry if he held university
office, as professor or librarian. No fellowship nowadays is confined to
unmarried men.
This is one of three radical changes which the university has undergone
in the last thirty years. The abolition of the Religious Test Act which
severed the strict connexion of our universities with the Church of England,
the marriage of fellows, and the appointment of men not in clerical orders
to fill the chief university and college offices, have gradually changed the
face of university life, secularising it and socialising it, bestowing on it,
definitely, a lay and undenominational character which is perhaps not so far
from its primitive ideal as sticklers for the connexion of the universities
with the Church would have us believe. It is no longer an advantage to be in
orders at Cambridge: they do not help you to a fellowship for this is given
to the best man in open competition; even heads of colleges need no longer
be clergymen, and only one collegiate office, that of the dean, is still
preferably bestowed on a parson. The results are curious. Clerical fellows
are popular, but theology is a neglected subject in the big colleges and the

theological chairs are not centres of influence. At the same time every
college enjoys clerical patronage, which can be exercised in favour of its
deserving sons; and every college, besides its dean, appoints chaplains for
the maintenance of the chapel services.[337] Clerical fellows, it is true, are
now in a minority, but there seems to be no reason why the clerical don
should cease to abound, as he has always abounded, in our university cities.
A university education has become more not less valuable for a clergyman
now that it enables him to meet men whose beliefs differ widely from his
own; now that the right to display an academic hood in church is no longer
prized as its chief advantage.[338]
Among the ‘dons’ the centre of social life has always been the
The
combination combination room. It represents that pledge of civilisation the
room.
with-drawing-room, the room contiguous to the banqueting-hall,
where the pleasures of the spirit steal an advantage over the pleasures of the
table. The rudeness which marked the period of the early renascence, from
court to convent, in England, clung also to our academic life, and it is not
till the last quarter of the xvi century that we find the fellows first provided
with table napkins, and learn that the enterprising college which made the
innovation exacted a fine of a penny from those who continued to wipe
their fingers on the tablecloth. The temptation to this latter practice must
indeed have been great; for the fork which made its appearance at the dawn
of the renascence in France was unknown in England two hundred years
later. It is only in the course of the next, the xviith, century that the
combination room emerges as a more or less luxurious apartment; the
subsequent addition of newspapers, magazines, and easy chairs marking in
turn the rise of journalism and the higher standard of comfort. The dons of
Charles II.’s time who had to be content with the “London Gazette”
supplemented the lack of news by social clubs. “The Ugly Faces” club
dined periodically in what was then the ugliest of college halls—Clare.
“The Old Maids’ Club” flourished in the early xix century, with Baker the
antiquary, Tonstall, and Conyers Middleton as members. The first “news
letter” was however laid on the table of Kirk’s coffee-house in Charles’s
reign. The first flying-coach, following the example of Oxford which had
run a coach to London in one day, sped to the Capital in 1671.[339]
When the xix century opened there was no general society in
Cambridge. It was more out of the way of polite England than Oxford, and
many dons whose homes were at a distance spent the whole year in their

colleges, emphasising the faults and therefore detracting from the virtues of
small learned societies. The dons in the xvi century, say at S. John’s
College, had been a brilliant company who bestowed as much on the
Elizabethan age as they took from it: but the xviii century closed upon a
period of dulness and reaction, in which the rudeness of material
civilisation met a social uncouthness little calculated to recall the university
of Spenser, of Burleigh, of Bacon. The intimacy between the fellows and
their head was a thing of the past; the familiarity between scholar and don
had been replaced by “donnishness” which kept the undergraduate at arm’s
length; the blight of the artificial and stilted, the sterile and pompous
aristocratism of just a century ago had settled down upon the university.
Isolated in this eastern corner of England, just before the enormous impulse
to travelling brought by railways, just after the cosmopolitan spirit which
took even the Englishman abroad—the sense of a debt to Italy, of a
continental comradeship—had finally ceased to exist, Cambridge dons at
the dawn of the xix century had perhaps fathomed the lowest social depths.
But before this century passed a social change more wonderful than the
material changes around them metamorphosed university society. The
unmannerly don married; and the sex which makes society, the sex which
suffers no social deterioration when left to its own devices—the aristocratic
sex—was introduced as the don’s helpmeet. More still—worse still—she
was introduced in the same quarter of a century as what the weak-kneed
among us cry out upon—his rival. It is the same donnish bachelor,
separated by a gulph from the social amenities, wedded to ingrained habits
and some eradicable prejudices, who suffered women to come to
Cambridge and take what they could of the intellectual advantages he
himself enjoyed. The historian of the great movements of the age we live in
will record with interest this proof of the traditional open-mindedness
which has never deserted the Cantabrigian, which has never failed to
respond to the sacred dual claims of the age and the intellect.

PARKER’S PIECE
This large open space in the centre of Cambridge is one of the
Town’s playgrounds. In the distance is the Roman Catholic
Church, and the boundary wall of the Perse Grammar School, just
behind the trees on the left.

The learned body which congregates in the combination rooms
Classes of
students. is the ecclesia docens of the university; the learning body—the
ecclesia discens—includes all members of the university below
the degree of M.A., and is divided into four or five classes. The most
important of these from the academic point of view is the scholar, and for at
least two centuries after colleges were built the only resident students were
these students on the foundation.[340] To them were joined in course of time
the pensioners, youths who paid for their board and lodging, the class
which now makes up the great majority of undergraduates. Two other
classes were added. The peers and eldest sons of peers with other fellow-
commoners—a class which has fallen into practical desuetude but is not
obsolete—and the sizars. The peers enjoyed some privileges which would
not be coveted nowadays—they could make themselves conspicuous on all
occasions by their clothing, and they could take a degree without working
for it. The younger sons of peers and the richer undergraduates also messed
at the fellows’ table, and were therefore called “fellow-commoners”: the
advantages of this arrangement did not end with the better treatment in hall,
for the companionship of the fellows and seniors of his college must have
proved a welcome stimulus to an intelligent young man.[341] Lastly, there
were and are the “sizars,” the poorer students, not on the foundation of the
college, who pay smaller fees and receive their commons gratis.[342] The

sizar of fifty years ago used to wait on the fellows at dinner and dine off the
broken victuals, reinforced by fresh vegetables and pudding.
When Macaulay summed the advantages of a Cambridge fellowship he
omitted perhaps the chief, the college residence which like “the good
dinner” is to be had “for nothing.” Fellows and scholars receive their
college quarters gratis; but the rest of the undergraduate population pays for
its lodging. It is housed in its 17 colleges, the new hostels which are
springing up on all sides, and the licensed lodgings in the town. The cost of
the college bed and sitting room a term varies from £3 to three times this
sum. Service adds £2 or £3 a term. Small lodgings with service can be had
in the less good streets for £5-£7; good rooms from £8 to £10, while more
than £12 is only charged in the best positions, or near the big colleges. The
expense of college rooms is augmented by the prepayments for furniture
(the average valuation of the permanent furniture is £20, but the sum may
be as low as £10 or as high as £40), by the “caution money,” about £15,
returned at the end of the term of residence, the admission fee (varying with
the college from 6/8 to £5) and the matriculation fee £5. During residence
there is also an annual payment of £9-15 towards the upkeep of the college
and its servants, and the tuition fee, which covers all lectures in one’s own
college, and varies from £18 to £24 a year.
It was to obviate the necessity of paying these fees that the system of
non-collegiate students, familiarly called “non-colls,” was devised in 1869.
While the expenses of an undergraduate who is a member of a college
average about £165 a year, £60 in excess of this and £60 less representing
the higher scale of expenses on the one hand and the minimum on the other,
the undergraduate who lives in lodgings and is not a member of any college
can live for £78 a year (if he does not require “coaching” or private tuition
which costs about £9 a term) and it is just possible to take the B.A. degree
after a three years’ residence which has cost you at the rate of £55 a year.
Fifty years ago the minimum cost of living at Cambridge for a pensioner
was £150 and double this sum involved no extravagant outlay. A fellow-
commoner required £800 a year and could not live on less than £500. These
were the aristocratic days of English universities and they were in sharp
contrast to the time when scholars were poor, begged their way to and from
college, and were included among vagabonds in the statute of 1380 directed
against mendicancy. But the entertainment in those days was also widely
different. Two fellows shared not only a room but a bed, or a two-bedded

room would be shared by a fellow and two poor scholars. It was not till the
xvi century that each fellow had a bed to himself and a room to himself if
space permitted.[343] The dining hall was a comfortless room where rude
fare was served at a tresselled board to guests who sat upon wooden stools.
The conditions of the xiii and xiv centuries were not greatly bettered in the
xvth and xvith, and Erasmus found it hard to stomach the fare at Queens’
College at a time when the Cambridge ale appears to have been no
improvement on the “wine no better than vinegar” which came from the
surrounding vineyards.
The little lads who thronged the streets of Cambridge in the
Early
discipline. xiii century were under little or no discipline. They ran up debts
with the Jews, who had established themselves there in the
opening years of the previous century, fought the townsmen, and had few
duties to society beyond making their own beds, a work certainly performed
by university scholars in the xiii and xiv centuries and enjoined on the boys
of the famous schools founded in the xvth. It was this custom of doing your
own work, at least until you became an advanced student when the little
boys did it for you, which was the origin of “fagging” in our two most
ancient schools connected respectively with our two universities—Eton and
Winchester.[344] Even this amount of work, however, was not expected of
fellow-commoners in the xvi century, who frequently got out of hand,
though few of them have left us so delightful a reminder of their misdeeds
as the young Earl of Rutland has done in a letter to his mother who had
complained of his behaviour: “I do aseure your Ladyship that the cariage of
myselfe both towardes God and my booke, my comeliness in diet and
gesture, shall be such as your Ladyship shall hear and like well of.”
With the great era of college building in the succeeding century, the
founders’ statutes make their appearance; and in days when monks were
birched and nuns were slapped the college stocks held in durance vile the
fellow who had presumed to bathe in any stream or pool of Cambridgeshire,
while the college hall resounded to the strokes of the birch which visited the
scholar for the same offence. College discipline was supplemented by
university discipline, and the academic authorities shared legal powers with
the town authorities until recently. The jurisdiction of the university
extended not only to matters affecting its members, but to a conusance in
actions which affected the townsmen.[345] The last attempt to exercise the
right of imprisoning undesirable characters in the “Spinning House” was

made by the vice-chancellor in 1893; but the incarceration of a young
woman on this occasion caused so much indignation in the town that it led
to the final disallowance of all the vice-chancellor’s powers, in this
direction, which were waived by the university in 1894.
University discipline is in the hands of the vice-chancellor and
Present
discipline— his court,[346] and the proctors. College discipline in those of the
proctors, [347] and tutors. Two proctors perambulate the town every
fines, “hall,” dean
“chapels.”
night, each accompanied by two servants known to the
undergraduate as the proctor’s “bull-dogs.” They take the name of any
offending student and bring him up next morning if necessary before the
vice-chancellor. They can also send men back to their college or rooms,
enter lodgings, and exact fines. When the youth of 19 or 20 leaves the
higher forms of a public school and comes to the university, he is treated as
a man, and leads a man’s life guided by himself. But he becomes also a
member of a great society, existing for certain purposes. If he is a man, he is
a very young one; and if he guides his own life he has only just begun to do
so. He lives in his own house—for his college room, like the Englishman’s
dwelling, is his castle—but he must be at home by 10 p.m.
This is the first point of discipline. The gates of colleges and the outer
doors of lodgings are shut at 10, and any one who presents himself after that
hour, without his tutor’s permission, has his name taken by the college
porter, or by the lodging proprietor who acts in loco janitoris. He must also
dine in hall, if not every day at least five times in the week, which must
include Sunday. The third restriction on his liberty is (or at least was
originally) a care for his soul. The obligation to attend chapel so many times
a week resolves itself now into two attendances in the week and generally
two on Sunday. No means of enforcing this are however taken nowadays,
and the men are generally left free to judge for themselves in this respect,
though ‘moral suasion’ is exercised by the deans except in the case of
nonconformists and conscientious objectors. Fifty years ago 8 “chapels”
were expected; but if a pensioner kept 6 and a fellow-commoner 4, he was
left untroubled by his dean. In New England at the same epoch no less than
16 attendances at chapel every week were required, seven at unseasonable
hours; a burden which was tolerated with more cheerfulness by the New
Englander than were the 8 “chapels” by his Cambridge contemporary.
The licensing of all lodgings and places of entertainment[348]
Town
licences. to which undergraduates may go, is the hold which the university

Expulsion
“rustication” has over the town. Its sanctions for the undergraduate are fines
. “gating.” and expulsion; breaches of

TRINITY BRIDGE, KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL IN THE
DISTANCE
This is one of the many charming views on the Cam at “the Backs”
of the Colleges.

college rules being visited by “gating” and expulsion. A man can be
expelled for any cause which in the judgment of the university or the
college warrants it. If a man thus expelled from the university society
refuses “to go down”—to leave Cambridge—he cannot live in any licensed
lodging house in the town.[349] A man may also be sent down for a term,
which is called “rustication,” an epithet which suggests to him that he has
forfeited the society of men of polite learning. If a man misbehaves himself
he can be “gated,” i.e. the porter receives instructions not to let him out
after a certain hour—and it may be any hour the authorities choose to fix
and for any length of time.
The tutor.
The college tutor is the official who supervises the
undergraduate’s academic career. He advises him what subject to
read for, what examinations to take, what books to master. The career of a
mediocre man is often made and that of a first-rate man heightened by an
able tutor, and Cambridge has boasted some very great men in this capacity.
The mathematical genius of Newton was quickened by having for his tutor
Isaac Barrow; Whichcote of Emmanuel, Laughton of Clare, and Shilleto of

Trinity were eminent as tutors and “coaches”; and “coaching” supplements,
for a very backward or a very advanced student, the lectures of college and
university.[350]
The academic appearance of a university owes much to the
The cap and
gown. traditional cap and gown worn by all its members. A bonnet and
gown are very ancient appanages of the learned professions of
divinity law and medicine—they were the dignified apparel of doctors in
the three faculties. Short hose had not become fashionable when
universities sprang into existence, and the clerk or scholar even if he were
not destined for major was very usually in minor orders: the gown is
therefore a fitting distinction for those learned societies which have never
ceased their corporate existence, and have carried into modern times, as a
special dress, items of attire which like clerical vestments, the cassock, the
monastic habit, and the friar’s tunic were proper to the age which saw their
rise.
The distinctive features of academic dress are simply survivals of this
ordinary dress of the period: the ceremonial hood is the hood which was
worn in everyday life in the xiith the xiiith xivth and xvth centuries.[351] If
we had looked in at the priory church of Barnwell on a day when the
novices made their profession we should have seen each one enter dressed
in the black habit or gown, a cloak of fur, and the “amess[352] over his
head”: and when he walked out he was already vested with the capa nigra
of the canon. Here, then, we have all the elements of early academic dress;
the homely Gilbertine canons, so familiar in the Cambridge thoroughfares,
wore it in white; for it was the dress of the more respectable, the decently
clad, clergy and clerks as well as of those most respectable and regular
clergy, the canons. The dress of the better looked-after scholars on the
college foundations differed but little from this. No doubt the scholars of
Peterhouse habitually wore the clerical vestis talaris[353]—the gown to the
ankle—but the special item of academic attire adopted at Cambridge
appears to have been the capa nigra.[354] The majority of scholars in the
hostels and grammar schools observed no general rule as to costume,[355]
but the scholars of any standing wore the black cappa of the canon; and the
hood, lined with sheepskin or minever, was becoming—even in the xiv
century—the habitual, and therefore distinctive, dress of foundation
scholars when they “commenced” bachelor or master.[356] The hood indeed
was probably restricted to an academic use before this century closed, for

there is a statute of the year 1413 ordering hoods of kid or lambskin to be
worn. The incepting Cambridge bachelor,[357] then, wore a cappa, a fine
hood was gradually restricted to the master of arts.
The soft bonnets or caps—of doctors, bishops, jurists, canons—are
derivatives of the hood, as is the stiff cap—the biretta, as is the mitre itself.
The xviii century Cambridge student still wore a soft round cap, like that
worn to-day by the Italian university student and quite recently adopted in
France: but the Paduan doctors had adopted the stiff square cap in the xvi
century, and our own students revolted against the round cap in 1769, and
thereupon accomplished the feat which neither Archimedes “nor our
Newton” had attempted:

For all her scholars square the circle now.[358]

The chancellor of the university wears a black and gold robe. Scarlet is
the colour of the doctors’ gowns, as it still is of the papal doctors of divinity.
The physician of Chaucer’s time wore his furred scarlet gown, and scarlet
gowns and corner caps were worn by the Cambridge doctors when the
Cromwells entertained James I. on his way from the north in 1603.
The master wears a full-sleeved gown of stuff or silk; the bachelor’s
gown has two flowing bands hanging loose in front; the undergraduate’s
gown is both scantier and shorter than these; but ‘Advanced Students’ wear
the bachelor’s gown, without the loose bands. The academic gown of
English universities is now black, but the earlier violet gown of Trinity is
recorded in the present blue gown of its undergraduates, a blue gown being
also worn by the neighbouring college of Gonville and Caius.[359] The
gowns of certain colleges are distinguished by little pleats in the stuff or
bars of velvet.
Peers and eldest sons of peers, in the first half of the xix century, wore
the black silk gown and tall silk hat of an M.A.,[360] and on great occasions a
more splendid dress adorned with gold tassels and lace. Fellow-commoners
wore a gown with gold or silver lace and a black velvet cap; the younger
sons of peers being known as “Hat-fellow-commoners” because they wore
the M.A.’s silk hat instead of the velvet cap.
Most of the pensioners at Cambridge in the xviii century (but not the
fellow-commoners) used to wear a sleeveless gown called a “curtain.”[361]
Neither the clerical cassock nor the capa nigra in fact account for the

undergraduate’s dress of later or present times; the original of which, I
think, is to be found in the sleeveless gown or coat, called soprana, of the
ecclesiastical colleges founded between the xv and xvii centuries. Two of
the peculiarities of the soprana are still traceable. The bands of the
bachelor’s gown may be seen attached to the black coat of the Almum
Collegium founded in 1457 by Cardinal Capranica, to the violet and black
dress worn by the Scotchmen,[362] to the red coat of the college founded by
Ignatius Loyola, and the blue of the Greek College founded by Gregory
XIII.; while one string, adorned with the papal arms, is left on the soprana
worn by the Vatican seminarists: these are leading strings, denoting the state
of pupilage.[363] The Cambridge scholar’s and bachelor’s gown is black—
the descendant of the full black cappa—but as we have just seen the coat or
gown of the ecclesiastical colleges is of different colours, and the ancient
gowns of Trinity and Caius still record this variation.
Every one in statu pupillari must wear cap and gown after nightfall, on
Sunday,[364] at examinations and lectures (except laboratory
demonstrations), when visiting the vice-chancellor or any other official on
academic business, in the library, the Senate House, and the university
church: professors and others usually wear the gown while lecturing, and all
dons wear it in chapel and hall.
A twentieth century undergraduates’ day does not differ from
The
undergradua those recorded in his diary by Wordsworth’s brother when he was
tes’ day.
a freshman at Trinity in 1793.[365] This is how he was employed
during the Reign of Terror and within a few days of the execution of Marie
Antoinette:—“Chapel. Lectures. Considered of a subject for my essay on
Wednesday se’nnight. Drank wine with Coleridge. Present the Society.
Chapel. Read ‘Morning Chronicle.’ Found in it an ode to Fortune, by
Coleridge, which I had seen at Rough’s yesterday. Read ratios and variable
quantities, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” It was indeed rather in
its outer than in its inner circumstance that the life even of the xiii and xiv
century undergraduate differed from that of the xxth. Then as now he
listened to doctors in their faculties and his own college seniors expounding
the mysteries of art and science; then, as now, he supplemented these
lectures with private reading, then, seated upon a wooden stool in a corner
of a crowded room, or in the college library, or best of all in the college
meadows; now, in a comfortable arm chair or stretched upon a sofa in his
private sitting room.[366] Then, as now, he caroused or discussed “the

universe” with his friends, as his nature suggested. Then, as now, he made
early acquaintance with the river Granta and knew each yard of the flat
roads round the university town. Even the periodical outbreak between
“town and gown” belongs as much to the xiii century as to the most recent
history in the xxth.[367]
Lectures take place in the morning, “coaching” and private study usually
in the late afternoon and evening. Two to four is the chosen time for
recreation, and the chief recreations of the Cantab used to be the road and
the river. The latter runs familiarly past the windows of his college rooms,
and invites him as he steps forth from the threshold of his college court.
Boating, swimming, or fishing, the student of a bye-gone day found in the
Granta a never-failing and an inexpensive resource. Cambridge fish as we
have seen has always been famous, and the Merton scholars poached upon
the townsmen’s fishing rights long before the xiii century was out.
“Your success in the Senate House” said a well-known tutor “depends
much on the care you take of the three-mile stone out of Cambridge. If you
go every day and see no one has taken it away, and go quite round it to
watch lest any one has damaged its farthest side, you will be best able to
read steadily all the time you are at Cambridge. If you neglect it, woe betide
your degree. Exercise, constant, and regular, and ample, is absolutely
essential to a reading man’s success.” And the reading men have taken the
lesson to heart. No roads until the era of bicycles were better tramped than
the flat Cambridge roads which lend themselves so well to this form of
recreation; pair after pair of men, tall and small, a big and a little together,
used to keep themselves informed as to their state of repair, or lose the
sense of space and time in discussions on the modern substitute for
“quiddity” and essentia, or the social and biological problems which are
newer even than these.
Once back in his college the persons on whom the undergraduate’s
comfort most depends are the college cook the bedmaker and the “gyp.”
The last calls him, brushes his clothes, prepares his breakfast, caters for
him, serves his luncheon, waits on him and his friends, and carries back and
forth the little twisted paper missives which, as an American noticed fifty
years ago, Cambridge undergraduates are perpetually exchanging. All these
services the gyp may have to perform for a number of other men. The only
woman servant is the “bedmaker” whose name sufficiently describes her
official business, but who for the great majority of modern students

discharges the functions of gyp. The college kitchen is a busy centre. Here
is prepared not only the hall dinner but all private breakfasts and luncheons
served in college rooms; and most of the college kitchens supply luncheons
and dinners to residents in the town if required. Dinner in hall costs from
one shilling and tenpence to two shillings and a penny, according to the
college; bread and butter called “commons” can be had from the buttery for
6d. a day; a breakfast dish at a cost of from 6d. to 1/; and at some college
halls a luncheon is served at a small fixed charge.[368]
A hundred years ago the undergraduate dressed for “hall” with white silk
stockings and pumps and white silk waistcoat. A few wore powder, the
others curled their hair, and he was a bucolic youth indeed who omitted at
least the curling. “Curled and powdered” the Cambridge scholar wore his
hair even in the xiv century provoking the indignation of primates and
founders. A hundred and fifty years ago beer was served for breakfast, and
only Gray and Walpole drank tea. Even fifty years ago the food was roughly
served and in an overcrowded hall. It was however abundant, and extras
like soup, confectionery, and cheese could be “sized for” i.e. brought you at
an extra charge. The food provided consisted of plain joints and vegetables,
with plenty of beer. The fellows’ table and the side tables of the bachelors
were better served.
“The wine,” the famous entertainment which followed the old four
o’clock dinner fifty years ago, has yielded place to coffee and tea. In the
May term teas assume new proportions; for during the term which is fateful
to the reading man as that preceding the tripos examination, the idle man
turns work time into play, invites his friends and relatives up to Cambridge,
and entertains his sisters at “the races.” It is not indeed to be supposed that
the majority of undergraduates are to be found keeping themselves awake
with black coffee, a damp towel bound about their brows, while they burn
the midnight oil. Even the harmless necessary “sporting of one’s oak” is no
longer “good form.” In days when you advertise for a curate and a
schoolmaster who is a good athlete the very thin literary proclivities of the
bulk of Englishmen cannot be held to be on the increase. What one might
legitimately hope for is that athletics should prove a safety-valve to the
natural “rowdyism” of the non-reading man; so that if school and university
sports cannot make a scholar they might at least turn out something not
unlike a gentleman. Last October (1905) proved a “record” in the number of
men “going up,” and November proved “a record” in the number of men

who should have been “sent down.” What took place is fresh in our
memories; and it will not quickly be forgotten that while the undergraduates
of one university were shouting their disgrace, a well-known bishop was
signalising (and exaggerating) the disgrace of the other; and we may choose
between the merits of leaguing with the town blackguard to kick policemen
at Cambridge or indulging the vice which changed the name of “wines” at
Oxford to “drunks.” At the rejoicings for Mafeking the iron railings and
posts were torn up along the ‘backs,’ and everything combustible from
drays to handcarts was “commandeered” to make a bonfire on Market hill,
where many panes of glass in the surrounding houses were smashed.
Proctors’ “bull-dogs” were rolled over in the mud, and the proctors treated
to the dignity of a “chairing.”[369] The bonfire on Market hill is a
development of a traditional ritual more amusing and less dangerous: you
drag out your own and your friends’ furniture and make a bonfire in the
middle of the college “court.”
Would it be impossible, among so many good rules, to make cap and
gown obligatory at both universities between the hours of 9 and 12? The
spectacle of youths hugging golf clubs on the Oxford station at ten o’clock
in the morning cannot be extraneous to examination results which show that
not 3 men in 4 who matriculate, take the B.A. At Cambridge there is good
promise in the large increase of scientific students who take advantage of
the facilities afforded by its laboratories: more men entered for the
“doctors’ college” in October 1905 than for any other, except of course
Trinity; and even “the sporting college” has been a principal contributor to
the number of medical graduates. Since 1883 there has been a board of
Indian Civil Service studies, and the universities between them send up far
the larger number of candidates for this service. A board of agricultural
studies was instituted in 1899, a diploma in agriculture is now awarded,
also one in sanitation, and geographical studies are encouraged by prizes.
Since 1899, when the tripos was divided, the Historical has become one of
the larger triposes and in 1905 had the highest number of entries after the
Natural Sciences.[370]
The traditional rivalry in sports has of course been that
University
athletics. between the two universities. The inter-university boat race was
begun in 1836, and the first 4 races were won by Cambridge, as
was also the first race rowed in outriggers in ’46. Of the 64 races run,
Oxford has won 6 more than Cambridge; Cambridge has won 5 out of the

last 6, and has also won by the greater number of lengths (in ’49 by “many,”
and in 1900 by 20).[371] The great inferiority of the ‘Cam’ to the ‘Isis’ is
partly compensated by the excellent style of rowing which Eton

THE TOWER OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL FROM
THE RIVER
Trinity College Library lies on the right, through the trees.

traditions carry on into Cambridge. The happy connexion between
Cambridge and Eton established by Henry VI. has never ceased to link the
most aristocratic English school with the more democratic of the English
universities, and many boys come to the “light blue” university already
wearing her favours. In football and golf the two universities have shown
equal prowess; Cambridge cricket is superior (the inter-university match
was started in 1839 and Cambridge won the first 6 matches), and in
athletics (1868-1906) Cambridge took the lead until the Rhodes scholars
arrived at the sister university.

The Union Society forms another distraction well calculated to turn out
the English ideal of a university man—a man, id est, ready for public
affairs. It was founded in 1815 by the union of three already existing
debating societies, the present building was erected in 1866 and fitted up as
a club. Stratford Canning (Lord Stratford de Redcliffe) and Blomfield,
afterwards Bishop of London, belonged to one of these earlier “spouting
clubs” in 1806, where Palmerston and Ellenborough both “laid the
foundation” of their parliamentary fame. The college ball and the college
concert are also crowded into the student’s seven weeks of residence in the
May term, taking the place of the plays which formed the staple
entertainment in the xvi and xvii centuries. The modern “A.D.C.” has been
rendered famous by the “Greek Plays” which were inaugurated twenty-five
years ago with a performance of “Ajax.”
Sunday at
But the round of work and play comes to an end with Sunday,
Cambridge. and the university has preserved the festival aspect of this day, the
day when continental beadles and gens d’armes don their fine
plumes and when what is bright and gay rather than what is dull and grave
is mated to the idea of a day of rest. The college courts—the outdoor centre
and rallying point of college life—are thronged with men gay in surplice or
gown[372] as they were thronged on that Sunday 370 years ago when
Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester found two hundred dons assembled
“as is their wont” and buttonholed the men who were likely to pleasure his
grace in the matter of the divorce. That fine day in the xvi century was no
doubt a repetition of many fine days in the centuries preceding it, for it is
always fine in Cambridge on Sunday. And Sunday after Sunday the
undergraduate has received a lesson in dignities, as he circled becapped and
begowned on the cobbled paths round the greater luminaries becapped and
begowned tranquilly stepping on the college grass. The modern
undergraduate does not remember a time when a pathway ran across the turf
from corner to corner of the college courts, as it did in Clare Hall, in the old
court of Corpus, and in William of Wykeham’s foundation at Oxford. On
“scarlet days” the courts are still more gay, for the doctors then appear in
their scarlet.[373]
The gowns in the court clothe the learned and the unlearned, and make a
present of as brave an academic appearance to the rowdiest of non-readers
as to the future senior wrangler. The academic year is divided into 3 terms
of 8 or 9 weeks each: half the year only is therefore passed at Cambridge.

For serious study the intervals are too long and the ‘long vacation term’ has
become the reading man’s term par excellence; all the colleges are then half
full, the numbers being swelled by the medical students. The multiplication
of extra-collegiate scholarships has not told all one way. Parents who used
to make sacrifices to send a son to the university now count upon a
scholarship, with the result that on the principle of ‘light come light go’ less
use is made of opportunities. The university authorities look to the
“advanced students” (of whom there are now 60 or 70 in residence) who are
staying up for research work or come from other universities, for solid
academic achievement.
Class from
There is no more interesting enquiry connected with our
which the subject than that concerning the classes from which the academic
academic
population population has been recruited at different epochs, and the careers
has been
drawn.
for which the university has fitted its members.
The Church has always remained the most constant client of
academic advantages: it was the churchmen who on the decline of the
monasteries and when the universities were established as learned
corporations, exchanged the cloister for the college education. The
dissolution of the monasteries and the breach with Rome left the
universities as the only representatives of the faculty of theology; and
during the last century, especially, if a man were destined for the Church he
went—ipso facto—to Cambridge or Oxford even though he were the only
member of his family to do so. In the xv as in the xvi centuries it was
chiefly men destined for the faculties of theology and law who frequented
the universities, and then, as always in their history, the poorest scholar
lived side by side with the youth of family and influence.
The lawyers, perhaps, have gone in equal proportions to a university or
to one of the Inns of Court; many have gone to both. The great change to be
observed is as regards students of the third faculty, medicine. In the xix
century the doctor and the tradesman’s son did not go to a university; but
this century, as we have seen, has already been marked by the enormous
accession of medical students at Cambridge. The gradual growth of a
powerful middle class resulted in the later xvi century in filling the
universities with the sons not only of the older yeomanry of our shires but
of the new Merchant Adventurers, often themselves men of gentle blood
and coat armour. It is perhaps from this century that the idea began to
prevail that an academic education was the proper education of a

gentleman. Of this century it was true as it had been true of no other that
“the civil life of all English gentlemen” is begun at Oxford or Cambridge.
Statesmen and ministers, the political and the diplomatic careers, were
recruited at the universities, and university-trained canonists and lawyers
like Cranmer and More, and churchmen like Wolsey and Gardiner were
chosen to be the ambassadors and secretaries of state. Ascham complains to
Cranmer that sons of rich men “who sought only superficial knowledge”
and “to qualify themselves for some place in the State” overran the
university, and both universities soon became, in Macaulay’s words, the
training ground not only of all the eminent clergy, lawyers, physicians,
poets, and orators, but of a large proportion of the “nobility and opulent
gentry” of the country.
In England men belonging to what have, hitherto, been the governing
classes have always sought advantages which would doubtless be less
apparent in countries where nobility and gentry are synonyms and where
government is not carried on by means of two such institutions as the House
of Commons and the House of Lords. A noblesse which gives no scions to
the professions or to a representative chamber has seldom sought academic
distinction. The man destined for parliament for the diplomatic service and
the government office—occupations which an acute American observer has
said are chosen by Englishmen as the business of their lives “without
studying any other profession”[374]—prepared himself in no other way than
by three or four years spent at the university, with or without graduating
there. It was not however till the nineteenth century opened that the
distinctively aristocratic trend of a university was defined. Throughout that
century the university was par excellence the seminary of the English
gentleman, and the parson. A few bankers’ sons might be put into their
fathers’ counting houses, a few government officials might place their sons
at an early age in a government office, but the exception only proved the
rule.
Let us look at some examples of the class from which
Examples.
Cambridge was recruited through the xvi and xvii centuries.
xvi c.
Hugh Latimer (b. 1491) was the son of a yeoman farmer; Sir
Thomas Wyatt (b. 1503) was the son of a knight. The father of xvii c.

Matthew Parker (b. 1504) was a Norwich merchant; Bacon (b. 1561) and
his brother, fellow-commoners of Trinity, were sons of the Lord Keeper and
nephews of Burleigh. Fletcher (b. 1579) the dramatist, was the son of the

Bishop of London, and his cousins the poets were sons of Elizabeth’s
Master of the Requests and ambassador to Russia.[375] In the xvii century
Herrick the poet (b. 1591) was the son of a goldsmith established in
London; Waller (b. 1605) a nephew of Hampden’s, a man of large private
fortune; Cowley (b. 1618) was

UNIVERSITY BOAT-HOUSES ON THE CAM—SUNSET
This view is taken near Stourbridge Common and the bend of the
river known as Barnwell Pool, looking towards the town.

son to a city grocer; Marvell (b. 1620) son to a Yorkshire xviii c.
clergyman; while Temple was the son of an Irish Master of the
Rolls. In the latter half of the xvii century we still hear of “the farmer’s son
newly come from the university”[376]—Bentley was one of them—and at
the same time we hear that Tuckney, Whichcote’s tutor, “had many persons
of rank and quality” under him at Emmanuel College. In the xviii century,
Pepys’ (b. 1703) father was a tailor, the Wordsworths were sons of a north
country attorney, Sir William Browne (b. 1692) was the son of a physician.
Recruiting
Men of low origin were sent up, and have always been sent up,
schools. to the universities through the beneficence of patrons, and the
poor tailor Stow was enabled to write his history owing to the
patronage of Archbishop Parker who sent him to Oxford. Through the xv
and early xvi centuries the monastic and other convent schools supplied
university students. Bale (b. 1495) had been educated by the Norwich

Carmelites, Coverdale (b. 1487) had been an Austinfriar at Cambridge. At
the present day the big grammar schools, and in especial the Norwich
grammar school which educated Nelson, send every year a contingent of
students, as they have done since the reign of Edward VI. If we take the
sporting representatives sent from the two universities the year before last,
23 from Oxford and 21 from Cambridge, we shall find that one third of the
Cambridge men hailed from the greater public schools, Eton, Charterhouse,
and Rugby.[377] Our colonies are also a recruiting ground, and with them
Cambridge is favourite university.[378]
The number of undergraduates entered this academic year (1906-7) was
the largest on record, totalling 1021. The reputation and the popularity of
colleges of course wax and wane: for the past two years the largest number
of entries (excluding Trinity) has been for Caius and Pembroke, Emmanuel
coming next, and then S. John’s.[379] The number of non-collegiate students
is steadily increasing.
There are no ‘high Church’ centres among the colleges, and
Religion at
Cambridge. there is no ‘broad Church’ movement among the undergraduates.
The ‘broad Church’ movement is among the younger dons and in
connexion with the University Settlement. There are nonconformists in
every college, but the reunion with Christendom which begins at home
finds no advocates among other university men. As usual there is at
Cambridge no particular ‘school’ of religious thought. There is however just
now a decided religious movement among the undergraduates, almost
exclusively connected with the ‘high Church’ parish of S. Giles. The
majority of the men make little religious profession, but there is no violent
reaction such as agitated Oxford in the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ and the yearly
increasing number of scientific students inclines to a pantheistic rather than
a materialistic standpoint.
The undergraduate population is decidedly conservative, as the
Cambridge
politics. university has always been. At the present moment both sides of
the fiscal controversy are represented, the distinguished
Cambridge economist Dr. Cunningham advocating tariff reform, while the
Professor of Political Economy is a free-trader.
The “slumming” movement made an early appeal to the
The
university younger members of the university. Their present work in south
settlement in
Camberwell. London was begun over twenty years ago, and “Cambridge

House” has existed for ten years in a district which has been called “the
largest area of unbroken poverty in any European city.” The workers are all
laymen, 11 out of the 17 colleges being represented by resident Cambridge
men, while an undergraduate secretary in every college assists in furthering
the movement.
We saw at the beginning of this chapter that the aspect of the
Married
dons. university had changed with the marriage of fellows, tutors, and
officials; and in time this factor must greatly modify the
conditions of life at our universities. Both of these are now overrun with
children’s schools, and there can be little doubt that all the boys (and many
of the girls) will go to college. The natural profession for many of these,
owing to the father’s influence with his college and the son’s inherited
inclinations, will be academic. It would certainly not be to the advantage of
our seats of learning if they became in this sense close corporations. It is
obvious that this would mean less movement of ideas and less opportunity
for the outside world to affect the university; and if a large number not only
of the teachers but of the scholars belonged to such a caste as this, if the
profession of teaching were handed down from father to son, the situation
would not be unlike that which threatened Europe when Gregory VII.
interposed and made the Christian world his executor in enforcing clerical
celibacy. A new tuitional field would be open to the young graduate in the
numerous schools of Cambridge and Oxford, but this would only accentuate
the vicious circle of an education which might come to suggest the
ecclesiastical seminary rather than the English university. Perhaps, too, a
young man loses more than half the social and worldly advantages of a
college life if when

DITTON CORNER, ON THE CAM
From this spot the boat races are viewed. Behind the elms is the
village of Ditton, and the building we see is Ditton Church.

he “goes up to the university” he does not change his habitat.
The married fellow cannot begin life again elsewhere after the 5 or 10
years’ teaching at his college which used to precede his departure for a
benefice: the old bachelor, if he stayed on, no longer taught, and new men
took his place in the lecture room. But now a fellow cannot renounce the
lecture room, for he and his family cannot live on the fellowship. Lecturers
are therefore often men past the prime of life, and moreover men who no
longer live in daily contact with the undergraduate. New blood comes in
seldom, and percolates slowly. On the other hand valuable men stay who
would under the old system have left. The influx of the “monstrous
regiment” will not however, one hopes, diminish an advantage at present
possessed by the seniors at our centres of learning—a general equality of
fortune which frees university society from the laborious vulgarity that
travails the soul elsewhere, from the general “ponderousness,” as someone
has called it, of English life. At least Gray’s advice to Wharton not to bring
his wife to Cambridge would now be quite out of place; the “few” women
are no longer “squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves or
other people,” and the men are no longer “not over agreeable neither.”

CHAPTER V

UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

Men who owe nothing to a university—40 great Englishmen—Cambridge men: the scientists,
the poets, the dramatists, other literary men, the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers and
physicians, the statesmen. (pp. 250-260.)
National movements: King John and the barons—the peasants’ revolt—York and Lancaster—the
new world—Charles and the Parliament—James II. and the University—the Declaration of
Indulgence—the Nonjurors—William and Mary and Cambridge whiggery—Jacobitism and Toryism
at Cambridge in the reign of Anne—George I. and Cambridge—modern political movements. (pp.
260-269.)
Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question of the divorce, Lutheranism at
Cambridge, later reformers and the Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge
martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the Latitudinarians, the Deists, the
evangelical movement, the Tractarian movement, anti-calvinism. (pp. 269-281.)
Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of Elizabeth—the Royal Society—the
Cambridge Platonists—modern science. (pp. 281-291.)
Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the university: early Cambridge names
—a group of great names in the xiii and xiv centuries—Cambridge men in the historical plays of
Shakespeare—genealogical tables of founders—Cantabrigians from the xv century to the present day
—Cambridge men who have taken no degree. (pp. 291-309.)

WHAT part is played by a university in the life of a people? This can only be
gauged by its output of men, its influence on great movements, the trend
and character of the learning it fosters and the opinions it encourages.
During the centuries in which the English universities have existed, the
first degree of excellence has been reached in every department of human
knowledge and activity by men whom no university can claim.
Shakespeare, Bunyan, Hawkins, Raleigh, Drake, the Hoods, Howard of
Effingham, Clive, Warren Hastings, Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington,
Scott, Dickens, Keats, Browning, were at no university; the same is true of
Smollett, Richardson, and Sheridan. It is noticeable, nevertheless, that the
literary names cited include none but poets and novelists. Among scientific
men and philosophers, Bishop Butler, Faraday, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Lubbock
(Lord Avebury), Spencer, G. H. Lewes, Buckle, and Grote were not trained
at universities—even among the great educationalists, the founders of
colleges in our universities and of great public schools, few received an
academic education. Some careers, again, are entirely outside the sphere of

university influence—admirals and great captains, sailors and soldiers, do
not go to universities, and among inventors hardly one hails from a seat of
learning. Art, also, is not fostered by an academic atmosphere; painters,
architects, and musicians owe nothing to it; and although universities adorn
themselves with professorships of the fine arts, and of music, it is not to
them that we go for definitions of art, or for an output of artists. In Orlando
Gibbons, indeed, Cambridge possessed a native musician whose
compositions and unrivalled technique as an organist place him in the first
rank of musical Englishmen; but while nearly every English artist owes
something to a wanderjahr in Italy, scarcely one ever resided at a university.
Nevertheless if we were to take a short list of representative Englishmen,
of the men who have influenced and shaped the national life, its religion, its
politics, its thoughts, who have helped to realise the English genius and to
make England what it is, we should find that a large proportion of those
who could have been educated at Cambridge or Oxford were in fact
university men. In the following list those who have had a preponderant
influence on English education from the vii century onwards, are included:
—
vii-viii c. Bede.†
vii c. Hild.*†[380]
viii c. Alcuin.*†
ix c. Alfred.†
xii c. Stephen Langton (Paris).
" Grosseteste* Oxford (and Paris).
xiii c. Roger Bacon (Paris) and Oxford.
" Edward I.†
xiv c. Wyclif Oxford.
" Chaucer Cambridge.
" William of Wykeham* [381] none.
xiv-xv c. Lady Margaret.* †
xv-xvi c. Colet* Oxford.
" Bishop Fisher* Cambridge.
" Wolsey Oxford.
xvi c. Sir Thomas More Oxford.
" Cranmer Cambridge.
" Ascham* Cambridge.
" Elizabeth†
" Drake none.
" Raleigh[382] none.
" Sir Philip Sidney Oxford.

" Lord Bacon Cambridge.
xvi-xvii c. Shakespeare none.
" Harvey Cambridge.
" Cromwell Cambridge.
" Milton Cambridge.
" Jeremy Taylor Cambridge.
" Bunyan none.
" Locke Oxford.
" Newton Cambridge.
xvii-xviii c. Marlborough none.
xviii c. Wesley Oxford.
" Clive none.
xviii-xix c. Nelson† none.
" Pitt Cambridge.
xix c. John Stuart Mill none.
" Darwin Cambridge.
" Gladstone[383] Oxford.
" Florence Nightingale†[384]

Of these, 9 could not have been at a university and are marked †, but of the
remaining 31, 23 were at a university; 12 at Cambridge, 10 at Oxford. Two
were at both Paris and Oxford, and one was at Paris.
In this chapter, however, our concern is with the great men produced by
the one university. There are two fields in which Cambridge is and always
has been facile princeps. She has nurtured all the great scientists, and all the
great poets. The discoveries of world-wide importance have been the work
of Cambridge men—such were the three which revolutionised the science
of the world, the laws of the circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of
evolution. From Bacon the founder of experimental philosophy to Darwin
and Kelvin, every great name is a Cambridge name, if we except indeed the
few who like Wallace, Humphry Davy, Faraday, and the elder Herschell
owe nothing to a university.
If the scientific pre-eminence of Cambridge is unquestioned,
Literature.
her poetical pre-eminence is no less absolute. Chaucer, Spenser,
Marlowe, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson called her
mother. In the long list of English poets every poet of first rank (excluding
Shakespeare and Keats who were at no university) was at Cambridge,
except Shelley who was expelled from Oxford.
The dramatist movement from Marlowe to Shirley is one of the most
important in our literature. Here for the first time in English history a group

of Englishmen set themselves, on leaving the university, to earn an
independence by literature—and the opportunity offered them was writing
for the players. The dramatists were, with but few exceptions of which the
greatest is Shakespeare himself, university men; and of these all who were
epoch-marking hail from Cambridge. The list is headed by the first English
tragic poet, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great predecessor; and
Ben Jonson the greatest of his younger contemporaries was also a
Cambridge man. Lyly who created the art tradition of English comedy, went
to Cambridge from Oxford and there graduated M.A. Lodge after leaving
Oxford went to Avignon, took his M.D. degree there, and on returning to
England went to Cambridge. Shirley, the last of the dramatists, went from
Oxford to Cambridge.[385]
The sonneteers had preceded the dramatists, and the first writer of an
English sonnet was another Cambridge man, Sir Thomas Wyatt.[386] Surrey
whose university, if he went to one, was certainly Cambridge, wrote the
first blank verse. The first English essayist was Bacon, and he takes his
place in literature by another tide, because he was the first to adapt our
language as the vehicle for a scientific literature. Of the five men who in the
great days of the flowering of English poesy wrote about the art of verse
Spenser, Webbe, Harvey, Sidney, and Puttenham, the first three, whose
contribution is also the most important, were Cambridge men.
All literary initiative, indeed, between the xiv and xviii centuries appears
to have come from the one university; the epoch-making representatives of
our literature, that is, were Cambridge men: Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe and
Ben Jonson (in defect of

THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM—EVENING
In the distance are seen the square tower of the Pitt Press and
Pembroke College. Behind the trees are Peterhouse and the
Congregational Church.

Shakespeare), Bacon, Milton, Dryden.[389] The first history of English
literature also comes from the hand of a Cantabrigian, John Bale. There are
two other classes of English literature to which reference must be made.
The novelists as we have already seen have not been alumni of our
universities, partly because this is a field in which women have attained the
highest rank, partly because there seems to be that something more of the
artistic afflatus in the novelist’s craft and that something less of the
academic, as compared with the other forms of literature, which we should
à priori have certainly predicated of poetry also. A list of the novelists, from
Mrs. Afra Behn to George Meredith would however show how different is
the case of the novelists to that of the poets.
The last branch of literature, the importance of which is much greater
than its literary merit, is journalism. Here, too, Cambridge led the way,
though here, as elsewhere, it has not maintained its position. It was Roger
Le Strange who as sole licenser and authorised printer and publisher of
news, printed the first number of the “London Gazette”;[390] and Andrew
Marvell’s newsletters to his constituents at Hull were A.D. 1658-78.
among the earliest attempts at parliamentary reporting.

The learned
When we turn to philosophy, we find that Cambridge has been
professions. singularly poor in metaphysicians, logicians, and political
philosophers. Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Oxford all
precede her. Among eminent representatives of the learned faculties
Cambridge had, with the exception of Segrave, Bateman, and Beaufort, no
great churchmen in the xiv century. In the xvth it can boast that it nurtured
Thomas Langton,* Fox,* Rotherham,* Alcock,* Tunstall, and Fisher.* In
the next century Cambridge has it all its own way, the succession of
primates is hers, and nearly every one of the prelates who took the leading
parts in that busy century were Cambridge alumni: Fox,* Gardiner,*
Latimer,* Ridley,* Cranmer,* Parker,* Grindal,* Whitgift,* Bancroft.[391]
In the xvii century Andrewes,* Cosin,* Williams* the opponent of Laud,
Taylor, Stillingfleet, and the primates Bancroft, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tenison,
represented the university.
Cambridge has also contributed her large share of the lawyers, lords
chancellors and chief justices of England, from Thorpe, Cavendish and
Beaufort in the reigns of Edward III. and his successors to Booth,
Rotherham, Alcock, Fox, Ruthall, Goodrich, Wriothesley, Gardiner, Heath,
Coke, the two Bacons, Williams, Guilford and Lyndhurst in later times. The
great physicians, Caius, “Butler of Cambridge,” Gilbert, Harvey, Wharton,
Sydenham,[392] Paris, Grew, Sir William Browne and Sir Samuel Garth,
were all Cambridge men, and illustrate the early history of medicine from
the xvi century to the xixth.
The roll of Cambridge statesmen is not less distinguished: the
Statesmen
and two Cecils, Walsingham, Boyle ‘the great earl’ of Cork, of whom
diplomatists.
Cromwell said that had there been one like him in every province
it would have been impossible for the Irish to raise a rebellion; Cromwell
himself, Sir W. Temple, Halifax, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Castlereagh,
Wilberforce, Stratford de Redcliffe, Palmerston.
The first great national movement in which the groups of
National
movements. scholars and teachers settled at Cambridge and Oxford could have
taken part was the conflict with King John under the leadership of
Stephen Langton, and the Barons’ war led by Simon de Montfort.
Cambridge clerks were implicated in the former, for as soon as Henry III.
came to the throne he ordered the expulsion of all those excommunicate
scholars who had joined Louis the Dauphin, the Barons’ candidate for the
throne of England; and it is surmised that Hugh de Balsham

Wars of the
later in the century favoured the side on which Simon de
Roses. Montfort fought. It was at Cambridge too that the Dauphin held
his council after the demise of John. Much had happened at the
university between this struggle in the xiii century and the latter part of the
xivth when the peasants’ revolt again raised the standard of
A.D. 1378-1381.
rebellion. The university was no longer a mere aggregate of
poor scholars and unendowed teachers, it had long grown into a privileged
corporation possessing fine buildings and a full treasury. As such, peasant
and burgess bore to it no good will, and Wat Tyler’s riots were seized as the
opportunity to burn the university charters, ransack the colleges, and
mishandle the masters and scholars. At the neighbouring manor-house of
Mildenhall (which had formed part of the historic dowry of Queen Emma
the mother of the Confessor) Prior John of Cambridge who was acting at
the time as abbot of Bury-St.-Edmund’s, was murdered by the mob. In 1381
Buckingham, after dispersing the revolted peasantry in Essex, held ‘oyer
and terminer’ at Cambridge, and the town was among the few which was
exempted from the general pardon.
Through the next great national crisis Cambridge was Lancastrian. The
men of letters of this party, its poets and historians, were Cambridge men,
members of Cambridge colleges—Warkworth, Skelton, the Pastons. The
Lancastrian sympathies of the university dated indeed from the time of “the
good duke” and of John of Gaunt, both of whom befriended it and became
patrons of one of its important colleges; and the intimate connexion with
the House of Beaufort, which began when Cardinal Beaufort studied at
Peterhouse,[393] culminated when Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of
Henry VII., crowned by her singular benefactions the sympathies of the
university for the House of Lancaster. Edward IV. had not loved Cambridge,
had indeed robbed Henry VI.’s college of its revenues; but it was there that
the royal houses laid down the sword to join in a work of scholarly peace,
and few episodes in the annals of a university are more interesting than the
building of Queens’ College by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth
Woodville, and the labours of Lady Margaret in whose son were at length
reconciled the rival claims of York and Lancaster.
We have seen that a Washington lies buried in the ancient
The
colonisation chapel of the first Cambridge college, and we are to see further on
of the new
world. that the impulse which set the “Mayflower” on her course
proceeded from a Cantabrigian. The oldest of the ‘pilgrim fathers’

was a Peterhouse man, persecuted in England for his ‘Brownist’ opinions.
There were many university men among the first settlers, but they were
chiefly from the one university; and ‘Cambridge’ was the name which rose
to their lips when they christened the town in the great state of
Massachusetts where they first set foot. Thomas Hooker, one of the
founders of Connecticut, was a Cambridge graduate and exercised great
influence among the New England settlers. John Eliot, “the Indian apostle,”
had graduated at Cambridge in 1622; and Harvard, the ‘Cambridge’ of the
new world, was founded by another of her sons.
No sooner had America been colonised by these exiles for
The
Parliament their faith than the English revolution brought about the changes
and the
Stuarts. which would have kept them in this country. Both universities
declared for the king. The loyalty of Oxford is a household word,
and it certainly was not diminished by the fact that Charles had his
headquarters in the university town: but Cambridge loyalty was not less; the
university plate was sent to Charles at York in
1642, and among the chests which reached Oxford there A.D. 1642-4.
were some which arrived safely at the colleges and never
arrived anywhere else.[394] The royalist poet was a Cambridge man with a
Devonshire cure, Robert Herrick. Cambridge also supplied ‘the first
cavalier poet’ John Cleveland, who lost his fellowship for the king,
Abraham Cowley, ejected in the same way
by the Puritans, and yet another poet and yet another fellow in
A.D. 1643.
Richard Crashaw, a royalist born in the year that Shakespeare
died, who on refusing to sign the Covenant retired to Paris where he was
employed on royalist business by the exiled queen. Isaac Barrow, too,
whose father lost everything for the royal cause, and had been with Charles
at Oxford when Isaac went up to Trinity, refused the Covenant; and lived to
find himself in an increasing solitude amidst the growing Puritanism of the
university. A royalist
sermon preached by Brownrigg (Bishop of Exeter) deprived
A.D. 1645.
him of the Mastership of S. Catherine’s, and Queens’ College
was entirely depopulated by the Parliament men.
But contemporary with Herrick and Crashaw there were Cambridge men
still more famous, and they espoused the parliamentary cause. Chief of
these was the Cambridge poet on the parliament side, John Milton. Both

universities suffered severely from the Roundheads, yet together they
contributed the chief actors against the king. From Cambridge came
Cromwell, Milton, and Hutchinson, from Oxford Ireton, Hampden, and
Pym. Anti-monarchical and Puritan opinions were, however, only grafted
on the university as a result of the violent measures and the wholesale
ejectments carried out by Cromwell and his agents.[395]
By the middle of the xvii century Cambridge had become
A.D. 1657.
Puritan, though here she was outstripped by Oxford which had
been Puritan fifty years earlier, before Elizabeth died. Among the
“regicides” many were university men; Andrew Marvell and the young
Dryden at Cambridge were friends to Oliver: but the Presbyterian Wallis, a
member of Emmanuel College and later one of the founders of the Royal
Society, protested against the king’s death warrant which met with the
approval of such men as Milton, Hampden, and Hutchinson.
The Restoration was welcomed at both universities. The
The
university scheme to secure a Protestant succession and the attempt to
and James
II. exclude James now agitated men’s minds. The ‘bill of exclusion’
was condemned both at Oxford and Cambridge; and the earlier
Rye House plot was met at the latter by the deposition of Monmouth at that
time chancellor of the university. To the loyal addresses sent by both
Cambridge and Oxford on the coronation of James II., Cambridge added a
condemnation of the attempt to alter the succession. The attitude of the
bench of bishops was not less emphatic—only two prelates could be found
to sign the invitation to William of Orange.[396] It was with these facts
before him that James set to work to affront a loyal clergy and the two loyal
seats of learning; and thus gave to each a rare occasion of proving their
quality. The king first attempted to force the hand of the universities, and
began by ordering Cambridge to confer the M.A. degree on a Catholic.
This was refused. The vice-chancellor, and with him eight
A.D. 1687.
fellows (one of whom was Isaac Newton) was cited to appear
at Westminster before the High Commission. Oxford was much more
harshly treated, and there is nothing in the history of either university to
surpass the splendid resistance of Magdalen College to tyranny, during
which it was twice depleted of its
fellows. The Declaration of Indulgence, however admirable in
A.D. 1688.
itself, struck a blow at constitutional principles, and

introduced the dangerous corollary that he who could loose motu proprio
could also bind. The loyal archbishop of Canterbury, a graduate of
Emmanuel, with six other prelates refused to publish the Indulgence, and
were sent to the Tower. Lloyd of S. Asaph, Lake of Chichester, Turner of
Ely, and White of Peterborough were Cantabrigians; Ken of Bath and Wells
and Trelawney of Bristol, Oxonians.[397] Perhaps never since the primacy of
Stephen Langton had the Church in England been so popular, or shown
itself so ready to slough the servilism which attends on state Churches.
In the following year five of the seven staunch prelates
A.D. 1689.
who had withstood James, refused to take the oath
The of fealty to William and Mary. The primate, with Turner, Lake,
nonjurors.
White, and Ken, to whom were joined Lloyd of Norwich[398] and
Frampton of Gloucester, headed some 400 of the clergy as ‘Nonjurors.’
Under Bancroft the non-juring clergy established a schism in the English
Church which lasted till the xix century. The Cambridge Sherlock had at
first the greatest influence among them, but neither he nor Ken followed
them in the subsequent schism. If another Cambridge man, Jeremy Collier,
was the ablest of the nonjurors, Dodwell, a Dublin man, and professor of
Ancient History at Oxford, was the most erudite.
Although, as we have seen, the two bishops who signed the
The House
of Hanover. invitation to William were Oxford men, Oxford had no love for
the ‘Roman-nosed Dutchman,’ and William had no love for
Oxford. Halifax, William’s henchman, and Nottingham, the leaders of the
party which placed William and Mary on the throne, hailed respectively
from Cambridge and Oxford: but it was the favour with which Cambridge
greeted the accession of the new sovereigns that became the seed of its
whiggery. During the reign of Anne, nevertheless, an anti-Hanoverian spirit
spread among the younger men. Not only were there Jacobites
among the undergraduates and the junior dons, but a political
A.D. 1702-14.
party was forming which represented the permanent elements
in Toryism when separated from Jacobitism. Amongst this party high
churchmanship also found refuge. The non-juring clergy still left at the
university lived there in close retirement, and helped to swell the ranks
neither of the nascent
Jacobitism nor the new high churchism. A new vice-
A.D. 1714.
chancellor, favourable to the House of Hanover, followed a
A.D. 1715.

Jacobite predecessor just in time to present a loyal address to George I. on
his accession. This was rewarded by the splendid gift of Bishop Moore’s
library; while at Oxford, where the Jacobites were more noisy and had just
made the anniversary of the Pretender’s birthday the occasion for a
disturbance, two Jacobite officers were placed under arrest, and a troop of
horse was quartered in the city. These events gave rise to the following
couplets:
(Oxford) The King observing with judicious eyes,
The state of both his Universities,
To one he sends a regiment; for why?
That learned body wanted loyalty.
To th’ other books he gave, as well discerning
How much that loyal body wanted learning.

(Sir Wm. Browne
for Cambridge) The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse:
For Tories own no argument but force.
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent:
For Whigs allow no force but argument.

Modern
When we come to modern politics, the parts are played on the
political stage at Westminster.
politics.

In the radical matter of parliamentary reform, the first step was
made by one of Cambridge’s great sons, the younger Pitt, fifty years before
a Whig ministry led by Earl Grey, another Cantabrigian, laid the Reform
Bill on the table of the House. The claims of America to self government
and freedom from taxation were upheld by both the Pitts, by Fox and by
Burke, and opposed by Samuel Johnson. The Whigs, as we know, were, as a
whole, of Johnson’s mind in the matter.
Cambridge opposed the Manchester school of Liberalism—and Catholic
emancipation, Free-trade, Reform bills, and Home Rule for Ireland were all
measures which received no support from the Whig-Conservative
university.

Philanthropy seems to be as far removed from the academic purview as
art or practical politics: none of the great humanitarian movements which
dignified the xix century took their rise in Cambridge; but Clarkson and
Wilberforce were Cambridge men, and Grey
abolished slavery itself in 1834.
A.D. 1807-34.

In the century succeeding that which saw the
Religious historical birth of our two national universities, the first breath of
movements.
The the early renascence was wafted to our shores: but that dual
Lollards.
aspect of the later movement which haunted and shaped its whole
course in England had been presaged in a remarkable way, and in Wyclif
Oxford gave a forerunner of the religious renascence a hundred years before
the advent of the humanistic. Even when Henry IV. ascended the throne,
Ralph Spalding, a Carmelite friar, was the only person of note at Cambridge
suspected of Lollardry; and when Archbishop Arundel set A.D. 1401.
himself to crush Wyclif’s movement at the two universities,
the Cambridge harvest was of the poorest.
The
But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement
Reformation passed from Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as
.
we have seen, are seldom the consequence of an opinion of the
Schools. The struggles of the barons, the parliamentary wars, the
restoration, the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne,
were not prepared in any university. But there is one exception—and the
prime part in that reawakening of the human mind which issued in the
English Reformation, must be assigned to the university of Cambridge.
Here was laid the intellectual and historical basis of the reformed religion,
and Cambridge produced the men and the minds which created the
ecclesiastical order, the liturgy, and the service books deemed suitable to the
reformed faith. The stones of Cambridge are indeed a monument to the
academic and intellectual form of Protestantism, as the cathedral at Orvieto
is a monument to the crudest form of eucharistic doctrine.
The end of the xv century found Cambridge very happily situated. It met
the dawn of the religious awakening with a galaxy of men representing the
noblest spirit of the time: Fisher, Fox, Thomas Langton, Alcock,
Rotherham, even Lady Margaret herself and Erasmus, belonged to
Cambridge in a sense which did not apply to Colet and More at Oxford.
They constitute a group of Cambridge ‘reformers before the Reformation’

who were eager patrons of the New Learning; and the epoch was marked
there by the rise of important college foundations. As a result, the university
benefited to an extraordinary degree by gifts of religious lands made not by
the hand of the despoiler but by the friends of the old faith.

UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF GREAT ST. MARY
The original church dates back at least to the thirteenth century
and was partially rebuilt in 1351. The present edifice is
Perpendicular Gothic, and was begun in 1478 and not completely
finished until 1608. It is the largest Parish Church in Cambridge,
and the University sermons are preached in it.

Peterhouse had itself been one of the earliest known instances of the
conversion of religious property to secular purposes;[399] but in the xv and
early xvi century the instances crowd upon us. Henry VI. bestowed on
King’s College and on God’s House land from the alienated priories;
Alcock obtained from the Pope the dissolution of the Benedictine nunnery
which he converted into Jesus College; Lady Margaret endowed Christ’s
College with abbey lands; her stepson the Bishop of Ely dissolved the
Canons’ House of S. John’s bestowing its property upon the new S. John’s
College; and Mary gave monastic property to Trinity.
But the hopes raised in England by the spirit of catholic reform were
defeated: and it is again to Cambridge that we must look for the next group
of men in the march of events—Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer all drew
their inspiration from Cambridge.

The divorce
Closely allied to the movement for reform was the question of
of Catherine.the divorce, and Cranmer, less scrupulous than Wolsey, was the
first to suggest a legal solution in the king’s favour. The Church
and the universities were invited to emit a (favourable) judgment on the
point; and as a result of the tactics to this end the junior leaders at Oxford
pronounced in its favour, while the opinion elicited from Cambridge really
left the matter where it was before. The university declared that Henry’s
marriage with his brother’s wife was illegal if the previous union had been
consummated, but no answer was given to the second question—whether
the pope possessed the dispensing power. This was no answer at all, and
undermined neither the king’s position nor the pope’s.
Meanwhile, at the Austinfriars, a Lutheran movement had
Lutheranism
. sprung up. Here, as elsewhere, the community to which Luther
himself belonged led the way in the Protestant revolt. Barnes, the
Augustinian prior, was the centre of a group of reformers who met at the
White Horse inn; and Miles Coverdale, one of his friars, learnt his
reforming principles at the Cambridge friary. The meetings at the White
Horse were to have consequences which affected the other university.
Clerke Cox and Taverner were to form part of the little group of Cambridge
scholars who took possession, at Wolsey’s bidding, of Cardinal College,
and to provoke the cry of the warden of Wykeham’s house: “We were clear
without blot or suspicion till they came!” The famous “Oxford Brethren”
were the Cambridge nucleus of the Reform in the sister city.
The travail of the times, indeed, passed through a series of
The English
bible and men who came from the one university—the laboratory of the
service
books. Reformation was at Cambridge. The English Bible comes from
its hands: Tyndale was the earliest worker, and
Coverdale produced the first complete English bible in 1535- A.D. 1524-68.
6. “Cranmer’s bible” appeared in 1540; “Matthew’s” bible (1537) was the
work of the Cambridge martyr John Rogers who had also assisted Tyndale.
Amongst the latter’s assistants had been Roy, a Cambridge Franciscan, and
Scory, a Cambridge Dominican.[400] The “Bishop’s bible” was published
under the auspices of the Cambridge primate, Parker; and other scholars
associated in the work of translation were Clerke and Dillingham of
Christ’s, Layfield, Harison, and Dakins of Trinity, Sir Thomas Smith, and
Bishops Andrewes and Heath.[401] Erasmus’ New Testament had appeared

under the auspices of Warham, and of three Cambridge men, Fisher, Fox,
and Tunstall.[402]
The service books owe as much to the one university: it is the
‘Cambridge mind’ which sets its seal on these formularies. The Cambridge
scholars were the best prepared men: Cranmer knew more about liturgies
than any one among the reformers; no one but Andrewes was the equal of
the catholic divines in patristic knowledge. The prayer book as it stands is
in the main Cranmer’s work; Cox and Grindal were on the Windsor
Commission which compiled the Communion service in the first Prayer-
book of 1549. Nine years later Elizabeth entrusted the revision of Edward
VI.’s 1552 Prayer-book to Parker, and Cox and Sir Thomas Smith were
among the revisers. In the final revision of 1660 Cosin rendered great
services; and even when the still-born attempt was made to revise the
liturgy in the reign of William and Mary, the task was once more assigned
to Cambridge men, Tenison, and Patrick who was set to mutilate the
collects.
The Articles of Religion in their original form and number were the
work of Cranmer, their reduction to Thirty-nine was the work of another
Cambridge primate, Parker.[403] Whitgift drew up for Elizabeth the famous
“Lambeth Articles”; and when the vexed subject of the Athanasian creed
agitated the ecclesiastical commission of 1689 as it is agitating the national
Church now—then, as now, when Cambridge heads of houses, professors of
divinity, and deans and tutors of colleges have signed a declaration in
favour of its excision from the public services, two Cambridge men
protested—the one against its retention, the other against its unqualified
damnatory clauses.[404] Dryden had already made a similar protest.
Long however before the reformers had a free hand, Burleigh in his
retirement in Lincolnshire had jotted down the names of the eight learned
men most fit to carry out the Reform and to settle its formularies when a
Protestant queen should succeed. Seven of these men hailed from
Cambridge.[405]
It was not only in what concerned scholarship that the travail
The
Cambridge of the Reformation belonged to Cambridge. It gave, in the person
martyrs.
of Fisher, the only member of the episcopal bench who died for
denying the royal supremacy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII. the first
group of Cambridge Lutherans gave other martyrs: Bilney, like Barnes, had

carried his faggot and recanted Lutheran opinions before Wolsey, but
afterwards took new courage and went to the stake for them. The cause left
smouldering by the death of Barnes, Bilney, and George Stafford (a fellow
of Pembroke) was rekindled by Latimer. Henry himself had examined
another Cambridge reformer, John Nicholson (“Lambert”) who denied the
corporal presence in the eucharist, and that royal and rigid sacramentarian
had condemned him. “Pleasant Taylor” “making himself merry with the
stake” was another Cantabrigian.[406] The first man to die for his faith when
Mary’s reign opened was Rogers of Pembroke[407]; and “the hardiest” of the
Marian Martyrs was another Cambridge man, Bradford. As she had
nurtured the only martyr-bishop on the Catholic side, so Cambridge
nurtured the Protestant group of prelates who died at the stake: Cranmer,
Ridley, and Latimer are three Cambridge martyrs whose only title to be
known as “the Oxford martyrs” is that Oxford burnt them. It must not be
forgotten, also, that one of the fifteen heroic London Carthusians, martyred
at Tyburn in 1535, was William Exmew of Christ’s.
The death of Fisher, chancellor of the university, was followed by a
wholesale ejection of the professors of the ancient learning, and the man
who died for his denial of that ‘anglican solecism’ the royal supremacy was
immediately succeeded by the man who first suggested it to Henry—
Thomas Cromwell.[408]
The next religious movement in the country was the Puritan,
The Puritan.
against which we know that Elizabeth fought as lustily as Henry
had combated Lutheranism. Despite the fact that there were Puritan nuclei,
as there had earlier been Lutheran nuclei, at Cambridge, Puritanism was
eventually imposed on the university only by the same violent means as had
banished the old religion—wholesale ejections. The Anglican heads of
colleges were turned out, under Oliver, to be replaced by Puritan Masters, in
precisely the same way as Thomas Cromwell had replaced the Catholics by
men who accepted the royal supremacy.
One of these early nuclei of Puritanism was fomented by
Early
Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, and Thomas Aldrich, Master of Corpus,
ism.
became the leader of the Cambridge Puritans. Cartwright was one
of the first Presbyterians, and canvassed the English counties in the interest
of that form of Church government. The movement was checked by
Elizabeth, and Cartwright was driven from his professorship. Later on the
Puritan Tuckney was Regius professor of Divinity as Cartwright had been

Margaret Professor. Presbyterianism was not congenial to the university:
Hall Bishop of Norwich, the satirist who was a contemporary of
Shakespeare, and Archbishop Williams the life-long opponent of Laud, both
went to the Tower for protesting against the acts of the Long Parliament,
and Hall though he was a noted ‘low-churchman’ remonstrated against the
proposed abolition of episcopacy. Among still more eminent Cantabrigians,
Jeremy Taylor was as much opposed to its abolition as Milton favoured it:
but when, in 1643-4, the Westminster Assembly met, Wallis the Cambridge
scientist acted as its secretary, the Oxonian Selden being another of the
thirty laymen present at its deliberations.
The
Milton had no liking for the Westminster Assembly; with
Brownists or Cromwell he sympathised with the rising Independent
Independent
s. Congregations who took their principles from the Brownists of
Elizabeth’s time. Of the five movements which were still to
sweep over the face of religious England, two originated in Cambridge.
How inept the university is to the creation of such schools of thought, how
alien to its genius such creations are, may be gauged by the comparatively
puny character of these two movements. The Brownists and the Cambridge
Platonists do not suggest a world set ablaze; but though ineffective as
schools both of them represented far-reaching principles, and have left a
lasting impression on Anglo-Saxon religion. It is easy to show this in the
case of the Brownists: for Browne was the spiritual father of the Pilgrim
Fathers, of the men who colonised a continent to obtain space to form those
free Church communities which many Englishmen regarded as the logical
completion of the principles of the Reformation. The English refugees at
Amsterdam were disciples and adherents of Robert Browne, and it was a
little company
of Brownists which eventually set out in two ships for the new A.D. 1620.
world, one of which—the “Mayflower”—reached what is now
the State of Massachusetts. The Brownists were the first party of separatists
from the newly established Church in England, and the old and new worlds
recognise in them the true spiritual forbears of all Independent and
Congregational Churches; whose ecclesiastical polity requires that each
congregation should suffice to itself, be complete in itself.
The
In the next century arose the liberal church movement of
Latitudinaria Hales, Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. Falkland, the great
ns.
layman who inspired it, had been educated at Dublin university,

but was entered for S. John’s College as early as 1621, and claimed in after
life, in a letter to the then Master, to have been a member of that society.
Taylor was a Cambridge man who had removed to Oxford; Hales and
Chillingworth were both distinguished Oxford scholars. The distinction
made by Taylor and Chillingworth between essential and non-essential
articles of belief was very far ahead of the theoretical and practical
narrowness of the German Protestantism around them. The problem at issue
was stated by Stillingfleet,[409] “fresh from the generous intellectual life of
Cambridge,” on the eve of the Restoration: Does there exist, in regard to
Church government, any such jus divinum as would prevent men, under the
stress of circumstances, learning from each other, and arriving at unity? The
doctrine of accommodation stated in his Eirenicum, though it was not in
advance of the earlier speculation of Ussher, Chillingworth, Taylor, and
Hales, anticipated later developments of theological speculation with which
we are all familiar.
The xvii and xviii centuries saw the rise and progress of
Deism.
Deism. Lord Herbert of Cherbury[410] “the father of deism” was
educated at Oxford; the great opponent of his doctrines was the Cambridge
philosopher Samuel Clarke. Nevertheless deism was not a university
movement. Bolingbroke, Morgan, and Blount (1654-93) were at no
university; Shaftesbury (b. 1621) and Tindal had been at Oxford; Woolston
and Anthony Collins (b. 1676) had been at Cambridge; and Toland after a
residence at three other universities, retired to Oxford. Conyers Middleton,
librarian of Trinity, was another opponent of the deists. Like unitarianism,
deism undoubtedly responds to a certain temper of English religious
speculation and sentiment, but apparently to no very wide-spread temper;
and the success of English deism was consummated not here but on the
continent.
The evangelical movement is entirely associated with the
The
Evangelical names of John and Charles Wesley and Whitfield—with a group
movement.
of Oxford men. There was no principle of ecclesiastical polity and
none of philosophy underlying it: it was a fervent religious revival begun
within the Church of England and ending outside it, and as such the great
influence it has exerted would appear to have presented few attractions for
the Cambridge mind.
The ‘Tractarian movement’ which also arose as a renewal of
The
Tractarian religious life in the Church of England, was, like Wesleyanism,

movement,
and the due exclusively to Oxford men. A still earlier ‘High Church’
earlier
Cambridge
movement—a ritualistic movement before ‘Tractarianism’—had
movement. however found its home in Cambridge under the auspices of
Andrewes, Wren, and Cosin. These three men, later bishops of
Winchester, Ely, and Durham respectively, established a type of Reformed
churchmanship not only more tolerant and scholarly than Laud’s but one
which was more genuinely a university movement; for it was indigenous—
its patrons were all heads of Cambridge houses—and it did not meet, as did
Laud’s efforts at Oxford, with dislike and rejection at the university. Two
hundred years passed before the Tractarian movement at Oxford reproduced
its likeness and tendered it to Englishmen as the vera effigies of the Church
of England.[411] The influence on religion of Charles Simeon and other
Cambridge men in ante-Tractarian days should also be remembered; neither
should it be forgotten that the liberal anti-Calvinistic churchmanship of
Peter Baro and Overall was first taught by Cambridge men.
The pre-eminence of Cambridge during the age of Elizabeth
The age of
Elizabeth would be in itself sufficient proof of its relation to the New
and the New
Learning. Learning—to the revival of letters and of Greek, the rise of
experimental science, and the theological speculations of the
century. Round Elizabeth there gathered from the first to the last days of her
reign a brilliant group of men—scholars, poets, tutors, prelates, lawyers,
statesmen, philosophers, travellers, explorers. Every name we chance upon,
every man who influenced the court, the letters, the science of the day, hails
from Cambridge. The tutors of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary,
and Elizabeth had all been Cambridge men, and Cambridge men were
appointed as their physicians and chaplains. Names like those of Skelton,
Fisher, Erasmus, Croke, Tyndale, Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and Cheke;
of Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; of Bacon, Gilbert,
Harvey and Caius, conjure up a picture of the scholarship of the age, of the
new stir in thought, letters, and learning. Let us look at two other well-
defined groups of Elizabethans—the statesmen and the churchmen. The two
Cecils, Walsingham, Haddon and Fletcher (Masters of the Requests),
Bacon, Knollys, Sussex, Smith, and Mildmay were all Cambridge men; and
so were all Elizabeth’s great prelates: Lancelot Andrewes, her chaplain, and
dean of Westminster, and the primates Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift: and
they represented every party in the country. Fulke Greville the most
fortunate of the Queen’s favourites, Sir John Harrington her godson, and

Essex, were also Cambridge men. Among the gallant little company of the
first adventurers one only is known to have studied at a university, and he
was at Cambridge: Sir Thomas Gresham conducted the expedition fitted out
by Raleigh which resulted in the discovery of Virginia—named after the
virgin queen—and in the introduction of the tobacco leaf. Cavendish, a
Corpus man, brought to England the tobacco called after him. Clifford, third
earl of Cumberland, a Trinity man, was one of the early privateers and
navigators; and young Roger Manners, of Queens’ and Corpus, went the
“Islands Voyage” with Robert Devereux who had studied at Trinity. Even
Drake, who was at no university, is known as a Cambridge benefactor, and
was as we have seen a large subscriber to the chapel of Corpus Christi
College.
In the last place the New Learning of the Tudor age was carried from
Cambridge to the sister university. It was so well understood that
Cambridge represented this new learning that Wolsey went there for the
men who, by colonising Cardinal College, were to introduce it at Oxford;
and Fox of Pembroke founded a belated Corpus Christi College with the
express purpose of erecting a monument in Oxford to the Renaissance.
The last half of the xv century brought with it the great
The
schoolmaste schoolmasters. Mulcaster of Eton and King’s was master of
rs.
Merchant-Taylors’ on its foundation; Colet’s school, S. Paul’s,
sent to Cambridge for its second head, and five of its first eight head
masters were Cambridge and King’s men. King’s College has supplied a
large proportion of the Provosts and head masters of Eton, many of the
famous masters of Harrow, and a King’s man counts as the creator of
Rugby “as it now is.” Ascham’s “Schoolmaster” was epoch-making, and his
connexion with his university was much closer than William Lily’s with
Oxford.
The Royal
The brilliant epoch of Elizabeth spent, intellectual life
Society A.D. smouldered during the reigns of the first two Stuarts and the
1660-62.
Protectorate, to be renewed and rekindled not by fresh literary
activity but by the inquisitive temper which invaded the nation as it
emerged, with the Restoration, from civil conflict and the slough of
doctrinal wrangling. This inquisitiveness took shape in the institution of the
Royal Society. The foyer of the Royal Society was London, although some
of its most distinguished members migrated later with Wilkins to Oxford.
Of the eminent men who formed the first Royal Society Wallis, Wilkins,

Foster, Jonathan Goddard, Sir William Ball, Lawrence Rooke, Sir William
Petty, Ward the mathematician, Ray, Woodward the mineralogist,
Flamsteed, Sloane, Boyle, Halley, Chief-Justice Hale, Lord Keeper
Guilford, with Sprat the Bishop of Rochester (its historian), Cowley and
Dryden (its poets), and Sir Robert Moray—Wallis, Foster, Rooke, Ray,
Woodward, Flamsteed, Guilford, Cowley, and Dryden, were Cantabrigians.
Four of the most prominent, Ward, Boyle, Sloane and Ball, were at no
university; Goddard went from Oxford to Cambridge where he graduated;
Petty though he became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford was educated at
foreign universities; Moray was at S. Andrews and Paris; Wilkins, Halley,
Hale, and Sprat were at Oxford. Among the first fellows there came from
Oxford Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Hook of the microscope,
Sydenham: More the Platonist, Sir William Temple, Willughby the
ornithologist, and Grew, came from Cambridge. Two more of Charles’s
courtiers joined Moray, Kenelm Digby from Oxford, and Villiers Duke of
Buckingham from Cambridge.
The
The next movement in English thought was both religious and
Cambridge philosophical. When Latitudinarianism ceased to be ecclesiastical
Platonists.
it passed from Oxford and became identified with the sister
university.[412] Here it was handled by a group of men, from the two
colleges Emmanuel and Christ’s, so as to embrace a moral and political
philosophy, to which the term Platonist is only aptly ascribed if it be meant
to stand for the “mass of transcendental thought”; that traditional Platonism
of the speculative schools which had succeeded one another down the
centuries, always at war with nominalism and constantly asserting the
transcendent character of moral ideas and the reality of free will. Hobbism
came to assail this position; for Hobbes applied Bacon’s method to the
moral and social order, and found the basis for them in certain obvious facts
of human nature. The spirit of enquiry set afoot by the Cambridge Platonists
was none the less real because it was opposed to such tenets. They set
themselves, in fact, to enquire whether authority and tradition should guide
men in matters of faith. They asserted that reason was supreme, and they
sought to place Christianity again—to place Protestantism for the first time
—under the protection of that noble spiritual idealism which the great
thinkers of the early Church had chosen for the new faith; to penetrate
Christianity with philosophy.[413]

The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal ecclesiastical
polity. The new movement was something more, something finer.
Cambridge now gathered up the floating philosophical speculation which
existed in the xvii century side by side with the intense absorption in
dogmatic wranglings, the rapid growth of sects—of Anabaptists,
Antinomians, anti-Trinitarians, Arians. “A kind of moral divinity,” as
Whichcote’s tutor, the Puritan Tuckney, cried out in alarm, was to be
substituted for theological polemic. The movement indeed was due to the
combination of a higher spirituality than the Puritan with the new spirit of
bold enquiry in moral and speculative fields[414]—it constituted a
Cambridge reaction against the trammels of Puritanism. It was the first of
all English religious movements (not excepting Wycliffism) to ally a growth
of the religious sentiment with the demand for a wide and liberal theoretical
basis to theology. At the head of this theological movement stands
Benjamin Whichcote (b. 1609) tutor of Emmanuel, who numbered among
his pupils Wallis, Smith, and Culverwell, and who was afterwards Provost
of King’s. Ralph Cudworth (b. in Somersetshire 1617) is perhaps the central
figure: he is great as a moral philosopher, great in his impartial statement of
an opponent’s case, great even in his freedom from the party and political
heat which consumed his contemporaries.[415] In John Smith (b. 1616) of
Emmanuel[416] the movement becomes more speculative, his was the finest
and most richly stored mind, and his “Select Discourses” perhaps mark the
culminating point of the Cambridge school. There remains Henry More (b.
1614) the better known name, of Christ’s College, the exponent of
Descartes, the ardent follower of Plato, from whom he learnt “that
something better and higher than the knowledge of human things
constitutes the supreme happiness of man.” His Enchiridion ethicum and
Enchiridion metaphysicum were the text books of the school.
This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only “one of the
most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical
thought in England,” but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote’s
aphorism “There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions
about it” sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order and
Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of ecclesiastical
parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into the relation of
philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan nor Presbyterian had
brought any such liberating attitude towards theology, for which indeed the

early Protestantism cared not one jot, but which has never entirely died out
of England since the speculations of the Cambridge Platonists.[417] The
Englishman—fed with the crude dogmatism of Luther, the arid
ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of the Puritan, and the intolerance of
all three—now for the first time was called dispassionately to consider the
claims of the philosophical reason, the eternal distinction between essential
and non-essential—a distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant—
fundamental and non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the
claims, in fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed
verities ultimately depends. A “rational Christian eclecticism” was for the
first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the principle
upon which the problems of the present day attend for solution. The values
to be assigned to the notions of “orthodoxy,” of dogma—who around them
had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford it has always been a
question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge a question of
substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the credentials of theories.
Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were ineffective. Their
philosophy lacked a touchstone, concentration; and they allied its fate to a
ridiculous bibliology. For More, who taught at the university which gave us
our school of biblical critics—Erasmus, Colenso, Westcott, Lightfoot, Hort
—the wisdom of the Hebrew had been transmitted to Pythagoras, and from
Pythagoras to Plato, who thus becomes the heir of divine (the Hebrew)
philosophy. Such a doctrine was a serious embarrassment to a cause in the
age of Hobbes; it meant that the rational and critical criteria of the day went
unutilised, and no doctrine can withstand such a charge. There was, too, a
certain lack of the spirit of adventure, that gallant spirit which is not out of
place even in philosophy, and of the courage which belongs to enthusiasm.
The appeal to reason made by Hooker had debouched as Latitudinarianism;
Laud and George Herbert had both opposed it; but Puritan England was
stronger than both and would have none of either. The Platonists stood
between them—called upon the Laudian to modify his conception of
authority, upon the Puritan to admit the claims of reason, enriched
Latitudinism with a philosophy. They were not listened to. None the less the
via media they offered has penetrated English thought. The Englishman
favours reason but is no Hobbist, he must have his God behind the machine;
he likes the supremacy of reason with a nebulous Plato behind it—not the
real Plato, but a Plato to hurl as a weapon in the face of the materialist,

without understanding too much about it. The ‘Cambridge mind’ hit on a
middle term, a resting place for speculation and for faith, which suits the
Englishman in the long run better than either Laud or Hobbes. In Cudworth
we have that mind typified—that union of toleration with half lights which
triumphs in England. Very bold speculation is not the Englishman’s forte.
His intellect in such gesta is not clear-cut, and his practical sense is always
compatible with unturned-out-corners of mysticism, prejudices, reverences
false and true—all the haziness made by those useful half lights loved by a
people who do not like to be mystified, but do not wish to be too much
enlightened.
And if we ask why Cambridge should be Platonist, the answer is because
it always resisted the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Reaction against
scholasticism had brought Plato to Florence in the xv century, it made Plato
at home in Cambridge in the xviith. We have called Cambridge the
laboratory of the Reformation; there too, we see, was made the first attempt
to reconcile Protestantism with philosophy: in undoing the servitude of the
latter to religion, which had been the mark of the middle ages, the
Cambridge Platonists did away with medievalism, joined hands, behind its
back, with that Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrine schools which had
influenced the early Church, defied, of course, scholasticism, and prepared
the place for our modern moral sciences tripos.
Modern
We have already seen that Cambridge is the representative in
science. England of the scientific movement which has changed the face
of the modern world. It may perhaps be pretended that the stages
of its development in Europe have been marked by the great men emanating
from this one university. The names of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, Flamsteed,
Newton, Darwin, are signposts of the direction which science was to take
and landmarks of its achievements.

ADDENBROKE’S HOSPITAL IN TRUMPINGTON STREET
This building, as we now see it, was remodelled by Sir M. Digby
Wyatt 1864-65.

William Gilbert the discoverer of terrestrial magnetism and of the
affinity of magnetic and electric action, was praised by Galileo, while
Erasmus called him “great to a degree which is enviable.” Flamsteed began
that series of observations which initiated modern astronomy, Horrox came
still earlier, and they have been followed by such Cantabrigians as Newton,
Nevil Maskelyne, Herschell, Airy and Adams. Newton and Darwin are two
of the greatest names in the history of the physical and physiological
sciences—they stand out as creators of epochs in the march of human
knowledge: on Newton’s statue in Trinity chapel are inscribed the words qui
genus humanum ingenio superavit—of whom else could they be spoken?—
Darwin has revolutionised our thoughts in spheres far removed from those
directly affected by his great hypothesis.
When we turn to consider the relation of these distinguished sons to the
university which bred them, it is interesting to find how close this has
always been. From the first makers of Cambridge to the last, from its
earliest distinguished sons to its latest, the individual’s relation to the
university has been a close one and the same names come down the
centuries and create a homogeneity in Cambridge history which has
certainly not received its due meed of recognition. A group of persons—of
families—is already assembled in this remote eastern corner of England in
the xiii and xiv centuries which contains the elements of our university
history: Stantons, de Burghs, Walsinghams, Beauforts, Clares, Greys,

Pembrokes are there—and Gaunt and Mortimer the roots of Lancaster and
York. If we had looked in upon the town earlier still, in the xi and xii
centuries, we should have found Picot—the ancestor of the Pigotts whose
name is recorded in Abingdon Pigotts hard by—who succeeded to the
honours of Hereward the Wake[418] and who founded the church dedicated
to the Norman saint Giles; Peverel who brought the Austin canons to
Cambridge, Clare, de Burgh, Fitz-Eustace (or Dunning) and, by the side of
these companions of the Conqueror, the sons of the soil—the Frosts and
Lightfoots. In the xiii century there were the Dunnings assisting the Merton
scholars to establish themselves, Mortimer endowing the Carmelites, the
Veres[419] establishing the Dominicans, de Burghs, Walsinghams, Walpoles,
and Bassetts,[420] the Greys, and Manfields,[421] and “Cecil at the Castle”—
all of whom appear in Edward I.’s Hundred Rolls.
The name of Clare figures on every page of the history of the
Plantagenets. The first Gilbert de Clare had been employed to terrorise the
East Anglians who held out against William; another Gilbert is at the head
of the barons, his son is the guardian of Magna Charta, and his
granddaughter founded Clare College. She also built the Greyfriars house at
Walsingham in 1346, was, with her kinsmen the Monthermers a great
benefactor to the first Augustinian priory founded a hundred years earlier at
Stoke Clare[422] and found time
to send timber from her estates towards the building of the
A.D. 1248.
king’s Hall, as Queen Elizabeth sent a similar gift just two
hundred years afterwards to the king’s college of Trinity. The Clares had
received 95 lordships in Suffolk, which formed “the honour of Clare,” and
they gave their name to the county in Ireland. Through Ralph de
Monthermer the founders of Clare and Pembroke were allied, for he was
Elizabeth de Clare’s stepfather, and afterwards brother-in-law to Aymer de
Valence (see Tables I, II).
We first hear of the de Burghs in 1198 when Thomas,
A.D. 1198.
brother to Hubert the king’s chamberlain, became guardian to
A.D. 1225.
a Bury ward. In 1225 a de Burgh was bishop of Ely, and a
hundred years later John de Burgh the 4th earl of Connaught and 2nd earl of
Ulster married with Elizabeth de Clare. Towards
the end of the xiv century another de Burgh, author of the
A.D. 1385
“Pupilla oculi” was chancellor of the university, and it is he

who purchased the land of S. Margaret’s hostel in 1368.
The connexion of the Mortimers with Cambridge also dates
A.D. 1291.
from the xiii century: Guy de Mortimer figures in the
Cambridge Hundred Rolls as the benefactor of the Carmelite friars, and
sixty years later Thomas, son of Sir Constantine de Mortimer, ceded land
for King’s Hall.
The name of Walsingham occurs as that of a prior of Ely in 1353. The
Walsinghams held two manors
in Suffolk, besides land in Cambridge part of which was sold A.D. 1344.
to the king for the site of King’s Hall.

There was a Ralph Walpole bishop of Ely, and A.D. 1290-1299.
subsequently of Norwich in the time of Edward I., who gave a
messuage to Peterhouse as early as 1290. The Walpoles continued to figure
on the roll of this college till in the xvi century the Walpole of that day fled
with the Jesuit Parsons to Spain after the trial of Campian; he became vice-
rector at Valladolid but was eventually martyred at York five years before
the close of the century. Robert and Horace Walpole continued the
Cambridge traditions of their family.
With the xiv century other names appear: the Scropes, Gonvilles,
Stantons,[423] the families of Cambridge and of Croyland, Haddon,[424]
Zouche,[425] and Cavendish, and last but not least Valence, and the house of
Gaunt and Beaufort.
The connexion of the Scropes with Cambridge probably dates from the
earlier half of the xiv century. Scropes, as we have seen, figure among the
chancellors of the university in that century, and were allied not only to the
Mortimers but to the Gonvilles: when therefore we find the representative
of the house of Valence who is also a grandson of Roger Mortimer, and
whose son married a descendant of the founder of Clare, engaged in a
political intrigue with Gaunt,
Scrope, and the Master of Pembroke in 1371, and the
A.D. 1371.
Scropes[426] Greys and Mortimers conspiring with
Richard Earl of Cambridge[426a] early in the next century,
A.D. 1414.
we gain a very definite impression of a Cambridge coterie.

“—— Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, in their dear care,
And tender preservation of our person”——

are the words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Henry V. before his
discovery of their treachery.
Indeed the historical plays of Shakespeare, from the dawn of
Shakespeare
and our university history in the reign of John to its zenith in that of
Cambridge
men. Henry VIII., place prominently before us our Cambridge
protagonists. In “King John” the names of Louis the Dauphin,
Chatillon, and de Burgh recall the Cambridge history of two centuries.
Chatillon is here the ambassador of Philip of France who calls upon John to
surrender his “borrowed majesty” into Prince Arthur’s hands; and in the
next century Marie de Chatillon and Elizabeth de Burgh are building
colleges. Sir Stephen Scrope figures in “Richard II.” In “Henry IV.” Scroop
Archbishop of York and Edward Mortimer, and in “Henry V.” the Earl of
Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, appear. In “Henry VI.,” with Beaufort,
Mortimer, Suffolk, Somerset, Buckingham and Stafford, Stanley,
Woodville, and Margaret of Anjou—all of whom were to play a part in
Cambridge history—we have Bassett of the Lancastrian faction, and Vernon
representing the Yorkists. The dramatis personae of this play thus include
the dramatis personae of King’s and Queens’ Colleges, of Haddon Hall, of
Magdalene, and Christ’s. In “Richard III.” Rotherham of York appears, with
many others who belong to Cambridge in the xv century; while in “Henry
VIII.” even Dr. Butts of Gonville, Henry’s physician, is not omitted.
In the xv century we have some new names. Zouche is
xv c.
there still, and Scrope, and Bassett, and Beaufort, but there are xvi c.
also Langton, Stafford, Pole, Brandon, Stanley, and
Babington. In the xvi century Stanley, Brandon, Stafford, Sidney, Audley,
Bacon and Cecil, are all prominent names.
These various groups are not independent. The annexed pedigrees will
show us that the Clares, Mortimers, de Burghs, Audleys, and Staffords had
intermarried: that Valence and Chatillon, Mortimer, Grey, and Hastings,
formed one family; that the Beauforts, through John of Gaunt, joined the
house of Edward III. to the house of Tudor, and were allied to the Staffords,
Nevilles, and Stanleys; that the Scropes were allied to the Mortimers, the
Staffords again to the family of Chatillon and to the Woodvilles: the
Sidneys to the Brandons, the Brandons to the Greys, the Greys to the

Woodvilles;[427] and that the xvi century Audleys intermarried with the
Greys as the xiv century Clares had wedded with the Audleys; that through
Mortimer, Stafford, Hastings, and Grey, the founders—Clare, de Burgh,
Chatillon, Valence, Beaufort, Stafford, Woodville, Audley, and Sidney—
form one clan. Before we proceed with the list of well-known Cambridge
names from the xvi century onwards, let us notice in passing that certain
titles have always clung to Cambridge, no matter who bore them: such are
Pembroke, Huntingdon, Buckingham, Suffolk, Leicester.[428]

[429]

The names of great Cantabrigians hardly ever appear singly in the annals
of the university, and as there are family groups among founders so there
are also among its other benefactors and distinguished representatives.
Babington, Bacon, Beaumont, Bryan, Cavendish, Cecil, Coleridge, Darwin,
Devereux, Fletcher, Greville, Harvey, Langton, Lightfoot, Lytton, Manners,
Montague, Neville, Newton, Palmer, Shepard, Taylor, Thackeray, Temple,
Wordsworth—all form such groups, and have provided the university not
only with great names, but with a family history.
No name has clung more steadily to Cambridge than Babington—it was
known there at least as early as the xv century, and was that of the 25th
abbot of Bury in the time of Henry VI. Henry Babington was vice-
chancellor in 1500; Dr. Humphrey Babington built the two sets of rooms on
the south side of Nevile’s court known as ‘the Babington rooms,’ in 1681,
and his family have given prominent members to the university ever since.

One of the Bacons was the last Master of Gonville, and Nicholas Bacon and
his two sons were at Corpus and Trinity. Beaumont is a Peterhouse name;
but in the reign of Elizabeth Dr. Robert Beaumont was Master of Trinity
and vice-chancellor, and a Beaumont was Master of Peterhouse
in the xviii century. Towards the end of the xiv century William
Temp. Ric.
ii. 1380- Cavendish was fellow and master of the same college, and John
1397.
Cavendish had been chancellor in 1380. In Gray’s time Lord John
Cavendish was at Cambridge, in the next century Henry Cavendish the
scientist; and the connexion of this family with the university has never
been severed.
The Cecils appear at Cambridge with the rise of Burleigh’s family in
Elizabeth’s reign, and they were connected with the Bacons a family which
also came into prominence at the same time; the great Bacon was
Burleigh’s nephew, and the Cecils were kinsmen of other celebrated
Cambridge men—Cheke, Hatton, Howard, and the founder of the
Brownists. Moreover one of the early Cecils had been made water
Temp. Hen.
viii. bailiff of Whittlesey (‘bailiff of Whittlesey mere’) and keeper of
the swans in the fen district. William, first Lord Burleigh, was
born in his mother’s house at Bourn—the place which gave its name to the
barony held successively by Hereward, Picot, and Peverel. The third and
fifth lords married with the Manners, the sixth with a Cavendish. Both the
Cecils of Elizabeth’s time were chancellors of the university; Burleigh’s
eldest son Thomas Earl of Exeter and Lady Dorothy Nevill his wife gave no
less than £108 a year to Clare Hall, and ‘Mr. Cecil’ was moderator when
James visited the university in 1615. Darwin had been preceded at
Cambridge by old Erasmus Darwin, botanist and poet, the ‘Sweet
Harmonist of Flora’s court’ as Cowper calls the ancestor of the man who
gave us the great harmonizing hypothesis of the century. [430] Fletcher is
another Cambridge name. Fletcher Bishop of London was at Corpus, so was
his son the dramatist; Giles the brother of the bishop, one of Elizabeth’s
ambassadors, was at King’s, his two poet sons were Cambridge men, and
there was a scientific Fletcher at Caius in the xvi century. Greville or
Grenville is another Cambridge name: Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke
(whose mother was a Neville) was at Jesus College, so was his cousin the
second lord, whose father had been sent to Trinity in 1595 by Robert
Devereux Earl of Essex with a letter of advice on Cambridge studies written

by another old Cantabrigian, Bacon. The first Lord Lansdowne in the time
of Charles II. and Sir Bevil Greville (ob. 1706) were both at Trinity.
The Suffolk name of Hervey is another which has always figured in
Cambridge—there was Hervey Dunning in the xiiith and Hervey de Stanton
in the xiv century; a Harvey succeeded Gardiner and Haddon in the
Mastership of Trinity Hall, of which he was a considerable benefactor, and
was vice-chancellor in 1560, Gabriel Harvey, a kinsman of Sir Thomas
Smith’s, was a fellow of this college and of Pembroke, William Harvey was
at Caius. Langton[431] is an ancient and honoured name; it was that of the
6th Master of Pembroke, of John Langton chancellor of the university in the
time of Henry VI., of Thomas Bishop of Winchester, and other Cambridge
men. Lightfoot is a name which was known in the fen before the Conquest,
and was that of the eminent Cambridge Hebraist two hundred years before
the Bishop of Durham studied there. The Lyttons have been known at the
university since the xvii century, Sir Rowland Lytton the antiquary was a
member of Sidney Sussex College[432] and Bulwer Lytton was at Trinity
Hall. The Montagues and Montacutes have been important since the day
when Simon Montacute Bishop of Ely befriended Peterhouse. Through the
xvii century, the first Master of Sidney Sussex, Richard Bishop of Norwich
(the antiquary), the 2nd Earl of Manchester, and Charles Montague
(afterwards Lord Halifax) who, with Prior, replied to Dryden’s “Hind and
Panther,” were all Cambridge men; and Sir Sidney Montague of Barnwell
was one of Charles I.’s Masters of the Requests. We have seen
A.D. 1627.
how the Nevilles intermarried with the families of Cambridge
founders; Henry Neville was proctor, and vice-chancellor in 1560; Thomas
Nevile was 8th Master of Trinity[433] and vice-chancellor, and 6th Master of
Magdalene, where the name was again recorded in the last Master of the
college (Lord Braybrooke). There was a Newton at Cambridge, 6th Master
of Peterhouse, contemporary with Beaufort, Thorpe, Scrope,
A.D. 1381.
and de Burgh. In the middle of the xvi century another
Newton was vice-chancellor; fifty years later Fogg Newton was Provost of
King’s and vice-chancellor in the 8th of James I., and an Isaac Newton
unknown to fame entered for Peterhouse about the same time as the
discoverer of the law of gravitation entered Trinity. Palmer is another well-
known name: a John Palmer was proctor in the reign of Elizabeth, Edward
Palmer was fellow of Trinity in the reign of Charles I., and Edward Palmer
Professor of Arabic, the sheikh Abdullah, was a Cambridge man. Skeltons

have been found at the university since a proctor of that name
A.D. 1391.
who flourished in the days of Richard II.; Shepards since the
days of Elizabeth when there was a proctor of that name; Jeremy Taylor
was kin to Rowland Taylor the Cambridge martyr; and Palmerston
continued the tradition of the Temples. The Sternes had played a part in
Cambridge before the days of Laurence Sterne;[434] Thackeray followed
other members of his family to the university, and there have been
Wordsworths at Cambridge ever since the poet went to S. John’s and his
brother Christopher was Master of Trinity.
Other Cambridge names claim attention. There had been Latimers and
Ridleys at Cambridge before the Protestant martyrs. Aldrich belongs to the
xvi and xvii centuries. Byngham was not first heard of when the parson of
S. John Zachary built God’s House, but is the name of no less a personage
than the first Master of Pembroke (Thomas Byngham), and another William
Byngham was proctor in the year when Whitgift was vice-
A.D. 1570.
chancellor. One of the Bassetts was proctor as late as 1488,
and Roger Ascham’s father in the xvi century was steward to the great
Yorkshire house of Scrope; Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel, was
brother-in-law to Sir Francis Walsingham, and was allied to the Ratcliffes.
[435] There were Days before the Days of King’s; the Harringtons—allied to
the Montagues, Stanleys and Sidneys—were Cambridge men; a Hatton was
proctor in 1499 and later Provost of King’s, and the Hattons of the time of
Elizabeth and her successors—who intermarried with the Montagues—were
all benefactors of Jesus College.[436] The northern Percies have often taken
part in Cambridge affairs, and Percy Bishop of Carlisle was
A.D. 1451.
chancellor of the university in the time of Henry VI. Roger
Rotherham was Master of King’s Hall before the days of the great
chancellor. There were Somersets at Cambridge from the days of Henry VI.,
and a Stafford was proctor the year Henry VIII. beheaded
—— bounteous Buckingham
The mirror of all courtesey.

Stokys and Stokes was a well-known name before Sir George Stokes
went to Pembroke; Sedgwick was on the papist side in the controversy held
before Edward VI.’s commissioners; Tyndale, like Aldrich, belongs to the
xvi and xvii centuries. Fitzhugh is a name which flourished at the university
in the xv and early xvi centuries. Parker, Paston,[437] Morgan, Cosin and

Cousins, and the various forms of Clark are constant Cambridge names. In
modern times Macaulay, Trevelyan, Paget, Maitland, and Lyttelton should
be added.
The subject of university men must not be dismissed without noticing
how many of the most distinguished Cantabrigians never earned a degree.
We have already seen (in chapter iii.) that in some periods of greatest
intellectual achievement the examination tests at the university were wholly
inadequate: what follows is a list of great and prominent men who took no
degree at all:—Bacon, Byron, Macaulay (fellow of Trinity), Gray (professor
of history),[438] Morland the hydrostatician,[439] Woodward the founder of
mineralogy,[440] Donne, Fulke Greville, Parr the classic, Sir William
Temple, Cromwell, Pepys and Mildmay both of whom were conspicuous
benefactors of the university, Dryden who received his degree by
dispensation of the Primate, Stratford de Redcliffe who was created M.A. by
royal mandamus, Palmerston who graduated “by right of birth.” There was
no one so important as Macaulay in 1822 when his name was absent from
the tripos list, no one so great as Darwin in the tripos lists of 1831 when he
took an ordinary degree.
The Oxford roll of non-graduates is not less distinguished: Sir Thomas
More, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney, Wolsey,
Massinger and Beaumont the dramatists, Shaftesbury, Gibbon, Shelley—
while Halley the astronomer took his M.A. by royal mandamus, and Locke’s
degree was irregular. Dublin university has not a dissimilar tale to tell;
Burke failed to distinguish himself there, and Swift was given a degree
speciali gratia.

CHAPTER VI

GIRTON AND NEWNHAM

Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York with the monastery of Ely—
English women and education—the four “noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at
Cambridge—the rise of the movement for university education—two separate movements—
Girton—Newnham—rise of the university lecture movement—Anne Clough—the Newnham
Halls and Newnham College—the first triposes—the “Graces” of 1881—social life at the
women’s colleges—character and choice of work among women—the degree—status of
women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford—and status elsewhere.

THE foundation of the women’s colleges is of sufficient importance to call
for a chapter in any history of the university, even if they did not in
themselves awaken so much general interest. Cambridge cannot be
otherwise than proud of its position as pioneer university in the higher
education of the women of the country; the women’s colleges count as one
of its glories and stand to it in the relation which Spenser gave to the river
Ouse:
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowne
He doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it.

They belong to its atmosphere of vitality and growth, their presence adds
something to that air of newness and renewal which has never been absent
from the university town.
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby were of the same blood, kin to
Edwin and Oswy. They founded two of those famous double monasteries
for women and men, one of which became the greatest school in England,
the other the nursing mother of the university of Cambridge.[441] The
histories of the School of York and of the School which was to rise on the
banks of the Granta had therefore been linked together since the vii century
by Hild and Etheldreda. Was any prevision vouchsafed to Hild, that mother
of scholars, of the day just twelve hundred years later when two women’s
colleges were to rise by the side of the great school in the diocese of Ely?
The centre of learning which had Etheldreda of Ely for one of its patrons
was certainly propitious to women; but Cambridge had another patroness—
whose name was among the earliest to be invoked in the town after the

coming of the Normans—that Rhadegund who ruled the first nuns and the
first double monastery in France, who was ordained a deacon by S. Médard,
in whose convent study came next to prayer, who lectured each day to her
spiritual children, and whose learning is recorded with admiration by one of
her monks, the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus.[442]
Perhaps there is no country with a long history where women have
played a smaller part on the national stage than England. But a conspicuous
exception must be made—in education they have played a great part, and
this part was nowhere greater than in Cambridge. We have the little group
of college builders who lived in contiguous centuries—Elizabeth de Clare,
Marie de Saint-Paul, Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond—to
prove it: but the activity of the xiv and xv centuries was equally apparent
between the viith and xth. It was Saxon nuns who carried learning to
Germany, and the rôle of the great abbesses in those centuries, while it must
be reckoned among the exceptions to the inconspicuous part played by
women in English history, also served prominently the cause of education.
[443]

The “two noble and devoute countesses” who built Clare and Pembroke,
and whom Margaret of Anjou desired to imitate, realised perhaps more than
anyone else in the xiv century the extraordinary joy of launching those first
foundations with their promise for the

THE GREAT BRIDGE—BRIDGE ST.
This view is painted from the old Quay side. The water-gate of
Magdalene College is seen on the right, and in the distance is the
Tower in the New Court of St. John’s College rising above the tree-
tops.

future:[444] but it was something of this joy which was reserved for their
descendants who saw the rise of Newnham and Girton. It was, indeed, not
to two but to four noble and devoute countesses[445] that Cambridge owed
its most efficient co-operation in the great periods which mark its history—
the dawn of the renascence in the xiv, the threshold of our modern life in
the xv, and the consolidation of the religious movement in the xvi century:
[446] and if Queens’ College was built by Margaret of Anjou “to laud and
honneure of sexe femenine” Cambridge has repaid her by extending the
significance of her ambition.
The women’s colleges which we now see did not, then, begin the
connexion of women and the university, they completed it. It is a curious
thing when one looks down a list of Cambridge benefactors to find that
from a college to a common room fire, from a professorship to a Cambridge
“chest,” from the chapel to a new college to the buttress of a falling college,
from a university preacher to a belfry,[447] the names of women never fail to
appear as benefactors, but appear in no other way. Not once until the xix
century did any woman benefit from the learning which her sex had done so
much to inaugurate, to sustain and consolidate.
In the year 1867 the idea of founding a woman’s college and of
associating the higher education of women with the university of
Cambridge began to take shape.[448] No movement of the century, it may
confidently be affirmed, has done so much to increase the happiness of
women, and none has opened to them so many new horizons. If men look
back on the years spent at the university as among the happiest in their
lives, so that everything in later life which recalls their alma mater—not
excluding the London terminus from which they always “went up”—
borrows some of its glamour, the university life meant all this, and more,
for women. To begin with it repaired a traditional injustice, the absence of
any standard of individual life especially for the unmarried; the neglect of
every personal interest, talent, or ambition, which a woman might have
apart from looking after her own or other people’s children. The
Reformation, in itself, had done singularly little for women. Puritan views

were of the kind patronised by a Sir Willoughby Patterne, and no step had
been made towards recognising women’s claims as individuals since the
days when convents had in some measure certainly admitted these, a fact
which probably sufficed to make the convent turn the scale on the side of
happiness.
Girton and Newnham are the outcome of two contemporaneous but
separate movements. In 1867, as we have seen, the moral foundations were
laid of a college in connexion with Cambridge university where women
should follow the same curriculum and present themselves for the same
examinations as men. In 1869 the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, fellow of
Trinity, and afterwards Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy,
suggested that lectures for women should be given at Cambridge in
connexion with the new Higher Local Examination which the university
had that year established for women all over England. To-day, more than
thirty years after the building of the two colleges, Newnham and Girton are
as alike in character as two institutions can be, but this likeness is the
consequence of changes on both sides. The view taken by the promoters of
Girton was that if women were to be trained at the university by university
men they should undergo precisely the same tests, and take precisely the
same examinations as men. Professor Sidgwick contented himself with a
scheme for relating the higher education of women to university teaching,
and not only accepted but encouraged a separate course of study and a
separate examination test. Girton represents the principle that a woman’s
university education should closely resemble that which the centuries had
evolved as the best for men. Newnham was started to further a scheme of
education as unlike the men’s as preparation for the higher work made
possible. The one grew out of a claim to have the same examination as men;
the other was the outcome of an examination established expressly for
women. Events have not justified the second scheme. If women’s education
was to be connected with the university, the only permanently satisfactory
way was, clearly, to follow the curriculum already traced out. If this was not
actually the best which could be devised, the foundation of women’s
colleges was not the moment to attempt to alter it. A “best” created for
women would always have been thought to be a second best. There were in
fact not one but two objects set before all who interested themselves in
these things—to get higher education for women, and to win recognition for
their capacity to do the same work as men. Among the founders of women’s

colleges many had present to their minds something further than the
advantages of education—they looked forward to a time when women
should participate in the world’s work, and have a fair share in the common
human life; not a fair share of its labour, for this had never been lacking, but
of the means, the opportunities, and the recognition enjoyed by men.
Girton at once prepared its students for the university Previous
Women and
the ordinary Examination, and claimed that they should be examined for both
degree.
the

VIEW OF CAMBRIDGE FROM THE CASTLE HILL
The central object in the picture is the tower of St. John’s College
Chapel, with the tower of Great St. Mary’s a little to the right and
King’s College Chapel to the extreme right. In the middle distance
on the left is Jesus College and the Round Church, and nearer to
us we look down upon the roofs of Magdalene College. The
building on the right in foreground is St. Giles’ Church, the
original foundation of which takes us back nearly to the Conquest.
In the extreme distance is the rising ground known as the Gog-
Magog Hills.

ordinary and the honour degree. Newnham at first prepared its students for
the Higher Local examinations and the triposes, discountenanced the
Previous Examination and would not allow its students to prepare for the
Ordinary degree. In the event, Newnham has had to abandon the
examination which was the original raison d’être of its existence, and
Girton has had virtually to abandon its claim to examination for the

ordinary degree. This means that every woman who takes a degree takes it
in honours: the same is true of no college of men in Cambridge except
King’s. The founders of Newnham considered it a waste of time for women
to come to the university to qualify themselves for that Ordinary degree
which graces the majority of our men, and which represented such a
mysterious weight of learning to sisters at home in the old days. This
decision has a double ricochet—it is good for the colleges, for only the
better women come up; it is bad for many women who, like many men, are
unfit to do tripos work and who might yet enjoy from residence at
Cambridge the same advantages—direct and extraneous—which the ‘poll’
degree man now obtains.
Girton.
The first committee for the future Girton College met on
December 5th 1867;[449] but the foundation of Girton dates from
October 16, 1869 when a hired house at Hitchin, midway between
Cambridge and London, was opened to six students at a time when it was
not thought advisable to plant a women’s college in Cambridge. The college
at Hitchin[450] was carried on under serious tuitional and other
disadvantages—lecturers from the university, for example, were paid for the
time occupied in the journey—and in 1873 the college was removed to
Girton, a village two miles out of Cambridge.
The manor of Girton on the Huntingdon road—the old via
The manor
and village Devana—belonged in the xi century to Picot the Norman sheriff
of Girton.
of Cambridge who expropriated part of its tithes for the
endowment of the canons’ house and church of S. Giles which is passed by
Girtonians on their way from the college to the town. In the xvi century the
manor provided a rent charge for Corpus Christi College. Earlier still it was
the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial ground (discovered in a college
field in 1882-6). The college itself is built on old river gravel.
The final decision to build near but not in the university town
The
founders. was taken at the last moment when Lady Augusta Stanley, wife of
Dean Stanley, refused both money and moral support if it were
decided otherwise.[451] Lady Augusta Stanley who thus determined a step
which has not proved advantageous to Girton was not, however, one of the
founders of the college. This honour is due in the first place to Madame
Bodichon (Barbara Leigh Smith before her marriage) and to Miss Emily
Davies, daughter of Dr. Davies, rector of Gateshead, who elaborated the
scheme together. The first thousand pounds which made possible the

realisation of the scheme was given by the former, whose activity in all
causes for the advancement of women’s interests was crowned by her gifts
to the first women’s college: part of her capital was made over in her life-
time to Girton which became her trustee for the payment of the interest until
her death in 1891, and of certain terminable annuities afterwards.[452] The
third founder was Henrietta wife of the 2nd Lord Stanley of Alderley and
daughter of the 13th Viscount Dillon,[453] a munificent donor to the college,
who joined the movement in 1871, before the removal from Hitchin, and
who died in 1895.
The picturesque and collegiate-looking building which arose
The college.
in 1873 for the accommodation of 21 students, was thus the first
residential college for women ever built in connexion with a university. It
was, like Pembroke, the result of a woman’s intention to found and finish a
domus seu aula scholarium, the scholars being, for the first time, of the sex
of the founder. Subsequent building in 1877, 1879, 1884, 1887 (when Jane
C. Gamble’s legacy enabled the college to house 106 students) and finally
between 1899 and 1902, has greatly increased its capacity, and the college
now holds 150 students in addition to the Mistress and the resident staff. It
contains a large hall, libraries, reading room, lecture rooms, a chemical
laboratory, chapel, hospital, and swimming bath; and its position outside the
town gives it the advantage of large grounds, some thirty acres being
divided into hockey fields, ten tennis courts, an orchard, and kitchen
garden; while a seventeen acre field, purchased with the Gamble bequest in
1886, is utilised as golf links and woodland. Over the high table in the hall
are the portraits of the three founders; Madame Bodichon is represented
painting, reminding each generation of students that one of their founders
was a distinguished and delightful artist.

GIRTON COLLEGE—EVENING
These buildings were designed by Mr. Waterhouse. They are of red
brick, and were first occupied in 1873.

The college is governed by its members,[454] from whom is
Government
. drawn the Executive Committee, three members of which are
indirectly chosen by the old students. The Executive Committee
appoints the Mistress and college officers, but the Mistress nominates the
resident staff with the exception of the bursar, junior bursar, librarian, and
registrar. The fees for residence and tuition are thirty-five guineas for each
of the three yearly terms, and they include “coaching.” Students may be in
residence who are not reading for a tripos, the goal of the great majority. A
great part of the preparation for triposes is done at the college by its own
resident staff. The first Cambridge degree examination taken by women
was in 1870 when five of the six Hitchin students were examined for the
Previous Examination;[455] and the first tripos examination taken by women
was two years later when three of these students passed in the classical and
mathematical triposes.[456] In scholastic successes, Girton trained the first
wrangler (Miss Scott, equal to 8th wrangler 1880), the first senior moralist
(Miss E. E. Constance Jones, the present Mistress of Girton), and the only
senior classic (Miss Agnata Ramsay, now wife to the Master of Trinity); and
was the first to obtain first classes in the classical tripos.[457]
Among scholarships and exhibitions are six foundation scholarships the
gift of private persons; the scholarships of the Clothworkers’, Drapers’,
Goldsmiths’, and Skinners’ Companies and of the Honourable the Irish
Society; in addition to which there are other valuable scholarships and

studentships due to private benefactors, and the Gamble, Gibson,
Montefiore, Metcalfe, and Agnata Butler prizes.[458]
Former Girton students not only fill posts all over Great
Former
Girton Britain and Ireland as head or assistant mistresses in high schools,
students.
grammar schools, and women’s colleges, but they are to be found
holding the professorship of mathematics and a classical fellowship at Bryn
Mawr College Pennsylvania, in the high schools of Pretoria, Bloemfontein,
and Moscow, in women’s colleges at Toronto and Durban, as mathematical
or other tutors in Queen’s College London, Queen’s College Belfast, and
Alexandra College Dublin. A Girtonian is vice-president of the British
Astronomical Association, computer at Cambridge Observatory, assistant
inspector to the Scotch Education Department, lecturer in modern economic
history in the university of London, a fellow of the university of London, on
the staff of the Victoria History of the Counties of England, assistant on the
staff of the English Dialect Dictionary (just published); while one is
secretary and librarian of the Royal Historical Society, and another (a D.Sc.
of London) is a fellow of the same society. Old students are also to be found
as educational missionaries in Bombay and Calcutta, as members of the
Missionary Settlement for University Women in Bombay, and of the
Women’s Mission Association (S.P.G.) at Rurki; as medical missionary at
Poona, as missionaries at Lake Nyasa, and in Japan, and the principal of the
North India Medical School for Christian Women is also a Girtonian. In
special work, a Girtonian is H.M.’s principal lady inspector of factories, one
of H.M.’s inspectors of schools, a Poor Law guardian, a deputy
superintendent of the women clerks’ department of the Bank of England,
and on the secretarial staff of the Tariff Commission. An old Girtonian is
the only woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the
only woman to hold the Hughes Gold Medal of the Royal Society.
All other colleges which have been founded or will be founded for
women owe a debt to Girton for upholding the principle of equal conditions
and equal examination tests in the university education of women and men.
Its promoters always kept steadily before them the two ends of women’s
education, and never moved from the position that “what is best for the
human being will be found to be also the best for both sexes.” To them it is
mainly due that when Plato’s ideal of equal education of the sexes came at
length to be realised, after women had waited for it more than two thousand

years, it was not upon a basis of separate examinations for women, and
separate tests so designed as to elude comparison.[459]
The village of Newnham which is approached from the
Newnham.
“Backs” of the colleges, and

THE BOATHOUSE ON ROBINSON CRUSOE’S ISLAND
On the upper river at the back of King’s Mill, not far from
Queens’ College. Across the bridge in the distance and behind the
trees on the left is Coe Fen, and on the right is Sheep’s Green.

which, until 1880, was also accessible by a ferry over Coe fen, played an
important part in the early history of the university. It was the site given to
the Whitefriars, who had been the first arrivals in Cambridge, and who from
the time of their appearance there as romites till they became the sons of S.
Theresa were the most conspicuous community in the town. The first
general of the Carmelites—an Englishman—had been a contemporary of
the founder of the first college, and it was at Newnham that he visited his
friars in the middle of the xiii century, at the convent there which is
described in the Hundred Rolls and the Barnwell Chartulary.[460] In the
same century William de Manfield left his lands in Newnham to the
scholars of Merton. In the next (the xiv) century the manor of Newnham
was given to Gonville Hall by Lady Anne Scrope, and both Sir John
Cambridge and Henry Tangmer, who were aldermen of the guilds of the
Blessed Virgin and Corpus Christi, gave or bequeathed lands and houses
they held in Newnham to the new college which the

guilds had built.[461] The Carmelites moved later to the present A.D. 1291.
site of Queens’ and the adjoining ground, and the edge of their
property is skirted by every Newnham student on her way to lectures either
through Silver Street or King’s College. This new residence was the gift of
Sir Guy de Mortimer and was in the busy university centre—Mill Street in
the parish of S. John Baptist—so that the friars still heard the sound of the
horn which was blown at the King’s Mill to tell the miller at Newnham that
he might begin to grind. Beyond the mill was Newnham Lane, which
stretched to Grantchester.[462]
Like Peterhouse which was adapted and built for the “Ely Scholars,” the
Hall at Newnham was the outcome of a students’ association:—the North of
England Council for the Higher Education of Women, of which Miss
Clough was president, and the association formed to promote the interests
of the Higher Local students were its real progenitors.
As soon as the removal from Hitchin had been decided, it was hoped that
the students already settled in Cambridge and the Girton community might
form one body; but the decision to build away from the town put a stop to
any such scheme. The standpoint of the promoters of Newnham had always
diverged in some particulars from that of the promoters of Girton. The
former wished to reduce the expenses of

QUEENS’ LANE—THE SITE OF THE OLD MILL STREET
The Towers of Queens’ College Gateway are seen on the left,
through the trees on the right is St. Catherine’s College, and in the
distance a portion of King’s College.

a university education to the minimum, and they wished, too, that it should
be completely undenominational, while a clause in the constitution of
Girton provided for Church of England instruction and services. Finally, the
question as to which preliminary and degree examinations should be
preferred by women was still pending.[463] But when the moment came to
hire and build a house of residence, the advantage was all on the side of
Newnham. Work began in a hired house in the centre of the town with five
students, in the October term of 1871.[464] These quarters were too noisy,
and Miss Clough, who loved a garden, found an old house set in a large
garden and orchard, with the historic name of Merton Hall, and moved
there in 1872. A supplementary house in Trumpington Street was taken next
year, and there were then in residence 14 students in Merton Hall, 7 in
Trumpington Street, and 8 in town lodgings. In 1875 Newnham Hall was
built on one side of Coe fen and Newnham Mill, as Peterhouse had been
built on the other. So that Newnham students frequented the streets of
Cambridge from the first, and had their house of residence in the town two

years before the sister community settled at Girton. The founders of Girton
had been the first to ideate a women’s college in connexion with university
teaching, but Newnham was the first college for women to take its place by
the side of the historic colleges in Cambridge.
Let us now retrace our steps for a moment. In March 1868 the North of
England Council memorialised the university to obtain advanced
examinations, and in the following year Cambridge instituted the
examinations for girls over eighteen since known as the Higher Local
Examination. In the autumn of the same year (1869), as we have seen—the
year which saw the establishment of the future Girton community at Hitchin
—the organisation of the Cambridge lectures for women was mooted under
the auspices of Mr. Henry Sidgwick. The first meeting was convened at the
house of Mrs. Fawcett, whose husband was then Professor of Political
Economy at the university, and whose little daughter, the future senior
wrangler, was peacefully cradled at the time in a room above. The result of
this meeting was the formation of a committee of management consisting of
members of the university, and of an executive committee, and the
programme of a course of lectures was printed for the following Lent term
1870.[465] The original scheme

MERTON HALL
An old house in the Merton Estate district.

included a students’ house where women from a distance could be lodged.
Two students applied in the autumn term of 1870 for permission to reside in
Cambridge, and were received into private houses in the town. Meanwhile
in response to an appeal, originating with Mrs. Fawcett, exhibitions of £40
for two years for students attending the lectures had been given by John
Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, and before the year closed it was found
necessary to open a house of residence. In March 1871 the post of head of a
house of residence was offered to Miss Anne J. Clough.
Anne
We know more about Miss Clough than about any founder or
Clough. first principal of a college on which he or she left a personal
mark. Of the life and thoughts of others, with the exception
perhaps of Bateman in the xiv century and Fisher in the xvith, we know
singularly little. Anne J. Clough was born on January 20, 1820, at
Liverpool. Through her Newnham received, what Girton missed, the
impress of a strong individuality, now placed by “great death” at a distance
which enables us to focus and appraise it. Her father’s family was of Welsh
origin and traced itself to that Sir Richard who was agent to the great
merchant-adventurer, Sir Thomas Gresham. To her Yorkshire mother, Anne
Perfect, she and her brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, owed their
literary interests. In appearance she was of middle height and spare—an old
woman of that Victorian epoch in which she was born, out of whose eyes
looked the soul of the twentieth century, and after. She seemed indeed to
have two personalities—the white hair and an uncertain gait typified the
one, but the eyes, very dark and very bright, would lift unexpectedly in the
midst of a conversation, and then the visitor would receive a revelation; he
would see no more the old woman but the woman who must always be
young, the stamp of an inexhaustible energy, that shrewdness with an
unconquerable idealism close behind, an atmosphere about her of uncouth
poetry.
For she was no artist. She had not that which separates the artist from the
man of ideas, or the dreamer, or the seer—expression. No poetical
imagination was ever more tongue-tied. She spoke by actions, and used
words only as indications of thoughts. Her speech was compared by a
former student to the works of early painters, before command over the
material had been obtained, but where “sheer force of character and feeling
had risen over the difficulties.” She was an idealist, but she could never
understand the value of an abstract principle. Her interest was always in the

individual, in the career, and she came to no matter, to no person, with a
store of general principles ready for the case. She wanted to give women
not merely learning, but a life of their own, to call out interests, to satisfy
their individuality. She liked to find in them many and marked vocations,
for she understood the dignity of all work and had no disdain of common
things. She wanted every one to have a place and an office in life, and must
perforce fit the squarest bits into a round hole, so intolerably pathetic was it
to her that they should have no hole. You could not “hand her the salt or
open the door for her” without receiving “some recognition of your
individuality” a student said of her. This recognition of the individuality of
women and of the human and practical sides of higher intellectual training
was her contribution to the movement in which she took so great a part.
And the contribution was all important.
She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It
was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the teachers
in elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings of University
Extension Lecture students. Miss dough’s belief in happiness—in people’s
right to happiness—was the source of most delightful qualities. She had
waited, she said, for her own till she was fifty years old, and it had come to
her with Newnham. She insisted on the little pleasures “which bring joy by
the way.” Nothing was too small to engage her own attention, and her
educational qualities lay in awaking similar interest in others, as her moral
disposition led her to share and so to increase the common stock of interests
and supports in life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college
boundaries she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all
that had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the
minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two students
made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the door carrying a
good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none convenient for the
purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the students were grown-
up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised elsewhere, each of
whom had her own place in the world, her own personal life, its rights and
liberties. Yet the “head” who habitually intervened in small college matters
(with a total lack of power of organisation, which in the administration of
Newnham she left to others) and who was frequently agitated and over
anxious about them, balanced these things by a life-long habit of interest in
large public affairs, and, what was more strange, by a very real serenity. She

did not think the individual should be sacrificed to the college, or “to a
cause, however good.” She never lived in a small milieu—even Newnham.
She constantly exercised a simple diplomacy, not divorced from
sympathy—with independent-minded students, with university dons who
viewed Newnham with disfavour, and in generally vain attempts to
conciliate high theory with prudent practice. It was here that her
characteristics sometimes jarred on the early students, among whom were
many ardent spirits, people whose presence there at all was the consequence
of a struggle à outrance with convention and prejudice; and who resented
Miss Clough’s temporising ways, as though the first maker of Newnham
were a backslider in the matter of first principles. They thought her indirect
and timid. She was neither. She had real courage, not only as her biographer
has said “audacity in thought”[466] but audacity in execution. She was
staunch and tenacious, and might be found taking an individual’s part
against the whole college; and whether the help she gave was moral or
financial, no one ever knew of it but herself. Neither did she always prefer
the most brilliant or useful student, but would take under her wing the
apparently most insignificant. She had no fear of the unusual, though the
younger students thought so, and it was “her indifference to abstract
principle” which made them sometimes judge that she despised ideals. She
had also a singular frankness—a singular directness—when speaking with
others face to face; her important things were said at odd moments, odd
moments were her opportunities. Neither did she compromise; she went all
the way round and came out at the same place. This expedient made it quite
unnecessary to override obstacles, and her aphorism “my dear, you must go
round” was received with hostile scorn by a student seated on the high
horse of abstract considerations. Indeed Miss Clough was not a fighter in
the sense that she could neglect the quantity of others’ feelings: and her
desire that people should not be offended was part of a sympathy, not of a
timidity, which could not be conquered. The working of her mind is shewn
in the saying: “If we watch, we may still find a way to escape”—because to
her there was no inevitable where her sympathies were engaged. Her
diplomacy led her to keep her notions to herself, so that they should not be
nipped in the bud by the frost of hostile criticism.
“My dear, I did wrong” was the disarming reply to a very young student
who asked her “as one woman to another” whether she considered she had
been justified in a certain course of action. Her singleness of purpose—the

absence of all vanity—a complete disinterestedness, shone on all occasions.
Her never failing search after the right course she once tried to express by
saying to a student: “You must remember that I try to be just but I don’t
always succeed”; and she criticised the performance with complete
detachment from the personal equation.[467]
Among the ideas which seethed in her brain was the training of students
as doctors to work among Hindu women; and one of the last things she
interested herself about was a school for girls at Siam. She wanted teachers
trained to teach.[468] She urged students to know at least one country and
one language besides their own. Her liking for new people, her interest in
foreigners, especially in Italians, and in travel, was part of a spirit of
adventure with which she was largely endowed. She liked old students to go
to the colonies, and her interest in such doings never flagged. Her hold on
the xx century was foreshadowed in the interest she took during the last
years in the Norwegians, and in Japan. She felt very special sympathy with
elementary teachers who receive small encouragement for highly important
and difficult work. Even the monotonous life of the country clergy claimed
her attention, as did a Sunday class for working men inaugurated by one of
the students—which she visited, taking the keenest interest in the
handwriting of the men, in the books they read. Her relations with her
servants were always delightful, and she found time in the midst of a busy
life to teach the Newnham house boy to write.
She sometimes spoke at the college debates, and usually, as a student
remarked, “spoke on both sides.” On college anniversaries she would make
short addresses, and point the connexion of study with life—“examinations
demand concentration, presence of mind, energy, courage,” qualities which
“come into use every day”: or she would tell students “to bear defeat, and to
try again and again”; or she would quote the American who said we should
not complain about things which can be remedied, or which cannot be
remedied; and add: “there is great strength in these words.”
Her religion was unconventional like her mind; full of aspiration, but
lacking in definiteness. She spoke of it as “a longing towards what is
divine,” as “arising from the contemplation of the divine.” She spoke of
“bringing our hearts into a constant spirit of earnest longing after what is
right” and added in language which discovers the burning thought and the
halting utterance that made strange partnership in her: “There is no
occasion, then, of kneeling down and repeating forms to make prayers.”

One of the last acts was to preside on February 3, 1892 at a meeting
which recommended the Council to build a college gateway; the gateway
which was to symbolise the concentration of the work—for the public
pathway had just been closed—and the attollite portas to ever fresh
generations of students. Its bronze gates are the old students’ memorial of
her. And on the morning of October 27, 1892, she died, in her room on the
garden at Newnham, looking out at the gathering light of the new day.
She was buried with the honours of the head of a college, the Provost
and fellows of King’s offering their chapel for the purpose. She lies in the
village church-yard of Grantchester, the civitatula which Bede describes
where the sons of Ely monastery came to fetch the sarcophagus for S.
Etheldreda. So in her death she is not divided from the great memories
which link the history of the university to that of the movement to which
she gave her life.
The first 28 students came into residence in Newnham Hall on October
18th 1875, and found the moment no less thrilling because they approached
the door of their alma mater across planks and unfinished masonry. More
room was at once needed, and “Norwich House” in the town was hired. In
1879 the Newnham Hall Company and the Association for promoting the
Higher Education of Women[469] amalgamated, and as “the Newnham
College Association for advancing education and learning among women in
Cambridge” built the second, or North Hall. Thus Newnham Hall became
Newnham College. A public pathway led between the two halls, and this
was not closed till 1891; but in 1886 a still larger building, containing the
college hall, was erected, and called Clough Hall, the original Newnham
(“South”) Hall becoming the “Old Hall,” and the North Hall becoming
“Sidgwick Hall.” Lastly the two original halls were joined by the “Pfeiffer
building”[470] and the college gateway in 1893, and in 1897 Mr. and Mrs.
Yates Thompson presented a fine library, the pretty old library of Newnham
Hall which had been built in 1882, being converted into a reading room.
The land for the three Halls was purchased from S. John’s College, the
hockey field is on Clare land, and the total acreage is about ten and a half
acres. The college holds 160 students, a few ‘out students’ being affiliated
to one or other of the halls—and consists of a large hall, capable of seating
400 persons, a smaller hall and reading room in each building, the library,
nine lecture and class rooms, gymnasium, small hospital, chemical
laboratory, and the Balfour laboratory in the town which is a freehold of the

college. The grounds contain two fives courts, lawn tennis courts, and a
hockey ground. In the hall are the portraits of Miss Clough, Professor and
Mrs. Sidgwick, and Miss M. G. Kennedy, as the four people who had given
most of their life work to Newnham.[471]
The fees vary from £30 to £35 a term according to

NEWNHAM COLLEGE, GATEWAY
This shows the east front, and is called the Pfeiffer Building. The
whole of the buildings are in the Queen Anne style, and were
designed by Basil Champneys. The Bronze Gates were placed here
as a memorial to Miss Clough.

the rooms occupied. The college is governed by a Council, and presided
over by a Principal, Old Hall Sidgwick Hall and Clough Hall having each a
resident vice-principal.[472] Miss Clough hoped to effect a real and lasting
union between the old students and Newnham—that the college might be
the support of the students, and the students of the college. It was a
principle she had always present to her mind, and she herself did much to
realise it. School and college have long bestowed this advantage on men,
which is reinforced by the support men are accustomed to give to each
other; but all this is lacking for the woman who goes forth into the world to
fend for herself. University life might however do much to supply the want,
and it is to be hoped that women will form a tradition on the point, as men
have done. The constitution of the college at least preserves some part of its
first Principal’s idea, old students have from the first had a share in the
government and a place on the Council.
Candidates for entrance must pass the College Entrance examination (of
the same standard as the university Previous Examination), unless they have
already taken equivalent examinations. The greater number read for a
tripos, but students may follow special lines of study. As to its university