Cambridge and Its Story
by Charles William Stubbs · English · Gutenberg #43764 · 471,723 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Cambridge and Its Story
Author: Charles William Stubbs
Illustrator: Fanny Railton
Herbert Railton
Release date: September 18, 2013 [eBook #43764]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
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Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Every attempt has been made to replicate the original as printed.
Variation in the spellings of names has not been corrected
(i.e. Queens'/Queen's)
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Some illustrations have been moved from mid-paragraph for ease of reading.
(etext transcriber's note)
CAMBRIDGE
AND ITS STORY
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: Oriel Windows Queen's College]
CAMBRIDGE
AND ITS STORY
BY
CHARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D.
DEAN OF ELY
[Illustration]
WITH TWENTY-FOUR LITHOGRAPHS
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HERBERT RAILTON
THE LITHOGRAPHS BEING
TINTED BY
FANNY RAILTON
1903
LONDON
J. M. DENT & CO.
ALDINE HOUSE, W.C.
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
I should wish to write one word by way of explanation of the character
of the descriptive historical sketch which forms the text of the present
book.
Some time ago I undertook to prepare, for "the Mediæval Towns Series" of
my Publisher, a work on the Story of the Town and University of
Cambridge. Arrangements were made with Mr. Herbert Railton for its
pictorial illustration. It had been intended in the first instance, that
the artist's pen and ink sketches should have been reproduced by the
ordinary processes used in modern book illustration. But the poetic
glamour of such a place as Cambridge and its _genius loci_ did not allow
the enthusiasm of the artist to remain satisfied with such drawings only
as might be readily reproduced by the ordinary processes. In addition to
many sketches in black and white, suitable for reproduction in the body
of the text in illustration of interesting bits of architectural detail,
or of quaint grouping, Mr. Railton has also drawn a series of
large-sized pencil-pictures of the principal College buildings. These
drawings are so beautiful, so full of delicacy and tenderness and yet so
firm and effective in their treatment of light and shade, and show so
much sympathy for the old buildings and all their picturesque charm,
that the Publisher at once felt that they must not be treated as
ordinary book illustrations. The artist had produced pictures worthy to
be classed with the best work of Samuel Prout. It became the duty of the
Publisher to treat them with corresponding respect. The method of
auto-lithography has accordingly been adopted, by which the plates are
an absolute reproduction in size and tint of the pencil drawings, and
the artist's work goes straight to the reader without any mechanical
intervention. A new feature has been added by which the colour stones
have been made by Mrs. Railton acting in collaboration with her husband.
This process of reproduction necessarily involved a change in the
proposed format of the book. It was determined, therefore, to issue in
the first instance an _edition de luxe_ of "The Story of Cambridge," on
specially prepared paper and in large quarto size. I have readily
consented to such a course, for although I may seem, by the more
imposing form of a large Library Edition, to be guilty of some
presumption in placing my Historical Sketch in competition with such
histories as those of Mr. Mullinger in the "Epochs of History Series,"
or of my friend, Mr. T. D. Atkinson, in "Cambridge Described"--the
larger books of Mr. J. W. Clark on the architectural history of
Cambridge, and of Mr. Mullinger on the general history of the University
are already classics to which humbler writers on Cambridge can only look
as to final authorities--I can only hope that my readers will recognise
that my presumption is only apparent, and meanwhile I rest confident
that even the historical critic will have little care for the inadequacy
of my prose rendering of "The Story of Cambridge," absorbed as he must
be by his delight in the beauty of Mr. Railton's drawings. In any case,
I shall be entirely satisfied if only my descriptive sketch is found
adequate for the help of the general reader in appreciating the story of
which the artist has been able to give so poetic an interpretation.
C. W. S.
THE DEANERY, ELY,
_Michaelmas_, 1903.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
CHAPTER I
LEGENDARY ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY 1
Geographical and commercial importance of the city site--Map of the
county a palimpsest--Glamour of the Fenland--Cambridge the gateway of
East Anglia--The Roman roads--The Roman station--The Castle
Hill--Stourbridge Fair--Cambridge a chief centre of English commerce.
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE IN THE NORMAN TIME 22
William I. at Cambridge Castle--Cambridge at the Domesday Survey--Roger
Picot the Sheriff--Pythagoras School--Castle and Borough--S. Benet's
Church and its Parish--The King's Ditch--The Great and the Small
Bridges--The King's and the Bishop's Mills--The River Hythes--S. Peter
by the Castle and S. Giles Church--The early Streets of the City--The
Augustinian Priory of Barnwell--The Round Church of the Holy
Sepulchre--The Cambridge Jewry--Debt of early Scholars to the
Philosophers of the Synagogue--Benjamin's House--Municipal Freedom of
the Borough.
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNINGS OF UNIVERSITY LIFE 49
Monastic Origins--Continuity of Learning in Early England--The School of
York--The Venerable Bede--Alcuin and the Schools of Charles the
Great--The Danish Invasions--The Benedictine Revival--The Monkish
Chroniclers--The Coming of the Friars--The Franciscan and Dominican
Houses at Cambridge--The Franciscan Scholars--Roger Bacon--Bishop
Grosseteste--The New Aristotle and the Scientific Spirit--The Scholastic
Philosophy--Aquinas--Migration of Scholars from Paris to Cambridge--The
term "University"--The Colleges and the Hostels--The Course of
Study--Trivium and Quadrivium--The Four Faculties--England a Paradise of
Clerks--Parable of the Monk's Pen.
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLIEST COLLEGE FOUNDATION: PETERHOUSE 71
The Early Monastic Houses in Cambridge--Student Proselytising by the
Friars--The Oxford College of Merton a Protest against this
Tendency--The Rule of Merton taken as a Model by Hugh de Balsham,
Founder of Peterhouse--The Hospital of S. John--The Scholars of
Ely--Domestic Economy of the College--The Dress of the Mediæval
Student--Peterhouse Buildings--Little S. Mary's Church--The Perne
Library--The College Chapel.
CHAPTER V
THE COLLEGES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 93
The Fourteenth Century an Age of Great Men and Great Events but not of
Great Scholars--Petrarch and Richard of Bury--Michael House--The King's
Scholars--King's Hall--Clare Hall--Pembroke College--Gonville Hall--Dr.
John Caius--His Three Gates of Humility, Virtue, and Honour.
CHAPTER VI
THE COLLEGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE GUILDS 120
Unique Foundation of Corpus Christi College--The Cambridge Guilds--The
influence of "the Good Duke"--The Peasant Revolt--Destruction of
Charters--"Perish the skill of the Clerks!"--The Black Death--Lollardism
at the Universities--The Poore Priestes of Wycliffe.
CHAPTER VII
TWO ROYAL FOUNDATIONS 137
Henry VI--The most pitiful Character in all English History--His
devotion to Learning and his Saintly Spirit--His foundation of Eton and
King's College--The Building of King's College Chapel--Its architect,
Reginald of Ely, the Cathedral Master-Mason--Its relation to the Ely
Lady Chapel--Its stained glass Windows--Its close Foundation--Queens'
College--Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydville--The buildings of
Queens'--Similarity to Haddon Hall--Its most famous Resident,
Erasmus--His _Novum Instrumentum_ edited within its Walls.
CHAPTER VIII
TWO OF THE SMALLER HALLS 173
The Foundation of Trinity Hall by Bishop Bateman of Norwich--On the Site
of the Hostel of Student-Monks of Ely--Prior Crauden--Evidence of the
Ely Obedientary Rolls--The College Buildings--The Old Hall--S. Edward's
Church used as College Chapel--Hugh Latimer's Sermon on a Pack of
Cards--Harvey Goodwin--Frederick Maurice--The Hall Library--Its ancient
Bookcases--The Foundation of S. Catherine's Hall.
CHAPTER IX
BISHOP ALCOCK AND THE NUNS OF S. RHADEGUND 183
The New Learning in Italy and Germany--The English "Pilgrim Scholars":
Grey, Tiptoft, Linacre, Grocyn--The practical Genius of England--Bishops
Rotherham, Alcock, and Fisher--Alcock, diplomatist, financier,
architect--The Founder of Jesus College--He takes as his model Jesus
College, Rotherham--His Object the Training of a Preaching Clergy--The
Story of the Nunnery of S. Rhadegund--Its Dissolution--Conversion of the
Conventual Church into a College Chapel--The Monastic Buildings,
Gateway, Cloister, Chapter House--The Founder a Better Architect than an
Educational Reformer--The Jesus Roll of eminent Men from Cranmer to
Coleridge.
CHAPTER X
COLLEGES OF THE NEW LEARNING 210
The Lady Margaret Foundations--Bishop Fisher of Rochester--The
Foundation of Christ's--God's House--The buildings of the new
College--College Worthies--John Milton--Henry More--Charles Darwin--The
Hospital of the Brethren of S. John--Death of the Lady
Margaret--Foundation of S. John's College--Its buildings--The Great
Gateway--The new Library--The Bridge of Sighs--The
Wilderness--Wordsworth's "Prelude"--The aims of Bishop Fisher--His
death.
CHAPTER XI
A SMALL AND A GREAT COLLEGE 246
Dissolution of the Monasteries--Schemes for Collegiate Spoliation
checked by Henry VIII.--Monks' or Buckingham College--Refounded by Sir
Thomas Audley as Magdalene College--Conversion of the old buildings--The
Pepysian Library--Foundation of Trinity College--Michaelhouse and the
King's Hall--King Edward's Gate--The Queen's Gate--The Great Gate--Dr.
Thomas Neville--The Great Court--The Hall--Neville's Court--New
Court--Dr. Bentley--"A House of all Kinds of Good Letters."
CHAPTER XII
ANCIENT AND PROTESTANT FOUNDATIONS 265
Queen Elizabeth and the Founder of Emmanuel--The Puritan Age--Sir Walter
Mildmay--The Building of Emmanuel--The Tenure of Fellowships--Puritan
Worthies--The Founder of Harvard--Lady Frances Sidney--The Sidney
College Charter--The Buildings--The Chapel and the old Franciscan
Refectory--Royalists and Puritans--Oliver Cromwell--Thomas Fuller---A
Child's Prayer for his Mother.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_TINTED LITHOGRAPHS_
ORIEL WINDOWS, QUEENS' COLLEGE _Frontispiece_
THE SCHOOL OF PYTHAGORAS _facing page_ 28
PETERHOUSE " 82
CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE " 96
PEMBROKE COLLEGE " 106
GATE OF HONOUR AND GATE OF VIRTUE, CAIUS COLLEGE " 112
THE CHURCHES OF S. EDWARD AND S. MARY THE GREAT
FROM PEAS HILL " 123
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE AND S. BENEDICT'S CHURCH " 128
THE PITT PRESS, S. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH, AND CORPUS
CHRISTI COLLEGE " 132
THE WEST DOORWAY, KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL " 144
GATEWAY TO OLD COURT OF KING'S COLLEGE " 153
THE CHAPEL, TRINITY HALL " 174
ORIEL WINDOW, JESUS COLLEGE " 178
GATEWAY IN GREAT COURT, S. CATHERINE'S COLLEGE " 180
THE CHAPEL, CHRIST'S COLLEGE " 214
GATEWAY, S. JOHN'S COLLEGE " 230
ORIEL IN LIBRARY, S. JOHN'S COLLEGE " 236
TOWER AND TURRETS OF TRINITY FROM S. JOHN'S COLLEGE " 243
THE LIBRARY, CHAPEL, AND HALL, MAGDALENE COLLEGE " 248
GATEWAY AND DIAL, TRINITY COLLEGE " 254
NEVILLE'S COURT, TRINITY COLLEGE " 260
HALL AND CHAPEL, EMMANUEL COLLEGE " 266
DOWNING COLLEGE " 274
THE GARDEN FRONT, SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE " 278
_BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS_
PAGE
COURTYARD OF THE FALCON INN 25
SAXON TOWER, S. BENEDICT'S CHURCH 29
THE ABBEY HOUSE 35
CHAPEL, BARNWELL PRIORY 39
THE ROUND CHURCH 41
ORIEL WINDOWS FROM HOUSE IN PETTY-CURY _facing page_ 46
CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE 101
PEMBROKE COLLEGE 107
PEMBROKE COLLEGE, ORIELS AND ENTRANCE 109
CAIUS COLLEGE, THE GATE OF HONOUR 117
KING'S PARADE 139
KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL 145
KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL _facing page_ 150
KING'S COLLEGE QUADRANGLE 155
CLOISTER COURT, QUEENS' COLLEGE 163
ORIEL WINDOW, QUEENS' COLLEGE 166
THE BRIDGE AND GABLES, QUEENS' COLLEGE 169
A BIT FROM SIDNEY STREET 172
DIVINITY SCHOOLS AND S. JOHN'S 193
NORMAN WORK IN CHURCH OF JESUS COLLEGE 197
NORMAN WORK IN N. TRANSEPT, JESUS COLLEGE CHAPEL 201
ENTRANCE TO CHAPTER-HOUSE, PRIORY OF S. RHADEGUND 203
JACK IN WOLSEY'S KITCHEN, CHRIST'S COLLEGE 219
THE COURTYARD OF THE WRESTLERS' INN _facing page_ 220
ENTRANCE TO S. JOHN'S COLLEGE 229
S. JOHN'S COLLEGE FROM THE BACKS 233
BRIDGE OF SIGHS, S. JOHN'S COLLEGE 239
TOWER AND GATEWAY, TRINITY COLLEGE _facing page_ 252
THE FOUNTAIN, TRINITY COLLEGE " 258
[Illustration: CAMBRIDGE AND ITS STORY]
CHAPTER I
LEGENDARY ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY
"Next then the plenteous Ouse came far from land,
By many a city and by many a town,
And many rivers taking under-hand
Into his waters as he passeth down,
The Cle, the Were, the Grant, the Sture, the Bowne,
Thence doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit,
My Mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowne
He doth adorne, and is adorn'd by it
With many a gentle Muse and many a learned wit."
--SPENSER'S _Faerie Queene_, iv. xi. 34.
Geographical and commercial importance of the city site--Map of the
county a palimpsest--Glamour of the Fenland--Cambridge the gateway
of East Anglia--The Roman roads--The Roman station--The Castle
Hill--Stourbridge Fair--Cambridge a chief centre of English
commerce.
One could wish perhaps that the story of Cambridge should begin, as so
many good stories of men and cities have begun, in the antique realm of
poetry and romance. That it did so begin our forefathers indeed had
little doubt. John Lydgate, the poet, a Benedictine monk of Bury, "the
disciple"--as he is proud to call himself--"of Geoffrey Chaucer," but
best remembered perhaps by later times as the writer of "London
Lackpenny" and "Troy Book," has left certain verses on the foundation of
the Town and University of Cambridge, which are still preserved to
us.[1] Some stanzas of that fourteenth-century poem will serve to show
in what a cloudland of empty legend it was at one time thought that the
story of the beginnings of Cambridge might be found:--
"By trew recorde of the Doctor Bede
That some tyme wrotte so mikle with his hande,
And specially remembringe as I reede
In his chronicles made of England
Amounge other thynges as ye shall understand,
Whom for myne aucthour I dare alleage,
Seith the translacion and buylding of Cambridge.
* * * * *
"Touching the date, as I rehearse can
Fro thilke tyme that the world began
Four thowsand complete by accomptès clere
And three hundred by computacion
Joyned thereto eight and fortie yeare,
When Cantebro gave the foundacion
Of thys citie and this famous towne
And of this noble universitie
Sette on this river which is called Cante.
* * * * *
"This Cantebro, as it well knoweth
At Athenes scholed in his yougt,
All his wyttes greatlye did applie
To have acquaintance by great affection
With folke-experte in philosophie.
From Athens he brought with hym downe
Philosophers most sovereigne of renowne
Unto Cambridge, playnlye this is the case,
Anaxamander and Anaxagoras
With many other myne Aucthors dothe fare,
To Cambridge fast can hym spede
With philosophers and let for no cost spare
In the Schooles to studdie and to reede;
Of whose teachinges great profit that gan spreade
And great increase rose of his doctrine;
Thus of Cambridge the name gan first shyne
As chief schoole and universitie
Unto this tyme fro the daye it began
By cleare reporte in manye a far countre
Unto the reign of Cassibellan.
* * * * *
"And as it is put eke in memorie,
Howe Julius Cesar entring this region
On Cassybellan after his victorye
Tooke with hym clarkes of famous renowne
Fro Cambridg and ledd theim to Rome towne,
Thus by processe remembred here to forne
Cambridg was founded long or Chryst was borne."
But it is not only in verse that this fabric of fable is to be found.
Down even to the middle of the last century the ears of Cambridge
graduates were still beguiled by strange stories of the early renown of
their University--how it was founded by a Spanish Prince, Cantaber (the
"Cantebro" of Lydgate's verses), "in the 4321st year of the creation of
the world," and in the sixth year of Gurgant, King of Britain; how
Athenian astronomers and philosophers, "because of the pleasantness of
the place," came to Cambridge as its earliest professors, "the king
having appointed them stipends"; how King Arthur, "on the 7th of April,
in the year of the Incarnacion of our Lord, 531," granted a charter of
academic privileges "to Kenet, the first Rector of the schools"; and how
the University subsequently found another royal patron in the East
Anglian King Sigebert, and had among its earliest Doctors of Divinity
the great Saxon scholars Bede and Alcuin.
I have before me as I write a small octavo volume, a guide-book to
Cambridge and its Colleges, much worn and thumbed, probably by its
eighteenth-century owner, possibly by his nineteenth-century successor,
in which all these fables and legends are set out in order. The book has
lost its title-page, but it is easily identifiable as an English
translation of Richard Parker's _Skeletos Cantabrigiensis_, written
about 1622, but not apparently published until a century later, when the
antiquary, Thomas Hearne, printed it in his edition of Leland's
_Collectanea_. My English edition of the _Skeletos_ is presumably either
that which was "printed for Thomas Warner at the Black Boy, Pater Noster
Row," and without a date, or that published by "J. Bateman at the Hat
and Star in S. Paul's Churchyard," and dated 1721. As an illustration of
the kind of record which passed for history even in the last
century,--for the early editions of Hallam's "History of the Middle
Ages" bear evidence that that careful historian still gave some credence
to these Cambridge fables,--it may be interesting to quote one or two
passages from the legendary history of Nicholas Cantelupe, which is
prefixed to this English version of Parker's book:--
"Anaximander, one of the disciples of Thales, came to this city on
account of his Philosophy and great Skill in Astrology, where he
left much Improvement in Learning to Posterity. After his Example,
Anaxagoras, quitting his Possessions, after a long Peregrination,
came to Cambridge, where he writ Books, and instructed the
unlearned, for which reason that City was by the People of the
Country call'd the City of SCHOLARS.
"King Cassibelan, when he had taken upon him the Government of the
Kingdom, bestowed such Preheminence on this City, that any Fugitive
or Criminal, desirous to acquire Learning, flying to it, was
defended in the sight of His Enemy, with Pardon, and without
Molestation, Upbraiding or Affront offer'd him. For which Reason,
as also on account of the Richness of the Soil, the Serenity of the
Air, the great Source of Learning, and the King's Favour, young and
old, from many Parts of the Earth, resorted thither, some of whom
JULIUS CÆSAR, having vanquished Cassibelan, carry'd away to Rome,
where they afterwards flourish'd."
There then follows a letter, given without any doubt of authenticity,
from Alcuin of York, purporting to be written to the scholars of
Cambridge from the Court of Charles the Great:--
"To the discreet Heirs of CHRIST, the Scholars of the unspotted
Mother Cambridge, _Ælqninus_, by Life a Sinner, Greeting and Glory
in the Virtues of Learning. Forasmuch as Ignorance is the Mother of
Error, I earnestly intreat that Youths among you be us'd to be
present at the Praises of the Supreme King, not to unearth Foxes,
not to hunt Hares, let them now learn the Holy Scriptures, having
obtain'd Knowledge of the Science of Truth, to the end that in
their perfect Age they may teach others. Call to mind, I beseech
you dearly beloved the most noble Master of our Time, _Bede_ the
Priest, Doctor of your University, under whom by permission of the
Divine Grace, I took the Doctor's Degree in the Year from the
Incarnation of our Lord 692, what an Inclination he had to study in
His Youth, what Praise he has now among Men, and much more what
Glory of Reward with God. Farewell always in _Christ Jesu_, by
whose Grace you are assisted in Learning. Amen."
We may omit the mythical charter of King Arthur and come to the passage
concerning King Alfred, obviously intended to turn the flank of the
Oxford patriots, who too circumstantially relate how their University
was founded by that great scholar king.
"In process of time, when Alfred, or Alred, supported by divine
Comfort, after many Tribulations, had obtained the Monarchy of all
England, he translated to Oxford the scholars, which Penda, King of
the Mercians, had with the leave of King Ceadwald carried from
Cambridge to Kirneflad (rather Cricklade, as above), to which
scholars he was wont to distribute Alms in three several Places. He
much honour'd the Cantabrigians and Oxonians, and granted them many
Privileges.
"Afterwards he erected and establish'd Grammar Schools throughout
the whole Island, and caus'd the Youth to be instructed in their
Mother Tongue. Then perceiving that the Scholars, whom he had
conveyed to Oxford, continually applied themselves to the Study of
the Laws and expounded the Holy Scriptures: he appointed Grimwald
their Rector, who had been Rector and Chancellor of the City of
Cambridge."
The severer canons of modern historical criticism have naturally made
short work of all these absurd fables; nor do they even allow us to
accept as authentic the otherwise not unpleasing story quoted from the
Chronicle, or rather historical novel, of Ingulph, in the quaint pages
of Thomas Fuller, written a generation later than Richard Parker's book,
which tells how, early in the twelfth century, certain monks were sent
to Cambridge by Joffrey, Abbot of Crowland, to expound in a certain
public barn (by later writers fondly thought to be that which is now
known by the name of Pythagoras' School) the pages of Priscian,
Quintillian, and Aristotle.
There is little doubt, I fear, that we may find the inciting motive of
all this exuberant fancy and invention in the desire to glorify the one
University at the expense of the other, which is palpably present in
that last quotation from Parker's book, and which is perhaps not
altogether absent from the writings and the conversation of some
academic patriots of our own day. We may, however, more wisely dismiss
all these foolish legends and myths as to origins in the kindlier spirit
of quaint old Fuller in the Introduction to his "History of the
University of Cambridge":--
"Sure I am," he says, "there needeth no such pains to be took, or
provision to be made, about the pre-eminence of our English
Universities, to regulate their places, they having better learned
humility from the precept of the Apostle, In honour preferring one
another. Wherefore I presume my aunt Oxford will not be justly
offended if in this book I give my own mother the upper hand, and
first begin with her history. Thus desiring God to pour his
blessing upon both, that neither may want milk for their children,
or children for their milk, we proceed to the business."
Descending then from the misty cloudland of Fable to the hard ground of
historic Fact, we are shortly met by a question which, I hope, Fuller
would have recognised as businesslike. How did it come about that our
forefathers founded a University on the site which we now call
Cambridge--"that distant marsh town," as a modern Oxford historian
somewhat contemptuously calls it? The question is a natural one, and has
not seldom been asked. We shall find, I think, the most reasonable
answer to it by asking a prior question. How did the town of Cambridge
itself come to be a place of any importance in the early days? The
answer is, in the first place, geographical; in the second, commercial.
We may fitly occupy the remaining space of this chapter in seeking to
formulate that answer.
And first, as to the physical features of the district which has
Cambridge for its most important centre. "The map of England," it has
been strikingly said by Professor Maitland, "is the most wonderful of
all palimpsests." Certainly that portion of the map of England which
depicts the country surrounding the Fenlands of East Anglia is not the
least interesting part of that palimpsest. Let us take such a map and
try roughly to decipher it.[2]
If we begin with the seaboard line we shall perhaps at first sight be
inclined to think that it cannot have changed much in the course of the
centuries. And most probably the coast-line of Lincolnshire, from a
point northwards near Great Grimsby or Cleethorpes at the mouth of the
Humber to a point southwards near Waynefleet at the mouth of the
Steeping River, twenty miles or less north of Boston, and again the
coast-line of Norfolk and Suffolk from Hunstanton Point at the
north-east corner of the Wash round past Brancaster and Wells and Cromer
to Yarmouth and then southwards past Southwold and Aldborough to Harwich
at the mouth of the Orwell and Stour estuary, has not altered much in
ten or even twenty centuries. But that can hardly be said with regard to
the coast-line of the Wash itself. For on its western side our
palimpsest warns us that there is a considerable district called
_Holland_; that on its south side, a dozen miles or more from the
present coast-line, is a town called _Wisbech_ (or Ouse-beach); that
still farther inland, within a mile or two of Cambridge itself, are to
be found the villages of Waterbeach and Landbeach; and that scattered
throughout the whole district of the low-lying lands are villages and
towns whose place-names have the termination "ey" or "ea," meaning
"island"--such, as Thorney, Spinny, Sawtrey, Ramsey, Whittlesea,
Horningsea; and that one considerable tract of slightly higher ground,
though now undoubtedly surrounded by dry land, is still called the Isle
of Ely. These place-names are significant, and tell their own story. And
that story, as we try to interpret it, will gradually lead us to the
conclusion that the ancient seaboard line of the Wash, instead of being
marked on the map of England as we have it now, by a line roughly
joining Boston and King's Lynn, would on the earliest text of the
palimpsest require an extended sea boundary on which Lincoln, and
Stamford and Peterborough, and Huntingdon and Cambridge, and Brandon and
Downham Market would become almost seaboard towns, and Ely an island
fifteen miles or so off the coast at Cambridge.
Such a conclusion, of course, would be somewhat of an exaggeration, for
the wide waste of waters which thus formed an extension of the Wash
southwards was not all or always sea water. So utterly transformed,
however, has the whole Fen country become in modern times--the vast
plain of the Bedford level contains some 2000 square miles of the
richest corn-land in England--that it is very difficult to restore in
the imagination the original scenery of the days before the drainage,
when the rivers which take the rainfall of the central counties of
England--the Nene, the Welland, the Witham, the Glen, and the
Bedfordshire Ouse--spread out into one vast delta or wilderness of
shallow waters.
The poetic glamour of the land, now on the side of its fertility and
strange beauty, now on the side of its monotony and weird loneliness,
has always had a strange fascination for the chroniclers and writers of
every age. In the first Book of the _Liber Eliensis_ (ii. 105), written
by Thomas, a monk of Ely, in the twelfth century, there is a description
of the fenlands, given by a soldier to William the Conqueror, which
reads like the report of the land of plenty and promise brought by the
spies to Joshua. In the _Historia Major_ of Matthew Paris, however, it
is described as a place "neither accessible for man or beast, affording
only deep mud, with sedge and reeds, and possest of birds, yea, much
more by devils, as appeareth in the Life of S. Guthlac, who, finding it
a place of horror and great solitude, began to inhabit there." At a
later time Drayton in his _Polyolbion_ gives a picture of the Fenland
life as one of manifold industry:--
"The toiling fisher here is towing of his net;
The fowler is employed his limèd twigs to set;
One underneath his horse to get a shoot doth stalk;
Another over dykes upon his stilts doth walk;
There other with their spades the peats are squaring out,
And others from their cars are busily about
To draw out sedge and reed to thatch and stover fit:
That whosoever would a landskip rightly hit,
Beholding but my Fens shall with more shapes be stored
Than Germany or France or Thuscan can afford."
This eulogy of the Fenland, however, Drayton is careful to put into the
mouth of a Fenland nymph, who is not allowed to pass without criticism
by her sister who rules the uplands:--
"O how I hate
Thus of her foggy fens to hear rude Holland prate
That with her fish and fowl here keepeth such a coil,
As her unwholesome air, and more unwholesome soil,
For these of which she boasts the more might suffered be."
But probably the most picturesque and truthful imaginative sketch of the
old fenlands is that which was given in our own time by the graphic pen
of Charles Kingsley in his fine novel of "Hereward the Wake," somewhat
amplified afterwards in the chapters of "The Hermits," which he devoted
to the history of St. Guthlac:--
"The fens in the seventh century," he says, "were probably very
like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi or the swampy
shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now in summer one sea
of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares
by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and
doleful lines of poplar trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black
wandering streams, broad lagoons, morasses submerged every
spring-tide, vast beds of reed and sedge and fern, vast copses of
willow and alder and grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat,
which was swallowing up slowly, all devouring, yet preserving the
forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had
once grown on that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists
assure us) beneath the sea from age to age. Trees torn down by
flood and storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters
back on the land. Streams bewildered in the flats, changed their
channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature left to
herself ran into wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole
fen became one 'dismal swamp,' in which at the time of the Norman
Conquest, 'the last of the English,' like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's
tale, took refuge from their tyrants and lived like him a free and
joyous life awhile."
Such was one aspect, then, in the early days of English history, of the
great plain that stretches from Cambridge to the sea. But our
map-palimpsest has further physical facts to reveal which had an
important influence on the civic and economic development of Cambridge.
To the south-east of this great plain of low-lying fenlands rises the
upland country of boulder clay, stretching in a line almost directly
west and east from the downs at Royston, thirteen miles below Cambridge,
to Sudbury-on-the-Stour. The whole of this ridge of high ground, which
roughly corresponds with the present boundaries between Cambridgeshire
and Suffolk and Essex, was in the early days covered with dense forest.
Thus the Forest and the Fen between them formed a material barrier
separating the kingdom of East Anglia from the rest of Britain. At one
point only could an entrance be gained. Between the forest and the fen
there runs a long belt of land, at its narrowest point not more than
five miles wide, consisting partly of open pasture, partly of chalk
down. In the neck, so to say, of this natural pass into East Anglia lies
the town of Cambridge. A careful scrutiny of our map will show, on the
under-text of our palimpsest, a remarkable series of British earthworks,
all crossing in parallel lines this narrow belt of open land between the
fen and the forest, marked on the map as Black Ditches, Devil's Dyke,
the Fleam or Balsham Dyke, the Brent or Pampisford Ditch, and the Brand
or Heydon Way. Of these the longest and most important is the well-known
Devil's Dyke, near Newmarket. It is some eight miles long in all, and
consists of a lofty bank twelve feet wide at the top, eighteen feet
above the level of the country, and thirty feet above the bottom of the
Ditch, which is itself some twenty feet wide. The ditch is on the
western side of the bank, thus showing that it was used as a defence by
the people on the east against those on the west. It was near this ditch
that the defeat of the ancient British tribe of the Iceni by the Romans,
as described by Tacitus ("Annals," xii. 31), took place in A.D. 50.[3]
At Cambridge itself the ancient earthwork known as Castle Hill may
belong to this British period, and have formed a valuable auxiliary to
the line of dykes in defending the ford of the river and the pass
behind; but upon this point authorities are divided.[4] Indeed, there is
good ground for the opinion that the Castle Hill is a construction of
the later Saxon period, and may, in fact, be referred to the time of
the Danish incursions in the ninth century, during which time Cambridge
is known to have been sacked more than once.
However that may be, there is ample proof that the site of the Castle at
any rate was occupied by the Romans, for the remains of a fosse and
vallum, forming part of an oblong enclosure within which the Castle
Hill, whether early British or later Saxon, is included, seem to
indicate the position of a Roman station here. Moreover, to this place
converge the two great Roman roads, of which the remains may still be
traced: _Akeman Street_, leading from Cirencester (Corinium) in the
south through Hertfordshire to Cambridge, and thence across the fen (by
the Aldreth Causeway, the scene of William the Conqueror's two years'
campaign with Hereward) to Ely, and so onwards to Brancaster in Norfolk;
and the _Via Devana_, which, starting from Colchester (Colonia or
Camelodunum), skirted the forest lands of Essex through Cambridge and
Huntingdon (Durolifons) northwards to Chester (Deva). Whether the Roman
station, however, at the junction of these two roads can be identified
as the ancient Camboritum is still a little doubtful. Certainly the
common identification of Cambridge with Camboritum, because of the
resemblance between the two names, cannot be justified. That resemblance
is a mere coincidence. The name Cambridge, in fact, is comparatively
modern, being corrupted, by regular gradations, from the original
Anglo-Saxon form which had the sense of Granta-bridge. The name of the
town is thus not, as is generally supposed, derived from the name of the
river (Cam being modern and artificial), but, conversely, the name of
the river has, in the course of centuries, been evolved out of the name
of the town.[5]
To return, however, to the Castle Hill. It may be doubtful, as we have
said, whether the Roman station there was Camboritum or not, but there
can be no doubt that the station, whatever it may have been called by
the Romans, must have been a fairly important one, not only as
commanding the open pass-way between the forest and the fen leading into
East Anglia, but also as standing at the head of a waterway leading to
the sea. It is difficult, of course, to estimate the extent of the
commerce in these early days, or even perhaps to name the staple article
of export that must have found its way by means of the fenland rivers to
the Continent, but that it must have been at times considerable we may
at least conjecture from the fact that in the records of the sacking of
the Fenland abbeys--Ely, Peterborough, Ramsey, and Crowland--by the
Danes in the seventh century there is evidence of a great store of
wealth, costly embroideries, rich jewels, gold and silver, which can
hardly have been the product of native industry alone, but seem to
indicate a fair import trade from the Continent.
The geographical position, in fact, of Cambridge at the head of a
waterway directly communicating with the sea is a factor in the history
of the town the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. In direct
communication with the Continent by means of the river, and on the only,
or almost the only, line of traffic between East Anglia and the rest of
England, it naturally became the chief distributing centre of the
commerce and trade of eastern England, and the seat of a Fair which in a
later age boasted itself the largest in Europe.
In his "History of the University," Thomas Fuller gives an account of
the origin of this Fair, which is perhaps more picturesque than
accurate:--
"About this time," he says--that is, about A.D. 1103, in the reign
of the first Henry--"Barnwell,[6] that is, Children's Well, a
village within the precincts of Cambridge, got both the name
thereof and a Fair therein on this occasion. Many little children
on Midsummer (or St. John Baptist's) Eve met there in mirth to play
and sport together; their company caused the confluence of more and
bigger boys to the place: then bigger than they: even their parents
themselves came thither to be delighted with the activity of their
children. Meat and drink must be had for their refection, which
brought some victualling booths to be set up. Pedlers with toys and
trifles cannot be supposed long absent, whose packs in short time
swelled into tradesmen's stalls of all commodities. Now it is
become a great fair, and (as I may term it) one of the townsmen's
commencements, wherein they take their degrees of wealth, fraught
with all store of wares and nothing (except buyers) wanting
therein."
This description of Fuller is obviously a rough translation of a passage
from the _Liber Memorandorum Ecclesia de Bernewelle_, commonly called
the "Barnewell Cartulary," given at page xii. of Mr. J. W. Clark's
"Customs of Augustinian Canons," and dated about 1296.
It is possible, of course, that the celebrated Stourbridge Fair, which
in later centuries was held every autumn in the river Meadow, a mile or
so below the town, adjoining Barnwell Priory, did date back to these
early times, but its two earliest charters undoubtedly belong to the
thirteenth century, one belonging to the reign of King John, granting
the tolls of the Fair to the Friars of the Leper Chapel of St. Mary
Magdalene, the other to Henry III.'s time fixing the date of the Fair
for the four days commencing October 17, being the Festival of St.
Etheldreda, Virgin, Queen and Abbess of Ely. From this time onward at
any rate the annual occurrence of this Fair furnishes incidents, not
always commendable, in the annals of both town and University. It is
said with probability that John Bunyan, who in his Bedfordshire youth
may well have been drawn to its attractions, made the Fair at
Stourbridge Common the prototype of his "Vanity Fair." And certainly any
one who will take the trouble to compare the description of the Fair
given by the Cambridgeshire historian Carter with the well-known passage
in the "Pilgrim's Progress," cannot but feel that the details of
Bunyan's picture are touches painted from life:--
"Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the
Wilderness, they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of
that Town is _Vanity_; and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called
_Vanity Fair_ ... therefore at this Fair are all such Merchandise
sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments,
Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all
sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters,
Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls,
Precious Stones and what not.
"And moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen
Jugglings, Cheats, Games, Plays, Fools, Apes, Knaves, and Rogues,
and that of all sorts.
"And as in other Fairs of less moment, there are the several Rows
and Streets under their proper names, where such and such wares
are vended; so here likewise you have the proper places, Rows,
Streets ... where the wares of this Fair are soonest to be found.
Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the
German Row, where several sorts of vanities are to be sold."
The historian, it is true, speaks of "the Sturbridge Fair as like to a
well-governed city, with less disorder and confusion than in any other
place where there is so great a concourse of people," yet when one reads
in Bunyan's "Progress" of the Peremptory Court of Trial, "under the
Great One of the Fair," ever ready to take immediate cognisance of any
"hubbub," one cannot but remember that the judicial rights of the
University in the regulation of the ale-tents and show-booths on
Midsummer Common were at least a fertile theme for satire with the
licensed wits of both Universities, whether of "Mr. Tripos" at
Cambridge, or of the "Terræ Filius" at Oxford, and wonder what amount of
truth there may have been in the rude statement of the latter that "the
Cambridge proctors at Fair time were so strict in forbidding
undergraduates to enter public-houses in the town because it would spoil
their own trade in the Fair."
But as Fuller would say, "Enough hereof. It tends to slanting and
suppositive traducing of the records." Let us proceed with our history.
And that we may do so let us end this introductory chapter of Fable and
Fact by enforcing the point, of which the incident of Stourbridge Fair
was but an illustration, that Cambridge became the seat of an English
University, because it had already become a chief centre of English
trade and commerce, and had so become because in the early centuries it
had stood as guardian of the only pass-way which crossed the frontier
line of the kingdoms of Mercia and the West Saxons and the kingdom of
the East Anglians, and at a later time had been the busy porter of the
river gate, by which the merchandise of northern Europe, borne to the
Norfolk Wash and the Port of Lynn by the ships of Flanders and the Hanse
towns of the Baltic, found its way, by the sluggish waters of the Cam
and the Ouse, to a place which was thus well fitted to become the great
distributing centre of trade for southern England and the Midlands.
Stourbridge Fair is a thing of the past. Cambridge as a distributing
centre for the trade of northern Europe has ceased to be. The long line
of river barges no longer float down the stream. The waters of the Wash
are silting up. The fame of the town has been eclipsed by the fame of
the University. But town and University alike may still gaze with
emotion at the old timbered wharfs and clay hithes of the river, the
green earthwork of the Castle Hill, the far-stretching roads once known
as Akeman Street and the Icknield Way, the grass-grown slopes of the
Devil's Dyke, as the symbols of mighty forces which in their day brought
men from all parts of Europe to this place, and have been potent to make
it through many centuries a centre of light and learning to England and
the world.
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE IN THE NORMAN TIME
"At this time the fountain of learning in Cambridge was but little,
and that very troubled.... Mars then frighted away the Muses, when
the Mount of Parnassus was turned into a fort, and Helicon derived
into a trench. And at this present, King William the Conqueror,
going to subdue the monks of Ely that resisted him, made
Cambridgeshire the seat of war."--FULLER.
William I. at Cambridge Castle--Cambridge at the Domesday
Survey--Roger Picot the Sheriff--Pythagoras School--Castle and
Borough--S. Benet's Church and its Parish--The King's Ditch--The
Great and the Small Bridges--The King's and the Bishop's Mills--The
River Hithes--S. Peter by the Castle and S. Giles Church--The early
Streets of the City--The Augustinian Priory of Barnwell--The Round
Church of the Holy Sepulchre--The Cambridge Jewry--Debt of early
Scholars to the Philosophers of the Synagogue--Benjamin's
House--Municipal Freedom of the Borough.
On the site of the ancient Roman station of which we have spoken in the
preceding chapter, as guarding the river ford and the pass between
forest and fen into East Anglia, William the Conqueror, returning from
the conquest of York in the year 1068, founded Cambridge Castle, that
"it might be"--to quote Fuller's words--"a check-bit to curb this
country, which otherwise was so hard-mouthed to be ruled." Here, in the
following year, he took up his abode, making the castle the centre of
his operations against the rebel English who had rallied to the
leadership of Hereward the Wake, in his camp of refuge at Ely. But the
castle at Cambridge never became a military centre of importance. No
important deed of arms is recorded in connection with it. It was a mere
outpost, useful only as a base of operations. It was so used by William
the Conqueror. It was so used by Henry III. in his futile contest with
the English baronage. It was so used by the Duke of Northumberland in
his unsuccessful attempt to crush the loyalist rising of East Anglia
against his plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. It was so used
by Oliver Cromwell when he was organising the Eastern Counties
Association, and forming "his lovely company" of Ironsides. But beyond
these episodes Cambridge Castle has no history. In the early part of the
fourteenth century it was used as a prison for common criminals. Edward
III. built his College of King's Hall with some of its materials, and
from that time onwards it appears to have been used as a quarry by the
royal founders of more than one college. Its last remaining outwork, the
Gate House, was demolished in 1842. Now there is nothing left but the
grass-grown mound, still known as Castle Hill, the resort of occasional
American tourists who are wise enough to know how fine a view of the
town may be obtained from that position, and, so it is said, a less
frequent place of pilgrimage also to certain university freshmen who are
foolish enough to accept the assurance of their fellows that "at the
witching hour of night" they may best observe from Castle Hill those
solemn portents which, on the doubtful authority of the University
Calendar, are said to happen when "the Cambridge term divides at
midnight."
But if the Castle at Cambridge, as a "place of arms," had practically no
history, much less had the town over which nominally it stood guard. The
old streets of Cambridge show no sign of ever having been packed closely
within walls in the usual mediæval fashion. In the early days the town
seems to have been limited to a little knot of houses round the castle
and along the street leading down to the river ford at the foot of the
Castle Hill. From the Domesday Survey we learn that in the time of
Edward the Confessor the town had consisted of 400 dwelling-houses, and
was divided into ten wards, each governed by its own lawman ("lageman")
or magistrate, a name which appears to suggest that the original
organisation of the town was of Danish origin. By the year 1086 two of
these wards had been thrown into one, owing to the destruction of
twenty-seven houses--"pro castro"--on account of the building of the
Castle, and in the remaining wards no fewer than fifty-three other
dwellings are entered as "waste." Altogether, in Norman times the
population of Cambridge can hardly have exceeded at the most a couple of
thousand. The customs of the town were assessed at £7, the land tax at
£7. 2s. 2d. Both of these seem to have been new impositions, payable to
the royal treasury. How this came about one cannot say, but from this
time onward, all through the middle ages, the farm of Cambridge appears
frequently to have been given as a dower to the Queen.
[Illustration: Courtyard of the Falcon Inn]
The earldom of Cambridge and Huntingdon has been almost invariably held
by a member of the Royal Family. The first steps, indeed, towards
municipal independence on the part of the borough were taken when the
burgesses demanded the privilege of making their customary payments
direct to the King, and ridding themselves of this part, at any rate, of
the authority of the sheriff. Certainly, there was much complaint made
to the Domesday Commissioners concerning the first Norman sheriff of
Cambridgeshire, one Roger Picot, because of his hard treatment of the
burgesses. Among other things, it was said that he had "required the
loan of their ploughs nine times in the year, whereas in the reign of
the Confessor they lent their ploughs only thrice in the year and found
neither cattle nor carts," and also that he had built himself three
mills upon the river to the destruction of many dwelling-houses and the
confiscation of much common pasture. Reading of these things one is
almost tempted to wonder, whether the old stone Norman house still
standing, styled, by a tradition now lost, "the School of Pythagoras,"
in close proximity as it is to the river, the ford, and the castle, may
not have been the residence of this sheriff or of one of his immediate
successors. The house cannot, certainly, be of a later date than the
latter part of the twelfth century. Originally, it appears to have
consisted of a single range of building of two storeys, the lower one
formerly vaulted, the upper one serving as a hall. How it came by its
present name of "Pythagoras School" we do not know, and certainly there
is no reason to suppose that it was at any time a school. The Norman
occupier, however, of this stone house, with his servants and retainers,
could hardly have been other than a leading personage in the community,
and must have contributed in no slight degree to its importance.
Possibly it may have been owing to the destruction of houses caused by
the clearing of the sites for both this mansion and for the Castle, that
the dispossessed population sought habitation for themselves on the low
lying ground across the ford, on the east bank of the river. Whether
this was the cause or not, certainly the town on the west bank--"the
borough," as the castle end of Cambridge was still called in the memory
of persons still living[7]--overflowed at an early period to the other
side of the river, and gradually extending itself along the line of the
Via Devana, eventually coalesced with what had before been a distinct
village clustering round the ancient pre-Norman church of S. Benedict.
This church, or rather its tower, is the oldest building in Cambridge
and one of the most interesting. It is thus described by Mr.
Atkinson.[8]
[Illustration: The School of Pythagoras.]
"The tower presents those features which are usually taken to
indicate a Saxon origin. It is divided into three well-marked
stages, each one of which is rather narrower than the one below it.
The quoins are of the well-known long-and-short work (a sign of
late date), and the lowest quoin is let into a sinking prepared for
it in the plinth. The belfry windows are of two sorts; the central
window on each face is of two heights, divided by a mid-wall
balister shaft, supporting a through-stone of the usual character.
On each side of this window there is a plain lancet at a somewhat
higher level, and with rubble jambs. Above these latter there are
small round holes--they can hardly be called windows. Over each of
the central windows there is a small pilaster, stopped by a corbel
which rests on the window head; these pilasters are cut off
abruptly at the top of the tower, which has probably been altered
since it was first built; most likely it was originally terminated
by a low spire or by gables. The rough edges of the quoins are
worked with a rebate to receive the plaster which originally
covered the tower. The arch between the tower and the nave springs
from bold imposts, above which are rude pieces of sculpture,
forming stops to the hood mould. The quoins remaining at each angle
of the present nave show that it is of the same length and width as
the nave of the original church, and they seem to show also that
the original church had neither aisles nor transepts. The chancel
is also the same size as that of the early church, for though the
east and north walls have been rebuilt, they are in the positions
of the Saxon walls. The south wall of the chancel has been altered
at many different periods, but has probably never been rebuilt. The
bases of the chancel arch remain below the floor. The early church
was probably lighted by small lancets about three inches wide,
placed high in the wall, and without glass."
The present nave is of the thirteenth century. The chancel was built as
late as 1872. The building which still abuts against the south chancel
wall belongs, however, to the fifteenth century, and was a connecting
hall or gallery with "the old court" of Corpus Christi College, which
not only took its early name of S. Benet from the ancient church, but
for some century and more possessed no other College chapel. The bells
of S. Benet, we read in the old College records, were long used to call
the students "to ye schooles, att such times as neede did require--as to
acts, clearums, congregations, lecturs, disses, and such like." But this
belongs to its story in a later age. The Pre-Conquest Church of S.
Benet, as we have said, probably served a township separate and distinct
from the Castle-end "borough" on the west bank of the river. After the
two villages became united, the Norman Grantebrigge, and indeed the
mediæval Cambridge of later days, seemed to have formed a straggling and
incompact town, stretching for the most part along the Roman road which
crossed the river by the bridge at the foot of Castle hill, and so
eastward past S. Benet's, and onward to the open country, eventually
reached Colchester across the forest uplands. This Roman Way, following
the line of the modern Bridge Street, Sidney Street, S. Andrew Street,
Regent Street, ran close to the eastern limit of the town, marked
roughly at a later time by the King's Ditch. This was an artificial
stream constructed as a defence of the town by King John in the year
1215. It was strengthened later by King Henry III., who had also
intended to protect the town on this side by a wall. The wall, however,
was never built, and the Ditch itself could never have been much of a
defence, except, perhaps, against casual marauders, though for centuries
it was a cause of insanitary trouble to the town. Branching out of the
river at the King's and Bishop's Mills, just above Queen's College, it
joined the river again, after encircling the town, just below the Great
Bridge and above the Common now called Jesus Green. The Ditch was
crossed by bridges on the lines of the principal roads. One of these,
built of stone, still remains under the road now called Jesus Lane.
There appears to have been a drawbridge also at the end of Sussex
Street. The river itself, which formed the western boundary of the town,
was spanned by two bridges, the Great Bridge at Castle End and the Small
Bridge or Bridges at Newnham by the Mill pond. Between the two bridges
were the principal wharfs or river hithes--corn hithe, flax hithe,
garlic hithe, salt hithe, Dame Nichol's hithe. These have all now given
place to the sloping lawns and gardens of the colleges, the far-famed
"Cambridge Backs." The common hithe, however, below the Great Bridge
still continues in use. It is with certain rights in regard to these
hithes that the earliest Royal charter of which we have record deals. It
is an undated writ of Henry I. (1100-1135) addressed to Henry, Bishop of
Ely (1109-1131), and attested by an unnamed Chancellor and by Miles of
Gloucester and by Richard Basset. The main object of the King's writ
seems to be to make "his borough of Cambridge" the one "port" and
emporium of the shire. "I forbid"--so runs the writ--"that any boat
shall ply at any hithe in Cambridgeshire save at the hithe of my borough
at Cambridge, nor shall barges be laden save in the borough of
Cambridge, nor shall any take toll elsewhere, but only there."
Numerous narrow lanes, all now vanished, with the exception of John's
Lane, Gareth Hostel Lane, and Silver Street, led down from High Street
to the quays. The town was intersected by three main streets. From the
Great Bridge ran the streets already mentioned as following the line of
the old Roman Way (the Via Devana). From this old roadway, at a point
opposite the Round Church, there branched off the High Street--now
Trinity Street and King's Parade--leading to Trumpington Gate. Parallel
to the High Street, and between it and the river, ran Milne Street,
leading from the King's Mill at the south end of the town, and
continuing northwards to a point about the site of the existing sun-dial
in Trinity Great Court, where it joined a cross-street leading into the
High Street. Parts of Milne Street still exist in the lanes which run
past the fronts of Queen's College and Trinity Hall. In mediæval times
the entrance gateways of six colleges opened into it--King's Hall,
Michael House, Trinity Hall, King's College, S. Catharine's Hall, and
Queen's College. Of the most ancient church of the town, that of S.
Benedict, we have already spoken. Of the possibly contemporary church of
S. Peter by the Castle, the only architectural remains of any importance
now existing are a rich late Norman doorway and the bowl of an ancient
font. The tower and spire belong to the fourteenth century. The rest of
the building is entirely modern. Bricks, however, said to be Roman,
appear to have been used in the new walls. Similarly of the other two
ancient Castle-end churches, All Saints by the Castle, and S. Giles. Of
the former nothing now remains and its actual site is doubtful, for the
parish attached to it has been united with S. Giles ever since the time
when in the fourteenth century the Black Death left it almost without
inhabitants. Of the Church of S. Giles there remains the ancient
chancel arch of late Saxon or early Norman character (the familiar
long-and-short work seems to date it about the middle of the eleventh
century), and the doorway of the nave, which have been rebuilt in the
large new church opened in 1875.
[Illustration: The Abbey House]
It was, however, from this old church of S. Giles by the Castle that the
first religious house in Cambridge of which we have any record, and
quite possibly the most important factor in the early development of the
University, the wealthy Augustinian Priory of Barnwell, took its origin.
The story of that foundation is this.[9]
Roger Picot, Baron of Bourne and Norman Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, of
whose hard treatment the Cambridge burgesses complained to the
commissioners of the Domesday Survey, had married a noble and pious
woman named Hugoline. Hugoline being taken very ill at Cambridge, and on
the point, as she thought, of death, vowed a vow, that if she recovered
she would build a church in honour of God and S. Giles. "Whereupon,"
says the legend, "she recovered in three days." And in gratitude to God
she built close to the Castle the Church of S. Giles in the year 1092,
together with appropriate buildings, and placed therein six canons
regular of the order of S. Augustine, under the charge of Canon Geoffrey
of Huntingdon, a man of great piety, and prevailed upon her husband to
endow the Church and house with half the tithes of his manorial
demesnes. Some vestiges of this small house (_veteris coenobioli
vestigia_) were still extant in Leland's time. Before, however, this
Augustinian house had been thoroughly established, Earl Pigot and his
wife Hugoline died, committing the foundation to the care of their son
Robert. Robert unfortunately became implicated in a conspiracy against
Henry I., was charged with treason, and obliged to fly the country. The
estates were confiscated, and the canons reduced to great want and
misery. In this extremity a certain Pain Peverel, a valiant young
Crusader, who had been standard-bearer to Robert Curthose in the Holy
Land, and who had received the confiscated estates of Picot's son,
Robert, came to the rescue, declaring that as he had become Picot's
heir, so he would succeed him in the care of this foundation, and
increase the number of canons to the number of the years of his own age,
namely thirty. He determined also to move the house to a more
convenient situation, and accordingly, in the year 1112, he transferred
it to an excellent site in Barnwell, a mile and a half or so down the
river, just off the high-road leading from Cambridge to Newmarket. This
transaction is related as follows:--
"Perceiving that the site on which their house stood was not
sufficiently large for all the buildings needful for his canons,
and was devoid of any spring of fresh water, Pain Peverel besought
King Henry to give him a certain site beyond the borough of
Cambridge, extending from the highway to the river, and
sufficiently agreeable from the pleasantness of its position.
Besides, from the midst of that site there bubbled forth springs of
clear fresh water, called at that time in English _Barnewelle_, the
children's springs, because once a year, on St. John Baptist's Eve,
boys and lads met there and amused themselves in the English
fashion with wrestling matches and other games, and applauded each
other in singing songs and playing on musical instruments. Hence by
reason of the crowd of boys and girls who met and played there, a
habit grew up that on the same day a crowd of buyers and sellers
should meet in the same place to do business. There, too, a man of
great sanctity, called Godesone, used to lead a solitary life in a
small wooden oratory that he had built in honour of St. Andrew. He
had died a short time before, leaving the place without any
habitation upon it, and his oratory without a keeper."[10]
In this pleasant place accordingly the house was rebuilt on a very large
scale, and by the liberality of Peverel and his son William richly
endowed. In the year 1112, we read in the Cartulary that Peverel at once
set about building "a church of wonderful beauty and massive work in
honour of S. Giles." To this church he gave "vestment, ornaments, and
relics of undoubted authenticity which he had brought back from
Palestine"; but before he could carry out his intention of completing
it, he died in London of a fever "barely ten years after the translation
of the canons. His body was brought to Barnwell and buried in a becoming
manner on the north side of the high altar." By the munificence,
however, of a later benefactor, the church was finished and consecrated
in 1191, and before the end of the next century the conventual
buildings, cloister, chapter house, frater, farmery, guest hall, gate
house, were complete, and the Priory of Augustinian canons at Barnwell
took its place in the monastic history of Cambridgeshire, a place only
second probably to that of the great Benedictine House at Ely.[11] All
that now remains of the Priory is a small church or chapel standing near
the road, and the fragment of some other building. The whole site,
however, was excavated for gravel in the beginning of the last century,
so that it is impossible to speak with any certainty of the disposition
of the buildings, although Mr. Willis Clark, in his "Customs of
Augustinian Canons," has from documentary sources made an ingenious
attempt to reconstruct the whole plan of the Priory. The small chapel of
S. Andrew the Less, although it has long been known as the Abbey Church,
has, of course, strictly no right to that name. Obviously it cannot be
the church of "wondrous dimensions" built by Pain Peverel. The chapel,
although in all likelihood it did stand within the Priory precincts, was
most probably built for the use of the inhabitants of the parish by the
canons, in order that they themselves might be left undisturbed in the
exclusive use of the Conventual Church. It is a building of the early
English style, with long, narrow lancet windows, evidently belonging to
the early part of the thirteenth century.
[Illustration: Chapel Barnwell Priory]
The material remains of the Priory are therefore very meagre, but a most
interesting insight into the domestic economy of a monastic house is
afforded by the "_Consuetudinarium_; or, Book of Observances of the
Austin Canons," which forms the Eighth Book of the Barnwell Cartulary,
to which we have already alluded. A comparison of the domestic customs
of a monastic house in the thirteenth century, as shown in this book,
and of the functions of its various officers, with many of the
corresponding customs and functions in the government of a Cambridge
college, not only in mediæval but in modern times, throws much light on
the origin of some of the most characteristic features of college life
to-day.[12]
Let us retrace our steps, however, along the Barnwell Road from the
suburban monastery to the ancient town. There are still some features,
belonging to the Norman structure of Cambridge, which demand our notice
before we pass on.
At a point where the High Street, now Trinity Street, branches off from
Bridge Street stands the church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the four
round churches of England.[13]
[Illustration: The Round Church]
Presumably it must have been built by some confraternity connected with
the newly established Military Order of the Templars, and, to judge by
the style of its architecture--the only real evidence we have as to its
date, for the conjecture that it owes its foundation to the young
crusader, Pain Peverel, is purely fanciful, and of "the Ralph with a
Beard," of which we read in the Ramsey cartularies as receiving "a grant
of land to build a Minster in honour of God and the Holy Sepulchre," we
know nothing--probably between 1120 and 1140. In its original shape, the
church must have consisted of its present circular nave with the
ambulatory aisle, and in all probability a semi-circular eastern apse.
The ambulatory was vaulted, as in all probability was also the central
area, while the apse would doubtless be covered with a semi-dome. The
chancel and its north aisle, which had apparently been remodelled in
early English times, was again reconstructed in the fifteenth century.
At about the same time an important alteration was made in the circular
nave by carrying up the walls to form a belfry. The additional stage was
polygonal and terminated in a battlemented parapet. The Norman corbel
table, under the original eaves of what was probably a dwarf spire, was
not destroyed, and thus serves to mark the top of the Norman wall.
Windows of three lights were not only inserted in the additional stage,
but were also substituted for the circular-headed Norman windows of both
ambulatory and clerestory.
"Such," says Mr. Atkinson, "was the condition of the Church when,
in 1841, the Cambridge Camden Society undertook its 'restoration.'
The polygonal upper story of the circular nave, containing four
bells, was destroyed; sham Norman windows, copied from one
remaining old one, replaced those which had been inserted in the
15th century; and new stone vaults and high pitched roofs were
constructed over the nave and ambulatory. The chancel, with the
exception of one arch and the wall above it, were entirely rebuilt;
the north aisle, with the exception of the entrance arch from the
west, was rebuilt and extended eastwards to the same length as the
chancel; a new south aisle of equal dimensions with the enlarged
north aisle was added; and a small turret for two bells was built
at the north-west corner of the north aisle; the lower stage of
this turret was considered a sufficient substitute for the
destroyed vestry. A new chancel arch of less width than the old one
was built, and a pierced stone screen was formed above it. In
addition to all this, those old parts which were not destroyed were
'repaired and beautified,' or 'dressed and pointed,' or 'thoroughly
restored.' What these processes involved is clear from an
inspection of the parts to which they were applied; in the west
doorway, for instance, there is not one old stone left."[14]
Across the road from the Round Church, in the angle of land caused by
the branching apart of the High Street and the Bridge Street, was
planted one of the earliest Jewries established in England. The coming
of the Jews to England was one of the incidental effects of the Norman
Conquest. They had followed in the wake of the invading army as in
modern times they followed the German hosts into France, assisting the
Normans to dispose of their spoil, finding at usurious interest
ready-money for the impoverished English landowner, to meet his
conqueror's requisitions, and generally meeting the money-broking needs
of both King and subject. In a curious diatribe by Richard of Devizes
(1190), Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, Oxford, Exeter, Worcester,
Chester, Hereford, York, Ely, Durham, Norwich, Lincoln, Bristol,
Winchester, and of course London are all mentioned as harbouring Jewish
settlements. The position of the Jew, however, in England was all along
anomalous. As the member of an alien race, and still more of an alien
religion, he could gain no kind of constitutional status in the kingdom.
The common law ignored him. His Jewry, like the royal forest, was
outside its domain. He came, indeed, as the King's special man--nay,
more, as the King's special chattel. And in this character he lived for
the most part secure. The romantic picture of the despised, trembling
Jew--the Isaac of York, depicted for us in Scott's "Ivanhoe"--cringing
before every Christian that he meets, is, in any age of English history,
simply a romantic picture. The attitude of the Jew almost to the last is
one of proud and even insolent defiance. In the days of the Red King at
any rate, he stood erect before the prince, and seemed to have enjoyed
no small share of his favour and personal familiarity. The presence of
the unbelieving Hebrew at his court supplied, it is said, William Rufus
with many opportunities of mocking at the Christian Church and its
bishops. In a well-known story of Eadmer, the Red King actually forbids
the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith. "It was a poor
exchange," he said, "which would rob me of a valuable property and give
me only a subject." The extortion of the Jew was therefore sheltered
from the common law by the protection of the King. The bonds of the Jew
were kept, in fact, under the royal seal in the royal archives, a fact
of which the memory long remained in the name of "The Star" chamber; a
name derived from the Hebrew word (_ishtar_) for a "bond."
[Illustration: Oriel Windows from House in Petty-Cury now demolished _To
face p. 46_]
The late Mr. J. R. Green, in a delightful sketch on the early history of
Oxford in his "Stray Studies," afterwards incorporated into the pages of
his "History of the English People," seems inclined to give some support
to the theory which would connect the origin of the University with the
establishment of the Oxford Jewry. This theory, however, can hardly be
accepted.[15] It is very probable indeed that the medical school, which
we find established at Oxford and in high repute during the twelfth
century, is traceable to Jewish origin; and the story is no doubt true
also, which tells how Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of
material research by means of the Hebrew instruction and the Hebrew
books which he found among the Jewish rabbis of the Oxford Synagogue. It
is reasonable also to suppose that the history of Christian
Aristotelianism, and of the Scholastic Theology that was based upon it,
may have been largely influenced by the philosophers of the Synagogue.
It seems, indeed, to be a well-established conclusion, that the
philosophy of Aristotle was first made known to the West through the
Arabic versions brought from Spain by Jewish scholars and rabbis. But
it is undoubtedly "in a more purely material way" that, as Mr. Green
truly says, the Jewry most directly influenced academic history. At
Oxford, as elsewhere, "the Jew brought with him something more than the
art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought
with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of
yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of
almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the
Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great
monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of
industrial activity to which we own the noblest of our Minsters in the
loans of the Jew."
Certainly at Cambridge, though perhaps hardly to the same extent as at
Oxford, the material influence on the town of the Jewry is traceable. At
Oxford, it is said that nearly all the larger dwelling-houses, which
were subsequently converted into hostels, bore traces of their Jewish
origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombard's Hall, Jacob's
Hall, and each of the successive Town Halls of the borough had
previously been Jewish houses. We have some evidence of a similar
conversion at Cambridge. In the first half of the thirteenth century,
before we hear either of Tolbooth or of Guildhall, the enlarged judicial
responsibilities of the town authorities made it necessary that they
should be in possession of some strong building suitable for a prison.
Accordingly, in 1224, we find King Henry III. granting to the burgesses
the House of Benjamin, the Jew, for the purposes of a gaol. It is said
that either the next house or a part of Benjamin's House had been the
Synagogue of the Jewry, and was granted in the first instance to the
Franciscan Friars on their arrival in the city. Benjamin's House,
although it had been altered from time to time, appears never to have
been entirely rebuilt, and some fragments of this, the earliest of
Cambridge municipal buildings, are perhaps still to be found embedded in
the walls of the old Town Arms public-house--a room in which, as late as
the seventeenth century, was still known as "The Star Chamber"--at the
western side of Butter Row, in the block of old buildings at the corner
of Market Square, adjoining the new frontage of the Guildhall.
With this relic of the ancient Jewry we reach the last remaining
building in Cambridge that had any existence in Norman times. And with
the close of this age--the age of the Crusades--we already find the
Cambridge burgess safely in possession, not only of that personal
freedom which had descended to him by traditional usage from the
communal customs of his early Teutonic forefathers, but also of many
privileges which he had bought in hard cash from his Norman conqueror.
Before the time of the first charter of King John (1201) Cambridge had
passed through most of the earlier steps of emancipation which
eventually led to complete self-government. The town-bell ringing out
from the old tower of S. Benet's already summoned the Cambridge freemen
to a borough mote in which the principles of civic justice, of loyal
association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid, were acknowledged by
every member of a free, self-ruling assembly.
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNINGS OF UNIVERSITY LIFE
"Si tollis libertatem, tollis dignitatem."--S. COLUMBAN.
"Record we too with just and faithful pen,
That many hooded cænobites there are
Who in their private cells have yet a care
Of public quiet; unambitious men,
Counsellors for the world, of piercing ken;
Whose fervent exhortations from afar
Move princes to their duty, peace or war;
And oft times in the most forbidding den
Of solitude, with love of science strong,
How patiently the yoke of thought they bear ...
By such examples moved to unbought pains
The people work like congregated bees;
Eager to build the quiet fortresses
Where piety, as they believe, obtains
From heaven a general blessing; timely rains
And sunshine; prosperous enterprise and peace and equity."
--WORDSWORTH.
Monastic Origins--Continuity of Learning in Early England--The
School of York--The Venerable Bede--Alcuin and the Schools of
Charles the Great--The Danish Invasions--The Benedictine
Revival--The Monkish Chroniclers--The Coming of the Friars--The
Franciscan and Dominican Houses at Cambridge--The Franciscan
Scholars--Roger Bacon--Bishop Grosseteste--The New Aristotle and
the Scientific Spirit--The Scholastic
Philosophy--Aquinas--Migration of Scholars from Paris to
Cambridge--The term "University"--The Colleges and the Hostels--The
Course of Study--Trivium and Quadrivium--The Four
Faculties--England a Paradise of Clerks--Parable of the Monk's Pen.
In the centuries which preceded the rise of the Universities, the monks
had been the great educators of England, and it is to monastic origins
that we must first turn to find the beginnings of university and
collegiate life at Cambridge.
In the library of Trinity College there is preserved a catalogue of the
books which Augustine and his monks brought with them into England.
"These are the foundation or the beginning of the library of the whole
English Church, A.D. 601," are the words with which this brief catalogue
closes. A Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a book of the Gospels, a
Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles, and the exposition of
certain Epistles represented at the commencement of the seventh century
the sum-total of literature which England then possessed. In little more
than fifty years, however, the Latin culture of Augustine and his monks
had spread throughout the land, and before the eighth century closed
England had become the literary centre of Western Europe. Probably never
in the history of any nation had there been so rapid a development of
learning. Certainly few things are more remarkable in the history of the
intellectual development of Europe than that, in little more than a
hundred years after knowledge had first dawned upon this country, an
Anglo-Saxon scholar should be producing books upon literature and
philosophy second to nothing that had been written by any Greek or Roman
author after the third century. But the great writer whom after-ages
called "the Venerable Bede," and who was known to his own contemporaries
as "the wise Saxon," was not the only scholar that the seventh and the
eighth centuries had produced in England. Under the twenty-one years of
the Archiepiscopate of Theodore (669-690), schools and monasteries
rapidly spread throughout the country. In the school established under
the walls of Canterbury, in connection with the Monastery of S. Peter,
better known in after-times as S. Augustine's, and over which his friend
the Abbot Adrian ruled, were trained not a few of the great scholars of
those days--Albinus, the future adviser and assistant of Bede, Tobias of
Rochester, Aldhelm of Sherborne, and John of Beverley. The influence of
these and other scholars sent out from the school at Canterbury soon
made itself felt. In Northumbria, too, the torch of learning had been
kept alight by the Irish monks of Lindisfarne, and of Melrose and of
Iona, "that nest from which," as an old writer playing on its founder S.
Columba's name had said, "the sacred doves had taken their flight to
every quarter."
While Archbishop Theodore and the Abbot Adrian were organising
Anglo-Latin education in the monasteries of the south, Wilfrith, the
Archbishop of York, and his friend Benedict Biscop were performing a no
less extensive work in the north. The schools of Northumbria gathered in
the harvest of Irish learning, and of the Franco-Gallican schools, which
still preserved a remnant of classical literature, and of Rome itself,
now barbarised. Of Bede, in the book-room of the monastery at Jarrow, we
are told by his disciple and biographer, Cuthbert, that in the intervals
of the regular monastic discipline the great scholar found time to
undertake the direction of the monastic school. "He had many scholars,
all of whom he inspired with an extraordinary love of learning." "It was
always sweet to me," he writes himself, "to learn to teach." At the
conclusion of his "Ecclesiastical History" he has himself given a list
of some thirty-eight books which he had written up to that time. Of
these not a few are of an educational character. Besides a large body of
Scripture commentary, we have from his pen treatises on orthography,
grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. His book on "The Nature of
Things" was the science primer of the Anglo-Saxons for many generations.
He wrote, in fact, to teach. At the school of York, however, was centred
nearly all the wisdom of the West, and its greatest pupil was Alcwyne.
He became essentially the representative schoolmaster of his age. For
fourteen years, attracted by the fame of his scholarship, students not
only from all parts of England and Ireland, but also from France and
Germany, flocked to the monastery school at York. In 782 Alcwyne left
England to join the Court of Charles the Great and to take charge of the
Palatine schools, carrying with him to the Continent the learning which
was about to perish for a time in England, as the result of the internal
dissensions of its kings and the early ravages of the Norsemen.
"Learning," to use the phrase of William of Malmesbury, "was buried in
the grave of Bede for four centuries." The Danish invader, carrying his
ravages now up the Thames and now up the Humber, devastated the east of
England with fire and sword. "Deliver us, O Lord, from the frenzy of the
Northmen!" had been a suffrage of a litany of the time, but it was one
to which the scholars and the bookmen, no less than the monks and nuns
of that age, found no answer. The noble libraries which Theodore and
the Abbots Adrian and Benedict had founded were given to the flames. The
monasteries of the Benedictines, the chief guardians of learning, were
completely broken up. "It is not at all improbable," says Mr. Kemble,
"that in the middle of the tenth century there was not a genuine
Benedictine left in England."
A revival of monastic life--some attempt at a return to the old
Benedictine ideal--came, however, with that century. Under the auspices
of S. Dunstan, the Benedictine Order--renovated at its sources by the
Cluniac reform--was again established, and surviving a second wave of
Danish devastation was, under the patronage of King Cnut and Edward the
Confessor, further strengthened and extended. The strength of this
revival is perhaps best seen in the wonderful galaxy of monastic
chroniclers which sheds its light over that century. Florence of
Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, Ingulf, Geoffrey
Gaimar, William de Monte, John and Richard of Hexham, Jordan Fantosme,
Simeon of Durham, Thomas and Richard of Ely, Gervase, Giraldus
Cambrensis, William of Newburgh, Richard of Devizes all follow one
another in close succession, while Robert of Gloucester, Roger of
Wendover, and Matthew Paris carry on the line into the next age. But
apart from the Chroniclers, though the monasteries once more flourished
in England, the early Benedictine ideal of learning did not at once
revive. Indeed, the tendency of the monastic reformers of the twelfth
century was distinctly hostile to the more intellectual side of the
monastic ideal. By the end of the century the majority of the
Benedictine convents had sunk into rich corporations of landed
proprietors, whose chief ambition was the aggrandisement of the house to
which they belonged. The new impulse of reform, which in its indirect
results was to give the thirteenth century in England so dominant a
place in the history of her civilisation, came from a quite different
direction. Almost simultaneously, without concert, in different
countries, two great minds, S. Francis and S. Dominic, conceived a
wholly new ideal of monastic perfection. Unlike the older monastic
leaders, deliberately turning their backs upon the haunts of men in town
and village, and seeking in the wilderness seclusion from the world
which they professed to forsake, these new idealists, the followers of
S. Dominic and S. Francis, the mendicant Orders, the Friars' Preachers
and the Friars' Minors, turned to the living world of men. Their object
was no longer the salvation of the individual monk, but the salvation of
others through him. Monastic Christianity was no longer to flee the
world; it must conquer it or win it by gentle violence. The work of the
new Orders, therefore, was from the first among their fellowmen, in
village, in town, in city, in university.
"Like the great modern Order (of the Jesuists) which, when their
methods had in their turn become antiquated, succeeded to their
influence by a still further departure from the old monastic
routine, the mendicant Orders early perceived the necessity of
getting a hold upon the centres of education. With the Dominicans
indeed this was a primary object: the immediate purpose of their
foundation was resistance to this Albigensian heresy; they aimed at
obtaining influence upon the more educated and more powerful
classes. Hence it was natural that Dominic should have looked to
the universities as the most suitable recruiting ground for his
Order: to secure for his Preachers the highest theological training
that the age afforded was an essential element of the new monastic
ideal.... The Franciscan ideal was a less intellectual one ... but
though the Franciscans laboured largely among the neglected poor of
crowded and pestilential cities, they too found it practically
necessary to go to the universities for recruits and to secure some
theological education for their members."[16]
The Black Friars of S. Dominic arrived in England in 1221. The Grey
Friars of S. Francis in 1224. The Dominicans met with the least success
at first, but this was fully compensated by the rapid progress of the
Franciscans. Very soon after the coming of the Grey Friars they had
formed a settlement at Oxford, under the auspices of the greatest
scholar-bishop of the age, Grosseteste of Lincoln, and had built their
first rude chapel at Cambridge. In the early days, however, the
followers of S. Francis made a hard fight against the taste for
sumptuous buildings and for the greater personal comfort which
characterised the time. "I did not enter into religion to build walls,"
protested an English Provincial of the Order when the brethren begged
for a larger convent. But at Cambridge the first humble house of the
Grey Friars, which had been founded in 1224 in "the old Synagogue," was
shortly removed to a site at the corner of Bridge Street and Jesus
Lane--now occupied by Sidney Sussex College--and that noble church
commenced, which, three centuries later, at the time of the Dissolution,
the University vainly endeavoured to save for itself, having for some
time used it for the ceremony of Commencement.[17] But of this we shall
have to speak later in our account of the Foundation of Sidney College.
But if the Franciscans, in their desire to obey the wishes of their
Founder, found a difficulty in combating the passion of the time for
sumptuous buildings, they had even less success in struggling against
the passion of the time for learning. Their vow of poverty ought to have
denied them the possession even of books. "I am your breviary! I am your
breviary!" S. Francis had cried passionately to the novice who desired a
Psalter. And yet it is a matter of common knowledge that Grosseteste,
the great patron of the Franciscans, brought Greek books to England, and
in conjunction with two other Franciscans, whose names are
known--Nicholas the Greek and John of Basingstoke--gave to the world
Latin versions of certain Greek documents. Foremost among these is the
famous early apocryphal book, _The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs_,
the Greek manuscript of which is still in the Cambridge University
Library. There is no better statement, perhaps, of those gaps in the
knowledge of Western Christendom, which the scholars of the Franciscan
Order did so much to fill, than a passage in the writings of the
greatest of all English Franciscans, Roger Bacon, which runs to this
effect:--
"Numberless portions of the wisdom of God are wanting to us. Many
books of the Sacred Text remain untranslated, as two books of the
Maccabees which I know to exist in Greek: and many other books of
divers Prophets, whereto reference is made in the books of Kings
and Chronicles. Josephus too, in the books of his _Antiquities_, is
altogether falsely rendered as far as concerns the Chronological
side, and without him nothing can be known of the history of the
Sacred Text. Unless he be corrected in a new translation, he is of
no avail, and the Biblical history is lost. Numberless books again
of Hebrew and Greek expositors are wanting to the Latins: as those
of Origen, Basil, Gregory, Nazianzen, Damascene, Dionysius,
Chrysostom, and other most noble Doctors, alike in Hebrew and in
Greek. The Church therefore is slumbering. She does nothing in this
matter, nor hath done these seventy years: save that my Lord
Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, of holy memory did give to the Latins
some part of the writings of S. Dionysius and of Damascene, and
some other holy Doctors. It is an amazing thing this negligence of
the Church; for, from the time of Pope Damasus, there hath not been
any Pope, nor any of less rank, who hath busied himself for the
advantaging of the Church by translations, except the aforesaid
glorious Bishop."[18]
The truth to which Roger Bacon in this passage gave expression, the
scholars of the Franciscan Order set themselves to realise and act upon.
For a considerable time the Franciscan houses at both Oxford and
Cambridge kept alive the interest of this "new learning" to which Robert
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon opened the way. The work of the Order at
Oxford is fairly well known. And in the Cambridge House of the Order
there was at least one teacher of divinity, Henry of Costessey, who, in
his _Commentary on the Psalms_, set the example of a type of
scholarship, which, in its close insistence on the exact meaning of the
text, in its constant reference to the original Hebrew, and in its
absolute independence of judgment, has, one is proud to think, ever
remained a characteristic of the Cambridge school of textual criticism
down even to our own day.
* * * * *
But if the Franciscans, impelled by their desire to illustrate the
Sacred Text, had thus become intellectual in spite of the ideal of their
Founder, the Dominicans were intellectual from their starting-point.
They had, indeed, been called into being by the necessity of combating
the intellectual doubts and controversies of the south of France. That
they should become a prominent factor in the development of the
universities was but the fulfilment of their original design. With their
activity also is associated one of the greatest intellectual movements
of the thirteenth century--the introduction of the new Philosophy. The
numerous houses of the Order planted by them in the East brought about
an increased intercourse between those regions and Western Europe, and
helped on that knowledge of the new Aristotle, which, as we have said in
a previous chapter, England probably owes largely to the philosophers of
the Synagogue. It is round the University of Paris, however, that the
earlier history, both of the Dominican scholars and of the new
Aristotle, mainly revolves. Here the great system of Scholastic
Philosophy was elaborated, by which the two great Dominican teachers,
Albertus Magnus--"the ape of Aristotle," as he was irreverently and
unjustly called by his Franciscan contemporaries--and his greater pupil,
Thomas Aquinas, "the seraphic Doctor," vindicated the Christian Creed in
terms of Aristotelian logic, and laid at least a solid foundation for
the Christian Theology of the future, in the contention that Religion is
rational, and that Reason is divine, that all knowledge and all truth,
from whatever source they are derived, are capable of being reduced to
harmony and unity, because the name of Christianity is both Wisdom and
Truth.
In the year 1229 there broke out at Paris a feud of more than ordinary
gravity between the students and the citizens, undignified enough in its
cause of origin, but in the event probably marking a distinct step in
the development of Cambridge University. A drunken body of students did
some act of great violence to the citizens. Complaint was made to the
Bishop of Paris and to the Queen Blanche. The members of the University
who had not been guilty of the outrage were violently attacked and
ill-treated by the police of the city. The University teachers suspended
their classes and demanded satisfaction. The demand was refused, and
masters and scholars dispersed. Large numbers, availing themselves of
the invitation of King Henry III. to settle where they pleased in this
country, migrated to the shores of England; and Cambridge, probably from
its proximity to the eastern coast, and as the centre where Prince
Louis, in alliance with the English baronage, but a few years before had
raised the Royal standard, seems to have attracted a large majority of
the students. A Royal writ, issued in the year 1231, for the better
regulation of the University, probably makes reference to this migration
when it speaks of the large number of students, both within the realm
and "from beyond the seas," who had lately settled in Cambridge, and
gives power to the Bishop of Ely "to signify rebellious clerks who would
not be chastised by the Chancellor and Masters," and if necessary to
invoke the aid of the Sheriff in their due punishment. Another Royal
writ of the same reign expressly provides that no student shall remain
in the University unless under the tuition of some Master of Arts--the
earliest trace perhaps of that disciplinary organisation which the
motley and turbulent crowd representing the student community of that
age demanded.[19]
It will be observed that in these Royal writs the term "university"
occurs. But it must not be supposed that the word is used in its more
modern signification, of a community or corporation devoted to learning
and education formally recognised by legal authority. That is a use
which appears for the first time towards the end of the fourteenth
century. In the age of which we are speaking, and in the writs of Henry
III., _universitas magistrorum et discipulorum_ or _scholarium_ simply
means a "community of teachers and scholars." The common designation in
mediæval times of such a body as we now mean by "university" was
_studium generale_, or sometimes _studium_ alone. It is necessary,
moreover, to remember that universities in the earliest times had not
infrequently a very vigorous life as places of learning, long before
they received Royal or legal recognition; and it is equally necessary
not to forget that colleges for the lodging and maintenance and
education of students are by no means an essential feature of the
mediæval conception of a university.
"The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned
men, associated for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the
privilege that no one should be allowed to teach within their
dominions unless he had received their sanction, which could only
be granted after trial of his ability. The test applied consisted
of examinations and public disputations; the sanction assumed the
form of a public ceremony and the name of a degree; and the
teachers or doctors so elected or created carried out their office
of instruction by lecturing in the public schools to the students,
who, desirous of hearing them, took up their residence in the place
wherein the University was located. The degree was, in fact, merely
a license to teach. The teacher so licensed became a member of the
ruling body. The University, as a body, does not concern itself
with the food and lodging of the students, beyond the exercise of a
superintending power over the rents and regulations of the houses
in which they are lodged, in order to protect them from exaction;
and it also assumes the care of public morals. The only buildings
required by such a corporation in the first instance were a place
to hold meetings and ceremonies, a library, and schools for
teaching, or, as we should call them, lecture rooms. A college, on
the other hand, in its primitive form, is a foundation erected and
endowed by private munificence solely for the lodging and
maintenance of deserving students, whose lack of means rendered
them unable to pursue the university course without some extraneous
assistance."[20]
It must be remembered, moreover, that when a mediæval benefactor founded
a college his intentions were very different from those which would
actuate a similar person at the present day. His object was to provide
board and lodging and a small stipend, _not for students, but for
teachers_. As for the taught, they lodged where they could, like
students at a Scottish or a Continental university to-day; and it was
not until the sixteenth century was well advanced that they were
admitted within the precincts of the colleges on the payment of a small
annual rent or "pension"--whence the modern name of "pensioner" for the
undergraduate or pupil members of the college. Indeed, the term
"college" (_collegium_), as applied to a building, is a modern use of
the word. In the old days the term "college" was strictly and accurately
applied to the persons who formed the community of scholars, not to the
building which housed them. For that building the correct term always
used in mediæval times was "domus" (house), or "aula" (hall). Sometimes,
indeed, the two names were combined. Thus, in an old document we find
the earliest of the colleges--Peterhouse--entitled, _Domus Sancti Petri,
sive Aula Scholarium Episcopi Eliensis_--The House of S. Peter, or the
Hall of the Scholars of the Bishop of Ely.
In all probability the University in early days took no cognisance
whatever of the way in which students obtained lodgings. It was the
inconvenience and discomfort of this system, no doubt, which led to the
establishment of what were afterwards termed "Hostels," apparently by
voluntary action on the part of the students themselves. In the first
half of the sixteenth century there seem to have been about twenty of
these hostels,[21] but at the end of the century there appears to have
been only about nine left. There is an interesting passage in a sermon
by Lever at Paul's Cross, preached in 1550, which throws light upon this
desertion of the hostels, where he speaks of those scholars who, "havyng
rych frendes or beyng benefyced men dyd lyve of themselves in Ostles and
Inns, be eyther gon awaye, or elles fayne to crepe into colleges, and
put poore men from bare lyvynges."
The University then, or, more strictly speaking, the _Studium Generale_,
existed as an institution long before the organisation of the
residential college or hall; and as a consequence, for many a year it
had an organisation quite independent of its colleges. The University of
Cambridge, like the University of Oxford, was modelled mainly on the
University of Paris. Its course of study followed the old classical
tradition of the division of the seven liberal sciences--grammar, logic,
rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy--into two classes,
the _Trivium_ and _Quadrivium_, a system of teaching which had been
handed down by the monastic schools in a series of text-books, jejune
and meagre, which were mainly compilations and abridgments from the
older classical sources. One such treatise, perhaps the most popular in
the monastery schools, was a book by Martianus Capella, a teacher of
rhetoric at Carthage, in the fifth century. The treatise is cast in
allegorical form, and represents the espousals of Mercury and Philology,
in which Philology is represented as a goddess, and the seven liberal
arts as handmaidens presented by Mercury to his bride. The humour of
this allegory is not altogether spiritless, if at times somewhat coarse.
Here is a specimen. The plaudits that follow upon the discourse
delivered by Arithmetica are supposed to be interrupted by laughter,
occasioned by the loud snores of Silenus asleep under the influence of
his deep potations. The kiss wherewith Rhetorica salutes Philologia is
heard throughout the assembly--_nihil enim silens, ac si cuperet,
faciebat_. So popular did this mythological medley become, that in the
tenth century we find certain learned monks embroidering the subject of
the poem on their Church vestments. A _memoria technica_ in hexameter
lines has also come down to us, showing how the monastic scholar was
assisted to remember that grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric belonged to
the first division of the sciences called the _Trivium_, and that the
four other sciences belonged to the _Quadrivium_:--
"_Gram._: loquitur; _Dia._: vera docet; _Rhet._: verba colorat,
_Mus._: canit; _Ar._: numerat; _Geo._: ponderat; _Ast._: colit astra."
In a further classification given by another scholar of the end of the
twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, we have enumerated the four
Faculties recognised by the mediæval University: Arts, Theology, Law,
Medicine.
"Hic florent Artes, Coelestis Pagina regnat,
Stant Leges, lucet Jus: Medicina viget."
Such, then, was the cycle of mediæval study. And the student whose
ambition it was to become a master of this cycle--a _magister_ or
_doctor_ (for in early days the two titles were synonymous)
_facultatis_--must attain to it through a seven years' course. In the
school attached to a monastery or a cathedral, or from the priest of his
native parish, we may suppose that the student has learnt some modicum
of Latin, "the scholar's vernacular," or failing that, that the first
stage of the _Trivium_--_Grammatica_--has been learnt on his arrival at
the University. For this purpose, if he is a Cambridge student at least,
he is placed under the charge of a special teacher, called by a
mysterious name, _Magister Glomeriæ_, and he himself becomes a
"glomerel," giving allegiance oddly enough during this state of
pupilage, not to the Chancellor, the head of his University, but to the
Archdeacon of Ely. Of the actual books read in the grammar course it is
difficult to give an account. They may have been few or many. Indeed, at
this period when the works of Aristotle were coming so much into vogue,
it would seem as if the old Grammar course gave way at an early period
to Philosophy. In a curious old French fabliau of the thirteenth
century, entitled "The Battle of the Seven Arts,"[22] there is evidence
of this innovation; incidentally also, a list of the books more properly
belonging to the Grammar course is also given.
"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_.
Si vaut bien chascuns iiii Omers,
Quar il boivent à granz gomers,
Et sevent bien versefier
Que d'une fueille d'un figuier
Vous ferent-il le vers.
* * * * *
Aristote, qui fu à pié,
Si fist chéoir Gramaire enverse,
Lors i a point Mesire Perse
Dant Juvénal et dant Orasce,
Virgile, Lucain, et Elasce,
Et Sedule, Propre, Prudence,
Arator, Omer, et Térence:
Tuit chaplèrent sor Aristote,
Qui fu fers com chastel sor mote."
"Do you know the reason of the discord?
'Tis because they are not for the same science,
For Logic, who is always disputing,
Claims the ancient authors,
And the glomerel clerks of Orleans,
Each of them is quite equal to four Homers,
For they drink by great draughts
And know so well how to make verse,
That about a single fig leaf
They would make you fifty verses.
* * * * *
Aristotle who was on foot
Knocked Grammar down flat.
Then there rode up Master Persius,
Dan Juvenal and Dan Horace,
Virgil, Lucan, and Statius,
And Sedulius, Prosper, Prudentius,
Arator, Homer, and Terence:
They all fell upon Aristotle
Who was as bold as a castle upon a hill."
And so for the Cambridge "glomerel," if Aristotle held his own against
the classics, Dan Homer, and the rest, in the second year of his
university course the student would find himself a "sophister," or
disputant in the Logic school. To Logic succeeded Rhetoric, which also
meant Aristotle, and so the "trivial" arts were at an end, and the
"incepting" or "commencing" bachelor of arts began his apprenticeship to
a "Master of Faculty." In the next four years he passed through the
successive stages of the _Quadrivium_, and at the end received the
certificate of his professor, was admitted to the degree of Master of
Arts, and thereby was admitted also to the brotherhood of teachers, and
himself became an authorised lecturer. A post-graduate course might
follow in Theology or Canon or Civil Law, involving another five or six
years of university life. In the course for the Canon Law the candidate
for a doctor's degree was required to have heard lectures on the civil
law for three years, and on the Decretals for another three years; he
must, too, have attended cursory lectures on the Bible for at least two
years, and must himself have lectured "cursorily" on one of four
treatises, and on some one book of the Decretals.
Obviously, if this statutory course was strictly observed in those days,
the scarlet hood could never grace the shoulders of one who was nothing
more than a dexterous logician, or the honoured title of Doctor be
conferred on one who had never taught. _Disce docendo_ was indeed the
motto of the University of Cambridge in the thirteenth century.
The great constitutional historian of our country, the late Bishop
Stubbs, in one of the wisest and wittiest of his statutable lectures at
Oxford,[23] speaks of England in this age as "the paradise of clerks."
He illustrates the truth of his characterisation by drawing an imaginary
picture of a foreign scholar making an _Iter Anglicum_ with the object
of collecting materials for a history of the learning and literature of
England. The Bishop is able readily to crowd his canvas with the figures
of eminent Englishmen drawn from centres of learning in every part of
the land, from Dover, from Canterbury, from London, from Rochester, from
Chichester, from Winchester, from Devizes, from Salisbury, from Exeter,
from S. Albans, from Ely, from Peterborough, from Lincoln, from Howden,
from York, from Durham, from Hexham, from Melrose; scholars, historians,
chroniclers, poets, philosophers, logicians, theologians, canonists,
lawyers, all going to prove by the glimpse they give us into circles of
scholastic activity, monastic for the most part, how comparatively wide
was the extent of English learning and English education in the
thirteenth century--an age which it has usually been the fashion to
regard as barbarous and obscure--and how germinant of institutions,
intellectual as well as political, which have since become vital
portions of our national existence.
From the point of view of a later age there is doubtless something to be
said on the other side. _Disce docendo_ remained perhaps the academic
motto, but the learning and the teaching was still under the domination
of monasticism, and the monastic scholar, however patient and laborious
he might be and certainly was, was also for the most part absolutely
uncritical. He cultivated formal logic to perfection; he reasoned from
his premise with most admirable subtlety, but he had usually commenced
by assuming his premise with unfaltering, because unreasoning, faith. We
shall see, however, as we proceed with our history of the collegiate
life of the University, in the succeeding centuries, that the critical
spirit which gave force to the genius of the great Franciscan teachers,
Roger Bacon and Bishop Grosseteste, in resisting the tendencies of their
age, which found practical application also in the textual
interpretation of Holy Writ in such writings as those of Henry of
Costessey, or in the sagacious "Treatise on the Laws and Customs of
England"--the oldest of our legal classics--by Ranulf Glanville, or in
the "Historia Rerum Anglicanum," of the inquisitive and
independent-minded Yorkshire scholar, William of Newburgh, was a factor
not to be ignored in the heritage of learning bequeathed by the great
men of the thirteenth century to their more enlightened and liberal
successors, the theologians, the lawyers, and the historians of the
future.
There is a mediæval legend of a certain monkish writer, whose tomb was
opened twenty years or so after his death, to reveal the fact, that
although the remainder of his body had crumbled to dust the hand that
had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed. The legend is a
parable. Some of the lessons of that parable we may expect to find
interpreted in the academic history of Cambridge in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLIEST COLLEGE FOUNDATION: PETERHOUSE
"Re unius
Exemplo omnium quoquot extant
Collegiorum, fundatori."--_Epitaph of Walter de Merton._
The Early Monastic Houses in Cambridge--Student Proselytising by
the Friars--The Oxford College of Merton a Protest against this
Tendency--The Rule of Merton taken as a Model by Hugh de Balsham,
Founder of Peterhouse--The Hospital of S. John--The Scholars of
Ely--Domestic Economy of the College--The Dress of the Mediæval
Student--Peterhouse Buildings--Little S. Mary's Church--The Perne
Library--The College Chapel.
The first beginnings of the University of Cambridge are, as we have seen
in the preceding chapters, largely traceable to a monastic inspiration.
The first beginnings of the Cambridge Colleges, on the other hand, are
as certainly traceable to the protest which, as early as the middle of
the thirteenth century, it became necessary to make against the
proselytising tendencies of the monastic Orders. At a time when, as we
have seen, the University authorities took no cognisance whatever of the
way in which the student was lodged, and when even the unsatisfactory
hostel system--eventually organised, as it would appear, by voluntary
action on the part of the students themselves--did not exist, the houses
of the monastic Orders were already well established. We have described
the fully-equipped house of the Augustinian Canons at Barnwell. Within
the town the Franciscans had established themselves, as early as 1224,
in the old synagogue, and fifty years later had erected, on the present
site of Sydney College, a spacious house, which Ascham long afterwards
described as an ornament to the University, and the precincts of which
were still, in the time of Fuller, to be traced in the College grounds.
In 1274 the Dominicans had settled where Emmanuel now stands. About the
middle of the century the Carmelites, who had originally occupied an
extensive foundation at Newnham, but were driven from thence by the
winter floods, settled near the present site of Queens. Towards the
close of the century the Augustinian Friars took up their residence near
the site of the old Botanic Gardens. Opposite to the south part of the
present gardens of Peterhouse, on the east side of Trumpington Street,
were the Gilbertines, or the Canons of S. Gilbert of Sempringham, the
one purely English foundation. In 1257 the Friars of the Order of
Bethlehem settled also in Trumpington Street, and in 1258 the Friars of
the Sack, or of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, settled in the parish of
S. Mary the Great, removed soon afterwards to the parish of S. Peter
without the Trumpington Gate.
It was natural, therefore, that these well-equipped houses should hold
out great attractions and opportunities to the needy and houseless
student, and that complaint should shortly be made that many young and
unsuspicious boys were induced to enrol themselves as members of
Franciscan, or Dominican, or other Friars' houses long before they were
capable of judging the full importance of their action. One cannot read
the biographies of even such strong personalities as those of Roger
Bacon or William of Occam without surmising that their adoption of the
Franciscan vow was the result rather of the exigency of the student and
the proselytising activity to which they were exposed, than of any
distinct vocation for the monastic life, or of their own deliberate
choice. "Minors and children," as Fuller says in his usual quaint vein,
"agree very well together." To such an extent at any rate had the evil
spread at Oxford that, in a preamble of a statute passed in 1358, it is
asserted, as a notorious fact, that "the nobility and commoners alike
were deterred from sending their sons to the University by this very
cause; and it was enacted that if any mendicant should induce, or cause
to be induced, any member of the University under eighteen years of age
to join the said Friars, or should in any way assist in his abduction,
no graduate belonging to the cloister or society of which such friar was
a member should be permitted to give or attend lectures in Oxford or
elsewhere for the year ensuing."[24] It is not perhaps, therefore,
surprising to find that the earliest English Collegiate foundation--that
of Walter de Merton at Oxford in 1264--should have expressly excluded
all members of the religious Orders. The dangers involved in the
ascendency of the monks and friars were already patent to many sagacious
minds, and Bishop Walter de Merton, who had filled the high office of
Chancellor of England, and was already by his position an adversary of
the Franciscan interest, was evidently desirous of establishing an
institution which should not only baffle that encroaching spirit of Rome
which had startled Grosseteste from his allegiance, but should also give
an impulse to a system of education which should not be subservient to
purely ecclesiastical ideas. This is obviously the principle which
underlies the provisions of the statutes of his foundation of Merton
College. Bishop Hobhouse in his _Life of Walter de Merton_ has thus
carefully interpreted this principle:--
"Our founder's object I conceive to have been to secure for his own
order in the Church, for the secular priesthood, the academical
benefit which the religious orders were so largely enjoying, and to
this end I think all his provisions are found to be consistently
framed. He borrowed from the monastic institutions the idea of an
aggregate body living by common rule, under a common head, provided
with all things needful for a corporate and perpetual life, fed by
its secured endowments, fenced from all external interference,
except that of its lawful patron; but after borrowing thus much, he
differenced his institution by giving his beneficiaries quite a
distinct employment, and keeping them free from all those perpetual
obligations which constituted the essence of the religious life....
His beneficiaries are from the first designated as _Scholares in
scholis degentes_; their employment was study, not what was
technically called "the religious life" (_i.e._ the life of a
monk).... He forbade his scholars even to take vows, they were to
keep themselves free of every other institution, to render no one
else's _obsequium_. He looked forward to their going forth to
labour _in seculo_, and acquiring preferment and property.... Study
being the function of the inmates of his house, their time was not
to be taken up by ritual or ceremonial duties, for which special
chaplains were appointed; neither was it to be bestowed on any
handicrafts, as in some monastic orders. Voluntary poverty was not
enjoined, though poor circumstances were a qualification for a
fellowship. No austerity was required, though contentment with
simple fare was enforced as a duty, and the system of enlarging the
number of inmates according to the means of the house was framed to
keep the allowance to each at the very moderate rate which the
founder fixed. The proofs of his design to benefit the Church
through a better educated secular priesthood are to be found, not
in the letter of their statutes, but in the tenour of their
provisions, especially as to studies, in the direct averments of
some of the subsidiary documents, in the fact of his providing
Church patronage as part of his system, and in the readiness of
prelates and chapters to grant him impropriation of the rectorial
endowments of the Church."
Such was the _Regula Mertonensis_, the Rule of Merton, as it came to be
called, which served as the model for so many subsequent statutes.
This _Regula_ Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely (1257-1286), evidently had
before him, when some twenty years after his consecration to the
bishopric, he proceeded, by giving a new form to an earlier benefaction
of his own, to open a new chapter in the history of the University of
Cambridge.
Hugh de Balsham, before his elevation to the bishopric, had been
sub-prior of the Ely monastery, and at first sight therefore it might
seem a little surprising that he should have thought of encouraging a
system of education which was not to be subject to the monastic rule.
But Hugh de Balsham was a Benedictine monk, and the Benedictines in
England at this time were the upholders of a less stringent and ascetic
discipline than that of the mendicant orders, and were, in fact,
endeavouring in every way to counteract their influence. It had been the
aim of Bishop Balsham, in the first instance, to endeavour to bring
about a kind of fusion between the old and the new elements in
university life, between the Regulars and the Seculars. But this first
effort was not fortunate. About the year 1280 he introduced a body of
secular scholars into the ancient Hospital of S. John. This Hospital of
the Brethren of S. John the Evangelist had been founded, in the year of
1135, by Henry Frost, a wealthy and charitable burgess of the city, and
placed under the management of a body of regular canons of the
Augustinian Order. At a somewhat later time, Bishop Eustace, the fifth
Bishop of Ely, added largely by his benefactions to the importance of
the house. It was he who appropriated to the hospital the Church of S.
Peter, without the Trumpington Gate. Hugh of Northwold, the eighth
bishop, is said, at least by one authority, to have placed some secular
scholars there, who devoted themselves to academical study rather than
to the services of the Church, and he certainly obtained for the
Hospital certain exemptions from taxation in connection with their two
hostels near S. Peter's Church. The endowment of the secular students
was still further cared for by Bishop Hugh de Balsham. In the preamble
to certain letters patent of Edward I. (1280) authorising the
settlement, the Bishop, after a wordy comparison, in mediæval phrase, of
King Edward's wisdom with that of King Solomon, is credited with the
intention of introducing "into the dwelling place of the secular
brethren of his Hospital of S. John studious scholars who shall in
everything live together as students in the University of Cambridge,
according to the rule of the scholars of Oxford who are called of
Merton."[25] This document fixes the date of the royal license, on which
there can be little doubt that action was immediately taken. The change
of system was most unpalatable to the original foundationers and led to
unappeasable dissension. The regulars, it may be conjectured, were
absorbed in their religious services and in the performance of the
special charitable offices of the Hospital; while the scholars were,
doubtless, eager to be instructed in the Latin authors, in the new
Theology, in the civil and the canon law, perhaps in the "new
Aristotle," which at this time was beginning to excite so much
enthusiasm among western scholars. Anyhow, the two elements were too
dissimilar to combine. Differences arose, feuds and jealousies sprang
up, and eventually the good bishop found himself under the necessity of
separating the Ely scholars from the Brethren of the Hospital. This he
did by transplanting the scholars to the two hostels (_hospicia_)
adjoining the Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate,
assigning to them the Church itself and certain revenues belonging to
it, inclusive of the tithes of the church mills. This was in the year
1284, and marks the foundation of Peterhouse as the earliest of
Cambridge colleges. The Hospital of S. John, thus freed from the
scholarly element, went quietly on its career, to become, as we shall
see later, the nucleus of the great foundation of S. John's College. It
may have been a disappointment to Bishop Hugh that he had not been able
to fuse together the two dissimilar elements--"the scholars too wise,
and the brethren possibly over-good"--in one corporation. But, as Baker,
the historian of S. John's College, has said: "Could he but have
foreseen that this broken and imperfect society was to give birth to two
great and lasting foundations, he would have had much joy in his
disappointment."
In the year 1309 the new foundation of "the Scholars of the Bishops of
Ely" obtained certain adjoining property hitherto occupied by the Friars
of the Sack (_De Penetentia Jesu_), an Order doomed to extinction by the
Council of Lyons in 1274. Its slender resources were further added to on
the death of its founder by his bequest of 300 marks for the erection of
new buildings. With this sum a considerable area to the west and south
of the original hostels was acquired, and a handsome hall (_aulam
perpulchram_) was built. This hall is substantially the building still
in use. It was left, however, to his successor in the Bishopric of Ely,
Simon Montagu (1337-1345), to give to the new college its first code of
statutes. Bishop Simon, one is glad to think, did not forget the good
intentions of Bishop Hugh, for in his code of statutes, dated April
1344, he thus speaks of his predecessor:--
"Desirous for the weal of his soul while he dwelt in this vale of
tears, and to provide wholesomely, as far as in him lay, for poor
persons wishing to make themselves proficient in the knowledge of
letters, by securing to them a proper maintenance, he founded a
house or College for the public good in our University of
Cambridge, with the consent of King Edward and his beloved sons,
the prior and chapter of our Cathedral, all due requirements of law
being observed; which House he desired to be called the House of S.
Peter or the Hall (_aula_) of the scholars of the Bishops of Ely at
Cambridge; and he endowed it and made ordinances for it (_in
aliquibus ordinavit_) so far as he was then able; but not as he
intended and wished to do, as we hear, had not death frustrated his
intention. In this House he willed that there should be one master
and as many scholars as could be suitably maintained for the
possessions of the house itself in a lawful manner."[26]
There can be little doubt that the statutes which Bishop Montagu gave to
the college represent the wishes of his predecessor, for the Peterhouse
statutes are actually modelled on the fourth of the codes of statutes
given by Merton to his college, and dated 1274. The formula "_ad instar
Aulæ de Merton_" is a constantly recurring phrase in Montagu's statutes.
The true principle of collegiate endowments could not be more plainly
stated, and certainly these statutes may be regarded as the embodiment
of the earliest conception of college life and discipline at Cambridge.
A master and fourteen perpetual fellows,[27] "studiously engaged in the
pursuit of literature," represent the body supported on the foundation;
the "pensioner" of later times being, of course, at this period provided
for already by the hostel. In case of a vacancy among the Fellows "the
most able bachelor in logic" is designated as the one on whom, _cæteris
paribus_, the election is to fall, the other requirement being that, "so
far as human frailty admit, he be honourable, chaste, peaceable, humble,
and modest." "The Scholars of Ely" were bound to devote themselves to
the "study of Arts, Aristotle, Canon Law, Theology," but, as at Merton,
the basis of a sound Liberal Education was to be laid before the study
of theology was to be entered upon; two were to be admitted to the study
of the civil and the canon law, and one to that of medicine. When any
Fellow was about to "incept" in any faculty, it devolved upon the master
with the rest of the Fellows to inquire in what manner he had conducted
himself and gone through his exercises in the schools, how long he had
heard lectures in the faculty in which he was about to incept, and
whether he had gone through the forms according to the statutes of the
university. The sizar of later times is recognised in the provision,
that if the funds of the Foundation permit, the master and the two
deacons shall select two or three youths, "indigent scholars well
grounded in Latin"--_juvenes indigentes scholares in grammatica
notabiliter fundatos_--to be maintained, "as long as may seem fit," by
the college alms, such poor scholars being bound to attend upon the
master and fellows in church, on feast days and other ceremonial
occasions, to serve the master and fellows at seasonable times at table
and in their rooms. All meals were to be partaken in common; but it
would seem that this regulation was intended rather to conduce towards
an economical management than enacted in any spirit of studied
conformity to monastic life, for, adds the statute, "the scholars shall
patiently support this manner of living until their means shall, under
God's favour, have received more plentiful increase."[28]
An interesting feature in these statutes is the regulation with regard
to the distinctive dress of the student, showing how little regard was
paid at this period, even when the student was a priest, to the wearing
of a costume which might have been considered appropriate to the staid
character of his profession.
"The Students," writes Mr. Cooper,[29] "disdaining the tonsure, the
distinctive mark of their order, wore their hair either hanging
down on their shoulders in an effeminate manner, or curled and
powdered: they had long beards, and their apparel more resembled
that of soldiers than of priests; they were attired in cloaks with
furred edges, long hanging sleeves not covering their elbows, shoes
chequered with red and green and tippets of an unusual length;
their fingers were decorated with rings, and at their waists they
wore large and costly girdles, enamelled with figures and gilt; to
the girdles hung knives like swords."
In order to repress this laxity and want of discipline, Archbishop
Stratford, at a later period in the year 1342, issued an order that no
student of the university, unless he should reform his "person and
apparel" should receive any ecclesiastical degree or honour. It was
doubtless in reference to some such order as this that one of the
statutes of Peterhouse ran to this effect:--
"Inasmuch as the dress, demeanour, and carriage of scholars are
evidences of themselves, and by such means it is seen more clearly,
or may be presumed what they themselves are internally, we enact
and ordain, that the master and all and each of the scholars of our
house shall _adopt the clerical dress and tonsure_, as becomes the
condition of each, and wear it conformally in respect, as far as
they conveniently can, and not allow their beard or their hair to
grow contrary to canonical prohibition, nor wear rings upon their
fingers for their own vain glory and boasting, and to the
pernicious example and scandal of others."[30]
[Illustration: Peterhouse College]
"The Philosophy of Clothes," especially in its application to the
mediæval universities, is no doubt an interesting one, and may even--so,
at least, it is said by some authorities--throw much light upon the
relations of the universities to the Church. The whole subject is
discussed in some detail in the chapter on "Student Life in the Middle
Ages," in Mr. Rashdall's "History of the Universities of Europe," to
which, perhaps, it may be best to refer those of our readers who are
desirous of tracing the various steps in the gradual evolution of modern
academic dress from the antique forms. There it will be seen how the
present doctor's scarlet gown was developed from the magisterial "cappa"
or "cope," a sleeveless scarlet cloak, lined with miniver, with tippet
and hood attached of the same material--a dress which, in its original
shape, is now only to be seen in the Senate House at Cambridge, worn
by the Vice-Chancellor on Degree days; how the present gown and hood of
the Master of Arts and Bachelor is merely a development of the ordinary
clerical dress or "tabard" of the thirteenth century, which, however,
was not even exclusively clerical, and certainly not distinguished by
that sobriety of hue characteristic of modern clerical
tailordom--clerkly prejudice in the matter of the "tabard" running in
favour of green, blue, or blood red; and how the modern "mortar-board,"
or square college cap,--now usurped by undergraduates, and even
choristers and schoolboys--was originally the distinctive badge of a
Master of Faculty, being either a square cap or "biretta," with a tuft
on the top, in lieu of the very modern tassel, or a round cap or
"pileum," more or less resembling the velvet caps still worn by the
Yeomen of the Guard, or on very state occasions by the Cambridge or
Oxford doctors in medicine or law. The picturesque dress of university
students of the thirteenth century, still surviving in the long blue
coat and yellow stockings, and red leather girdle and white bands of the
boys of Christ's Hospital, is sufficient to show how much we have lost
of the warmth and colour of mediæval life by the almost universal change
to sombre black in clerical or student costume, brought about by the
Puritan austerity of the sixteenth century.
To return to the fabric of Bishop Hugh de Balsham's College. We have
seen how a handsome hall (_aulam perpulchram_) was built with the 300
marks of the Bishop's legacy. This is substantially the building of five
bays, which still exists, forming the westernmost part of the south
side of the Great Court of the College. The three easternmost bays are
taken up by the dining-hall or refectory, the westernmost is devoted to
the buttery, the intervening bay is occupied by the screens and passage,
at either end of which there still remain the original north and south
doorways, interesting as being the earliest example of collegiate
architecture in Cambridge. The windows of this hall on the south side
date from the end of the fifteenth century. The north-east oriel window
and the buttresses on the north side of the hall were added by Sir
Gilbert Scott in 1870, who also built the new screen, panelling, and
roof. At about the same time the hall was decorated and the windows
filled with stained glass of very great beauty by William Morris. The
figures represented in the windows are as follows (beginning from the
west on the north side): John Whitgift, John Cosin, Rd. Tresham, Thos.
Gray, Duke of Grafton, Henry Cavendish; in the oriel--Homer, Aristotle,
Cicero, Hugh de Balsham, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton; on
the south side--Edward I., Queen Eleanor, Hugh de Balsham, S. George, S.
Peter, S. Etheldreda, John Holbroke, Henry Beaufort, John Warkworth.
After the building of this hall the College evidently languished for
want of funds for more than a century. But in the fifteenth century the
College began to prosper, and a good deal of building was done. The
character of the work is not expressly stated in the Bursar's Rolls--of
which there are some thirty-one still existing of the fifteenth
century, and a fairly complete set of the subsequent centuries--but the
earliest buildings of this date are probably the range of chambers
forming the north and west side of the great court. The kitchen, which
is immediately to the west of the hall, dates from 1450. The Fellows'
parlour or combination room, completing the third side of the
quadrangle, and immediately east of the dining-hall, was built some ten
years later.
Cole has given the following precise description of this room:--
"This curious old room joins immediately to the east end of the
dining-hall or refectory, and is a ground floor called The Stone
Parlour, on the south side of the Quadrangle, between the said hall
and the master's own lodge. It is a large room and wainscotted with
small oblong Panels. The two upper rows of which are filled with
paintings on board of several of the older Masters and Benefactors
to the College. Each picture has an Inscription in the corner, and
on a separate long Panel under each, much ornamented with painting,
is a Latin Distic." ...[31]
Then follows a description of each portrait--there are thirty in
all--with its accompanying distich. As an example, we may give that
belonging to the portrait of Dr. Andrew Perne:
Bibliothecæ Libri Redditus pulcherrima Dona Perne, pium Musiste,
Philomuse, probant.
_Andreas Perne, Doctor Theol. Decanus Ecclesiæ Eliensis, Magister
Collegii, obiit 26 Aprilis, Anno Dom. 1573._
These panel portraits were removed from their framework in the
eighteenth century, and framed and hung in the master's lodge, but have
since been re-hung for the most part in the college hall, and their
Latin distichs restored according to Cole's record of them. The windows
of the Combination Room have been filled with stained glass by William
Morris, representing ten ideal women from Chaucer's "Legend of Good
Women."
On the upper storey of the combination room was the master's lodge. The
situation of these rooms at the upper end of the hall is almost as
invariable in collegiate plans as that of the buttery and kitchen at the
other end. The same may be said of that most picturesque feature of the
turret staircase leading from the master's rooms to the hall, parlour,
and garden, which we shall find repeated in the plans of S. John's,
Christ's, Queen's, and Pembroke Colleges. About the same period (1450)
the range of chambers on the north side of the court was at its
easternmost end connected by a gallery with the Church of S. Mary, which
remained in use as the College chapel down to the seventeenth century.
This gallery, on the level of the upper floor of the College chambers,
was carried on arches so as not to obstruct the entrance to the
churchyard and south porch from the High Street, by a similar
arrangement to that which from the first existed between Corpus Christi
College and the ancient Church of S. Benedict.
The Parish Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate, had from
the first been used as the College Chapel of Peterhouse. Indeed, the
earliest college in Cambridge was the latest to possess a private chapel
of its own, which was not built until 1628. All that remains, however,
of the old Church of S. Peter is a fragment of the tower, standing at
the north-west corner of the present building and the arch which led
from it into the church. This probably marks the west end of the old
church, which, no doubt, was much shorter than the present one. It is
said that this old church fell down in part about 1340, and a new church
was at once begun in its place. This was finished in 1352 and dedicated
to the honour of the blessed Virgin Mary. The church is a very beautiful
one, though of an unusual simplicity of design. It is without aisles or
any structural division between nave and chancel. It is lighted by lofty
windows and deep buttresses. On the south side and at the eastern gable
are rich flowing decorated windows, the tracery of which is designed in
the same style, and in many respects with the same patterns, as those of
Alan de Walsingham's Lady Chapel at Ely. Indeed, a comparison of the
Church of Little S. Mary with the Ely Lady Chapel, not only in its
general conception, but in many of its details, such as that of the
stone tabernacles on the outer face of the eastern gable curiously
connected with the tracery of the window, would lead a careful observer
to the conclusion that both churches had been planned by the same
architect. The change of the old name of the church from S. Peter to
that of S. Mary the Virgin is also, in this relation, suggestive. For
we must remember that it was built at a time--the age of Dante and
Chaucer--when Catholic purity, in the best natures, united to the
tenderness of chivalry was casting its glamour over poetic and artistic
minds, and had already led to the establishment in Italy of an
Order--the _Cavalieri Godenti_--pledged to defend the existence, or,
more accurately perhaps, the dignity of the Virgin Mary, by the
establishment everywhere throughout western Europe of Lady Chapels in
her honour. Whether Alan de Walsingham, the builder of the Ely Lady
Chapel, and the builder of the Church of Little S. Mary at Cambridge--if
he was not Alan--belonged to this Order of the Cavaliers of S. Mary, we
cannot say; but at least it seems probable that the Cambridge Church
sprang from the same impulse which inspired the magnificent stone poem
in praise of S. Mary, built by the sacrist of Ely.
At this period Peterhouse consisted of two courts, separated by a wall
occupying the position of the present arcade at the west end of the
chapel. The westernmost or principal court is, save in some small
details, that which we see to-day. The small eastern court next to the
street has undergone great alteration by the removal of certain old
dwelling-houses--possibly relics of the original hostels--fronting the
street, which left an open space, occupied at a later period partly by
the chapel and by the extension eastward of the buildings on the south
side of the great court to form a new library, and subsequently by a
similar flanking extension on the north.
The earliest of these buildings was the library, due to a bequest of Dr.
Andrew Perne, Dean of Ely, who was master of the College from 1553 to
1589, and who not only left to the society his own library, "supposed to
be the worthiest in all England," but sufficient property for the
erection of a building to contain it. Perne had gained in early life a
position of importance in the University--he had been a fellow of both
S. John's and of Queen's, bursar of the latter College and five times
vice-chancellor of the University--but his success in life was mainly
due to his pliancy in matters of religion. In Henry's reign he had
publicly maintained the Roman doctrine of the adoration of pictures of
Christ and the Saints; in Edward VI.'s he had argued in the University
pulpit against transubstantiation; in Queen Mary's, on his appointment
to the mastership of Peterhouse, he had formally subscribed to the fully
defined Roman articles then promulgated; in Queen Elizabeth's he had
preached a Latin sermon in denunciation of the Pope, and had been
complimented for his eloquence by the Queen herself. No wonder that
immediately after his death in 1589 he should be hotly denounced in the
Martin Marprelate tracts as the friend of Archbishop Whitgift, and as
the type of fickleness and lack of principle which the authors
considered characteristic of the Established Church. Other writers of
the same school referred to him as "Old Andrew Turncoat," "Old Father
Palinode," and "Judas." The undergraduates of Cambridge, it is said,
invented in his honour a new Latin verb, _pernare_, which they
translated "to turn, to rat, to change often." It became proverbial in
the University to speak of a cloak or a coat which had been turned as
"perned," and finally the letters on the weathercock of S. Peter's,
A.P.A.P., might, said the satirists, be interpreted as Andrew Perne, a
Protestant, or Papist, or Puritan. However, it is much to be able to say
that he was the tutor and friend of Whitgift, protecting him in early
days from the persecution of Cardinal Pole; it is something also to
remember that he was uniformly steadfast in his allegiance to his
College, bequeathing to it his books, with minute directions for their
chaining and safe custody, providing for their housing, and moreover,
endowing two college fellowships and six scholarships; and perhaps
charity might prompt us to add, that at a time when the public religion
of the country changed four times in ten years, Perne probably trimmed
in matters of outward form that he might be at hand to help in matters
which he truly thought were really essential.
The Perne Library at Peterhouse has no special architectural features of
any value; its main interest in that respect is to be found in the
picturesque gable-end with oriel window overhanging the street, bearing
above it the date 1633, which belongs to the brickwork extension
westward at that date of the original stone building. The building of
the library, however, preluded a period of considerable architectural
activity in the college, due largely to the energy of Dr. Matthew Wren,
who was master from 1625 to 1634. It is recorded of him that "seeing the
public offices of religion less decently performed, and the services of
God depending upon the services of others, for want of a convenient
oratory within the walls of the college," he began in 1629 to build the
present chapel. It was consecrated in 1632. The name of the architect is
not recorded. The chapel was connected as at present with the buildings
on either side by galleries carried on open arcades. Dr. Cosin, who
succeeded Wren in the mastership, continued the work, facing the chapel
walls, which had been built roughly in brick, with stone. An elaborate
ritual was introduced into the chapel by Cosin, who, it will be
remembered, was a friend and follower of Archbishop Laud. A Puritan
opponent of Cosin has written bitterly that "in Peter House Chappell
there was a glorious new altar set up and mounted on steps, to which the
master, fellows, and schollers bowed, and were enjoyned to bow by Dr.
Cosens, the master, who set it up; that there were basons, candlesticks,
tapers standing on it, and a great crucifix hanging over it ... and on
the altar a pot, which they usually call the incense pot.... And the
common report both among the schollers of that House and others, was
that none might approach to the altar in Peter House but in
sandalls."[32]
It is not surprising, therefore, to read at a little later date in the
diary of the Puritan iconoclast, William Dowsing:--
"We went to Peterhouse, 1643, Decemb. 21, with officers and
souldiers and ... we pulled down 2 mighty great Angells with wings
and divers others Angells and the 4 Evangelists and Peter, with his
keies, over the Chapell dore and about a hundred chirubims and
Angells and divers superstitious Letters...."
These to-day are all things of the past. The interior of the Chapel is
fitted partly with the genuine old mediæval panelling, possibly brought
from the parochial chancel of Little S. Mary's, or from its disused
chantries, now placed at the back of the stalls and in front of the
organ gallery, partly with oakwork, stalls and substalls, in the
Jacobæan style. The present altar-piece is of handsome modern wainscot.
The entrance door is mediæval, probably removed from elsewhere to
replace the doorway defaced by Dowsing. The only feature in the chapel
which can to-day be called--and that only by a somewhat doubtful
taste--"very magnifical," is the gaudy Munich stained-glass work
inserted in the lateral windows, as a memorial to Professor Smythe, in
1855 and 1858. The subjects are, on the north side, "The Sacrifice of
Isaac," "The Preaching of S. John the Baptist," "The Nativity"; and on
the south side, "The Resurrection," "The Healing of a Cripple by SS.
Peter and John," "S. Paul before Agrippa and Festus." The east window,
containing "The History of Christ's Passion," is said by Blomefield to
have been "hid in the late troublesome times in the very boxes which now
stand round the altar instead of rails."
CHAPTER V
THE COLLEGES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
"High potentates and dames of royal birth
And mitred fathers in long order go."--GRAY.
The Fourteenth Century an Age of Great Men and Great Events but not
of Great Scholars--Petrarch and Richard of Bury--Michael House--The
King's Scholars--King's Hall--Clare Hall--Pembroke
College--Gonville Hall--Dr. John Caius--His Three Gates of
Humility, Virtue, and Honour.
The dates of the foundation of the two Colleges, Clare and Pembroke,
which, after an interval of some fifty and seventy years respectively,
followed that of Peterhouse, and the names of Lady Elizabeth, Countess
of Clare, and of Marie de Valence, Countess of Pembroke, who are
associated with them, remind us that we have reached that troublous and
romantic time which marked the close of the long and varied reign of the
Great Edward, and was the seed-time of those influences which ripened
during the longer and still more varied reign of Edward III. Between the
year 1326, which was the date of the first foundation of Clare College,
the date also of the deposition and murder of Edward II., and the year
1348, which is the date of the foundation of Pembroke and the
twenty-first year of Edward III., the distracted country had passed
through many vicissitudes. It had seen the great conflict of parties
under the leadership of the great houses of Lancaster, Gloucester, and
Pembroke, culminating in the king's deposition and in the rise of the
power of the English Parliament, and in its division into the two Houses
of Lords and Commons. It had seen the growth of the new class of landed
gentry, whose close social connection with the baronage on the one hand,
and of equally close political connection with the burgesses on the
other, had welded the three orders together, and had given to the
Parliament that unity of action and feeling on which its powers have
ever since mainly depended. It had seen the Common Law rise into the
dignity of a science and rapidly become a not unworthy rival of Imperial
Jurisprudence. It had seen the close of the great interest of Scottish
warfare, and the northern frontier of England carried back to the old
line of the Northumbrian kings. It had seen the strife with France
brought to what at the moment seemed to be an end, for the battle of
Crecy, at which the power of the English chivalry was to teach the world
the lesson which they had learned from Robert Bruce thirty years before
at Bannockburn, was still in the future, as also was the Hundred Years'
War of which that battle was the prelude. It had seen the scandalous
schism of the Western Church, and the vision of a Pope at Rome, and
another Pope at Avignon, awakening in the mind of the nations an
entirely new set of thoughts and feelings with regard to the position of
both the Papacy and the Church. The early fourteenth century was indeed
an age of great events and of great men; but it was not an age, at least
as far as England was concerned, of great scholars. There was no
Grosseteste in the fourteenth century. Petrarch, the typical man of
letters, the true inspirer of the classical Renaissance, and in a sense
the founder of really modern literature, was a great scholar and
humanist, but he had no contemporary in England who could be called an
equal or a rival. His one English friend, Richard of Bury, Bishop of
Durham, book lover as he was--for his _Philobiblon_ we all owe him a
debt of gratitude--was after all only an ardent amateur and no scholar.
When Petrarch had applied to Richard for some information as to the
geography of the Thule of the ancients, the Bishop had put him off with
the statement that he had not his books with him, but would write fully
on his return home. Though more than once reminded of his promise, he
left the disappointed poet without an answer. The fact was, that Richard
was not so learned that he could afford to confess his ignorance. He
corresponds, in fact, to the earlier humanists of Italy--men who
collected manuscripts and saw the possibilities of learning, though they
were unable to attain to it themselves. There is much in his
_Philobiblon_ of the greatest interest, as, for example, his description
of the means by which he had collected his library at Durham College,
and his directions to students for its careful use, but despite his own
fervid love and somewhat rhetorical praise of learning, there is still a
certain personal pathos in the expression of his own impatience with the
ignorance and superficiality of the younger students of his day.
Writing in the _Philobiblon_ of the prevalent characteristics of Oxford
at this time, he writes:--
"Forasmuch as (the students) are not grounded in their first
rudiment at the proper time, they build a tottering edifice on an
insecure foundation, and then when grown up they are ashamed to
learn that which they should have acquired when of tender years,
and thus must needs even pay the penalty of having too hastily
vaulted into the possession of authority to which they had no
claim. For these and like reasons, our young students fail to gain
by their scanty lucubrations that sound learning to which the
ancients attained, however they may occupy honourable posts, be
called by titles, be invested with the garb of office, or be
solemnly inducted into the seats of their seniors. Snatched from
their cradle and hastily weaned, they get a smattering of the rules
of Priscian and Donatus; in their teens and beardless they chatter
childishly concerning the Categories and the Perihermenias in the
composition of which Aristotle spent his whole soul."[33]
It is to be feared that the decline of learning, which at this period
was characteristic, as we thus see, of Oxford, was equally
characteristic of Cambridge. Certainly there was no scholar there of the
calibre of William of Ockham, or even of Richard of Bury, or of the
Merton Realist, Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. It is
not indeed until more than a century later when we have reached the age
of Wycliffe, the first of the reformers and the last of the schoolmen,
that the name of any Cambridge scholar emerges upon the page of history.
[Illustration: Clare College and Bridge]
But meanwhile the collegiate system of the University was slowly
being developed. Some forty years after the foundation of Peterhouse, in
the year 1324, Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Canon
of Bath and Wells, obtained from Edward II. permission to found at
Cambridge the College of "the Scholars of St. Michael." The college
itself, Michaelhouse, has long been merged in the great foundation of
Trinity, but its original statutes still exist and show that they were
conceived in a somewhat less liberal spirit than that of the code of
Hugh de Balsham. The monk and the friar are excluded from the society,
but the Rule of Merton is not mentioned. Two years afterwards, in 1326,
we find thirty-two scholars known as the "King's Scholars" maintained at
the University by Edward II. It seems probable that it had been the
intention of the King in this way to encourage the study of the civil
and the canon law, for books on these subjects were presented by him,
presumably for the use of the scholars, to Simon de Bury their warden,
and were subsequently taken away at the command of Queen Isabella. The
King had also intended to provide a hall of residence for these
"children of our chapel," but the execution of this design of
establishing a "King's Hall" was left to his son Edward III. The poet
Gray, in his "Installation Ode," has represented Edward III.--
"Great Edward with the lilies on his brow,
From haughty Gallia torn,"
in virtue of his foundation of King's Hall, which was subsequently
absorbed in the greater society, as the founder of Trinity College. But
the honour evidently belongs with more justice to his father. It was,
however, by Edward III. that the Hall was built near the Hospital of S.
John, "to the honour of God, the Blessed Virgin, and all the Saints, and
for the soul of the Lord Edward his father, late King of England, of
famous memory, and the souls of Philippa, Queen of England, his most
dear consort, and of his children and progenitors."[34]
The statutes of King's Hall give an interesting contemporary picture of
collegiate life. The preamble moralises upon "the unbridled weakness of
humanity, prone by nature and from youth to evil, ignorant how to
abstain from things unlawful, easily falling into crime." It is required
that each scholar on his admission be proved to be of "good and
reputable conversation." He is not to be admitted under fourteen years
of age. His knowledge of Latin must be such as to qualify him for the
study of logic, or of whatever other branch of learning the master shall
decide, upon examination of his capacity, he is best fitted to follow.
The scholars were provided with lodging, food, and clothing. The sum
allowed for the weekly maintenance of a King's scholar was fourteen
pence, an unusually liberal allowance for weekly commons, suggesting the
idea that the foundation was probably designed for students of the
wealthier class, an indication which is further borne out by the
prohibitions with respect to the frequenting of taverns, the
introduction of dogs within the College precincts, the wearing of short
swords and peaked shoes (_contra honestatem clericalem_), the use of
bows, flutes, catapults, and the oft-repeated exhortation to orderly
conduct.
Following upon the establishment of Michaelhouse and King's Hall, in the
year 1326 the University in its corporate capacity obtained a royal
licence to settle a body of scholars in two houses in Milne Street. This
college was called University Hall, a title already adopted by a similar
foundation at Oxford. The Chancellor of the University at the time was a
certain Richard de Badew. The foundation, however, did not at first meet
with much success. In 1336 its revenues were found insufficient to
support more than ten scholars. In 1338, however, we find Elizabeth de
Burgh, Countess of Clare and granddaughter of Edward I., coming to the
help of the struggling society. By the death of her brother, the Earl of
Gloucester, at the battle of Bannockburn, leaving no issue, the whole of
a very princely estate came into the possession of the Lady Clare and
her two sisters. Having, by a deed dated 6th April 1338, received from
Richard de Badew, who therein calls himself "Founder, Patron, and
Advocate of the House called the Hall of the University of Cambridge,"
all the rights and titles of University Hall, the Lady Clare refounded
it, and supplied the endowments which hitherto it had lacked. The name
of the Hall was changed to Clare House (_Domus de Clare_). As early,
however, as 1346 we find it styled Clare Hall, a name which it bore down
to our own times, when, by resolution of the master and fellows in
1856, it was changed to Clare College. The following preamble to the
statutes of the College, which were granted in 1359, are perhaps worthy
of quotation as exhibiting, in spite of its quaint confusion of the
"Pearl of Great Price" with "the Candle set upon a Candlestick," the
pious and withal businesslike and sensible spirit of the foundress:--
"To all the sons of our Holy Mother Church, who shall look into
these pages, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady de Clare, wishes health and
remembrance of this transaction. Experience, which is the mistress
of all things, clearly teaches that in every rank of life, as well
temporal as ecclesiastical, a knowledge of literature is of no
small advantage; which though it is searched into by many persons
in many different ways, yet in a University, a place that is
distinguished for the flourishing of general study, it is more
completely acquired; and after it has been obtained, she sends
forth her scholars who have tasted its sweets, apt and suitable men
in the Church of God and in the State, men who will rise to various
ranks according to the measure of their deserts. Desiring
therefore, since this consideration has come over us, to extend as
far as God has allowed us, for the furtherance of Divine worship,
and for the advance and good of the State, this kind of knowledge
which in consequence of a great number of men having been taken
away by the fangs of pestilence, is now beginning lamentably to
fail; we have turned the attention of our mind to the University of
Cambridge, in the Diocese of Ely; where there is a body of
students, and to a Hall therein, hitherto commonly called
University Hall, which already exists of our foundation, and which
we would have to bear the name of the House of Clare and no other,
for ever, and have caused it to be enlarged in its resources out of
the wealth given us by God and in the number of students; in order
that the Pearl of Great Price, Knowledge, found and acquired by
them by means of study and learning in the said University, may
not lie hid beneath a bushel, but be published abroad; and by being
published give light to those who walk in the dark paths of
ignorance. And in order that the Scholars residing in our aforesaid
House of Clare, under the protection of a more steadfast peace and
with the advantage of concord, may choose to engage with more free
will in study, we have carefully made certain statutes and
ordinances to last for ever."[35]
[Illustration: Clare College and Bridge.]
The distinguishing characteristic of these statutes is the great
liberality they show in the requirements with respect to the professedly
clerical element. This, as the preamble, in fact, suggests, was the
result of a desire to fill up the terrible gap caused in the ranks of
the clergy by the outbreak of the Black Death, which first made its
appearance in England in the year 1348, and caused the destruction of
two and a half millions of the population in a single year.[36]
The Scholars or Fellows are to be twenty in number, of whom six are to
be in priest's orders at the time of their admission. The remaining
fellows are to be selected from bachelors or sophisters in arts, or from
"skilful and well-conducted" civilians and canonists, but only two
fellows may be civilians, and only one a canonist. The clauses relating
to the scheme of studies are, moreover, apparently intended to
discourage both these branches of law.
Of the further progress of the College in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries we have no record, for the archives perished in the fire which
almost totally destroyed the early buildings in the year 1521. In the
seventeenth century, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, it
was proposed to rebuild the whole College, but owing to the troubles of
that time it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, in
the year 1715, that the work was finished. "The buildings are," said the
late Professor Willis, "among the most beautiful, from their situation
and general outline, that he could point out in the University."
There is extant an amusing account of the controversy between Clare Hall
and King's College, caused by the desire of the former to procure a
certain piece of land for purposes of recreation on the east side of the
Cam, called Butt Close, belonging to King's. Here are two of the letters
which passed between the rival litigants.
"_The Answer of Clare-Hall to Certaine Reasons of King's College
touching Butt-Close._
"1. To the first we answer:--Iº. That y{e} annoyance of y{e} windes
gathering betweene y^{e} Chappell and our Colledge is farre greater
and more detriment to y^{t} Chappell, then any benefitt which they
can imagine to receiue by y{e} shelter of our Colledge from wind
and sunne.
"2º. That y^{e} Colledge of Clare-hall being sett so neare as now
it is, they will not only be sheltered from wind and sunne, but
much deprived both of ayre and light.
"3º. That y^{e} remove all of Clare Hall 70 feet westward will take
away little or no considerable privacy from their gardens and
walkes; for y{t} one of their gardens is farre remote, and y^{e}
nearer fenced with a very high wall, and a vine spread upon a long
frame, under which they doe and may privately walke."
"_A Reply of King's Colledge to y^{e} Answer of Clare-Hall._
"1. The wind so gathering breeds no detriment to our Chappell, nor
did ever putt us to any reparacions there. The upper battlements at
the west end haue sometimes suffered from y^{e} wind, but y^{e}
wind could not there be straightned by Clare-hall, w^{ch} scarce
reacheth to y^{e} fourth part of y^{e} height.
"2º. No whit at all, for our lower story hath fewer windowes y^{t}
way: the other are so high y^{t} Clare-Hall darkens them not, and
hath windows so large y^{t} both for light and ayre no chambers in
any Coll. exceed them.
"3º. The farther garden is not farre remote, being scarce 25 yards
distant from their intended building; y^{e} nearer is on one side
fenced with a high wall indeed, but y^{t} wall is fraudulently
alleaged by them, and beside y^{e} purpose: for y^{t} wall y^{t}
stands between their view and y^{e} garden is not much aboue 6 feet
in height: and y^{t} we haue any vine or frame there to walke under
is manifestly untrue."[37]
However, the controversy was settled in favour of Clare-Hall by a letter
from the King.
A tradition has long prevailed that Clare-Hall was the College mentioned
by the poet Chaucer in his "Reeve's Tale," in the lines--
"And nameliche ther was a greet collegge,
Men clepen the Soler-Halle at Cantebregge."
There appears, however, to be good reason for thinking that the Soler
Hall was in reality Garrett Hostel, a _soler_ or sun-chamber being the
equivalent of a garret. For the tradition also that Chaucer himself was
a Clare man there is no authority. The College may well be satisfied
with the list of authentic names of great men which give lustre to the
roll of its scholars--Hugh Latimer, the reformer and fellow-martyr of
Ridley; Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of the religious community of
Little Gidding; Wheelock, the great Saxon and oriental scholar; Ralph
Cudworth, leader of the Cambridge Platonists; Archbishop Tillotson and
his pupil the philosopher, Thomas Burnett; Whiston, the translator of
"Josephus"; Cole, the antiquary; Maseres, the lawyer and mathematician.
The foundation of Pembroke College, like that of Clare Hall, was also
due to the private sorrow of a noble lady. The poet Gray, himself a
Pembroke man, in the lines of his "Installation Ode," where he
commemorates the founders of the University--
"All that on Granta's fruitful plain
Rich streams of royal bounty poured,"
speaks of this lady as
"...sad Chatillon on her bridal morn,
That wept her bleeding love."
[Illustration: Pembroke College.]
This is in allusion to the somewhat doubtful story thus told by Fuller--
"Mary de Saint Paul, daughter to Guido Castillion, Earl of S. Paul
in France, third wife to Audomare de Valentia, Earl of Pembroke,
maid, wife, and widow all in a day (her husband being unhappily
slain at a tilting at her nuptials), sequestered herself on that
sad accident from all worldly delights, bequeathed her soul to God,
and her estate to pious uses, amongst which this is principal, that
she founded in Cambridge the College of Mary de Valentia, commonly
called Pembroke Hall."
[Illustration: Pembroke College]
All that authentic history records is that the Earl of Pembroke died
suddenly whilst on a mission to the Court of France in June 1324. His
widow expended a large part of her very considerable fortune both in
France and England on works of piety. In 1342 she founded the Abbey of
Denny in Cambridgeshire for nuns of the Order of S. Clare. The Charter
of Foundation of Pembroke College is dated 9th June 1348. It is to be
regretted that the earliest Rule given to the College, or to the _Aula
seu Domus de Valence Marie_, the Hall of Valence Marie, as it was at
first called, is not extant. A revised rule of the conjectural date of
1366, and another of perhaps not more than ten years later, furnished,
however, the data upon which Dr. Ainslie, Master of the College from
1828 to 1870, drew up an abstract of its constitution and early
history.[38] The most interesting feature of this constitution is the
provision made in the first instance for the management of the College
by the Franciscans, and its abolition on a later revision. According to
the first code--"the head of the College was to be elected by the
fellows, and to be distinguished by the title of the Keeper of the
House." There were to be annually elected two rectors, _the one a Friar
Minor_, the other a secular. This provision of the two rectors was
abolished in the later code, and with it apparently all official
connection between the College and the Franciscan Order, and it may be
perhaps conjectured all association also with the sister foundation at
Denny, concerning which the foundress, in her final _Vale_ of the
earlier code, had given to the fellows of the House of Valence Marie the
following quaint direction, that "on all occasions they should give
their best counsel and aid to the Abbess and Sisters of Denny, who had
from her a common origin with them."
[Illustration: Pembroke College Oriels & Entrance]
The exact date at which the building of the College was begun is not
known, but it was probably not long after the purchase of the site in
1346. Many of the original buildings which remained down to 1874 were
destroyed in the reconstruction of the College at that time. It is now
only possible to imagine many of the most picturesque features of that
building, of which Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Cambridge in 1564,
enthusiastically exclaimed in passing, "_O domus antiqua et religiosa!_"
by consulting the print of the College published by Loggan about 1688.
Of the interesting old features still left, we have the chapel at the
corner of Trumpington Street and Pembroke Street, built in 1360 and
refaced in 1663, and the line of buildings extending down Pembroke
Street to the new master's lodge and the Scott building of modern date.
The old chapel has been used as a library since 1663, when the new
chapel, whose west end abuts on Trumpington Street, was built by Sir
Christopher Wren. The cloister, called Hitcham's Cloister, which joins
the Wren Chapel to the fine old entrance gateway, and the Hitcham
building[39] on the south side of the inner court, are dated 1666 and
1659 respectively. All the rest of the College is modern.
The early foundation of Pembroke College had some connection, as we have
seen, with the Franciscan Order. The early foundation of Gonville Hall,
which followed that of Pembroke in 1348, had a somewhat similar
connection with the Dominicans. Edward Gonville, its founder, was
vicar-general of the diocese of Ely, and rector of Ferrington and
Rushworth in Norfolk. In that county he had been instrumental in causing
the foundation of a Dominican house at Thetford. Two years before his
death he settled a master and two fellows in some tenements he had
bought in Luteburgh Lane, now called Free School Lane, on a site almost
coinciding with the present master's garden of Corpus, and gave to his
college the name of "the Hall of the Annunciation of the Blessed
Virgin." But he died in 1351, and left the completion of his design to
his executor, Bishop Bateman of Norwich. Bateman removed Gonville Hall
to the north-west corner of its present site, adjoining the "Hall of the
Holy Trinity," which he was himself endowing at the same period.
However, he too died within a few years, leaving both foundations
immature. The statutes of both halls are extant, and exhibit an
interesting contrast of ideal--the one that of a country parson of the
fourteenth century, moved by the simple desire to do something for the
encouragement of learning, and especially of theology, in the men of his
own profession--the other that of a Bishop, a learned canonist and busy
man of state, long resident at the Papal court at Avignon, regarded by
the Pope as "the flower of civilians and canonists," desirous above all
things by his College foundation of recruiting the ranks of his clergy,
thinned by the Black Death, with men trained, as he himself had been, in
the canon and civil law. It was the Bishop's ideal that triumphed.
Gonville's statutes requiring an almost exclusively theological training
for his scholars were abolished, and the course of study in the two
halls assimilated, Bateman, as founder of the two societies, by a deed
dated 1353, ratifying an agreement of fraternal affection and mutual
help between the two societies, as "scions of the same stock";
assigning, however, the precedence to the members of Trinity Hall,
"_tanquam fratres primo geniti_."[40] The fellows were by this agreement
bound to live together in amity like brothers, to take counsel together
in legal and other difficulties, to wear robes or cloaks of the same
pattern, and to consort together at academic ceremonies. Thus Gonville
Hall was fairly started on its way. It ranked from the first as a small
foundation, and though it gradually added to its buildings and acquired
various endowments, it did not materially increase its area for two
centuries. The ancient walls of its early buildings--its chapel, hall,
library, and master's lodge--are all doubtless still standing, though
coated over with the ashlar placed on them in 1754. The ancient beams of
the roof of the old hall are still to be seen in the attics of the
present tutor's house. The upper room over the passage which leads from
Gonville to Caius Court is the ancient chamber of the lodge where the
early masters used to sleep, very little changed. The old main entrance
to the College was in Trinity Lane, a thoroughfare so filthy in the
reign of Richard II. that the King himself was appealed to, in order to
check the "_horror abominabilis_" through which students had to plunge
on their way to the schools. From time to time new benefactors of the
College came, though for the most part of a minor sort; some of whom,
however, have left quaint traces behind them. Of such was a certain
Cluniac monk, John Household by name, a student in 1513, who in his
will dated 1543 thus bequeaths--"To the College in Cambrydge called
Gunvyle Hall, my longer table-clothe, my two awter (altar) pillows, with
their bears of black satten bordered with velvet pirled with goulde:
also a frontelet with the salutation of Our Lady curely wroughte with
goulde; and besides two suts of vestements having everythinge belonging
to the adorning of a preste to say masse: the one is a light greene
having white ends, and the other a duned Taphada," whatever that may be.
He also leaves his books, "protesting that whatsoever be founde in my
bookes I intend to dye a veray Catholical Christen man, and the King's
letheman and trewe subjecte." This might seem to speak well, perhaps,
for the catholicity of the College in the thirty-fourth year of Henry
VIII., and yet thirteen years earlier Bishop Nix of Norwich had written
to Archbishop Warham: "I hear no clerk that hath come out lately of
Gunwel Haule but saverith of the frying panne, though he speak never so
holely." Anyhow about this time the College became notorious as a hotbed
of reformed opinions. It was, however, at this time also that a young
student was trained within its walls, who, after a distinguished career
at Cambridge--it would be an anachronism to call him senior wrangler,
but his name stands first in that list which afterwards developed into
the Mathematical Tripos--passed to the university of Padua to study
medicine under the great anatomist, Vesalius, ultimately becoming a
professor there, and returning to England, and to medical practice in
London, and having presumably amassed a fortune in the process, formed
the design of enlarging what he pathetically describes as "that pore
house now called Gonville Hall." On September 4, 1557, John Caius
obtained the charter for his new foundation, and the ancient name of
Gonville Hall was changed to that of Gonville and Caius College. In the
following year the new benefactor was elected Master, and the remaining
years of his life were spent, on the one hand, in quarrelling with
Fellows about "College copes, vestments, albes, crosses, tapers ... and
all massynge abominations;" and, on the other, in designing and carrying
out those noble architectural additions to the College which give to the
buildings of Caius College their chief interest.
[Illustration: Gate of Honour & Gate of Virtue Caius College]
"In his architectural works," says Mr. Atkinson, "Caius shews
practical common sense combined with the love of symbolism. His
court is formed by two ranges of building on the east and west, and
on the north by the old chapel and lodge. To the south the court is
purposely left open, and the erection of buildings on this side is
expressly forbidden by one of his statutes, lest the air from being
confined within a narrow space should become foul. The same care is
shewn in another statute which imposes on any one who throws dirt
or offal into the court, or who airs beds or bedlinen there, a fine
of three shillings and fourpence. In his will also he requires that
'there be mayntayned a lustie and healthie, honest, true, and
unmarried man of fortie years of age and upwardes to kepe cleane
and swete the pavementes.'"[41]
The love of Dr. Caius for symbolism is shown most conspicuously in his
design of the famous three Gates of Humility, of Virtue, and of Honour,
which were intended to typify, by the increasing richness of their
design, the path of the student from the time of his entrance to the
College, to the day when he passed to the schools to take his Degree in
Arts. The Gate of Humility was a simple archway with an entablature
supported by pilasters, forming the new entrance to the College from
Trinity Street, or as it was then called, High Street, immediately
opposite St. Michael's Church. On the inside of this gate there was a
frieze on which was carved the word HUMILITATIS. From this gate there
led a broad walk, bordered by trees, much in the fashion of the present
avenue entrance to Jesus College, to the Gate of Virtue, a simple and
admirable gateway tower in the range of the new buildings, forming the
eastern side of the court, still known as Caius Court.
"The word VIRTUTIS is inscribed on the frieze above the arch on the
eastern side, in the spandrils of which are two female figures
leaning forwards. That on the left holds a leaf in her left hand,
and a palm branch in her right; that on the right a purse in her
right hand, and a cornucopia in her left. The western side of this
gate has on its frieze, 'IO. CAIUS POSUIT SAPIENTIÆ, 1567,' an
inscription manifestly derived from that on the foundation stone
laid by Dr. Caius. Hence this gate is sometimes described as the
Gate of Wisdom, a name which has however no authority. In the
spandrils on this side are the arms of Dr. Caius."[42]
In the centre of the south wall, forming the frontage to Schools Street,
stands the Gate of Honour. It is a singularly beautiful and picturesque
composition, "built of squared hard stone wrought according to the very
form and figure which Dr. Caius in his lifetime had himself traced out
for the architect."[43] It was not built until two years after Caius'
death, that is about the year 1575. It is considered probable that the
architect was Theodore Havens of Cleves, who was undoubtedly the
designer of "the great murall diall" over the archway leading into
Gonville Court, and of the column "wrought with wondrous skill
containing 60 sun-dialls ... and the coat armour of those who were of
gentle birth at that time in the College," standing in the centre of
Caius Court, and of the "Sacred Tower," on the south side of the Chapel,
all since destroyed.
Beautiful as the Gate of Honour still remains, it must have had a very
different appearance when it left the architect's hand. Many of its most
interesting features have wholly vanished. Among the illustrations to
Willis and Clark's "History" there is an interesting attempt to restore
the gateway with all its original details. At each angle, immediately
above the lowest cornice, there was a tall pinnacle. Another group of
pinnacles surrounded the middle stage, one at each corner of the
hexagonal tower. On each face of the hexagon there was a sun-dial, and
"at its apex a weathercock in the form of a serpent and dove." In the
spandrils of the arch next the court are the arms of Dr. Caius, on an
oval shield, "two serpents erect, their tails nowed together," and
"between them a book." On the frieze is carved the word HONORIS. The
whole of the stonework was originally painted white, and some parts,
such as the sun-dials, the roses in the circular panels, and the
coats-of-arms, were brilliant with colour and gold. The last payment for
this "painting and gilding" bears date 1696 in the Bursar's book. Dr.
Caius died in 1573, and was buried in the Chapel. On his monument are
inscribed two short sentences--_Vivit post funera virtus_ and _Fui
Caius_.
[Illustration: Caius College The Gate of Honour]
And so we may leave him and his College, and also perhaps fitly end this
chapter with the kindly words with which Fuller commends to posterity
the memory of this great College benefactor:--
"Some since have sought to blast his memory by reporting him a
papist; no great crime to such who consider the time when he was
born, and foreign places wherein he was bred: however, this I dare
say in his just defence, he never mentioneth protestants but with
due respect, and sometimes occasionally doth condemn the
superstitious credulity of popish miracles. Besides, after he had
resigned his mastership to Dr. Legg, he lived fellow-commoner in
the College, and having built himself a little seat in the chapel,
was constantly present at protestant prayers. If any say all this
amounts but to a lukewarm religion, we leave the heat of his faith
to God's sole judgment, and the light of his good works to men's
imitation."[44]
CHAPTER VI
THE COLLEGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE GUILDS
"The noblest memorial of the Cambridge gilds consists of the
College which was endowed by the munificence of St. Mary's Gild and
the Corpus Christi Gild: it perpetuates their names in its own....
In other towns the gilds devoted their energies to public works of
many kinds--to maintaining the sea-banks at Lynn, to sustaining the
aged at Coventry, and to educating the children at Ludlow. In
embarking on the enterprise of founding a College, the Cambridge
men seem, however, to stand alone; we can at least be sure that the
presence of the University here afforded the conditions which
rendered it possible for their liberality to take this
form."--CUNNINGHAM.
Unique Foundation of Corpus Christi College--The Cambridge
Guilds--The influence of "the Good Duke"--The Peasant
Revolt--Destruction of Charters--"Perish the skill of the
Clerks!"--The Black Death--Lollardism at the Universities--The
Poore Priestes of Wycliffe.
"Here at this time were two eminent guilds or fraternities of towns-folk
in Cambridge, consisting of brothers and sisters, under a _chief_
annually chosen, called an alderman.
"The Guild of Corpus Christi, keeping their prayers in St.
Benedict's Church.
"The Guild of the Blessed _Virgin_, observing their offices in St.
Mary's Church.
"Betwixt these there was a zealous emulation, which of them should
amortize and settle best maintenance for such chaplains to pray for the
souls of those of their brotherhood. Now, though generally in those days
the stars outshined the sun; I mean more honour (and consequently more
wealth) was given to saints than to Christ himself; yet here the Guild
of Corpus Christi so outstript that of the Virgin Mary in endowments,
that the latter (leaving off any further thoughts of contesting) desired
an union, which, being embraced, they both were incorporated together.
2. Thus being happily married, they were not long issueless, but a small
college was erected by their united interest, which, bearing the name of
both parents, was called the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed
Mary. However, it hath another working-day name, commonly called (from
the adjoined church) Benet College; yet so, that on festival solemnities
(when written in Latin, in public instruments) it is termed by the
foundation name thereof."[45]
So picturesquely writes Thomas Fuller of the Foundation of Corpus
Christi College.
The colleges of Cambridge owe their foundation to many and various
sources. We have already seen two of the most ancient tracing their
origin to the liberality and foresight of wise bishops, two others to
the widowed piety of noble ladies, one to the unselfish goodness of a
parish priest. Later we shall find the stately patronage of kings and
queens given to great foundations, and on the long roll of university
benefactors we shall have to commemorate the names of great statesmen
and great churchmen, philosophers, scholars, poets, doctors, soldiers,
"honoured in their generation and the glory of their days." One college,
however, there is which has a unique foundation, for it sprang, in the
first instance, from that purest fount of true democracy, the spirit of
fraternal association for the protection of common rights and of mutual
responsibility for the religious consecration of common duties, by which
the Cambridge aldermen and burgesses in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were striving by their guild life, to cherish those essential
qualities of the English character--personal independence and faith in
law-abidingness--which lie at the root of all that is best in our modern
civilisation, and were undoubtedly characteristic of the English people
in the earliest times of which history has anything to tell us.
The history of the guild life of Cambridge is one of unusual interest.
The story breaks off far oftener than we could wish, but in the
continuity of its religious guild history Cambridge holds a very
important place, second only perhaps to that of Exeter. All the
Cambridge guilds of which we know anything seem to have been essentially
religious guilds, so prominent throughout their history remained their
religious object. It is only indeed in connection with one of the
earliest of which we have any record, the guild of Cambridge Thegns in
the eleventh century, associated in devotion to S. Etheldreda, the
foundress saint of Ely, that we find any secular element. That Guild
does indeed offer to its members a secular protection of which the later
guilds of the thirteenth century knew nothing, for they were religious
guilds pure and simple. It is true that in the first charter of King
John, dated 8th Jan. 1201, there appears to be a confirmation to the
burgesses of Cambridge of a _guild merchant_ granting to them certain
secular rights of toll. But there does not appear to be any historical
evidence to show that the Guild Merchant of Cambridge ever took definite
shape, or stood apart in any way from the general body of burgesses.
King John's charter simply secured to the town those liberties and
franchises which all the chief boroughs of England enjoyed at the
beginning of the thirteenth century.[46]
[Illustration: The Churches of S. Edward & St. Mary--the Great from Peas
Hill]
The first religious guild of which we have any record is the Guild of
the Holy Sepulchre, known to us only by an isolated reference in the
history of Ramsey Abbey, which tells us of a fraternity existing in
1114-36, whose purpose was the building of a Minster in honour of God
and the Holy Sepulchre, and which resulted in the erection of the
Cambridge Round Church. Of Cambridge guild life we hear nothing more
until the reign of Edward I., when we find record of certain conveyances
of land being made to the Guild of S. Mary. From the first this guild is
closely associated with Great S. Mary's Church, the University Church of
to-day, the Church of S. Mary at Market, as it was called in the early
days. The members of it were called the alderman, brethren and sisters
of S. Mary's Guild belonging to the Church of the Virgin. Its
benefactors direct that should the guild cease, the benefaction shall go
to the celebration of Our Lady Mass in her Church. The underlying
spirit, however, whatever may have been the superstitious ritual
connected with the organisation, was very much the same as that of the
English Friendly Society of to-day. "Let all share the same lot," ran
one of the statutes; "if any misdo, let all bear it." "For the
nourishing of brotherly love,"--so the members of another society took
the oath of loyalty--"they would be good and true loving brothers to the
fraternity, helping and counselling with all their power if any brother
that hath done his duties well and truly come or fall to poverty, as God
them help."
"The purpose of S. Mary's Gild was primarily the provision of
prayers for the members. The 'congregation' of brethren, sometimes
brethren and sisters, met at irregular intervals, to pass
ordinances and to elect officers. In 1300 they agree to attend S.
Mary's Church on Jan. 2, to celebrate solemn mass for dead members.
The penalty for absence was half a pound of wax, consumed no doubt
in the provision of gild lights before the altar of Our Lady.
Richard Bateman and his wife, in their undated grant, made the
express condition that in return they should receive daily prayers
for the health of their souls.... In the year 1307 ... the gild
passed an ordinance directing the gild chaplains to celebrate two
trentals of masses (60 in all) for each dead brother. If the
deceased left anything in his will to the gild, then as the
alderman might appoint, the chaplains should do more or less
celebration according to the amount bequeathed to the gild. The
rule is naïve, but its spirit is unpleasing. Individualism has
thrust itself in where it seems very much out of place. The
enrolment of the souls of the dead further witnesses to the purely
religious character of the gild, and the purchase of a missal
should also be noticed."[47]
The minutes and bede roll of the guild, which have lately been published
by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, show that the association
continued to flourish down to the time of the Great Plague. On its bede
roll we find such names as those of Richard Hokyton, vicar of the Round
Church; of "Alan Parson of Seint Beneytis Chirche"; of Warinus
Bassingborn, High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire in 1341; of Walter Reynald,
Chancellor of the University and Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in
1327; and of Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, and author of the
_Philobiblon_, who died in 1345. In 1352, on "account of poverty," the
Guild, by Royal Charter, was allowed to coalesce with the Guild of
Corpus Christi, for the purpose of founding a college.
Of this latter guild we have no earlier record than 1349, three years
only before the date of union with S. Mary's. Its minute-book, however,
which begins in 1350, shows it to have been at that time a flourishing
institution. It had probably been founded, like that which bore the same
dedication at York, for the purpose of conducting the procession on the
Feast of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, a festival
instituted about 1264. There are no existing bede rolls of the guild,
and therefore no means of knowing the names of any members who entered
before 1350. It appears to have been attached from the first to the
ancient Church of S. Benet. The reversion of the advowson of that Church
was in 1350 held by a group of men, several of whom were leading members
of the guild. In 1353 the then Rector entered the guild, and "by the
ordinance of his friends" resigned the Church to the Bishop "gratis,"
that "_the brethren_ and those who had acquired the advowson" might
enter upon their possession. It is disappointing to find that there are
no guild records telling of the union of S. Mary's guild with that of
Corpus Christi, or of the circumstances which led to the creation of the
college bearing the joint names of the two guilds. Such foundation was,
as we have said, a remarkable event in the history of Cambridge
collegiate life. Not that these guilds were the first or the last to
take part in the endowment of education; for many of the ancient grammar
schools of the country owe their origin to, or were greatly assisted by,
the benefactions of religious guilds. For example, Mr. Leach in his
"English Schools at the Reformation" has noted, that out of thirty-three
guilds, of whose returns he treats, no less than twenty-eight were
supporting grammar schools. But the foundation of a college was a more
ambitious task. It has a peculiar interest also, as that of an effort
towards the healing of what was, even at this time, an outstanding feud
between town and gown, between city and university.
The principal authority for the history of the site and buildings of the
college is the _Historiola_ of Josselin, a fellow of Queen's College,
and Latin secretary to Archbishop Parker. According to his narrative,
the guild of Corpus Christi had begun seriously to entertain the idea of
building a college as early as 1342, for about that date, he says:--
"Those brethren who lived in the parishes of S. Benedict and S.
Botolph, and happened to have tenements and dwelling-houses close
together in the street called Leithburne Lane, pulled them down,
and with one accord set about the task of establishing a college
there: having also acquired certain other tenements in the same
street from the University. By this means they cleared a site for
their college, square in form and as broad as the space between the
present gate of entrance (_i.e._ by S. Benet's Church) and the
Master's Garden."[48]
The original mover in the scheme for a guild college may well have been
the future master, Thomas of Eltisley, chaplain to the Archbishop of
Canterbury and rector of Lambeth. Among the Cambridge burgesses William
Horwood, the mayor, was treasurer of the Guild in 1352, and used the
mayoral seal for guild purposes, because the seals of the alderman and
brethren of the Guild "are not sufficiently well known." Another mayor
of Cambridge about this time, Robert de Brigham, was a member of the
other associated Guild of S. Mary. How the support of Henry, Duke of
Lancaster--the "Good Duke," as he was called--was secured does not
appear, but he is mentioned as alderman of the Guild, in the letters
patent of Edward III. in 1352, establishing the College. His influence
perhaps may have been gained through Sir Walter Manny, the countryman
and friend of Queen Philippa, whose whole family was enrolled in the
Guild.
At any rate, with the enrolment of the "Good Duke" as alderman of the
Guild, the success of the proposed college was secure. In 1355 the
Foundation received the formal consent of the chancellor and masters of
the University, of the Bishop of Ely, and of the Prior and Chapter of
Ely. The College Statutes, dated in the following year, 1356, show that
"the chaplain and scholars were bound to appear in S. Benet's or S.
Botulph's Church at certain times, and in all Masses the chaplains were
to celebrate for the health of the King and Queen Philippa and their
children, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the brethren and sisters,
founders and benefactors of the Guild and College," and although this
perhaps, rather than the love of learning, pure and simple, was the
chief aim which influenced the early founders of Corpus Christi College,
the Society has in after ages held a worthy place in the history of the
University, and "Benet men" have occupied positions in church and state
quite equal to those of more ample foundations. Three Archbishops of
Canterbury--Parker, Tennison, and Herring--have been Corpus men, one of
whom, Matthew Parker, enriched it with priceless treasures, and gave to
its library a unique value by the bequest of what Fuller has called "the
sun of English antiquity." Indeed, if they have done nothing else, the
men of the Cambridge guilds have laid all students of English history
under a supreme debt of gratitude in the provision of a place where so
many of the MSS. so laboriously collected by Archbishop Parker are
housed and preserved. From the walls of Benet College, also, there went
out many other distinguished men: statesmen, like Nicholas Bacon, the
Lord Keeper of the Seal; bishops, like Thomas Goodrich and Peter
Gunning, of Ely; translators of the Scriptures, like Taverner, and
Huett, and Pierson; commentators on the Old Testament, like the learned
and ingenious Dean Spencer of Ely, the Wellhausen of the seventeenth
century; soldiers, like the brave Earl of Lindsey, who fell at Edgehill,
or like General Braddock, who was killed in Ohio in the colonial war
against the French; learned antiquaries, like Richard Gough; sailors,
like Cavendish, the circumnavigator; poets, like Christopher Marlowe and
John Fletcher.
[Illustration: Corpus Christi College and S. Benedict's Church]
The College as originally built consisted of one court, which still
remains, and is known as "the Old Court." It still preserves much of its
ancient character, and is specially interesting as being probably _the
first originally planned quadrangle_. Josselin speaks of it as being
"entirely finished, chiefly in the days of Thomas Eltisle, the first
master, but partly in the days of Richard Treton, the second master." It
consisted simply of a hall range on the south and chambers on the three
other sides. The former contained at the south-east corner the master's
chambers, communicating with the common parlour below, and also
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