Cambridge
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Title: Cambridge
Author: M. A. R. Tuker
Illustrator: William Matthison
Release date: October 2, 2014 [eBook #47019]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAMBRIDGE ***
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)
CAMBRIDGE
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
This Bridge joins the Third Court with the Fourth or New Court. The
building on the right, seen through the bridge, is the Library, and
dates back to 1624.]
CAMBRIDGE
BY
M. A. R. TUKER
AUTHOR OF PARTS II. AND III. AND JOINT-AUTHOR OF PARTS I. AND IV. OF THE
HANDBOOK TO CHRISTIAN AND ECCLESIASTICAL ROME, AND
JOINT-AUTHOR OF ‘ROME’ IN THIS SERIES
PAINTED BY
WILLIAM MATTHISON
[Illustration]
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1907
_Published May 1907_
Preface
“Of making many books there is no end.” When I set about writing this
book I was ready to believe that the University had not its fair share
of the literary output. Cambridge indeed does not appear to suggest,
does not lend itself to, the numberless little brochures or hymns of
praise which accompany the honoured years of the sister university; in
weighty tomes and valuable _collectanea_ of MSS., however, it possesses
works (such as Cooper’s Annals, the Cole and Baker MSS., and Willis and
Clark’s Architectural History) not possessed by Oxford and unrivalled,
perhaps, by any English town.
In the middle of last century the invaluable Fuller was the most readily
accessible authority, but the last thirty years have seen the
publication of the monumental work of Messieurs Willis and Clark, and of
the History of the University by Mr. J. Bass Mullinger, while at the
same time the slighter literature of the subject has not been
neglected.
Nevertheless there is room, I hope, for a short book on the present
lines.
It is, I believe, the first time that a chapter on the women’s colleges
has anywhere appeared, and certainly the first time that such a chapter
forms part of an account of the University. I have taken pains to
authenticate the description here given, for events which occurred
thirty--even twenty--years back are now fading out of remembrance and
some of those who took part in them are no longer with us.
A first and last chapter on the origin of universities and on the sister
universities have been omitted for the purposes of this volume.
The pleasantest part of my task still remains to be performed--to thank
all those, both in and out of Cambridge, who have kindly afforded me
facilities, have obtained information on innumerable points, or
lightened my labours by lending books. In addition to this welcome
assistance my thanks are specially due to Mr. J. Willis Clark, late
fellow of Trinity, and Registrary of the University, for sparing time to
read the proof sheets of Chapters I. and II.--for sparing time and not
sparing trouble; to the Master of Peterhouse and to Dr. A. W. Verrall
(fellow and late tutor of Trinity) for reading the proof sheets of
portions of Chapter II. and portions of Chapter III.; to Mr. C. W. Moule
fellow and librarian of Corpus Christi, Mr. Ellis H. Minns
assistant-librarian, and late fellow, of Pembroke, to Miss M. G.
Kennedy, and to the Mistress of Girton; to the Assistant Keeper of MSS.
at the British Museum, and the Librarian at Lambeth; to Lord Francis
Hervey and Sir Ernest Clarke who kindly supplied some annotated
references to the school at Bury from the Curteys Register, and last but
not least to the Rev. H. F. Stewart (chaplain of Trinity) and Mrs.
Stewart, the former of whom has been good enough to read portions of the
proof sheets of Chapter IV.
For any opinions expressed I am, of course, alone responsible.
M. A. R. T.
_February 1907._
Contents
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The northern schools--legends--the town--the river--the fen
monasteries--the school of glomery--the religious orders--the
jurisdiction of Ely--the clerk and the religious.
School and university--Stourbridge fair--the university in the xiii
century--foundation of endowed scholars--hostels.....1-51
CHAPTER II
THE COLLEGES
The university and the colleges--the collegiate system--eras
of college building--Peterhouse--Michaelhouse--_collegium_
and _aula_--Clare--college statutes--architectural scheme of
a college--Pembroke--founders of colleges--Gonville--Trinity
Hall--Corpus Christi--Cambridge in 1353--Chaucer at Cambridge--the
schools, library, the university printers and the Pitt Press,
the senate house--King’s--King’s College chapel--Cambridge
college chapels--Queens’--English sovereigns at Cambridge--S.
Catherine’s--Jesus--Christ’s--Lady Margaret and Bishop Fisher--S.
John’s--Magdalene--King’s Hall and Trinity College--college
libraries--gateways--Caius--monks in Cambridge--Emmanuel--Sidney
Sussex--Downing--public hostels--nationality of founders and general
scope of their foundations--university and college revenues.....52-156
CHAPTER III
THE UNIVERSITY AS A DEGREE-GIVING BODY
Meaning of a degree--the kinds of degrees--the bachelor--the
ancient exercises of the schools called acts, opponencies, and
responsions--the sophister--questionist--determiner--master--regent
master--the degree of _M.A._--introduction of written
examinations--the tripos.
The subjects of study and examination: the _trivium_ and
_quadrivium_--grammar--Aristotle’s logic--rhetoric--the three
learned faculties--the doctorate--development in university
studies--the development of the mathematical tripos--the senior
wrangler--the classical tripos--Greek at Cambridge--the moral sciences
tripos--philosophy at Cambridge--the natural sciences tripos--science
at Cambridge--the language triposes--lists of the triposes--changing
value of the examination tests--the double tripos--present conditions
for the _B.A._ degree--modern changes in the examinations--standard of
the ordinary and honour degree, examples.
Method of tuition at Cambridge--the lecture--the class--the weekly
paper--the professorial chairs--readerships--lectureships--Lambeth
degrees--degrees by royal mandate--honorary degrees--the “modern
subjects”--and the idea of a university.....157-201
CHAPTER IV
COLLEGIATE AND SOCIAL LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY
University and college officers:--chancellor and
vice-chancellor--the senate--graces--proctors--bedells--the
master of a college--the vice-master or president--the
fellows--unmarried and married fellows--the combination room--dons’
clubs--‘Hobson’s choice’--the dons of last century--classes
of students:--scholar--pensioner--fellow-commoner--sizar--age
of scholars--privileges of peers--position of the
sizar--college quarters and expenses--‘non-colls’--early
discipline--jurisdiction of the university in the town--present
discipline:--the proctors--fines--‘halls’--‘chapels’--town
lodgings--expulsion--rustication--‘gates’--the tutor--academical
dress--cap and gown--the undergraduates’ day--the
gyp--the college kitchen--‘hall’--‘wines’--teas--the
May term--idleness--rioting--modern studies and tripos
entries--athletics--the Union Society--Sunday at Cambridge--scarlet
days--academic terms and the long vacation--multiplication of
scholarships--class from which the academic population has been
drawn and careers of university men:--the Church--the rise of an
opulent middle class--the aristocratic era--English conception of
the benefits of a university--examples of the classes from which the
men have come--recruiting grounds of the university--popularity of
colleges--numbers in the colleges--religion at Cambridge--Cambridge
politics--university settlement at Camberwell--married dons and future
changes.....202-249
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS
Men who owe nothing to a university--40 great Englishmen--Cambridge
men: the scientists, the poets, the dramatists, other literary
men, the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers, and physicians, the
statesmen.
National movements: King John and the barons--the peasants’
revolt--York and Lancaster--the new world--Charles and the
Parliament--James II. and the University--the Declaration of
Indulgence--the Nonjurors--William and Mary and Cambridge
whiggery--Jacobitism and Toryism at Cambridge in the reign of
Anne--George I. and Cambridge--modern political movements.
Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question
of the divorce, Lutheranism at Cambridge, later reformers and the
Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge
martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the
Latitudinarians, the Deists, the evangelical movement, the Tractarian
movement, anti-calvinism.
Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of Elizabeth--the
Royal Society--the Cambridge Platonists--modern science.
Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the
university--early Cambridge names--a group of great names in the
xiii and xiv centuries--Cambridge men in the historical plays of
Shakespeare--genealogical tables of founders--Cantabrigians from
the xv century to the present day--Cambridge men who have taken no
degree.....250-309
CHAPTER VI
GIRTON AND NEWNHAM
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York
with the monastery of Ely--English women and education--the four
“noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at Cambridge--the
rise of the movement for university education--two separate
movements--Girton--Newnham--rise of the university lecture
movement--Anne Clough--the Newnham Halls and Newnham College--the
first triposes--the “Graces” of 1881--social life at the
women’s colleges--character and choice of work among women--the
degree--status of women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford--and status
elsewhere.....310-360
List of Illustrations
1. The Bridge of Sighs, S. John’s College _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. Norman Church of the Holy Sepulchre 4
3. Market Square 10
4. The Old Gateway of King’s College 16
5. S. John’s College Gateway and Tower from Trinity
Street 24
6. Oriel Window of the Hall, Trinity Great Court 34
7. The Old Castle Inn 50
8. Peterhouse from the Street 56
9. Peterhouse--The First Court 58
10. Peterhouse from the Fellows’ Garden 62
11. Clare College and Bridge from the Cam--Autumn
Evening 64
12. Clare College and Bridge from the Avenue 66
13. The Hall of Clare College 68
14. The Old Court, Pembroke College 72
15. A Court and Cloisters in Pembroke College 74
16. Trinity Hall 78
17. S. Botolph’s Church and Corpus College from the
Steps of the Pitt Press, Trumpington Street 80
18. The Old Court, Corpus Christi College 82
19. S. Benedict’s Church from Free School Lane 84
20. King’s College Gateway and Chapel--Twilight Effect 90
21. Gateway of King’s College, King’s Parade 98
22. King’s College Chapel and the Entrance Court, from
the Fellows’ Buildings 100
23. King’s College Chapel and the Fellows’ Buildings 102
24. King’s College Chapel Interior from the Choir 104
25. The Hall of King’s College 106
26. Entrance Gateway, Queens’ College 108
27. An Old Court in Queens’ College 110
28. Queens’ College from the River Front 112
29. Gateway of S. Catherine’s College 114
30. Gateway of Jesus College 116
31. The Gateway of Christ’s College from S. Andrew’s
Street 118
32. The Fellows’ Building in Christ’s College 120
33. Milton’s Mulberry Tree in the Fellows’ Garden, Christ’s
College 122
34. The Gateway and Tower of S. John’s College 124
35. Entrance to S. John’s College Chapel from the First
Court 126
36. The Second Court of S. John’s College 128
37. The Combination Room, S. John’s College 130
38. The Library Window, S. John’s College, from the
Bridge of Sighs 132
39. Old Gateway and Bridge 134
40. Pepys’ Library, Magdalene College 136
41. The Gateway of Trinity College 138
42. The Great Court, Trinity College 140
43. The Hall of Trinity College from Nevile’s Court 142
44. Nevile’s Gate, Trinity College 144
45. Trinity College Bridge and Avenue, with Gate leading
into the New Court 146
46. Caius College and the Senate House from S. Mary’s
Passage 148
47. The Gate of Virtue, Gonville and Caius College 150
48. The Gate of Honour, Caius College 152
49. The First Court of Emmanuel College 154
50. The Old Court in Emmanuel College 156
51. The Lake and New Buildings, Emmanuel College 158
52. The Cloister Court, Sidney Sussex College 160
53. Downing College from the Entrance in Regent Street 162
54. Trumpington Street from Peterhouse 172
55. Peashill 180
56. Old Houses near S. Edward’s Church and S. Edward’s
Passage 184
57. Market Street and Holy Trinity Church 192
58. Great S. Mary’s, from Trinity Street 196
59. The Lake in Botanic Gardens 210
60. Parker’s Piece 216
61. Trinity Bridge, King’s College Chapel in the Distance 224
62. The Tower of S. John’s College Chapel from the
River 238
63. University Boat-houses on the Cam--Sunset 244
64. Ditton Corner, on the Cam 248
65. The Fitzwilliam Museum--Evening 256
66. University Church of Great S. Mary 270
67. Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Trumpington Street 290
68. The Great Bridge--Bridge Street 312
69. View of Cambridge from the Castle Hill 316
70. Girton College--Evening 320
71. The Boathouse on Robinson Crusoe’s Island 324
72. Queens’ Lane--the Site of the old Mill Street 326
73. Merton Hall 328
74. Newnham College, Gateway 338
75. The Granary on the Cam 342
76. Grantchester Mill 346
77. Madingley Windmill 352
_Map at end of Volume._
A Bibliography
ACKERMANN.---- History of the University of Cambridge. 2 vols.
1815.
ANSTEY, H.---- Munimenta Academica. Rolls Series.
London 1868.
ATKINSON, THOMAS DINHAM.---- Cambridge Described & Illustrated, with an
introduction by John Willis Clark, _M.A._
1897.
BAKER MSS.
42 vols. collected & compiled by Thomas Baker fellow of S. John’s
College, 19 of which are preserved at the University, the others at
the Brit. Mus.
BAKER--MAYOR.---- History of the College of S. John the Evangelist.
Cambridge 1869.
The Baker MSS. (Harl. MS. 1039) relating to S. John’s edited by J.
E. B. Mayor.
BALL, W. W. ROUSE.---- Trinity College, Cambridge.
London 1906.
In the College Monograph series.
BARNWELL CHARTULARY.---- Brit. Mus. Harl. MSS. No. 3601.
BENTHAM, JAMES.---- History & Antiquities of Ely.
Norwich 1812.
BENTHAM, JAMES.---- STEVENSON.---- A supplement to the 2nd ed. of Mr.
Bentham’s History & Antiquities of Ely.
Norwich 1817.
CAIUS, JOHN.---- De Antiquitate Cantebrigiensis Academiae.
Londini, in aedibus Johannis Day 1574.
CAMBRIDGE ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY’S PUBLICATIONS.
CAMBRIDGE PORTFOLIO.---- Edited by Rev. J. J. Smith, fellow & tutor of
Gonville & Caius.
1840.
CARTER, EDMUND.---- History of the University of Cambridge to 1753. 2
vols.
London 1753.
With MS. notes by Cole, in the Bodleian Library. (Containing the
list of the chancellors.)
CLARK, JOHN WILLIS.---- Cambridge. Brief historical & descriptive Notes.
Illustrated.
1890.
CLARK, JOHN WILLIS.---- The Observances in use at the Augustinian Priory
of S. Giles & S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire. Edited with a
translation & glossary.
Cambridge 1897.
COLE MSS.---- (Harleian MSS.)
60 vols., bequeathed by William Cole of King’s College to the
British Museum.
COOPER, CHARLES HENRY.---- Annals of Cambridge. 4 vols.
Cambridge 1843.
An additional pamphlet gives the Statutes of Victoria.
COOPER, CHARLES HENRY.---- Memorials of Cambridge. 3 vols.
Cambridge 1860-66.
The edition of 1880 is enlarged from the work of Le Keux.
COOPER, CHARLES HENRY.---- Memoir of Margaret Countess of Richmond &
Derby.
Cambridge 1874.
COOPER, CHARLES HENRY. & THOMPSON COOPER.---- Athenae Cantabrigienses.
Cambridge 1858-1861.
Vol. i. 1500-1585. Vol. ii. 1586-1609.
DYER, GEORGE.---- The Privileges of the University of Cambridge. 2 vols.
London 1824.
The Statutes of Elizabeth are printed in vol. i. 1559.
DYER, GEORGE.---- History of the University & Colleges of Cambridge. 2
vols.
1814.
EVERETT, WILLIAM.---- On the Cam.
London, S. O. Beeton, 1866.
FULLER, THOMAS, _D.D._---- The History of the University of Cambridge
(to the year 1634). Edited by Marmaduke Prickett, chaplain of Trinity, &
Thomas Wright, of Trinity.
Cambridge 1840.
HARE, ROBERT, of Gonville & Caius.---- Register of Charters, Liberties,
& Privileges of the University & the Town.
The nucleus of Dyer’s _Privileges_. The original is in the public
chest of the University, & there is a copy, made by Hare, in the
Registry.
HOBHOUSE, EDMUND, Bishop of Nelson, N.Z.---- Sketch of the Life of
Walter de Merton.
Oxford 1859.
HUMPHRY, G. M., _M.D._, _F.R.S._ (late Professor of Anatomy).---- Guide
to Cambridge, the Town, University, & Colleges.
Cambridge 1883.
HUNDRED ROLLS (for Cambridge).---- _Rotuli Hundredorum, temp. Hen. III.
et Edw. I. in Turr. Lond. &c. asservati._
Record Commission. 1812-1818.
LOGGAN, DAVID, _S.P.D._---- Cantabrigia Illustrata.
1690.
Containing the University costumes of the xvii century.
MASTERS--LAMB.---- History of the College of Corpus Christi in the
University of Cambridge. (With additional matter & a continuation to the
present time, by John Lamb.)
Cambridge 1831.
“MIND,” a quarterly review of Psychology & Philosophy. Vol. i.
Williams & Norgate 1876.
MULLINGER, J. BASS.---- History of the University of Cambridge from the
earliest times to the Royal Injunctions of 1535.
University Press 1874.
MULLINGER, J. BASS.---- History of the University of Cambridge from the
Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles I.
University Press 1884.
PARKER, MATTHEW.---- Academiae Historia Cantabrigiensis.
PARKER, RICHARD, _B.D._, fellow of Caius (1622).---- History &
Antiquities of the University of Cambridge.
London, printed at the Hat & Star, 1721.
PEACOCK, GEORGE, _D.D._, Dean of Ely, _V.P.R.S._---- Observations on the
Statutes of the University of Cambridge.
London & Cambridge 1841.
PEACOCK, GEORGE, _D.D._, Dean of Ely, _V.P.R.S._---- Appendix to
Observations on the University Statutes.
1841.
SEARLE, W. G.---- Ingulf & the Historia Croylandensis--an investigation
attempted. Camb. Ant. Soc. Pub. xxvii.
Cambridge 1894.
STOKYS, MATTHEW, & JOHN BUCK.---- The Bedells’ Books.
In Cole MSS. & in Peacock.
TAYLOR, RICHARD.---- Index Monasticus. The Abbeys & other Monasteries
formerly established in the diocese of Norwich & kingdom of East Anglia.
London 1821.
THOMPSON, ALEXANDER HAMILTON.---- Cambridge & its Colleges. Illustrated
by E. H. New. (Little Library.)
1898.
TULLOCH, PRINCIPAL.---- Rational Theology in England in the xvii
Century. 2 vols.
1872.
VENN, JOHN, _Sc.D._, _F.R.S._---- Biographical History of Gonville &
Caius College (1349-1897). 3 vols.
Cambridge 1897-1902.
WILLIS, ROBERT, and CLARK, J. W.---- The Architectural History of the
University of Cambridge & of the Colleges of Cambridge & Eton. 4 vols.
University Press 1886.
WORDSWORTH, CHRISTOPHER, fellow of Peterhouse.---- Scholae Academicae.
University Press 1877.
WORDSWORTH, CHRISTOPHER---- Social Life at the English Universities in
the xviii Century.
Cambridge 1874.
To the above must be added the College Histories, published by F.
E. Robinson London.
Peterhouse (Walker) 1906.
Clare (Wardale) 1899.
Gonville and Caius (Venn) 1901.
Trinity Hall (Malden) 1902.
Corpus Christi (Stokes) 1898.
King’s (Austen Leigh) 1899.
Queens’ (J. H. Gray) 1899.
S. Catherine’s (Bp. of Bristol) 1902.
Jesus (A. Gray) 1902.
Christ’s (Peile) 1900.
S. John’s (Mullinger) 1901.
Magdalene (Preston) 1904.
Emmanuel (Shuckburgh) 1904.
Sidney (Edwards) 1899.
Downing (Pettit Stevens) 1899.
No complete bibliography of the subject--of the MSS. or printed
matter--has been attempted. The above is a list of some Cambridge
documents and books most of which have been consulted personally by
the writer of the present volume.
CAMBRIDGE
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
I. _pp._ 1-30.
The northern schools--legends--the town--the river--the fen
monasteries--the school of glomery--the religious orders--the
jurisdiction of Ely--the clerk and the religious.
In Saxon times our schools of learning were grouped round York the Roman
centre of Britain, which represented not only the Roman tradition but
the vigorous Christianity of the north. It is this auspicious
combination which nourished for over a hundred years the university
spirit before universities, carried through Alcuin this spirit to the
Continent, and eventually brought learning hand in hand with
Christianity to Germany. Whatever may be true as to the distribution of
talent in England later in its history, in the vii and viii centuries
our great school was to be found at York, and England’s learned men
hailed from the kingdom of Northumbria.
[Sidenote: The School of York.
York and Rome.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 657.]
The School of York originated in the school established by Hild for the
Celtic clan community over which she presided; and Caedmon the first
English poet, John of Beverley, Wilfrid of York, Bede the father of
English learning, and the scholar Alcuin who has been called “minister
of Public Instruction to Charlemagne” were the noble fruit it put forth.
[Sidenote: A.D. 664.]
Its history was determined at the Synod of Whitby where Hild appears as
the link between the Celtic Aidan and the Roman Wilfrid, a
representative figure of the genius of English religion. She had been
baptized by Paulinus but her sympathies were with the Scottish Church.
The victory of Wilfrid did not destroy that dual character of English
Christianity which accompanied its mind and its liturgy to the last days
of the religious domination of Rome in the realm; but through this
victory York again entered the hegemony of Latin civilisation, was bound
afresh to the overshadowing tradition of Rome, and thenceforth sealed
with an European character its schools of learning.
[Sidenote: York and Canterbury.]
And through York Rome again takes possession of England. In the vii
century Christianity in Kent had ceased to be the Christianity of
Augustine; with the fall of Edwin Northumbria forgot the Christianity of
Paulinus; but the immediate result of the Roman victory at York was the
mission of Theodore to Canterbury, where the episcopal school he
inaugurated shared the honours though it never rivalled the learning of
the School of York.
[Sidenote: York and Cambridge.]
The legends which relate that Bede came to study at Cambridge in 682,
that Alcuin was one of its first doctors in theology, and that Alfred of
Beverley, “the Treasurer,” studied there, legends already known in the
time of Chaucer, symbolise the spiritual relationship between the School
of York and Cambridge. Those large elements which had operated at
York--that combination of the shaping power of Rome with the insular
force of Angle, Celt, and Saxon--had in them the promise of the English
genius and the English character; and one seems to trace the same wide
tradition, the operation of similarly large elements, in the future seat
of learning at Cambridge. The university of Chaucer, Spenser, and
Milton, of Fox, Fisher, and Langton, of Ascham, Bacon, Newton, Whewell,
and Lightfoot, may well be regarded as the spiritual descendant of the
School which first held the torch of English learning never again to be
entirely extinguished in this country.[1]
[Sidenote: Early legends of the origin of Cambridge.]
Further down, in the east of England, there in fact existed a still
earlier school than the schools at York, established in 635 by Siegebert
king of East Anglia. The site of this school was very probably Seaham or
Dunwich; but legend connects it with Cambridge, and the memory of King
Siegebert is kept green in the annual commemorations of the
university.[2] A legend referring to the same period connects Cambridge
with Canterbury. According to this, Ethelbert of Kent by the command of
Gregory the Great assigned a residence at Cambridge for some learned men
from “the village of Canterbury” (598-604).
Legend also relates that Edward the Elder founded the Cambridge schools
[Sidenote: A.D. 910.]
when he was repairing the ravages of the Danes in East Anglia, and gave
to them a charter of incorporation.
The fact not only that the neighbourhood of Cambridge, like Canterbury
and York, was the site of an early Anglo-Saxon school, but that
Cambridge was itself a Roman station, gave rise in its turn to another
legend of the origin of the university. According to this it was founded
by Cantaber the son-in-law of King Gurgentius and brother of Partholin
the Spanish king of Ireland, who gave his name to it, a name, no doubt,
formed from the _Cantabri_, the Spanish auxiliaries mentioned by Caesar.
Lydgate’s panegyric of the university shows us that a tradition of its
antiquity made up of both Roman and School of York elements received
credence in the xiv century; nay, remembering that Cambridge had been a
Roman town, men found no difficulty in supposing that Caesar had carried
off a supply of Cambridge dons to the capital of the world.
[Illustration: NORMAN CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
Believed to be the oldest of the four round Churches in England, built
about 1120-40.]
[Sidenote: The town of Cambridge.]
The Roman fortress lay on the left bank of the river, at the hamlet of
Grantchester (_Granta_, _castrum_); the town of Cambridge proper, on the
same bank, being called _Grantabrigge_. Here it was that William the
Conqueror’s castle was built on the site of a British earthwork still
known as Castle Mound, and here British as well as Roman coins and other
Roman remains have been discovered. The British town of Cair-Graunth has
been identified with both sites; while the Roman station marked in Saxon
maps as _Camboritum_ or _Camboricum_ has hitherto been confounded with
the site of the Norman fortress. We do not know where Camboricum was,
but we no longer identify it with Cambridge.[3]
In the time of Bede, and earlier, Grantchester was a desolate ruin,[4]
but Grantabridge was a place of some importance at the time of the
Domesday survey, and we find that nearly thirty of its four hundred
houses were destroyed to make room for William’s castle.[5] The town
which is still called Grantabridge in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in
Domesday, and in Henry I.’s charter, becomes Cantebruge before the
middle of the xii century, and Cantebrigge in Chaucer.[6]
[Sidenote: Roman roads.]
Two great Roman roads met near the Castle Mound, the one being the only
way across the pathless fens, running from the coast of Norfolk through
Ely to Cambridge and thence on to Cirencester and Bath; the other--_via
Devana_--was the great highway (along the site of the present Huntingdon
road) which led from Cambridge out of the fen country, stretching from
Chester[7] on the north-west to Colchester on the south-east. This road
crossed the only high ground in the flat country round Cambridge--the
low range of hills called the Gogmagogs and Castle Mound itself.
[Sidenote: The river.]
The river Granta gave its name to the British and Roman towns
(Cair-Graunth, Grantchester), to the university city, and to the whole
shire. The Granta or Cam, for it is now called by both names, is made by
the confluence of two small streams which meet beyond Grantchester; the
eastern branch, the Granta, rising in Cambridgeshire, the western, the
Rhee, in Hertfordshire. What other river in England can boast that it
has been celebrated by our poets in every age? For Milton it is _Camus_,
for Byron _Granta_, both names serve the muse of Gray; it is
Wordsworth’s _Cam_, but Spenser calls it _Guant_, and also _Ouse_, the
name it takes before reaching Ely, although the waters of the “plenteous
Ouse” join the Granta much lower down.[8]
[Sidenote: The ford.]
The important thing about the river, which determined the history of the
town on its banks, was that between Grantabridge and Grantchester it was
fordable, and here only could it be traversed by those going to and from
the east of England and the Midlands. Near Trumpington, indeed, a part
of the Via Devana had been carried by the Romans right through the
water.[9]
In the ix century the province of Cambridge--the _Flavia Caesariensis_
of the Romans--formed part of the Danelagh.[10] Throughout the middle
ages, writes Mr. J. W. Clark, the town “was a frontier fortress on the
edge of the great wild ... which stretched as far as the Wash”: and no
place suffered more from invasion and fire. The Danes completely
destroyed it in 870, after the capture of York; and the fortunes of the
two cities were again linked two hundred years later when William, fresh
from the reduction of the northern capital, turned
[Sidenote: A.D. 1068-1070.]
his steps to Cambridge and made it the centre of his operations against
the outstanding isle of Ely. A second destruction at the hands of the
Danes occurred in 1010, and in 1088 Cambridge was again devastated with
the rest of Cambridgeshire by Robert Curthose. This, however, led to a
vigorous re-instatement of the city by Henry I. who showed it many marks
of favour.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1102.]
In the second year of his reign he ordered the townsmen to pay their
dues to the bedells, and about this time the ferry which had hitherto
been “a vagrant ... even anywhere where passengers could get waftage
over,”[11] was established at Cambridge, bringing traffic in its train.
In 1106 the first signs of returning prosperity were seen in the
settlement of the Jews. The Cambridge Jewry was near the market-place,
and the Cambridge Jews were noted for their “civil carriage,” none of
the customary outrageous charges
[Sidenote: A.D. 1118.]
being brought against them there.[12] Twelve years later, the king gave
a charter to the burgesses.
Cambridge was at no period of its history a great or even a prosperous
commercial centre. East Anglia has always been a corner of England to
itself, not on the direct line to anywhere, and offering very few points
of vantage to the statesman or the merchant. The course of a river
determines the history of a town, as it first determines its site. This
is well exemplified in the histories of the Granta and the “Isis.” The
“Isis” is a reach of the Thames,[13] and this fact with its moral
political and commercial implications has coloured the whole history of
the town on its banks--everything came to Oxford by the river from
London, and dignified alderman or humble bargeman shared with the lesser
centre the life of the greater. The Granta and Ouse have a history in
every sense the opposite of this. Through the centuries, long before
Oxford was a town at all,[14] the sounds we hear are the thud of the
Ely barge as it strikes the bank of deserted Grantchester, and
Sexberga’s messengers borrow from the neighbourhood of the future
university the sepulture for the founder of Ely--the gift of a
civilisation still older than hers.[15] Or, three hundred and fifty
years later, the chant of the Ely monks is wafted out upon the water as
Canute bids his men rest a moment on their oars to listen
Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Canute the king rowed by.
The convent messenger, the Danish king, the Norman conqueror, may come
up the water, but they make the stir they find, and the river leaves no
trace behind them.
So the university town owes nothing to adventitious causes; makes no bid
for public favour, and has no tentacles to put forth to obtain it. But
the river has, nevertheless, determined its activities as well as its
reticences. It will give rise to a fair, and Stourbridge fair will
become one of the greatest fairs in the kingdom. The fish market was
another source of traffic. Ely and Cambridge fish were celebrated--Bede,
indeed, derives “Ely” from the abundance of its eels, although _helyg_
(the willow) seems the more
[Illustration: MARKET SQUARE
This picture represents what is called Half Market, which takes place on
Wednesday. Market day, properly speaking, is on Saturday, when the
square is filled with stalls. The church is Great St. Mary’s, and King’s
College Chapel is seen in the distance on the left.]
probable original.[16] The kings of England patronised this market,
Henry III. sending for his fish to Cambridge even when he was staying at
Oxford; and Chaucer is careful to note that the Cambridge miller was an
angler, skilled in mending his nets.[17] The isle of Ely, so-called
because cut off by river and mere from the rest of Cambridgeshire, was
proverbial for the turbulence of its population, and the men of Ely drew
the men of Cambridge into their quarrels, or harried them on their own
account. Cambridge Castle was built as an outpost against the English
earls who with Hereward resisted the Conqueror at Ely; it was at Ely
that another determined stand was made by Simon de Montfort’s followers
after Cambridge had been regained for John; and Henry III. had to bring
relief to the university town when its neighbours burnt and plundered it
during the years 1266-1270. The two centres were inseparable for weal or
woe, and the intellectual as well as the political life of Cambridge was
coloured for centuries by the activities of its neighbour.
[Sidenote: The fen monasteries.]
The proximity of the great fen monasteries must be reckoned as the chief
factor in the earlier scholastic--the pre-university--history of
Cambridge. Ely, Crowland, Bury-St.-Edmund’s and Peterborough were among
the most important and the most ancient religious houses in the country.
Crowland and Bury both had abbey schools influenced, as we shall see, in
the early xii century by the famous school at Orléans; Ely had besides
an episcopal school, and as monastery, school, and cathedral, was in
constant domestic relations with her neighbour of Cambridge.[18]
[Sidenote: Crowland.]
Among these famous houses, surrounded by undrained marshes, like
islands, forbidding and yet inviting access, none was more isolated than
Crowland which, reared as Venice upon piles and stakes driven into the
marshy ground, shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence and
solitude.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1109.]
The story that abbot Joffred of Crowland sent four Orléans monks full of
new learning to his Cambridge manor of Cottenham[19] early in the xii
century, who held disputations in a large barn, has been shown to be
entirely legendary. Yet the moment chosen by the self-styled continuator
of Ingulph is singularly felicitous.[20] We know nothing of any sources
of information which may have been open to a xiv century forger; but it
is certain that some such scholastic movements were fermenting in
Cambridge in the xii century. Joffred had been prior at Orléans which
was a flourishing school, and we have evidence that this school actually
influenced the university of Cambridge. The abbey house of Crowland was
burnt in 1091 and the rebuilding was not undertaken till 1113. It was
likely enough that the abbot should look out for something for his
learned monks to do, and should make use of an outlying manor near to
such a centre as Cambridge as a promising field for activities
restricted through the disaster to his house. Moreover the energies of
the lecturers, we are told, were directed against Jewish doctrines, and
the Jews, as we have seen, had come to Cambridge three years before. The
town was rising in prosperity, and the charter of 1118 points to the
conclusion that people and trade had been attracted to it since Henry’s
first rescript sixteen years earlier.[21]
Whether among those attracted to Cambridge we are to count the large
influx of scholars who are said to have listened to the Crowland monks,
or not, it is certain that Cambridge became once more in 1174 the
[Sidenote: A.D. 1174.]
theatre of great disaster, and a destructive fire was only stayed when
it could find no more fuel to feed it.[22]
[Sidenote: The school of glomery.]
_Soi-disant_ Peter of Blois declares that the monks when they set about
teaching “took the university of Orléans for their pattern.”[23] The
earliest school we come across at Cambridge is a “school of glomery”
under the patronage of the bishops of Ely. The archdeacon of Ely
nominated the “master of the glomerels” and one of the chief acts of
Hugh de Balsham was to limit the authority which the archdeaconry had
thus come indirectly to exercise in university matters. From
thenceforward the master of glomery is to have the same authority to
compose disputes between glomerels as other regent masters had towards
their scholars; but in disputes with scholars or with townsmen as to
lodgings or in grave matters affecting the jurisdiction of the
university, the glomerels were to plead before the chancellor. There
were thus two classes of students in the early days at Cambridge,
‘glomerels’ and ‘scholars.’ The former were subject to the _magister
glomeriae_ who in his turn was subject to the archdeacon of Ely; the
latter had grown up under the aegis of the regent masters and
chancellor.
Now the school of glomery was nothing else than the time-honoured
Cambridge school of grammar.[24] The word has been for centuries a
local term known only here, and it is therefore the more interesting to
find that the students of Orléans were called ‘glomerel clerks’ (_clers
glomeriaus_) and that they resisted the invasion of their grammar
schools by Aristotle’s logic in the xiii century.
Paris et Orliens ce sont ij:
C’est granz domages et granz deuls
Que li uns à l’autre n’acorde.
Savez por qui est la descorde?
Qu’il ne sont pas d’une science:
Car Logique, qui toz jors tence,
Claime les auctors autoriaus
Et les clers d’Orliens glomeriaus.[25]
There were also ‘glomerels’ at Bury-St.-Edmund’s and Abbot Sampson’s
doings as regards the grammar school there in the xii century bear a
strong resemblance to Balsham’s doings at Cambridge in the xiiith.[26]
The persistence of the glomery school at Cambridge and the equally
remarkable persistence of this school at Orléans goes far to justify the
conjecture that it was Orléans which influenced Cambridge, not Paris:
for Crowland had certainly been influenced by the same school, and
Cambridge and Bury were both familiar with ‘glomerels’; the former under
the jurisdiction of the diocesan the latter under that of the abbot.[27]
[Sidenote: The religious orders. The canons.]
Cambridge presents us with an excellent example of the relations which
secular and religious learning bore to one another in the foundation of
universities. Ecclesiastically it was of no importance whatever; it was
not the seat of a bishop nor the fief of abbot or prior--the one
monastic house was the nunnery of S. Rhadegund, founded before the
middle of the xii century--and at no time in
[Illustration: THE OLD GATEWAY OF KING’S COLLEGE
This gateway now forms the entrance to the Library from Trinity Lane.
The North door of King’s Chapel is seen in the distance.]
its history was the fate of the university determined by the learning of
the cloister or its fortune raised by a doctrine of the schools. Ely,
the outside influence which played the largest rôle, introduced no
monastic elements, and within Cambridge itself the communities which had
most part in its development were the canons, and canons always
represented a half-way house between clerk and monk. If their
contribution to European learning be altogether inferior to that of the
Benedictine, they at no time showed any desire to impose a tradition or
to stamp with their own hall mark the scholars who willingly attached
themselves to canonical houses. The earliest community of canons in
Cambridge was founded by a Norman, Hugolina wife to Picot Sheriff of the
county, in 1092, in gratitude for her recovery from sickness.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1092]
It was a foundation for six secular canons serving her church of S.
Giles by the Castle, and the little community was transformed, twenty
years later, by
[Sidenote: A.D. 1112.]
another Norman, Pain Peverel standard-bearer to the Duke of Normandy,
into the Canons Regular of Barnwell under the rule of S. Augustine.[28]
The six canons became thirty, and Barnwell Priory, on the other side of
the river, became a house of considerable importance, and gave
hospitality to Richard II. during the Cambridge parliament of 1388. It
continued to exist till the Suppression. About 1135 a second canons’
house was established on the present site of S. John’s College. This was
a hospital, or travellers’ hospice, designed by a Cambridge burgess,
Henry Frost, who gave the plot of land and endowed “a master and poor
brethren of the rule of S. Austin” to dispense the charity of the
house.[29] If the Barnwell canons of S. Giles were among the earliest
friends of the scholars, the canons of the hospice of S. John were to
play the most important part in their history.[30] S. John’s and the
other xii century foundation of S. Rhadegund were dissolved under
similar circumstances within thirteen years of one another, the latter
in 1497 the former in 1510.[31]
[Sidenote: The Gilbertine canons of Sempringham.]
There was a third community of Canons Regular at Cambridge. The
Lincolnshire community founded by S. Gilbert of Sempringham in the xii
century settled near Peterhouse in 1291. Their hostel “S. Edmund’s” took
its name from the old chapel dedicated to the martyr-king enshrined at
Bury-St.-Edmund’s, and a licence of Edward III.’s permitting the canons
to acquire houses and lands in the town styles them “the Prior and
Canons of the chapel of S. Edmund.” We hear of these possessions early
in the xiv century when (in 1417) the Prior of S. Edmund’s leases land;
and again in 1474 when the community sell land to William Bassett. Of
the 26 houses of this Order--the only Order of English origin--there
were two in the isle of Ely,[32] while a fourth was established near
Hitchin. The Barnwell Memoranda announcing their arrival in Cambridge
[Sidenote: A.D. 1291.]
say: “The canons of Sempringham first came to dwell at the chapel of S.
Edmund, and earnestly set about hearing lectures and attending
disputations.”
[Sidenote: Friars. Carmelites.]
The four orders of friars were all represented in Cambridge, and all
settled there in the course of the xiii century. The Carmelites or
Whitefriars were the first to arrive, settling in 1200 at
[Sidenote: A.D. 1249.]
Chesterton near the town, then at Newnham, and finally in Mill Street
(1291). For nearly a hundred years the Carmelites took no part in the
academic life of Cambridge. They refused to graduate, and showed no
desire to display the insignia of a secular doctorate over the
peculiarly sacred habit of their Order. It was, indeed, at Cambridge
that S. Simon Stock had had, in 1251, his vision of the Blessed Virgin,
and had received from her hands the celebrated “scapular of Our Lady of
Mount Carmel”; and it was not till forty years after this that the
Carmelite Humphrey Necton, at the urgent instance of the then chancellor
of the university, consented to take the degree of Doctor in
Theology.[33] In the reign of Richard II. this was the richest religious
house in Cambridge, and Edmund Langley Earl of Cambridge and Courtney
Archbishop of Canterbury lodged there during the parliament of 1388. The
Cambridge Carmelites put forth several eminent men: Bale, the historian,
had been a Carmelite at Norwich before proceeding to the university;
Walter Diss, a zealous opponent of the Lollards, was confessor to that
friend of Cambridge John of Gaunt; Nicholas Cantilupe (1441) wrote the
_Historiola Cantabrigiae_,[34] and friar Nicholas Kenton was chancellor
of the university as late as the middle of the xv century.
[Sidenote: Franciscans.]
The Franciscans, or Greyfriars, came to Cambridge soon after their
arrival in England, and during the lifetime of S. Francis. Among the
nine friars who landed in 1224 there were three Englishmen, Richard
Ingworth (the only friar in priest’s orders), who was accompanied
probably by another East Anglian, and by Richard of Devon. This East
Anglian element among the first Franciscans is noteworthy, for the first
Franciscan readers in divinity at both universities hailed from our
Eastern counties. The Cambridge burgesses established the friars at the
Jewish synagogue next to the prison.[35] These uncomfortable quarters
were exchanged later for a site in the present Sidney Street, where
Edward I. built them a friary. Here they took part and share in the life
of the university: the novices and younger brethren studied and
graduated, the elder taught; while the church of the Franciscans, which
was one of the finest buildings in the town, served the purposes of a
university church before the rebuilding of Great S. Mary’s.
[Sidenote: Dominicans.]
The Dominicans, or Blackfriars, did not reach Cambridge till about the
last quarter of the xiii century,[36] fifty years after the Franciscans.
A strange destiny decreed that a house which had once been under the
patronage of the seraphic Francis should nurture Oliver Cromwell and
become the first Protestant college; and that the house of “the Lord’s
Watchdogs” (_Dominicanes_) should become the front and centre of
Puritanism in the university.[37]
[Sidenote: Austinfriars.]
The last to arrive were the Austinfriars, who entered Cambridge in 1290,
at the same time as the Sempringham canons, just as the first Carmelite
took his university degree, and as the Jews were expelled from the town.
The priory was behind the present college of Corpus Christi, occupying
part of the site of the Botanical Gardens, where the new museums now
stand. Here was nurtured Miles Coverdale whose reforming principles were
imbibed from its prior Barnes afterwards burned as a heretic.[38] Like
the other Cambridge friars, the Austinfriars were dissolved at the
Reformation.[39]
[Sidenote: Other friars at Cambridge.]
There were other friars in Cambridge. The friars of the Sack[40] or _De
poenitentia Jesu_, were established in S. Mary’s parish in 1291, then
in the parish of S. Peter. This was one of the spurious orders of
Franciscans suppressed, as a result of the Council of Lyons, in 1307.
The Barnwell Chartulary, however, has recorded for us that “these
brethren of the Sack gathered together many scholars and good, and
multiplied exceedingly until the time of the Council of Lyons.”
[Sidenote: Other religious houses at Cambridge.]
The Bethlemite friars came over here in 1257, and appear to have had
only one house in England, that in Trumpington Street.[41]
Our-Lady-friars (_Fratres de Domina_) are first heard of about thirty
years later (1288). They were settled near the castle (and are hence
called in the Barnwell Chartulary: _Fratres beatae Mariae ad Castrum_)
and are only heard of at Cambridge and at Norwich where they arrived
before 1290 and were there established at the time of the plague.[42]
The Cambridge burgesses had an ancient leper hospital at Stourbridge,
under the dedication of “S. Mary Magdalene for lepers.” In the closing
years of the xiv century Henry Tangmer, alderman of the Guild of Corpus
Christi, founded the Hermitage of S. Anne and Hospital of Lazars. About
the same time (1395) the Benedictine nuns of S. Leonard of
Stratford-le-Bowe granted a curtilage in Scholars’ Lane to the
university.[43] The Priories of Anglesey S. John of Jerusalem and Tyltey
and the abbeys of Crowland (p. 12) and Denney all held land in
Cambridge.
The prior and convent of Anglesey, a Cambridgeshire house of Regular
Canons, owned land here as early as 1278-9, and were of some importance
in the town in the xiv century.[44] The land held by the knights of S.
John was not part of the confiscated Templar property, all of which
escheated to the Order, but was purchased by them early in the reign of
Edward I.[45] It lay in the university centre between Mill Street and
School Street (“Milnestrete alias Seynt Johnstrete”) and was a parcel of
open land on which was their patronal church of S. John Baptist, and
Crouched or S. Crosse’s Hostel.[46] In 1432 William Hulle, preceptor of
Swenefeld, Templecombe, and Quenyngton, and prior of the English Langue,
sold this ground to the university for the schools quadrangle, and the
New Schools of Canon Law were built upon it.[47] The
[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE GATEWAY AND TOWER FROM TRINITY STREET
Trinity Chapel is seen on the left behind the trees.]
knights’ property was on the west of the schools quadrangle, the
property of the nuns of Stratford-le-Bowe on the east. Denney and Tyltey
both owned land on the site of Christ’s Pieces and elsewhere in the xv
century. The former was a Franciscan nunnery founded by Marie de
Chatillon Countess of Pembroke (p. 69) on land which was claimed from
her by the knights of S. John as part of the sequestrated Templar
property. It lay on the borders of the fen between Cambridge and Ely.
The latter was a Cistercian house in Essex.[48]
The rôle reserved for these houses and congregations in the earlier
history of the university was subordinate. By the time that every
Benedictine house was required by the Constitution of Honorius III.
(1216-1227) to send some of its students to the universities, learning
had already passed from the monastery to the university, and the monks’
hostel at Cambridge[49] signalised the change. The part taken by the
friars is not less instructive. The refusal of the Carmelites
(throughout the xiii century) to pursue the academic course is valuable
evidence of the conflict between secular and religious studies at the
rise of the university. The Franciscans were the most important of the
mendicants in England, and as such took a paramount place at both
Cambridge and Oxford; but at the former their action was inconspicuous,
and there is nothing to indicate that they were at any time or in any
sense “nursing fathers” to Cambridge university whatever they may have
been elsewhere.
The moment when they made their appearance was at least as propitious
historically as it had been at Oxford, and the independent growth of
Cambridge, its escape from the intellectual thraldom of that
scholasticism of which the Franciscans were the chief exponents, are
hence doubly significant. The quarrels which arose in the early xiv
century between the officials of the university and the friars prove
that the religious societies which shared its academic life did by no
means act in permanent harmony with it. Thus in 1303 the chancellor
quarrelled with the Franciscans and Dominicans and excommunicated two of
the friars, and later in the century the university had to prohibit
novices in the Cambridge friaries from proceeding to their degrees under
eighteen years of age. Then, as now, the Franciscans were accustomed to
recruit very little lads for the noviciate, all of whom probably
received their education at the public Cambridge schools of grammar and
theology, and might be seen strutting about as full-fledged “masters of
arts before they were masters of themselves.”[50]
Before the xiii century closed--from the date of Hugh de Balsham’s
death--the university ceased to receive any help from monastic learning,
for the monks avoided Cambridge, and even Norwich priory sent its
students to Oxford.[51] Less than a hundred years elapsed, and we find
Gaunt, Pembroke, and Scrope--the court party--opposing the pretensions
and the temporalities of the clergy in the company of Cambridge men.
Pembroke--the representative of the house of Valence[52]--is their
spokesman, and it is Scrope
[Sidenote: A.D. 1371.]
and Sir Robert Thorpe, Master of a Cambridge college, who take the Purse
and the Seals from the hands of their episcopal holders Brantingham and
William of Wykeham. This movement, as Stubbs points out, was independent
of Wyclif’s; and it is remarkable that while William of Wykeham was
influencing Oxford the theories for which he stood were being repulsed
at Cambridge.
[Sidenote: Cambridge and the jurisdiction of Ely.]
There remains the relation of the university to the see of Ely. The
episcopal jurisdiction of Ely in the university did not long survive the
building of colleges. The scholars refused to plead in the archdeacon’s
court, and Balsham upheld them--their statutes already provided as
much.[53] Bishop Montacute also set limits to diocesan authority.[54] In
1317 John XXII. withdrew the university from the spiritual jurisdiction
not only of the diocesan but of the provincial archbishop; but it was
the friction arising from the failure of some of the bishops of Ely to
recognise the spiritual independence of the chancellor which resulted in
the celebrated court held at Barnwell priory at the instance of Martin
V., in 1430, under the presidency of its prior. Two forged bulls of
Honorius and Sergius[55] were cited as vii century evidence of the
spiritual liberties of Cambridge, and the Pope in a third bull set the
question for ever at rest in favour of the university. The solemn
visitation of the colleges which had taken place under the auspices of
Archbishop Arundel in 1401 was probably the result of the temporary
victory obtained by the Primate when the chancellor refused to take an
oath of obedience to him.
The early college statutes were as eager to repel the religious as the
rule of Benedict, the father of western monasticism, was to repel the
clergyman.[56] The statutes of Michaelhouse (1334), the earliest which
have reached us intact, provide that neither monk nor friar should
obtain admittance to the college. The statutes of Peterhouse enact that
no one deciding to enter a religious order can remain on the foundation.
It must at the same time be clearly realised that some of the earliest
colleges were little more than clerical seminaries.[57] What is peculiar
to Cambridge is that there a monk made the earliest attempt to endow
learning for the secular clergy--a monk who was also a bishop, the
ever-memorable Hugh Balsham. The non-monastic direction taken was by no
means as yet an anti-monastic one; but at the rise of both universities,
as soon as scholars were endowed and endowed houses began to be built
for them, the monastic and the academic careers were regarded as
incompatible vocations. It was the separation of the _clerk_ from the
_religious_, the recognition by Balsham of the secular scholar and of an
endowed foundation for such scholars which was neither a religious house
nor an _episcopia_, that transformed a more or less fortuitous concourse
of students and teachers--a mere amplification, as at Oxford, of the
school system of other great centres--into a chartered corporation of
scholars--a university.[58]
II
School and university--Stourbridge fair--the university in the xiii
century--Foundation of endowed scholars--hostels.
Both our universities doubtless count a school life of eight centuries
at least: but a school life, the activity of teachers and scholars, is
not the same thing as a university life. We have already said that
Oxford owed its history to the constant communication between it and
London, to its accessibility from the capital which made it the frequent
resort not only of our kings but, what is more to our purpose, of
scholars European and English.[59] The ferment created by their lectures
no doubt kept alive the desire for knowledge and the spirit of enquiry
among the motley population of the town; a moral atmosphere which in
its turn attracted students. At Cambridge everything was the opposite of
this. S. Frideswide’s at Oxford was a poor religious house, but it was
in the heart of the town; the monastery at Ely was a great religious
house, but its school was many miles from the university. Cambridge, as
we have seen, was accessible to no great centre, there was nothing to
attract the traveller who if he visited it almost certainly went out of
his way to do so. Nevertheless some influences were at work in the xii
century which determined the transformation of Cambridge into a _studium
generale_, a university. The river near the town, as I have already
said, gave rise to one of the greatest fairs in England, and Mr. J. W.
Clark is disposed to see in the concourse of people brought together by
Stourbridge fair the determining factor in our university history. The
fair was called after the Stour a stream lower down the river, and was
held in a large cornfield near Barnwell. It began on the feast of S.
Bartholomew, August 24, and lasted till the fourteenth day after the
feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14). These five weeks of
revelry proved more disturbing to Cambridge studies than the May term of
to-day; xiii century scholars spent their money at Stourbridge fair as
Isaac Newton spent his in the xviith; there he acquired his prism in
August 1661 and a book on “Judicial Astrology” the geometry and
trigonometry of which were then as ‘Greek’ to him. Sea-borne goods which
had probably always been brought inland up the river to this point,
formed the nucleus of the fair at Stourbridge. It is generally agreed
that three other English fairs exceeded the Cambridge fair in
importance, those at Bristol, Bartholomew’s in London, and Lynton. Defoe
however describes it as the largest in Europe, greater than that at
Nuremberg or than the Frankfort mart. It
[Sidenote: A.D. 1211.]
was already highly prosperous when King John made over its dues to the
leper hospice of S. Mary Magdalene; and it has been suggested that this
was the ancient fair to which Irish merchants brought their cloth in the
time of Athelstan.
Why so uncommercial a district became the site of one of the greatest
fairs in Europe, and why a _studium generale_ became established there,
are problems both of which we cannot resolve. There always remains at
the bottom some virtue in the apparently unpropitious city on the banks
of the Granta which as an Italian would say _fece da sè_. But Mr. J. W.
Clark’s suggestion has at least placed the two problems in
juxtaposition: the growing importance of the schools and the growing
importance of the fair both meet us in the opening lustres of the xiii
century; the fair, that is, has its roots in the preceding century when
the fate of the embryo seat of learning lay in the balance. How should a
fair, how should an extraordinary concourse of people, help to
consolidate a university? Simply because this was the age of peripatetic
teaching, because it was the custom all through the middle ages for
wandering scholars to find themselves where men gathered together, and
to claim for a theorem of Roscellinus or a doctrine from Araby brought
by the crusaders the ear of a crowd which had just been entertained by
the Norman jongleur.
[Sidenote: Earliest references to Cambridge university.]
Our first glimpse of the Cambridge schools shows us an immigration of
the scholars of one university to the other. In 1209,
[Sidenote: A.D. 1209 10th of John.]
in consequence of an unjust retaliation upon the students, Oxford was
depleted and its scholars found their way to Cambridge.[60] Nine years
later we have a rescript of Henry III.’s (1218) ordering all those
clerks
[Sidenote: A.D. 1218 2nd of Henry III.]
who had adhered to Louis to depart the realm. In the eleven years which
elapsed between this and 1229 the Franciscans had established themselves
at Cambridge, and in that year as a result of Henry’s invitation to
[Sidenote: A.D. 1229 13th of Henry III.]
Paris students to settle in England there was a considerable influx or
foreigners to the university, the echo of which may be traced in two
interesting rescripts of the year 1231. In one of these the king charges
the mayor
[Sidenote: A.D. 1231 15th of Henry III.]
and bailiffs of the town to deal fairly with members of the university
in the matter or lodgings, and enjoins them to establish according to
“university custom” two masters and two liegemen of the town to act as
“taxors.”[61] Dating the rescript from Oxford on the third day of May
the king writes: “It is already sufficiently known to you that a
multitude of scholars has gathered to our town of Cambridge, for the
sake of study, both from the regions near home and from beyond the seas;
the which is most grateful and acceptable to us, because it gives an
example of no small convenience to our whole realm, and our honour is
thereby increased; and you especially, among whom these students are
loyally dwelling should feel it matter of no little gratulation and
rejoicing.”[62] In the second rescript, dated from Oxford on the same
day, the king enjoins that no clerk shall live in the town (_quod nullus
clericus moretur in villa_) who is not under a _magister scholarum_.[63]
[Sidenote: Charters and Bulls. Charter of Hen. III. A.D. 1231. Bull of
John XXII. A.D. 1317.]
These letters patent addressed to the mayor and burgesses of the town by
Henry III. in 1231 are the earliest existing document which can be
regarded in the light of a university charter.[64] At the same time it
appears by no means certain that royal letters had not been addressed
earlier to Cambridge in which the
[Illustration: ORIEL WINDOW OF THE HALL, TRINITY GREAT COURT
In the nearer part of the picture is the Master’s Lodge, and in the far
distance two turrets of King’s Chapel stand up against the evening
sky.]
academic society there was treated as a moral entity. In the following
reign the jury of Cambridge made oath to the effect that “the Chancellor
and Masters of the university had appropriated to themselves more ample
liberties than were warranted in the charters granted them by the king’s
predecessors”;[65] and in the same way when, at the request of Edward
II., John XXII. erects Cambridge into a _studium generale_ in the second
year of his pontificate, he reaffirms and confirms the privileges with
which his predecessors in the apostolic chair and the English kings had
adorned the university: _omnia privilegia et indulta praedicto studio
... a pontificibus et regibus praedictis concessa_.[66] In this
instrument he refers to Cambridge university as _studium ab olim ibi
ordinatum_, “the university from old time there established.” Cambridge
and Oxford, however, like the earliest centres of learning in Italy and
France--Bologna and Paris--_grew into universities_; papal
authorisations follow instead of preceding their institution. In other
cases universities were definite creations which make their first
appearance with a bull of institution and inauguration attached to
them.[67]
Henry III.’s writs in behalf of Cambridge begin in the second and cover
the fifty years of his reign. In the 45th and again in the 50th year he
repeats and confirms his previous rescripts. The scholastic prosperity
of Cambridge dates from this reign as its civil prosperity dates from
that of Henry I.; and the traditions that Cambridge was Beauclerk’s
_alma mater_ and that Henry V. was a student at Oxford probably both
derive from the signal favours shown to the two by these monarchs
respectively.[68] Cambridge however was greatly reduced in the reign of
John, especially about the year 1214 in spite of the recent immigration
from Oxford.
[Sidenote: The Henrys and the Edwards.]
But from the accession of Henry III. onwards the university city became
the special care of the Henrys and the Edwards. Edward I., while still
Prince of Wales, visited the town in 1254 and undertook the
pacification of the quarrels in which scholars and townsmen were
engaged.[69] A document sealed with his own seal and those of the
university and the borough ordained that henceforth 13 scholars and 10
burgesses should be chosen to represent the interests of both parties.
Five of the former were to be Englishmen, 3 Scotchmen, 3 Irishmen, and 2
from Wales. The proportions are interesting.[70] It was soon after
Edward’s accession that the refusal of Cambridge
[Sidenote: 4th Edw. I. A.D. 1276.]
students to obey summonses to the archidiaconal courts led to Balsham’s
judicious settlement of the point.[71]
Edward II. continued the interest shown in Cambridge by his father and
grandfather; not only obtaining for it the status of a _studium
generale_ but maintaining a group of scholars there at his own
[Sidenote: A.D. 1317.]
charges--“king’s scholars” who were to rank with Ely and Merton scholars
in historical importance. The favour shown to the university by the
magnificent king his son was perhaps the one instance in which he took
pains to fulfil the intentions of his murdered father.[72]
[Sidenote: Foundation of endowed scholars. Hugh de Balsham]
In the long reign of Henry III., in the year 1257, Hugh de Balsham,[73]
subprior of Ely, was made tenth bishop of the diocese; and it was then
that he placed and endowed at S. John’s hospital a group of secular
students known as “Ely scholars,” who were the object of his anxious
care until his death in 1286. His scheme and its results are described
in the next chapter.[74] At this time there were no endowed houses at
Cambridge, no school buildings, no endowed scholars.[75] It was some
thirty years after the arrival of the Franciscans, the Carmelites had as
yet taken no part in the academic life, and many years were to elapse
before the Dominicans made their appearance. It was fifty years since
the Oxford immigration, and thirty since the king had invited over the
students from Paris. The distinction that was now made between the
clerk-canon, or the clerk-friar, and the scholar in arts or theology who
would remain a secular, converted, as we have said, the university
corporation into something more--a _studium generale_, and led, as we
shall see, to the building of the first endowed colleges.
[Sidenote: Walter de Merton.]
Contemporaneously with Balsham there lived and toiled another college
legislator, Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England and afterwards
Bishop of Rochester. His prime importance in developing the collegiate
conception will be seen in the next chapter; here we are concerned with
him as a founder of endowed scholars. Merton had eight nephews to
educate, and he set about designing an academic scheme the far-reaching
effects of which endure to this day, although the steps of the scheme
are involved in an obscurity which responds to his own hesitations. He
first assigned his manor of Malden,
[Sidenote: A.D. 1264.]
adjoining Merton in Surrey, as a chef-lieu and endowment for “poor
scholars in the schools” who are living under a code of rules prescribed
by himself. During the next five years he acquired lands both in
Cambridge and Oxford; his chief acquisition at the former being in 1269,
when he purchased an estate lying under the shadow of the Conqueror’s
castle which included the Norman manor house known as the School of
Pythagoras. This property had been in the possession of the Dunnings
since the Conquest, and was afterwards known as the Merton estate. In
the same year William de Manfield, who held a mortgage on this property,
states that he had given his lands in Cambridge to the house, scholars,
and brethren of Merton--_domui et scholaribus et fratribus de
Merton_.[76] Meanwhile Walter de Merton had been buying land at
Oxford,[77] and in 1274 he definitely moved the hall at Malden and
refounded it as Merton College in the sister university; the formula
hitherto maintained in his charters and statutes (see ii. p. 68) being
now changed, and “poor scholars who are studying at Oxford or elsewhere
where a _studium generale_ exists” (_Oxoniae, aut alibi, ubi studium
viget generale_) becomes “who are studying at Oxford where there is a
university” (_Oxoniae ubi universitas viget studentium_).
The scheme thus crowned in 1274 had had its birth twelve years before
when in 1262 Gilbert de Clare Earl of Gloucester allowed the manor of
Malden to be assigned to the Austin priory of Merton or to some other
religious house for the sustenance of _clerici in scholis degentes_
(poor clerks in the schools) who were living according to Merton’s
prescriptions.[78] This vesting of endowments in a religious house was
already familiar at both universities. The Bishop of Ely (Kilkenny) had
vested his exhibitions for divinity students in the prior of Barnwell in
1256, and it appears that this was Merton’s first intention. Two years
later, however, we find him assigning Malden and other manors to his
nephews, the beneficiaries being still described as “poor scholars in
the schools.”
Any scholars maintained at either university by these endowments were
“Merton scholars.” This is again made perfectly clear when the charter
(and statutes) of 1270 were issued, in which Walter de Merton settles
the Cambridge estates as part of the Malden endowments for “scholars
studying in Oxford or elsewhere.” It was part of his plan to acquire
local endowments at both universities, and also that vast clerical
patronage in the different shires which was obviously destined to ensure
the future of his scholars. This was the scheme eventually concentrated
in the foundation of Merton, Oxford: and when Bishop Hobhouse is
inclined to anticipate the date at which Merton scholars were
established there, we may entirely agree with him, only adding that if
there were certainly Merton scholars at Oxford before 1274, there were
no less certainly Merton scholars at Cambridge also before that date.
Merton’s scholars had their chef-lieu at Malden, but were studying at
these two universities, and possessed endowments at both during the
decade 1264-1274.
The Hundred Rolls furnish us with ample references to the Cambridge
scholars. In the Rolls for the borough and town of Cambridge, the 2nd
year of Edward I., they are accused of poaching on the
[Sidenote: A.D. 1274.]
fishing rights of the townsmen. “A servant of the House of the Merton
scholars[79] had appropriated to his masters’ use a certain foss common
to the whole town.” In the later inquisitions of the 7th of Edward I.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1278-9.]
we find them figuring among the most considerable Cambridge landlords,
one entry showing them to us as purchasers of land from Manfield: _Item
scolares de Merton tenent unum mesuagium cum quadraginta et quinque
acris terre ... quas emerunt de Willelmo de Manefeld_.[80]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1278-9.]
Three of these entries point to tenure of no very recent date. Thus
Eustace Dunning sold to Walter Howe a messuage with a croft which
Eustace had inherited from his father Hervey Dunning, and for which the
Howes, in accordance with an assignment made by Eustace Dunning, gave
twelve pence a year to the clerks of Merton (_per assignationem
praedicti Eustachi clericis de Merton xii^{d}_).[81] The declaration is
made by John son and heir of Walter Howe, so that Eustace Dunning’s
appointment in favour of the
[Sidenote: A.D. 1278-9.]
Merton clerks refers to some time back. Again, Agnes daughter of the
tailor Philip inherited a messuage in the parish of S. Peter which her
father “had held of the Merton scholars.” In the last place the
Cambridge jurymen affirm that two annual attendances should have been
made at the court of Chesterton for a holding of Eustace Dunning’s, but
that the scholars of Merton had failed to put in an appearance _for the
past six years_.[82]
These transactions cannot be held to relate to an estate managed for
the Oxford college founded in 1274, and to a period covering not more
than four or five years. From 1274, which is also the date of the
earliest Hundred Rolls, the Merton scholars were definitely and finally
established at Oxford; and when John Howe and Agnes Taylor gave their
evidence it is probable that there were no longer Merton scholars in
Cambridge: what their depositions seem to indicate is a concurrent
antiquity for Merton scholars at both universities. If these scholars
had not been settled among them when these land transactions occurred
the references would certainly have been to scholares de Merton
_Oxoniae_,[83] and it is well worthy of notice that the only two
instances in the Cambridge Hundred Rolls where “the Merton scholars at
Oxford” are referred to are two instances where Walter de Merton is said
to have “alienated” land in Cambridge for the use of the scholars in
Oxford.[84]
No doubt it had always been part of Merton’s design to found a
residential college for his scholars at one of the universities; and he
had perhaps strong reasons for establishing this at Cambridge. His great
patron was Chief-Justice Bassett, and the Bassetts were Cambridge
landowners. His patron in the original assignment of Malden manor was
Gilbert de Clare whose family gave its name in the next century to the
eponymous college at the same university. Was the _domus de Merton_ of
“the scholars and brethren” (p. 39) in fact at one time such a
residence? where poor scholars, some of them perchance from Merton
priory school itself, lived under the auspices of the Merton brethren?
Certain it is that a prior of Merton intrudes himself and his affairs
into the Cambridge Hundred Rolls.[85] It is also certain that the House
of Scholars of Merton is first heard of not at Oxford but at Cambridge.
Mr. J. W. Clark has pointed out in another connexion that the words
_domus_ and _aula_ were employed when a building was “appropriated by
endowment as a fixed residence for a body of scholars.” Our _domus
scholarium de Merton_ on which Cambridge lands were bestowed--to which
Cambridge lands were confirmed--in 1269, could not have been either in
Surrey or at Oxford.
Whether there was a house of Merton scholars at Cambridge before there
was a house of Merton scholars at Oxford, or not, it would appear that a
like antiquity must be claimed for the scholars themselves at both
universities.[86]
[Sidenote: Universities in other towns. The licence to found a
university at Northampton.]
One of the odd things about Merton’s movements is that though he began
buying land in Oxford the year after the Malden foundation (1265), he
made his chief acquisition in Cambridge as late as 1269, and that a year
later when he issued a revised set of statutes (1270) he still makes no
allusion to any change of locality. It is possible that in 1265 when he
wrote “at Oxford or at any other university” he had in mind the
tentatives then being made to found an English university in some other
town. It was in fact in 1262, the 45th year of the reign of Henry III.,
that Cambridge students had migrated to Northampton with the king’s
licence to found a university. The traditional bickerings between
southerners and northerners three years previously had been the cause of
the exodus, and the Cambridge scholars found many Oxonians already
there who had migrated from Oxford after their quarrel with the papal
legate in 1238 but had obtained no licence to institute a university.
The licence accorded to the masters and scholars of Cambridge university
was withdrawn four years later on a representation being made to Henry
III. that a university at Northampton must prove prejudicial to
Oxford.[87] Migrations of students to other towns took place throughout
the xiii century. They begin in 1209 when there was a general exodus
from Oxford not only to Cambridge but to the town of Reading. Thirty
years later the Oxonians migrated to Northampton and Salisbury, being
followed to the former in 1262 as we have just seen by many Cambridge
“masters and scholars.” These migrations certainly indicate that Oxford
and Cambridge were not yet regarded as such permanent homes of English
scholarship that other sites could not be substituted. The event which
most impressed the popular imagination occurred when both universities
had attained to European fame--the exodus in the reign of Edward III.
from Oxford to Stamford which caused the king in 1333 to issue his royal
letters forbidding any one to teach there. It had been prophesied that
the studies pursued at Oxford would be transferred to Stamford, and the
Cambridge floods gave rise to another prophecy, recorded by Spenser,
which showed that the Stamford incident still occupied men’s minds. The
flat Lincolnshire country would, it was said, become completely flooded,
and Stamford then would
---- shine in learning more than ever did
Cambridge or Oxford England’s goodly beames.
No migration took place from Cambridge after the foundation of its first
college. But before we enter upon this period of its history, and find
ourselves in the brilliant epoch which was so soon to overtake the
university in the xiv century, let us see what arrangements were made
for the accommodation of the scholar population previous to the
existence of colleges.
At first--in the xii and the early part of the xiii centuries--scholars
lived each at his own charges; perhaps groups of three and four would
club together, but every scholar was then, as Fuller expressively has
it, “his own founder and his own benefactor.”[88] The rescript of the
early years of Henry III., already cited,
[Sidenote: A.D. 1231 15th of Henry III.]
introduces us to the town hostels--_hospitia locanda_; and establishes
the taxing of lodging house charges by the _taxatores_, a usage probably
rendered the more necessary owing to the great influx of students two
years before, when the demand for lodgings must have been very much in
excess of the supply.[89] These town hostels, the result of town
enterprise, were subject to the four “taxors” only, and were under no
other academic supervision.[90] It seems highly probable, however, that
the king’s rescript gave rise to the university hostels, some thirty of
which were in existence fifty years later. In any case the rescript
leads us to conclude that the town hostels were in existence in the
previous century, and supplies us with a date before which we cannot
suppose that any university hostel existed.
[Sidenote: The university hostel.]
The university hostelries or inns for the accommodation of scholars who
lived there at their own charges were intermediate between the town
lodging house and the college, which they both anticipate and
supplement. A number of scholars joined together, elected their own
principal, and paid him at a fixed rate for board and lodging. At first,
therefore, the university like the town hostel was a private enterprise,
scholars undertook the charge of them in their private capacity. The
head of the hostel was called the Principal. Later on these institutions
changed their democratic character. The government passed entirely into
the hands of the principal, certain oaths were exacted of him, and he
kept a list of the scholars in his house.[91] The principal collected a
rent from the inmates, though in some hostels the accommodation appears
to have been free. All these changes, we may imagine, belong to the time
when some of the hostels were affiliated to colleges, becoming
thenceforward subject in all respects to the customs and discipline of
the endowed foundation. Thus S. Mary’s hostel, where Matthew Parker
studied, was affiliated to Corpus, Borden’s belonged to S. John’s
hospital, then to Ely, and in 1448 was affiliated to Clare; S. Bernard’s
belonged first to Queens’ then to Corpus; S. Austin’s to King’s. The
hostels took their name sometimes from the neighbouring church or
chapel, or other saintly patron, and sometimes from their proprietor.
“Newmarket” and “Harleston” hostels must have served for students from
these neighbouring towns. The monks who first came to study in Cambridge
lived in lodgings; but these were soon exchanged for the monastic
hostel, hence “Ely hostel” and “Monks’ hostel.”[92] Those zealous
learners the friars of the Sack had Jesu hostel, dismantled in 1307, the
Sempringham canons had S. Edmund’s hostel, the Barnwell canons had a
hostel in the town called S. Augustine’s, and the hospitaller knights of
S. John owned Crouched and S. John’s hostels in School Lane and Mill
Street.[93] Rud’s offers a good example of a xiii century Cambridge
hostel, and Physwick of one of the xivth. The former is mentioned in
1283 and was part of the compensation allowed in that year to S. John’s
for the alienated hostels at Peterhouse,[94] it still exists, almost
unaltered, and forms part of the Castle inn in S. Andrew’s Street.
Physwick was the private residence of an esquire bedell of that name who
bequeathed it for the purposes of a hostel in 1393. It was affiliated to
Gonville and was in use until absorbed in the buildings of Trinity
College in the xvi century.
Cambridge hostels were highly important foundations. The 8 jurists’
hostels housed eighty and a hundred students apiece, and the large
hostels of S. Bernard, S. Thomas, S. Mary, and S. Augustine sometimes
housed twenty and thirty regents without counting the non-regents and
students.[95] A large proportion of men whose names are not to be found
on the books of any college received their education in these houses.
The Inns, of which there were three at Cambridge--Oving’s, S. Zachary’s,
and S. Paul’s--were smaller and less important hostels and appear to
have been frequented by the richer students. Hostel and hall or college
existed side by side through the xiii, xiv, and xv centuries. Indeed
until the college system was well established the hostels greatly
exceeded the endowed halls in number, and they continued to supplement
the latter until the completion of the large colleges at the renascence.
Some twenty were erected as late as the xv and the opening years of the
xvi centuries. During the xiv and xv centuries many hostels were
destroyed to make room for the colleges; and in the xvith those which
remained were abandoned, Trinity
[Illustration: THE OLD CASTLE INN
Now styled “Ye Olde Castel Hotel.” The Baptist Church and the Police
Courts are seen just beyond, and the Roman Catholic Church in the
distance. The near trees are in the grounds of Emmanuel College.]
hostel, as Fuller testifies, being the only one remaining in use till
1540.[96]
CHAPTER II
THE COLLEGES
The university and the colleges--the collegiate system--eras of
college building--Peterhouse--Michaelhouse--_collegium_ and
_aula_--Clare--college statutes--architectural scheme of a
college--Pembroke--founders of colleges--Gonville--Trinity
Hall--Corpus Christi--Cambridge in 1353--Chaucer at Cambridge--the
schools, library, the university printers and the Pitt Press, the
senate house--King’s--King’s College chapel--Cambridge college
chapels--Queens’--English sovereigns at Cambridge--S.
Catherine’s--Jesus--Christ’s--Lady Margaret and Bishop Fisher--S.
John’s--Magdalene--King’s Hall and Trinity College--college
libraries--gateways--Caius--monks in Cambridge--Emmanuel--Sidney
Sussex--Downing--public hostels--nationality of founders and
general scope of their foundations--university and college
revenues.
The college is an endowed foundation providing for the residence and
maintenance of teachers--masters or graduates, and for the free
education of a certain number of poor scholars, to whose company are
added, according to the capacity of the building, other students who are
able to live at their own charges.
[Sidenote: Relation of the college to the university.]
Much has been said about the relation of the college to the university.
By some it is supposed that the latter is nothing but the aggregate of
the former; that somewhere in the time of the Georges “the university”
arrogated to itself a separate existence, and that since that time
university offices have taken precedence of collegiate offices.[97] The
_universitas_, the corporation of scholars, must and did precede any
college foundation: at the same time we cannot distinguish the
development of either of our universities from the rise of these
foundations, whose history has, ever since, been the history of the
academic society. Each college is independent and autonomous, and though
the aggregate of colleges does not constitute the university, each
collegiate foundation forms part and parcel of it in virtue of its union
with the incorporated society of Chancellor Masters and Scholars which
formed at first and still forms “the university.”
[Sidenote: The college the distinguishing characteristic of Cambridge
and Oxford].
It is the collegiate system which distinguishes the English universities
from all others. Everywhere else in Europe students live in their own
private lodgings and have complete control of their lives, subject to no
supervision whatever; the university has no rights over them and no
means of ensuring their good behaviour during the period in which they
choose to attend its lectures. In many parts of Europe the student
passes from a school curriculum in which he has been treated as a
complete dependent, on whose sense of common fairplay and honour, even,
no reliance can be placed, to a curriculum in which he at once becomes
his own absolute master. English instinct is against this--against
abandoning a young man at a critical moment of his life to his own
devices, his own unsupported endeavours, as it is against ruling him by
a system of espionage in his school days. It is in favour in both cases
of the moral support to be found in an external guarantee for order,
orderliness--and of a tacit assistance to good instincts, a tacit
resistance to bad; and the result is the university college.
[Sidenote: The origin of the college system.]
The result, as we say, is an English result, and is the development of a
scheme to which shape was first given by Walter de Merton, Chancellor of
England and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and Hugh de Balsham Bishop
and formerly subprior of Ely, in the reign of Henry III.[98] An endowed
house and college statutes formed part of this fine academic scheme,
which, in all its amplitude and completeness, sprang Athena-like from
the brain of Walter de Merton, and was destined from the first to be
realised in a university. It must, nevertheless, be clearly borne in
mind that the original college dwellings--and the college statutes--were
designed for adult scholars, they were, in fact, the earliest training
colleges for teachers, and it is only later that their advantages were
extended in equal measure to the taught.[99]
[Sidenote: The era of college building.]
College building began in the xiii century and ended with the xvith. The
first great period of building, however, belongs to the second quarter
of the xiv century, and no less than seven colleges and halls were
founded between the years 1324 and 1352. Ninety years elapsed before
the second period, which began with the foundation of King’s College in
1441 and ended with the foundation of S. John’s in 1509. The third and
last period opened a hundred years after the foundation of King’s and
closed with the foundation of the first Protestant colleges fifty years
later (1595):
First period. Second period. Third period.
Peterhouse 1284
(28 years) (68 years) (50 years)
Michaelhouse 1324 King’s College 1441 Magdalene 1542
Clare 1326-38 Queens’ 1448 Trinity 1546
King’s Hall 1337 S. Catherine’s 1473 (Caius 1557)
Pembroke 1347 Jesus 1495 Emmanuel 1584
Gonville Hall 1348 Christ’s 1505 Sidney Sussex 1595
Trinity Hall 1350 S. John’s 1509
Corpus Christi 1352
There were therefore 8 colleges in Cambridge by the middle of the xiv
century; when the xvi century opened there were 14, and at its close 12
of the previous buildings remained and 4 new had been added. Downing
College (built 1805) must be added to these, making at the present day a
total of 17 colleges.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Peterhouse.]
Peterhouse was founded by Hugh de Balsham[100] for his Ely scholars whom
he had in vain attempted to unite, with a separate endowment of their
own, under the same roof as the canons of S. John’s Hospital.[101] In
1284 he removed the Ely clerks to two hostels by S. Peter’s church at
the other end of the town, and at his death two years later left three
hundred marks for the erection of a hall. This was built in 1290 on the
south-west and formed with the scholars’ chambers the only collegiate
building at Peterhouse till the close of the xiv century. Here then were
the primitive elements of a college; the hostel or scholars’ lodging
house to which was added a common meeting and dining room, or hall. The
little parish church of S. Peter served for prayers and gave its name to
the college. College chapels were not built till considerably later: the
example first given by Pembroke College in the next century not being
followed for another hundred years. The quadrangle was not begun till
1424. A combination room[102] opening out from the hall, and a library,
were added along the south side. Over the former was the master’s room,
over the latter the students’ quarters; and all looked upon the ancient
lawn, the meadow with its elms beyond and, stretching to the right, with
its water gate, Coe fen.
Ye brown, o’er-arching groves,
That contemplation loves,
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight!
Oft at the blush of dawn
I trod your level lawn
* * * * *
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy.[103]
[Illustration: PETERHOUSE FROM THE STREET
The Tower of the Congregational Church in the distance.]
Hostels and church, facing the Trumpington road, were just without
Trumpington gate. In 1309 the college area was extended southwards, over
the ground occupied by Jesu hostel.[104] The property of the Gilbertine
canons was added in the xvi century. The college area covers the space
between Trumpington Street and Coe fen, and Little S. Mary’s church and
Scroope Terrace; two-thirds of the site of the Fitzwilliam Museum being
ground purchased from Peterhouse. The new Gisborne building (1825) is
built on the west beyond the hall. The frontage of Peterhouse on
Trumpington Street is unpromising; nothing suggests the charm of the
buildings on the south side or the open country beyond, stored with
historical memories. From the hall, a site unrivalled in the university,
opens the panelled combination room,[105] the “Good Women” of Chaucer
limned in one of its bays, recalling
The chambres and parlers of a sorte
With bay windowes
described by the poet’s contemporary.
Above the xvi century library (of which Balsham’s own books were the
nucleus, enriched by Whittlesey, Bottlesham, Arundel, Warkworth, Gray,
Perne, and Cosin)[106] a charming corner room in the students’ quarters
has been set apart by the present Master for evening study, a veritable
_solarium_ where the readers are surrounded by the portraits of the
great sons of Peterhouse.
[Sidenote: The chapel A.D. 1628.]
Old S. Peter’s church was perhaps burnt down in 1338-1340 by a fire
which is supposed to have also destroyed the chapel of S. Edmund. On its
site rose the present church of Little S. Mary.[107] But in the early
xvii century a movement was set afoot at Peterhouse which resulted in
the erection of a college chapel. It now stands in the midst of the
college buildings, and one of the two ancient hostels, “the little
ostle,” was demolished to provide a site. Matthew Wren, uncle of Sir
Christopher and then Master of the college, afterwards Bishop of Ely,
was the builder. The desire of the fellows of Peterhouse for a chapel of
their own coincided with the movement in the English Church for an
elaborate ritual. As it stands it is a perfect specimen of a xvii
century chapel, with its dark oak stalls, and its east window spared
from Commonwealth marauders by the expedient of removing the glass piece
by piece and hiding it till the
[Illustration: PETERHOUSE--THE FIRST COURT
The entrance to the chapel faces the spectator. On the right is seen the
Combination Room (1460) and the Hall. Through the Cloisters we get a
view into the street. This is the oldest college in Cambridge.]
iconoclastic fever had spent itself. But still we have only the shell of
the original chapel, the roof of which was adorned with figures of a
hundred and fifty angels the statue of S. Peter presiding from the west.
Nine years later all this was pulled down by the Commonwealth men and
the ritualist movement it embodied came to an end.[108]
[Sidenote: Hall portraits.]
Peterhouse hall, in common with the halls of all other colleges,
contains the portraits of its great men: here, however, they look down
upon us not only from the wall above the high table but from the stained
glass of the windows. Holbroke Master of the college, chancellor of the
university during the Barnwell process, and an early student of science;
Cardinal Beaufort scholar of the house who represented Henry V. at the
Council of Constance, and was himself, perhaps, _papabile_; Warkworth
writing his Lancastrian Chronicle--are in their doctor’s scarlet: here
also are Whitgift, Cosin, and Crashaw, who is depicted as a canon of
Loreto; the poet Gray, the third duke of Grafton chancellor of the
university and Prime Minister, and Henry Cavendish the physicist. The
panel portraits were removed here from the Stone parlour. The painting
of Bishop Law by Romney (?) reminds us that many of the Laws were at
Peterhouse, including the first Lord Ellenborough. Over the high table
is Lord Kelvin the latest famous son of the house. Among these must also
be noted Thomas Heywood “a prose Shakspeare,” Hutchinson “the regicide”
one of the first Puritan gentlemen and one of the best, Peter Baro,
Markland the classical critic, and Sherlock who measured himself against
Bossuet.
Peterhouse owes nothing to royal endowments but it has not lived outside
the stir of national movements either political or religious. There were
fervent Lancastrians within its walls in the xv century, fervent
partisans of the Stuarts in the xviith. It was, second to none in
England, the anti-Puritan college, numbering among its masters Wren and
Cosin, and that Doctor Andrew Perne who was among its most munificent
benefactors.[109] Perne was a Petrean first and a theologian afterwards,
and, as vice-chancellor, was to be found burning the remains of Martin
Bucer and Paul Fagius[110] in order to ingratiate the university with
Mary, and signing the Thirty-nine Articles on the accession of
Elizabeth. The letters AP AP on the weather cock of his college are said
to mean: Andrew Perne, “a Papist” or “a Protestant,” as you will; and in
Cantabrigian language a coat that has been turned is a coat that has
been _perned_, and _pernare_ signifies to change your opinions with
frequency.
Since the xvii century Peterhouse has been connected with no great
movements. In the xv century and again in the early xixth it produced
eminent physical and mathematical students; and in the xviii century
Sir William Browne, President of the College of Physicians, learnt here
his science. Scotchmen have a predilection for the college; and a
nucleus of history men is being formed under the present Master’s
guidance.
[Sidenote: Little S. Mary’s.]
The patronage of the historical church which was for three or four
centuries the chapel of Peterhouse remains in the hands of the college.
It is indeed an integral part of Peterhouse for every Petrean. But its
interest does not end here; it reaches across the Atlantic and binds the
new continent to the home-hearth of learning in England. A monument in
the chapel to Godfrey Washington who died in 1729 bears the arms _argent
two bars gules, in chief three estoiles_--the origin of the Stars and
Stripes. The Washington crest is an eagle issuant from a
crown--affirming sovereignty or escaping from a monarchy?[111]
[Sidenote: Cherry Hinton.]
The Rectory of Cherry Hinton two and a half miles south-east of
Cambridge, on the way to the village of Balsham, is no less important in
the history of the Ely scholars. In the xiv century the endowment of the
college was not sufficient for their maintenance all the year round: the
college nevertheless had made rapid progress since its separate
existence at Peterhouse began, and Fordham Bishop of Ely (1388-1426)
decided to confirm to them the greater tithes of Cherry Hinton of which
the college is to this day rector; but which had indeed been first
assigned them by Bishop Simon Langham as early as 1362.[112]
A visit to this interesting church completes our picture of the college
which “his affection for learning and the state of the poor scholars who
were much put to it for conveniency of lodging” persuaded Balsham to
endow.
[Sidenote: Peterhouse lodge.]
The lodge of Peterhouse is on the opposite side of Trumpington Street,
and is the only example of a lodge outside the college precincts in the
university. The house belonged to Charles Beaumont, nephew of the
metaphysical poet Joseph Beaumont who was Master of Peterhouse, and was
bequeathed by him for the college lodge in 1727.
Peterhouse has always been one of the small colleges. Balsham founded it
for a master, 14 fellows, and a few Bible clerks.[113] In the time of
Charles I. (1634) it maintained 19 fellows, 29 Bible clerks, and 8
scholars, making with the college officers and other students a total of
106. Sixty years earlier, when Caius wrote, there were 96 inmates, and
in the middle of the xviii century, 90. To-day there are 11 fellowships,
and 23 scholarships varying from £20 to £80 a year in value.
[Illustration: PETERHOUSE FROM THE FELLOWS’ GARDEN
On the right is the Combination Room (1460), while farther back in the
picture is the Hall, a continuation of this range of most ancient and
picturesque buildings.]
The bishops of Ely have never ceased to be the visitors of the college.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Michaelhouse.]
Nearly forty years elapsed before a second college was projected. On
September 27 1324 Hervey de Stanton, who like other founders in both
universities--like Merton, Alcock, Wykeham, and Wolsey--was a notable
pluralist,[114] opened Michaelhouse on the present site of Trinity. His
purchases for the site had been made in 1323-4, and as was the case with
the foundations preceding and succeeding it, Michaelhouse was an
adaptation of edifices already existing. It remained one of the
principal collegiate buildings until the xvi century and was
successively enlarged by absorbing both Crouched and Gregory’s as
students’ hostels.
[Sidenote: _Domus aula collegium._]
As Peterhouse was called “the House-of-Scholars of S. Peter,” so was
Michaelhouse called “the House-of-Scholars of S. Michael.” It will be
seen that _domus_ and _aula_ were the earliest appellations. As
_hospitia_ or _diversoria literarum_ signified the unendowed house, so
_domus_ or _aula scholarium_ signified the endowed house. Such compound
titles as “house of S. Peter or hall-of-scholars of the Bishop of Ely”
precede, as they explain, the later title _college_. A college denotes
not a dwelling but a community: precisely the same distinction is to be
drawn between _domus_ and _collegium_ as between _monasterium_ and
_conventus_. Every university _domus_ was intended for a college of
scholars, as every religious house was intended for a convent of
religious; the transition was easy, though not logical, from “college of
the hall of Valense-Marie” to Valence-Marie College, and to-day the word
is used indiscriminately to mean both the building and the
community.[115]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Clare Hall 1326-1338.]
Clare Hall was erected on the site of University Hall, a house for
scholars founded during the chancellorship of Richard de Badew who
obtained the king’s licence for it on February 20 1326, when he was
lodged at Barnwell.[116] In the next reign (1344, 18th of Edward III.)
it is referred to as “the hospice belonging to Cambridge university.”
This hall, like Peterhouse, originated in two hostels purchased for the
university in the street running parallel to the High Street, from the
present site of Queen’s to the back gate of Trinity.[117] Twelve years
later Elizabeth de Burgh[118] sister and co-heiress of
[Illustration: CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE FROM THE CAM--AUTUMN EVENING]
Gilbert Earl of Clare founded her college and in 1340 she obtained
possession of University Hall,[119] and decreed in 1359 that it should
thenceforth be known as the “House of Clare.”[120]
The scheme of building of Clare Hall was quadrangular; but no college
was longer in the building. A hall, combination room, and Master’s room
were on the west, while the chapel at the north-east angle was not built
till 1535.[121] The scholars had till then kept their prayers in the
parish church of S. Zachary and in the south chancel aisle of S.
Edward’s. The present chapel was not begun till 1764. As we see it now
Clare is a homogeneous piece of work of the time of Charles I., and in
its classical beauty is one of the finest in Cambridge. This complete
rebuilding occupied twenty-six years--from 1635 to 1661. There is no
record of the architect, though an unsupported tradition points to Inigo
Jones.
When one pictures Clare Hall it is to recall “the Backs,” the
characteristic feature of Cambridge scenery which rivals the beauty of
“the gardens” in the sister university. The grounds of the succession of
collegiate buildings fronting the ancient High Street, with sloping
lawns, bowling green, and fellows’ garden, extend along the backs of the
colleges beyond the narrow river over which each college throws its
bridge, and beyond again runs the well known road and the college
playgrounds.
Clare is supposed to have been the “Soler hall” of Chaucer’s Tale.[122]
It has enjoyed the reputation of a fashionable college, and indeed of a
“sporting college.” It no doubt enjoyed the former reputation from the
first, as a foundation under the patronage of the great house of Clare,
and furnished some of the overdressed dandies who flocked to Cambridge
in Chaucer’s time, as well as his “pore” Yorkshire “scolers” or others
like them. Ralph Cudworth was Master of the college; Tillotson
Archbishop of Canterbury, the martyr bishop Latimer, and Whiston the
successor of Newton were its fellows; and Nicholas Heath primate of
York, Sir George Downing, Cole the antiquary, Townshend, Chancellor of
the Exchequer, the first Marquis Cornwallis, Brodrick Archbishop of
Cashel, and Whitehead the laureate were its _alumni_. It was founded for
20 fellows or scholars, 6 of whom were to be in priests’ orders. In 1634
there were 15 fellows and 32 scholars, in all 106 inmates. In the time
of Caius there had been 129, and in the middle of the xviii century
there were about 100. There are
[Illustration: CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE FROM THE AVENUE
King’s College Chapel is seen through the trees.]
now 18 fellowships and 31 scholarships ranging in value from £20 to £60.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: College statutes.]
The statutes of Clare Hall were written by the founder in 1359, a year
before her death. The statutes of Peterhouse[123] and of Pembroke do not
exist in their original form--and those of Hervey de Stanton for
Michaelhouse and of Elizabeth de Burgh for Clare must be held to be the
two types of Cambridge college statutes. Of these the latter rank as the
most enlightened original code framed for a Cambridge college. Stanton’s
contain little more than directions for the conduct of a clerical
seminary, and this type was followed by the framers of the statutes of
Corpus Christi and in their general intention by Gonville in statutes
afterwards modified by Bateman. The statutes of King’s Hall framed for
Richard II. reverted to the Merton type; Henry VI.’s statutes for King’s
follow, as we shall see, the type already laid down by William of
Wykeham, while Lady Margaret Countess of Richmond, and John Fisher
Bishop of Rochester framed statutes which contain some original
elements.
Elizabeth de Burgh’s originality consists in her realisation of the
value of learning and of general knowledge for all kinds of men and for
its own sake. “In every degree, whether ecclesiastical or temporal,
skill in learning is of no mean advantage; which although sought for by
many persons in many ways is to be found most fully in the university
where a _studium generale_ is known to flourish.”[124] Thence it sends
forth its “disciples,” “who have tasted its sweetness,” skilled and
fitted, to fill their place in the world. She wishes to promote, with
the advancement of religious worship and the welfare of the state, “the
extension of these sciences”; her object being that “the pearl of
knowledge” “once discovered and acquired by study and learning” “should
not lie hid,” but be diffused more and more widely, and when so diffused
give light to them that walk in the darkness of the shadow of
ignorance.[125]
The statutes of Marie Valence were written twelve years earlier and even
in the form in which they have come down to us have a character of their
own and conform to none of the three types of Merton, Michaelhouse, or
Clare.[126]
Merton’s statutes were issued in 1264, 1270, and 1274, and the 1274
statutes exist in the university library in a register of the Bishops of
Lincoln. Mr. J. Bass Mullinger has printed Hervey de Stanton’s in
Appendix D. to his “History of the University of Cambridge”; they are
contained in the Michaelhouse book in the muniment room of Trinity.
* * * * *
For King’s Hall, founded in 1337, see page 131.
[Illustration: THE HALL OF CLARE COLLEGE
The notable features of this interior are the plaster ceiling and the
large oak figures over the fireplace, the latter designed by Sir M.
Digby Wyatt 1870-72.]
[Sidenote: Pembroke College A.D. 1347.]
Pembroke Hall was founded in 1347 by Marie daughter of Guy de Chatillon
comte de Saint-Paul and of Mary grand-daughter of Henry III. She was of
the blood of that Walter de Chatillon who in the retreat from Damietta
during the 7th crusade, held a village alone against successive assaults
of the Saracen; and having drawn forth their missiles from his body
after each sally, charged afresh to the cry of _Chatillon!
Chevaliers!_--and the widow of Aymer de Valence Earl of Pembroke the
inexorable enemy of Robert Bruce in Edward’s wars against the Scottish
king. Pembroke stands opposite Peterhouse and several hostels were
destroyed to make room for it. It was called by the founder the hall of
Valencemarie, and in Latin documents _aula Pembrochiana_.
[Sidenote: Architectural scheme of a college.]
With Pembroke the first college foundation stone was laid in Cambridge.
Here for the first time we have a homogeneous collegiate house and not a
mere adaptation of pre-existing buildings, and may therefore enquire
what was the architectural plan of a college. The principle of the
quadrangle, although it underwent considerable architectural
development, was recognised with the first attempt at college
architecture.[127] The special collegiate buildings at first occupied
one side of the court only. Here, facing the gateway, were to be found
the hall with its buttery and kitchen, above the hall the Master’s
lodging, with perhaps a garret bedroom above it--the _solarium_. The
combination room attiguous to the hall makes its appearance in the next
century, and at right angles or parallel to this main block stretch the
students’ chambers and studies. A muniment room or treasury is over the
gate; the library, occupying a third side,[128] and the chapel, come
later; and last of all the architectural gateway is added.[129] Meadows
and fields and the Master’s plot of ground are soon developed into the
Master’s garden, the fellows’ garden, the bowling green, and tennis
court. By the xv century the buildings round a courtyard easily assume
the plan of the new domestic dwelling of that epoch, of which the type
is Haddon Hall Derbyshire and, in Cambridge, Queens’ College: the
college _domus_ of the xiv century becomes the quadrangular manor-house
of the xvth and xvith. In such a scheme of public buildings only a few
scholars could be lodged in the main court, and smaller quadrangles for
their accommodation were therefore added. University Hostel formed one
side of such a second court in Pembroke; Clare and Queens’ had also
second courts, and their example was followed at Christ’s and S. John’s.
Here then we have a scheme of building which is neither monastic nor
feudal. It may with propriety be called scholastic but it is also
essentially domestic architecture. The college quadrangle as we see it
evolved in Cambridge is the earliest attempt at devising a dwelling
which should resemble neither the cloister nor the castle, should
suggest neither enclosure nor self-defence--a scholastic dwelling. The
college is the outcome of that moment in our history when feudalism had
played its part and monasticism was losing its power; it represents what
the rise of the universities themselves represents and its architectural
interest is unique. No monastic terms are retained; the hall is not a
refectory, the one constant monastic and canonical feature, the church,
has no part at all in the scheme--the scholars were men not separated
from their fellows and they used the parish church.
The first collegiate dwelling houses, like the English manor-house,
consciously or unconsciously followed one of the oldest house-plans
known to civilisation--the scheme of dwelling-rooms round a court was
that of the Roman house. The _aula seu domus scholarium_ had moreover as
its starting point--like the earliest _domus ecclesiae_--a hall in a
house; the hall is the nucleus of the college.[130]
[Sidenote: The site of Pembroke.]
Marie de Saint-Paul, like her predecessor Elizabeth de Burgh, purchased
university property for the site of her college. “University hostel”
which stood here formed one side of the narrow quadrangle the building
of which was at once begun, and a messuage of Hervey de Stanton’s formed
the other. Within five years the complete area had been acquired, and
it is probable that the south side was also partly built before the
founder’s death in 1377. On the west were the hall and kitchen, on the
east, abutting on the street, was the gate with students’ chambers on
either side of it. With the hostel the founder bought an acre of
meadowland which she converted into an orchard--“the orchard against
Pembroke Hall” it is called in her lifetime. She also obtained
permission from two of the Avignon popes--Innocent VI. and Urban V.--to
erect a chapel and bell tower, and these were built, after the middle of
the xiv century, at the north west corner of the closed quadrangle. This
interesting site was used later as a library and is still a reference
library and lecture room. Traces of fresco remain under the panelling,
and the chaplain’s room with its hagioscope for the altar is on the
east. The lower part of the bell tower also still exists.
In 1389 the college acquired Cosyn’s Place, and later Bolton’s, and in
1451 a perpetual lease of S. Thomas’s hostel. University hostel retained
its name till the last quarter of the xvi century, and it was only
pulled down in 1659 to make room for the Hitcham building which now
forms the south side of the second court. There is nothing left of the
xiv and xv century structures. The present lodge, hall, and library and
the other new buildings in stone and red brick have all been erected
since 1870. The chapel occupies part of the site of S. Thomas’s hostel,
and was built by Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely and Master of
[Illustration: THE OLD COURT, PEMBROKE COLLEGE
The Dining Hall is seen on the right of the picture.]
Peterhouse, at his own charges; the architect being his nephew
Christopher Wren. The bishop had already built Peterhouse chapel and
this new work was undertaken in fulfilment of his intention to make some
pious offering if he were ever liberated from the Tower, where the
Parliament kept him between the years 1642 and 1658. The fine
combination room is panelled with the oak from the xvii century hall.
The portrait of Marie de Saint-Paul presides in the present hall with
that of Henry VI. flanked by busts of Pitt, Gray, and Stokes.
Two spiritual relationships were bequeathed by the founder to the
college. One with the Franciscan friars, the other with the Minoresses
of Denney. The former connexion ceased almost as soon as it was devised,
for the existing edition of the statutes (made after the founder’s
death) omits all mention of it.[131]
No college but Trinity outshines Pembroke for the fame of its scholars
and none for the antiquity of its fame. Henry VI. in a charter granting
lands speaks of it as “this eminent and most precious college, which is
and ever hath been resplendent among all places in the university.”[132]
The king so favoured it that it was called his “adopted daughter”; and
when Elizabeth rode past it on her way to her lodging at King’s she
saluted it with one of those happy phrases characteristic of the Tudors:
“_O domus antiqua et religiosa!_” words which sum its significance in
university history.
Pembroke is the _alma mater_ of Edmund Spenser,[133] of Gray,[134] of
the younger Pitt,[135] of Thixtil, fellow in 1519, whose extraordinary
erudition is praised by Caius, of Wharton the anatomist, Sydenham the
xvii century physician, Gabriel Harvey the “Hobbinoll” of the
_Shepherd’s Calendar_,[136] Sir George Stokes the mathematician, and Sir
Henry Maine.[137] *Grindal and *Whitgift[138] of Canterbury, *Rotherham
and *Booth of York, *Richard Fox Master of the college, Bishop of
Winchester, and founder of Corpus Christi Oxford, the two Langtons
Bishops of *S. David’s and Winchester, *Ridley the martyr Bishop of
London, *Lancelot Andrewes Bishop of Ely, then of Winchester, with
[Illustration: A COURT AND CLOISTERS IN PEMBROKE COLLEGE
This represents the First or Entrance Court of the College. Beyond the
Cloisters is the Chapel designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed
in 1664.]
Felton and *Wren of Ely, are on its honour roll. The second Master was
Robert Thorpe of Thorpe-next-Norwich, knighted by Edward III. and
afterwards Lord Chancellor.[139] The old college garden, loved by
Ridley, is much despoiled, but “Ridley’s walk” remains. Pembroke gave
two other martyrs for their religious opinions, Rogers and
Bradford.[140] Two fellows of the college[141] in the reign of Edward
III. died in Rome where they had gone to obtain from Innocent VI.
possession of part of the original endowment of the college; a statute
prescribes that mass shall be said for them each July.
In the library are Gower’s _Confessio Amantis_ and the _Golden Legend_,
printed by Caxton. It is this last book which brought him the promise of
“a buck in summer and a doe in winter” from the Earl of Arundel, for its
great length had made him “half desperate to have accomplished it.”
There, too, is Gray’s MS. of the “Elegy.” The college also possesses
Bishop Andrewes’ library. Matthew Wren is buried in the chapel, and his
staff and mitre are preserved in the college, the latter being a
solitary specimen of a post-reformation mitre; it was worn over a
crimson silk cap.
The college was founded for 30 scholars, if the revenues permitted.[142]
In the time of Caius it housed 87 members; in Fuller’s time 100
(including 20 fellows and 33 scholars); in the middle of the xviii
century the number of students averaged 50 or 60. There are now 13
fellowships and 34 scholarships of the value of £20 to £80.
[Sidenote: Founders of Cambridge colleges.]
The Cambridge colleges are remarkable for the large proportion of them
founded and endowed by women. Of the 16 colleges built between the xiii
and xvi centuries, now in existence, 6 are due to the munificence of
women--Clare, Pembroke, Queens’, Christ’s, S. John’s, and Sidney Sussex.
Next as college builders come the chancellors of England, the bishops,
and the kings who have each endowed the university with three colleges.
Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reign of Edward
II., Thomas Lord Audley chancellor to Henry VIII., and Sir Walter
Mildmay Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth, all founded colleges,
two of which still remain--Magdalene and Emmanuel.[143] Hugh Balsham of
Ely, Bateman of Norwich, and Alcock of Ely founded three existing
colleges--Peterhouse, Trinity Hall, and Jesus.[143a] The kings of
England account for some of the finest work in the university, King’s
Hall, King’s College, and Trinity College.[144]
[Sidenote: The early series of colleges.]
In the series of Cambridge colleges the 3 foundations of the early xiv
century which followed Peterhouse were all merged in other colleges.
Pembroke which was the sixth foundation was the first piece of
collegiate building to be carried through in Cambridge, and Corpus
Christi must rank as the second.
The colleges from Peterhouse to Pembroke:--
Peterhouse 1284
Michaelhouse 1324 (Gonville 1348 )
{University Hall 1326 (Trinity Hall 1350)
{Clare 1338
King’s Hall 1337 Corpus 1352
Pembroke Hall 1347
Michaelhouse and King’s Hall went to swell the greatness of Trinity;
University Hall became the foundation stone of Clare: and all of them,
with Gonville and Trinity Hall, were incomplete adaptations of earlier
buildings at the time when Pembroke and Corpus were finished.
* * * * *
We now come to two colleges which formed an East Anglian corner in the
university.
[Sidenote: Gonville Hall 1348.]
Within a month of the licence granted to Marie de Saint-Paul, Edmund
Gonville obtained his for the erection of the hall which is called after
him. Gonville was an East Anglian parson, rector of two Norfolk parishes
and sometime vicar-general of the diocese of Ely. In one of these
parishes his elder brother Sir Nicholas Gonville of Rushworth had
already established a college of canons, and Edmund Gonville himself
was a great favourer of the Dominicans. Edward III.’s licence enabled
him to found a hall for 20 scholars in Lurteburgh (now Free school)
Lane, between S. Benet’s and great S. Mary’s, in 1348. In 1352 this site
was exchanged with Benet College for another on the other side of the
High Street,[145] the present site of Gonville and Caius. The Hall was
dedicated in honour of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and
enjoyed a great reputation among East Anglians and various proofs of
papal favour up to the eve of the Reformation.[146] Like Corpus its
object was the education of the clergy and theology was to be their
study. Alexander VI. (1492-1503) licensed annually two of its students
to preach in any part of England, apparently a unique permission.[147]
Humphrey de la Pole--who resided for many years--and his brother Edward,
sons of the second Duke of Suffolk, were students here; so was Sir
Thomas Gresham. Gonville was refounded as Gonville and Caius by Doctor
Keys (Caius) two hundred years later.[148]
[Sidenote: Trinity Hall A.D. 1350.]
Edmund Gonville left William Bateman Bishop of Norwich his executor in
the interests of his new foundation. Bateman, a notable
[Illustration: TRINITY HALL
The nearer building seen in the picture is the old Library, and beyond
it are the Latham Buildings.]
figure in the xiv century, set forth as Edward’s ambassador to the King
of France in the month that the Black Death made its appearance in East
Anglia (March 1350), and died at Avignon on an embassy from the king to
the Pope. In 1350 on his return from France,[149] he founded Trinity
Hall, near Gonville, on the site of the hostel of the monks of Ely[150]
which he obtained for that purpose.[151]
If Gonville’s foundation was intended for the country parson, Bateman’s
was intended for the _prete di carriera_. Both were designed to repair
the ravages in the ranks of the clergy left by the plague, but while
Gonville’s clerks were to devote their time to the study of theology
Bateman’s were to study exclusively civil and canon law. The college was
built round a quadrangle,[152] and the religious services were kept in
the church of S. John the Baptist (or Zachary) and afterwards in the
north aisle of S. Edward’s church; these two churches being shared with
the students of Clare. Indeed it was owing to Gardiner’s policy and
Ridley’s advice that Trinity Hall escaped incorporation with Clare
College in the reign of Edward VI. The library remains as it was in the
early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and was founded by Bateman with the
gift of his own collection. The Norfolk men were famous litigants.
Doctor Jessopp has shown that neither the Black Death nor any lesser
tragedy could hold them from an appeal to the law on every trivial
pretext. That the first college of jurists should have been founded by a
native of Norwich is certainly therefore a fitting circumstance.
Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England was
Master of Trinity Hall in the reign of Edward VI. and again in the first
year of Mary. He used to say “if all his palaces were blown down by
iniquity, he would creep honestly into that shell”--the mastership of
Trinity Hall. Other distinguished Masters were Haddon,[153] Master of
the Requests to Elizabeth, and Sir Henry Maine who had been fellow and
tutor. Bishop Sampson, a pupil of Erasmus, Thirlby, Glisson,[154]
Bilney, one of the early reformers, Lord Chesterfield, Bulwer Lytton,
and Leslie Stephen were all members of Trinity Hall, which is still the
college of the larger number of Cambridge law students. There are 13
fellowships, and about 12 scholarships varying in value from £80 to £21
a year, besides exhibitions of the same value.
* * * * *
In the middle of the xiv century there were two important guilds in
Cambridge, the one under the invocation of _Corpus Christi_ “keeping
their prayers in S. Benet’s church,” the other dedicated to the
[Illustration:
ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AND CORPUS COLLEGE FROM THE STEPS OF THE PITT
PRESS, TRUMPINGTON STREET
King’s College is seen in the distance.]
Blessed Virgin “observing their offices in S. Mary’s church.” These
guilds or confraternities--which existed all through the middle ages as
they had existed in classical Rome with precisely similar features--were
to be found, as we know, especially among the artisan class, and took
the place of our modern trades unions and mutual insurance societies.
Like every enterprise of the ages of faith they had a semi-religious
character, were usually attached as its “sisters and brethren” to some
church, and owed their members not only material assistance but
spiritual, paying for masses to be offered for the repose of the souls
of all deceased brethren.
[Sidenote: Corpus Christi A.D. 1352.]
It was two such guilds which forgetting their differences and laying
aside all emulations, joined together in the middle of the xiv century
in order to found and endow a college in their town. The brethren of the
guilds had been planning this enterprise since 1342, and in the
following years those who possessed contiguous tenements in the parishes
of S. Benet and S. Botolph pulled them down “and with one accord set
about the task of establishing a college there.”[155] “By this means
_they cleared a site for their college square in form_.”[156] Here then,
as in the case of King’s Hall and Pembroke, the earliest collegiate
buildings designed as such, the plan was quadrangular. Sometimes, as in
the case of Trinity Hall, the adjacent buildings for completing the
court could not be at once obtained, in others, as at Corpus itself and
Clare, the courts are irregular, owing to the same difficulty of getting
the foursquare space. Corpus Christi college presents us, indeed, with
the unique and perfect example in Cambridge of the ancient college
court. By March 1352 a clear space, 220 feet long by 140 wide, had been
cleared, and the guilds worked with so much good will that they had
nearly finished the exterior wall of their college in the same year.
“The building of the college as it appears at the present day,” writes
John Jocelyn, “with walls of enclosure, chambers arranged about a
quadrangle, hall, kitchen, and Master’s habitation, was fully finished
in the days of Thomas Eltisley, the first Master [1352-1376] and of his
successor” [1376-1377]. This original court is what we see also to-day:
the buildings are in two floors, the garrets were added later. The hall
range contains the Master’s lodging with a _solarium_ above it, a door
and passage leading thence to the hall. The three other sides were
devoted to scholars’ chambers. S. Benet’s served as the scholars’
church, and the gate was on this side of the court.
Before the reign of Henry VIII. there was but little glass or panelling
in either story of the building. But in Jocelyn’s time the Master’s and
fellows’ rooms were “skilfully decorated” with both. The fellows and
scholars together panelled, paved, decorated, plastered, and glazed the
public rooms of the college, in one case
[Illustration: THE OLD COURT, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
This is the oldest court in Cambridge. The Tower of the old Saxon Church
of St. Benedict is seen in the background.]
“the college paying for the material and the scholars for the labour.”
Thus was this college born of the democratic spirit and the sentiment of
union nurtured in the same spirit. The college was called “of Corpus
Christi and the Blessed Virgin” but was familiarly known from the close
of the xiv century to modern times as Benet College. It lay in the heart
of the Saxon town, between the Saxon church of S. Benet and the church
of the Saxon Botolph which also served the scholars for their prayers.
The former was used until the year 1500, when a small chapel
communicating with the south chancel of the church was built. In 1579
Sir Nicholas Bacon gave the college a chapel; and the modern chapel is
on its site. Sir Francis Drake was the largest contributor next to
Bacon. The queen gave timber, and the scholars of the college again
toiled side by side with the workmen.
On March 21, 1353 the guilds made over to their college Gonville’s house
in Lurteburgh Lane which they had exchanged with his executor Bateman.
More ground was purchased facing the street and in time two large
neighbouring hostels S. Mary’s and S. Bernard’s were acquired for
students. The second court has all been built since 1823, and contains
the modern hall, lodge, library and chapel, and muniment room, and the
Lewes collection. The ancient hall serves as the present kitchen.
In the Library is one of the most valuable collections of MSS. in the
country, the spoils of the dissolved monasteries gathered together by
Archbishop Parker. Here is the oldest or “Winchester” Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (to A.D. 892), and Jerome’s version of the four gospels sent
by Gregory to Augustin--“the most interesting MS. in England.” Here is
the splendid Peterborough psalter and “bestiary”; a _penitentiale_ of
Archbishop Egbert’s (A-S. translation); a Pontifical, probably written
before 1407; a xv century MS. Homer rescued by Parker from the whilom
baker of S. Augustine’s Abbey; Matthew Paris’ own copy of his history;
the Sarum missal of 1506, and a copy of the great English bible of 1568.
Here also is the first draft (1562) of the Articles of Religion, 42 in
number, scored over by Matthew Parker’s red chalk; the 3 articles which
were finally omitted (dealing with the state of the departed, the last
containing the statement “That all shall not be saved”) are here struck
out by Parker. The clause concerning the transubstantiation of the
eucharist he has similarly overscored.
Corpus also houses some of the most interesting plate in the university.
[Sidenote: Candle rents.
Corpus Christi procession.
College arms.]
The college was the chief sufferer in the peasant revolt of 1381
principally on account of the wealth which accrued to it from “candle
rents,” a tax chargeable on the tenants of all houses which had been
guild property.[157] On the festival of Corpus Christi--the
[Illustration: ST. BENEDICT’S CHURCH FROM FREE SCHOOL LANE
Its Saxon tower is the oldest building left in Cambridge, and close by
is the oldest piece of College building, the wall of Corpus Christi.]
Thursday in the Octave of Trinity--a great procession which included the
officers of the united guild, the civic dignitaries, and the university
authorities, perambulated the town from Benet Church to the bridge, the
Master bearing the pyx under a rich canopy. Even after the dissolution
of the guild the Master of Corpus continued the procession until it was
abolished by Henry VIII. in the 27th year of his reign (1535/6). The
ancient arms of the college consisted of the shields of the two
guilds--the emblems of the Passion for Corpus Christi; the triangle
symbol of the Trinity for the guild of the Blessed Virgin, above, Christ
crowning the Madonna and below, the guilds dedicating their college.
Exception was taken to them in Parker’s time as too papistical, and he
got the heralds to change them. The new arms still however recorded the
two guilds: quarterly, gules and azure, in the first and fourth a
pelican, with her young, vulning herself; in the second and third three
lilies proper
_Signat avis Christum, qui sanguine pascit alumnos;_
_Lilia, virgo parens, intemerata refert._
Among its great names Corpus counts Sir Nicholas Bacon the father of
Francis Lord Bacon, Matthew Parker who was Master of the college and its
great benefactor in later times, Christopher Marlowe and Fletcher,
Archbishop Tenison, Sir William Paston and a group of xvii century
antiquaries, and Boyle ‘the great earl’ of Cork. Roger Manners was a
considerable benefactor. In the time of Henry VII. Elizabeth Duchess of
Norfolk founded a bible clerkship and a fellowship, and placed the
buttresses of the college.[158]
The college soon maintained 8 fellows, 6 scholars, and 3 bible clerks.
All the inmates were destined by the founders for priests’ orders, this
being one of the four foundations in Cambridge due in whole or in part
to the dearth of clerks consequent on the black death.[159] In the time
of Caius Corpus held 93 persons and in Fuller’s time 126. In the xviii
century about 60. There are to-day 12 fellowships, about 15 scholarships
varying from £80 to £30 in value, 3 sizarships worth £25 each, and 6
exhibitions for students from S. Paul’s school, Canterbury, and the
Norwich Grammar school varying from £18 to double this sum.[160]
* * * * *
The building of Corpus Christi marks an historical and closes an
architectural epoch at Cambridge. The university had indeed two golden
ages--the reign of Edward III. and the reign of the Tudors. It has not
been sufficiently realised that Cambridge had no European rival in
scholastic activity in either period. In Edward’s reign six colleges
were built there--King’s Hall, Clare, Pembroke, Gonville, Trinity Hall,
and Corpus; only one college--Queens’--was founded at Oxford during the
same time. Three of these six foundations signalise local enterprise,
but the three earlier are a record of the affection of Edward’s house
for the university; and it is their preference for Cambridge in the xiv
century and the preference of the Tudors for it in the xvth and xvith
which marks its two great epochs.
[Sidenote: Cambridge in 1353.]
Let us look at the university as it was in the middle of the xiv
century, and let it be the year 1353. It is 250 years since Henry I.
began to reign; 150 before Erasmus lived here, and 550 before our own
time. It is the eve of that great change in the mental and moral _venue_
of humanity which ushered in the modern world. The Oxford friar Occam,
and with him scholasticism, had died four years before, Petrarch was
mourning Laura, and Chaucer was walking the streets of Cambridge the man
who was to be our link with the early Italian renascence and to clasp
hands across the century with Erasmus. Lastly, it was at this moment in
our history that the final adjustment of Norman and Saxon elements went
hand in hand with the creation of an English language--a period of which
Chaucer is our national representative. The town and university were
just emerging from the havoc wrought by the “black death,” but the royal
and noble foundations which had sprung up on all sides before the
appearance of the scourge had already attracted the youth round Edward’s
court to Cambridge; necessitating in 1342 Archbishop Stratford’s
injunction against the curls and rings of the young coxcombs studying
there.
Cambridge had in fact the reputation of the fashionable university,
while its fame is extolled by Lydgate--a younger contemporary of Chaucer
who had himself studied at Oxford--in words which show that at this date
it was believed also to be the older university.[161] Let us suppose
that Chaucer is returning from his first walk to Grantchester, along the
Trumpington road, past the scene he describes in the _Reeve’s Tale_, and
let us follow him up the Saxon High street. He skirts Coe fen and
reaches Peterhouse, its greater and its “little ostle” on the street,
with Balsham’s hall behind; and as he proceeds he sees on either hand
conspicuous signs of the love of the Edwards for Cambridge--to the right
the narrow quadrangle of Pembroke, beyond it, off the high road, past S.
Botolph’s and two hostels, lay the limestone walls of Corpus which had
just passed under the protection of Henry of Lancaster;[162] its old
court, then the newest of new courts at Cambridge, nestling against the
Saxon church of S. Benet. Behind lay the Austinfriars, and across the
road the Whitefriars from which Austin’s Lane led to Austin’s hostel,
occupying with Mill street the site of the future King’s College and
King’s College chapel. To the north of S. Benet’s he sees the university
church of Great S. Mary’s, just rebuilt after the fire, and opposite are
the schools begun a few years previously, with University, Clare, and
Trinity Halls behind, and “le Stone house” of Gonville. Then still to
his left, where now we see the buildings of Trinity, he beholds the
“gret colledge” King’s Hall which Edward III. has just built,
Michaelhouse with Crouched hostel which passed into its possession in
the February of this year, and its satellite hostels Ovyng’s and
Garret’s.
Just beyond King’s Hall is the building which forms the nucleus of the
university in the Norman town--the hospital of S. John, bordering on
Bridge street. As soon as this road is reached, which leads to the Great
Bridge, we see the crusaders’ round church of S. Sepulchre, and
following the road to the right we come to the Greyfriars, to the site
of the future God’s House, and past Preachers’ street to the Friars
Preachers or Blackfriars. On our left, across in the Greencroft, we have
left the Benedictine nunnery of S. Rhadegund. Returning past S.
Sepulchre’s we cross the river and come to the heart of the Norman
town--the Conqueror’s castle with the Norman manor house bought by
Merton in its shadow, and the churches of S. Giles and S. Peter.
Many of the hostels had recently disappeared to make room for the
colleges, but they were still as regards these latter nearly in the
proportion of three to one--and these latter, with the sole exception of
Peterhouse, had all arisen in the previous thirty years.
The sights and sounds in the streets suggested a new epoch--something
already achieved and something about to be achieved. Something of stir
before an awakening. The English language which was to prove in the
hands of its masters one of the finest vehicles of literary expression
began everywhere to be heard in place of the French of Norfolk and
Stratford-atte-Bowe. The softer southern speech prevailed over
[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE GATEWAY AND CHAPEL--TWILIGHT EFFECT
The Gateway and Screen on the left hand, and beyond it the Chapel. In
the distance the Senate House, Caius College, and the Tower of St.
John’s College Chapel.]
the northern, but the dialects of East Anglia and the Ridings of Yorks
were perhaps most frequently heard. The canons of S. John and S. Giles,
from the Norman side of the town, might be met in their black cloaks,
the Gilbertine canons, from the Saxon side, all in white with the homely
sheepskin cape. The Carmelites had already exchanged their striped brown
and white cloak--representing Elijah’s mantle singed with fire as it
fell from the fiery chariot--for the white cloak to which they owe their
name of Whitefriars. The Romites of S. Austin wore a hermit’s
dress.[163] Benedictine monks from Ely and Norwich could certainly be
seen in the streets of Cambridge,[164] and the Benedictine nuns of S.
Rhadegund rode and walked abroad in the black habit as it was the
universal custom in that great order for nuns to do. The Dominicans
looked like canons in their black _cappa_, the Franciscans like peasants
in their coarse grey tunic roughly tied with cord.
Besides the Carmelites and Austinfriars there were the Bethlemite friars
in Trumpington street and Our-Lady friars by the Castle; the former
could be distinguished at a distance by the red star of five rays on
their cloaks with a sky blue circle in its centre--the star of
Bethlehem; but both these communities wore the habit--black over
white--of the Dominicans. Scholars poor and rich jostled each other in
the schools and in the public ways, wearing the long and short gowns of
the day, the _cote_ which had just come into fashion, or the habit of
their order. There were doctors in the three faculties wearing scarlet
gowns and the doctor’s bonnet or _camaurum_, and there was a sprinkling
of doctors and of students from Orléans, Padua, Pavia, and Paris.
A large number of the inmates of the colleges round, and of the scholars
walking the streets, wear the clerical tonsure, many scores have the
coronal tonsure of the friar--yet the feeling in the air is secular.
Cambridge has always suggested a certain detachment; neither
zeal--perfervid or sour--nor the pressure of tradition upon living
thought has had its proper home there. It has not represented monastic
seclusion nor hieratic exclusion, and it did so at this moment of its
history less than ever. The dawn of the coming renascence shone upon the
walls at which we have been looking. The modern world has been born of
the birth-pangs which have since convulsed Europe, and the walls which
were then big with the future are now big with the past. But it is the
greatness of Cambridge that amidst the multiple suggestiveness of its
ancient halls of learning, tyranny of the past has no place. About it
the dawn of the renascence still lingers; and the early morning light
which presided at its birth still defines the shadows and seems to
temper the noon-day heat, as light and shade alternate in its history.
[Sidenote: Chaucer at Cambridge.]
We have taken it for granted that Chaucer was walking the streets of
Cambridge with us. We have no direct evidence as to where Chaucer
studied; but our indirect evidence is sufficient. In the “Canterbury
Tales” Chaucer introduces us to two Cambridge scholars and to a clerk of
Oxenforde; and if one considers what would nowadays be called the
internal evidence of the _Reeve’s Tale_ it is difficult to resist the
conclusion that Chaucer was at Cambridge. How else should he know
Trumpington so well? Its brook, its bridge, its mill, its fen? He knows
about the “gret colledge” which had risen a few years previously; he
knows that its Master is called “the warden,” that its scholars are also
its “fellaws.” He has learnt there the dialect of Yorkshiremen, and
reproduces not only their turns of speech but characteristic terms--as
_bete_, _kime_, _jossa_--in the East Anglian dialect. If we turn to the
_Miller’s Tale_ all this local colouring is to seek. A “clerke of
Oxenforde,” indeed, was no unfamiliar figure in the xiv century,
especially to a Londoner. Familiarity with the aspect of Cambridge and
its neighbourhood was a very different matter.
Chaucer was probably himself of East Anglian origin. His grandfather
Robert and John his father were both of Ipswich and London, and when he
was kidnapped by his mother’s family “Thomas Stace of Ipswich” is the
kidnapper. There are two events of his young life known to us, and both
suggest that he was at Cambridge. One of these we hear about from his
evidence in the famous Scrope and Grosvenor suit in 1386. An upstart
knight--Sir Robert Grosvenor--whose name Chaucer had never heard before,
had displayed the arms of the Scropes, and Chaucer testifies in the
Court of Chivalry action which ensues that he had often seen Henry le
Scrope use the proud armorials “azure, a bend or” in the French wars
where they had been companions in arms twenty-seven years before (1359).
Now this great Yorkshire family were connected with Cambridge from
Chaucer’s time: Richard le Scrope, the son of his old comrade, was
chancellor of the university in 1378.[165] Two members of the same
family were chancellors in the next century, and the intermarriage of
the Scropes with the Gonvilles is recorded there to this day in Scrope
or “Scroope Terrace.”[166] Is it not probable that Geoffrey Chaucer knew
Henry Scrope at Cambridge and formed there the friendship which moved
him to testify in his behalf thirty years later?
This conjecture does not become less probable when we turn to the other
incident in his early life, which came to light in 1866 with a fragment
of the household accounts of the wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence. Here
the name of Geoffrey Chaucer is mentioned (in 1357) as that of a junior
member of her household. His early connexion with the house of Edward is
therefore an historical fact like his later friendship with John of
Gaunt. Now in 1352 Lionel Plantagenet had married Elizabeth de Burgh the
grand-daughter and namesake of the founder of Clare Hall Cambridge. The
“gret colledge” about which Chaucer tells us in the _Reeves Tale_ is
called “Soler Hall” and “Soler Hall,” so Caius records, was the ancient
name for Clare. Remembering, however, the incomplete condition of Clare
and of other foundations at this date the present writer supposes the
“gret colledge” to have been King’s Hall, the first imposing
architectural undertaking in the university and the building which must
_par excellence_ have attracted attention in the middle of the xiv
century.[167] It may also have been Chaucer’s own college, and in this
connexion it is worthy of notice that with the exception of the
half-dozen “minor scholars” at Pembroke, King’s Hall was at this time
the only college which educated lads in their teens.
Assuming the year of the poet’s birth to have been 1340 he would have
been going to the university, according to the custom of those days,
about the year 1353, and his place in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household was
probably already assured him when he went to Cambridge.[168] He was back
in her service in his seventeenth year and therefore could not have had
time to study at both universities: and we may add to this that although
his general knowledge, which he had no time to acquire in later life,
suggests that he received a university education, there is not a tittle
of evidence to support the idea that Chaucer went to Oxford.
One more conjecture: had he got his information about prioress’s French
from the religious of the convent of S. Leonard of Stratford-atte-Bowe
whom we find owning land in Cambridge from the days of Edward I.?
[Sidenote: The Schools.
The High Street and School Street.]
It is to this period of the history of Cambridge that the first
university buildings as distinguished from collegiate buildings belong.
During the chancellorship of Robert Thorpe, Knight, Master of Pembroke
(1347-64) and Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, afterwards
Chancellor of England, the “schools quadrangle” was projected in that
street of colleges, unrivalled in Europe, which prolonging the
Trumpington Road as King’s Parade or Trinity Street or S. John’s Street
was anciently known as the “School street” of the university. It was
also the high street of the Saxon town of which S. Benet’s tower was the
nucleus, but whether the original Saxon town lay on this side of the
river, or whether, as frequently happened in the xi century, the Saxon
population retreated here leaving the Castle district to their Norman
conquerors, we have no means of determining.[169]
There were, then, no public buildings up to the xiv century. The
Greyfriars or the Austinfriars gave hospitality to the university on
public occasions, and the only brick and mortar evidence of a university
lay in the hostels and colleges. The “Schools” now erected were halls
for lecturing and scholastic disputations; the north, west, and east
sides were completed by the middle of the next century, the south side
being added in accordance with a decision taken in 1457 to build “a
_new_ school of philosophy and civil law, or a library.”[170] This was
erected on university ground (on the south) next to the school of canon
law (west). Over this last was the original library room (the “west
room” 1457) and “a chapel of exceeding great beauty.” The quadrangle
contained the Divinity school (north) with the Regent and non-regent
houses; opposite was the Sophisters’ school with the _libraria communis_
or _magna_; on the entrance side were the Chancellor’s (Rotherham’s)
Library, Consistory court and Court of the Proctors and Taxors; and
facing this the Bachelors’ school and the school of Medicine and Law;
the old “west room” having been converted into a school, by grace of the
Senate, in 1547.[171]
[Sidenote: The university library.]
The schools remained untouched till the opening years of the xviii
century when the Regent House was pulled down to build the present
university library. This is the oldest of the three great English
libraries, and stands on ground which has always been university
property. The early xv century library which was lodged in the Schools
quadrangle originated in gifts of single volumes by private donors until
52 had been collected; and books which were bequeathed in 1424 are still
preserved. Fifty years later (1473) the proctors Ralph Sanger and
Richard Tokerham made a catalogue of 330 books.[172] Rotherham
Archbishop of York next presented 200 tomes, and Tunstall Bishop of
Durham was another donor: many of these last gifts
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF KING’S COLLEGE, KING’S PARADE
This is one of the most picturesque views in Cambridge. On the right are
the Gateway and Screen and other portions of King’s College; on the left
are some ancient houses.]
were “embezzled” by “pilferers” before the middle of the xvi
century,[173] and the libraries of three successive Cambridge
archbishops of Canterbury, Parker, Grindal, and Bancroft, formed the
chief treasure of the university until 1715 when George I. purchased and
presented the library of Moore Bishop of Ely which is the nucleus of the
modern collection.[174]
There are 400,000 volumes on open shelves among which the student can
wander at will and get his own books without applying to the library
officials; a convenience which Lord Acton, the late Professor of Modern
History, used to say made this the only serviceable library in Europe.
Another privilege, which is possessed by all masters of arts, is that
books may be taken home. Undergraduates, if in academic dress, have also
free access. The university library is one of the three copyright
libraries in England.[175]
[Sidenote: The Pitt Press.]
A printing press was set up at Cambridge, early in the xvi century, by
Siberch who said of himself that he was the first in England to print
Greek--7 small volumes in the Greek character were printed by him at the
university. Carter, however, tells us that an Italian Franciscan,
William of Savona, printed a book at Cambridge in 1478, four years after
Caxton had printed the first book in England. Lord Coke pointed out
that this university enjoyed before Oxford the privilege of printing
_omnes et omnigenas libros_, “all and every kind of book” (1534). This
included the right to appoint 3 stationers or printers.
Siberch’s printing place was on the present site of Caius. In 1655 the
university obtained from Queens’ College a lease of the ground at the
corner of Silver street and Queens’ lane--the historic Mill street
district--now the site of the lodge and garden of S. Catherine’s. In
1804 the present site was obtained for the university press, with a
further “messuage fronting upon Trumpington street and Mill lane”; the
remaining properties in Trumpington street, between Silver street and
Mill street, being bought in 1831-3. The Pitt Press, a church-like
structure, stands opposite to Pembroke (Pitt’s) College, and owes its
name to the fact that the surplus funds of the Pitt monument in
Westminster abbey were a donation to the university towards defraying
the cost. The building also contains the offices of the university
Registrary.[176]
The Senate House was not founded till 1722, and lies on the north of the
library.[177]
[Sidenote: King’s College. A. D. 1441.]
Ninety years passed after the building of Corpus before Henry VI.
founded King’s College, and Margaret of Anjou, his consort, founded
[Illustration:
KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL AND THE ENTRANCE COURT, FROM THE FELLOWS’
BUILDINGS
A portion of the Chapel is seen on the left of the picture with Great
St. Mary’s tower in the distance. The Screen and Gate are on the
right.]
Queens’. It was in 1443 that the charter of the double foundation of
Eton at Windsor and King’s College at Cambridge was signed--the one “our
royal college of S. Mary of Eton,” the other “our royal college of S.
Mary and S. Nicholas”; for Henry dedicated his college to his patron
saint Nicholas “of Bari” the patron of scholars. The king laid the
foundation stone himself (p. 112) in the presence of John Langton
chancellor of the university, the keeper of the Privy Seal, the
chancellor of the Exchequer, and the bishops of Lincoln and
Salisbury.[178] The king’s father had intended to build a college at
Oxford; Henry VI. carried out his intention in endowing a college but
decided that the university should be Cambridge. A small college called
God’s House which had just been founded,[179] together with Mill Street
(acquired in 1445) and Augustine’s hostel (in 1449) and the church of S.
John Zachary, were pulled down to clear a space: but the original plan
for the college was never carried out, and the buildings we now see were
erected in the first quarter of the xviiith and in the xixth
centuries.[180]
[Sidenote: The chapel.]
The only portion of the original plan executed was the chapel. The
importance of King’s College chapel is not only architectural; is due
not only to the fact that it was begun before the Italian classical
revival as a monument of English Gothic, and completed in the full blaze
of the renascence, but that it marks a chapter in the history of English
religion. The church built for the old worship was consecrated for the
new; the first stone was laid by Henry VI. in the presence of great
catholic prelates, the oaken screen--perhaps the finest woodwork in the
country--bears the monogram of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn[181] twined
with true lovers’ knots. In the third place “this immense and
[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL AND THE FELLOWS’ BUILDINGS
The South door of the Chapel is seen to the right in the picture, and
the Fellows’ Buildings, constructed in 1723, are on the left. The
Fountain with a statue of the founder, Henry the Sixth, was designed by
H. A. Armstead, R. A.]
glorious work of fine intelligence,” as Wordsworth calls it, remains one
of the very finest monuments of Perpendicular architecture; and that
beautiful English feature the fan-vaulting, which is to be seen in the
Tudor chapel at the Guildhall, in Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster,
and at S. David’s (now ruinous), is here carried out over a larger area
than anywhere else.[182]
That branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die--
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.
So writes Wordsworth; and the stained glass windows, the most ‘complete
and magnificent series’ in the country says Carter, probably inspired
Milton’s
--storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full voic’d quire below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.
On the death of the Lancastrian monarch, Edward IV. sequestrated the
building funds, but returned a thousand pounds later, and Richard III.
contributed £700; but it is Henry VII. who brought the work to
completion.
King’s is the only college in the university which receives only those
students who intend to read for honours, and until 1857 its members
could claim the _B.A._ degree without presenting themselves for
examination.[183] The college was, almost immediately upon its
foundation, exempted not only from archiepiscopal and episcopal control
but also from the general jurisdiction
[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL INTERIOR FROM THE CHOIR]
of the university. It was endowed for the accommodation of a Provost, 70
poor scholars, 10 secular priests, 16 choristers, and 6 clerks--a total
of 103. Eton was designed for 132 inmates.[184] 24 of the 48
scholarships of King’s are now open. Each of these scholarships is of
the annual value of £80. There are also 46 fellowships. The most
celebrated Etonians have not however been educated at King’s, among
whose eminent sons have been Croke, Cheke (of S. John’s) Provost,
Woodlark the founder of S. Catherine’s, third Provost of the college and
also its benefactor, Sir John Harrington, Robert and Horace Walpole, Sir
Francis Walsingham, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Conisby, Haddon, Giles
Fletcher, Waller, Fleetwood, Oughtred an Etonian on the first
foundation, Whichcote (of Emmanuel) Provost, Upton, Cole, and Charles
Simeon who was a life fellow. Nicholas Close (1551) and Aldrich (1537)
both bishops of Carlisle, the former one of the original six fellows,
the latter the intimate of Erasmus, Rotherham of York (1467) a fellow
and a donor to the chapel fund, Fox of Hereford (1535), William and
George Day bishops of Winchester and Chichester, one provost of Eton the
other of King’s, Wickham of Lincoln and Winchester,[185] Nicholas West
(Bishop of Ely 1515) the friend of Fisher and More and Richard Cox
(1559) both scholars of the college, Oliver King of Exeter, then of Bath
and Wells (1492), Alley of Exeter, Guest of Rochester and Salisbury
(1559), Goodrich of Ely (1534), Pearson, and Sumner, are among its
prelates. Henry and Charles Brandon, heirs of their father the Duke of
Suffolk, and nephews of Henry VIII. and both proficient scholars, died
of the sweating sickness while in residence here in the reign of Edward
VI. Cardinal Beaufort was a princely benefactor to the college, and John
Somerset, physician to Henry VI., who came to Cambridge as an Oxford
sophister and here graduated, was one of the chief instruments in its
foundation, and drew up its statutes.[186]
The college has produced several great schoolmasters, and is now
gradually acquiring a reputation for historical studies, about one third
of the students being history men. The dedication to S. Nicholas is only
retained in formal descriptions: _King’s College_ has been by common
consent regarded as the fitting title for this truly royal foundation,
and it recalls that still older King’s Hall which is now merged in
Trinity.[187]
[Illustration: THE HALL OF KING’S COLLEGE
This was built by Wilkins 1824-28. On the walls are several portraits by
Sir Hubert Herkomer, R.A.]
[Sidenote: The Cambridge College chapels.]
The importance of King’s College chapel in university history since the
xv century leads us to consider the rôle played in Cambridge by
collegiate chapels. Every college chapel, and every church which has an
historical connexion with the university, has served--as all early
Christian edifices have served--other purposes than those of religious
worship. What we have to remark in Cambridge is that this ancient custom
continued there longer than elsewhere. The “Commencements” which took
place later in the Senate House used to be held, as we have seen, in the
famous church of the Greyfriars or in that of the Austinfriars. The
University church--Great S. Mary’s--was used by the university for its
assemblies in the xiii century and was the scene of all great civic
functions; disputations were held in it on Elizabeth’s visit in 1564.
The college chapels were everywhere used for the transaction of
important business; the Provost of King’s and other Masters are still
elected in the chapel, documents are still sealed in the chapel of
King’s and Trinity, and the Thurston speech is still pronounced in the
chapel of Caius. The choir of King’s was used for degree examinations as
late as 1851, and declamations are even now held in the chapel at
Trinity. Indeed the “exercises of learning” “used” in the chapels was
the reason given by the Corpus men to Lord Bacon’s father when asking
for a church to themselves; and Queen Elizabeth witnessed the
_Aulularia_ of Plautus in King’s chapel on Sunday August 6th 1564, as
the abbess and her nuns had assembled for Hrostwitha’s play in the abbey
church of Gandersheim six hundred years earlier. The building of
colleges adjoining a parish church is a feature peculiar to Cambridge.
Merton is the one exception at Oxford, and Pembroke is, as we have seen,
the only early exception to this rule at Cambridge.[188]
List of pre-reformation colleges built with chapels:--
1. Pembroke 1355-63 (the existing chapel is xvii c.)
2. King’s 1446-1536 (the existing chapel).
3. Queens’ 1448 (defaced at the reformation and restored. But a xix
c. chapel is now used).
4. Jesus 1495 (The then existing xii c. monastic chapel was rebuilt
by the founder.)
5. S. Catherine’s 1475 (the existing chapel is xvii c.)
6. Magdalene 1483 (completely restored in the middle of the xix c.)
Existing pre-reformation chapels:--
King’s xv c.
Queens’ xv c. (restored).
Jesus xv c.
Trinity Hall xv c.
Magdalene (restored) xv c.
Colleges built without chapels and with (generally) post-reformation
chapels:--
1. Peterhouse (xvii c.){188a}
2. Michaelhouse (none).
3. King’s Hall (chapel built temp. Edw. IV., and Ric. III. The site
of the present chapel of Trinity College).
4. Clare (1535. The existing chapel is 1764).{188b}
5. Gonville.{188c}
6. Trinity Hall 1474.
7. Corpus 1500, and 1579 (the existing chapel is on the site of the
latter, and was erected 1823).
Existing xvi c. chapels:--
Christ’s 1505 (the original chapel, but defaced); Trinity,
completed 1564-7.
At Caius, the present chapel is on the site of the xvi c. chapel;
and at S. John’s a xix c. structure replaces the xvi c. one, near
the same site.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE GATEWAY, QUEENS’ COLLEGE
This old gateway forms the principal entrance to the College from
Queens’ Lane.]
The oldest ecclesiastical site and building incorporated with a
Cambridge college is therefore the chapel of Jesus (but cf. S. John’s p.
126); the site of the earliest college chapel is at Pembroke--but it is
a site merely; the oldest existing college chapel is King’s.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Queens’ College. A.D. 1448.]
The charter for the foundation of Queens’ College is dated 15 April
1448, but by this date its north and east ranges were already built.
Queen Margaret of Anjou had been so impressed with the beauty and
majesty of the plans for King’s College that she could find no rest till
she had projected her own foundation--Queens’; to endow and perfect
which she set to work with holy emulation; dedicating it in her turn to
her patron saint, Margaret the legendary Virgin and Martyr whose body is
shown at Montefiascone, and to Bernard of Citeaux. Two years previously
the principal of S. Bernard’s hostel had founded a college of S.
Bernard, the site of which he changed in 1447 to the present site of
Queens’. This formed the moral nucleus of the queens’ college; but she
obtained the larger part of the ground, near King’s, from the
Carmelites. This is one of the three colleges in Cambridge built of red
brick, S. John’s and S. Catherine’s being the others. The Queens’
quadrangle is, as Messieurs Willis and Clark tell us, the earliest now
remaining which claims attention for its architectural beauty. It is 99
feet east and west by 84 north and south.[189] The plan is not only a
very perfect example of college architecture, but is a model of the xv
century English manor-house, of the type of Haddon Hall;[190] so that
Queens’ College is as homogeneous a structure as King’s is
heterogeneous. The hall is on the west, adjoining it is the combination
room, above, the President’s lodging with a bedchamber over it. The
north side is kept for the chapel and for the library which is on the
first floor. The chambers are on the east and south sides, the gateway
being in the former. As in other colleges the passage to the grounds
(or, as in this case, to the second court) is between the hall and the
butteries. The west side of the quadrangle which was gradually
cloistered forms the east side of the second court, and is washed by the
Cam. The beautiful gallery on the north has formed part of the lodge
since the xvi century,[191] and connects the old
[Illustration: AN OLD COURT IN QUEENS’ COLLEGE
This is the Cloister Court. In the quaint sixteenth century buildings on
the left is the Gallery, and facing the spectator is the doorway into
the First Court. The Hall is seen on the right of this doorway.]
president’s lodging with a set of rooms on the west side, among which is
the audit room now used as a dining room.
Queens’, like King’s, was originally built with a chapel, and in both
instances the foundation stone of the chapel was that of the college. A
new chapel and buildings now lie beyond the President’s garden on the
north. There is a small court on the south of the cloister court which
contains the rooms occupied by Erasmus, overhanging the college kitchen.
Besides Erasmus, who lived here for at least four years, Fisher was
there as President of the college until 1508, and Old Fuller was another
of its worthies. Henry Bullock, the opposer of Protestantism and friend
of Erasmus, was a fellow, so was Sir T. Smith; Bishop Pearson[192] and
Ockley _alumni_. Henry Hastings Earl of Huntingdon, whose portrait hangs
in the audit room, Manners Earl of Rutland, George Duke of Clarence,
Cecilia Duchess of York, and Maud Countess of Oxford, were among its
benefactors. But its chief benefactor was Andrew Doket, a friar (of what
order is not known) and its first President, who saved the fortunes of
the college after the fall of the House of Lancaster.[193] The picture
of principal interest is also to be found in the lodge--Holbein’s
portrait of Erasmus which was painted during a visit made at the
scholar’s request to England.
The college was originally endowed for a president and 4 fellows, and
their principal study was to be theology. There are now 11 fellowships,
and about 18 scholarships which vary in value from £30 to £60.
Queens’ College is a monument of peace. The Yorkist queen Elizabeth
Woodville continued Margaret of Anjou’s work, and the two queens are the
co-founders of the college. It is Elizabeth Woodville whose portrait
looks down upon us in the hall, and it was she who changed Queen
Margaret’s dedication and called their joint work Queens’ College.[194]
It is also a monument to the unambitious but well-defined revival of
learning that marked the reign of Edward IV., of which Woodville Earl
Rivers, the queen’s brother, Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, and Caxton
himself are the representatives.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Kingly visitors to the university.]
Both King’s and Queens’ Colleges have offered hospitality on several
occasions to English sovereigns. Henry VI. came to lay the foundation
stone of King’s in 1441 and was at King’s Hall in 1445-6 (when he laid
the foundation stone of his second college?), in 1448-9 and in
1452-3.[195] Edward IV. visited the university in 1463 and 1476.
[Illustration: QUEENS’ COLLEGE FROM THE RIVER FRONT
On the left is seen the garden front of the President’s Lodge. The
wooden bridge designed by Etheridge (1749) is known as the Mathematical
Bridge. In the distance are the two old mills--the King’s Mill and the
Bishop’s Mill.]
Henry VII. paid five visits to Cambridge and stayed at Queens’ in 1498
and again in 1506 when he occupied a chamber near the audit room. It was
on this occasion that he attended the service for the eve of S. George’s
day in King’s College chapel clad in the robes of the Garter. Henry
VIII. was by his father’s side during this visit, and came again in
1522. Mary came as far as Sir Robert Huddleston’s when Jane Grey was
proclaimed. Elizabeth was entertained in the Provost’s lodge of King’s,
and it was when repairing to her rooms there after the solemn service in
the chapel that she thanked God “that had sent her to this university
where she was so received as she thought she could not be better.” James
I. visited Cambridge twice in 1615 and was again at Trinity College in
1623 and 1624; Charles I. (who had been Nevile’s guest in 1613) was
entertained there in 1632 and 1642; and Charles II. in the long gallery
at S. John’s in 1681. Anne was there in 1705, George I. in 1717, and
George II. in 1728. Queen Victoria came in 1843 and again in 1847 when
the Prince Consort was installed as Chancellor; and Edward VII. visited
the university in February 1904.
John had been in Cambridge the month before his death, September 1216;
Henry III. was there in the second year of his reign (1218); Edward I.
was there as Prince of Wales in 1270, and lodged again in the castle in
1294. Edward II. was the guest of Barnwell priory in 1326. Edward III.
was there in September 1328. Richard II. was also lodged at Barnwell in
1388.
The Conqueror had been at Cambridge in 1070.
Matilda is the first queen-consort whom we can picture visiting the
university town; Eleanor of Castile was frequently at Walsingham with
Edward,[196] and she gave as we shall see a “chest” to the university.
Margaret of Anjou was never there, but Elizabeth Woodville came in 1468.
The mother of Henry VII. also came to see her college in 1505 and again
with the king in 1506. Elizabeth of York accompanied Henry VII. in 1498;
Catherine of Aragon slept at Queens’ in 1519; and Henrietta Maria was
with the king in 1631-2.
* * * * *
The erection of King’s and Queens’ Colleges opened a period of college
building which lasted sixty years, and closed with the foundation of S.
John’s (in 1509).
[Sidenote: S. Catherine’s College, 1473.]
In 1473 Robert Woodlark chancellor of the university and third provost
of King’s, and one of the original scholars of that foundation, built a
small college dedicated to the Glorious Virgin Martyr S. Catherine of
Alexandria, with the object of extending “the usefulness of Church
preaching, and the study of theology, philosophy, and other arts within
the Church of England.” The present red brick structure was erected two
hundred years later, this being the only college except Clare which has
been entirely rebuilt since its foundation. S. Catherine’s, or “Cat’s”
as the
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF ST. CATHERINE’S COLLEGE
This is a view of the old Renaissance Gateway (1679), being the entrance
to the College from Queens’ Lane.] undergraduate familiarly calls it,
is remarkable for the number of bishops it has educated, among whom were
Archbishop Sandys, May of Carlisle, Brownrigg of Exeter, all of whom
were Masters of the college, as was Overall of Norwich who migrated from
S. John’s: John Lightfoot, the orientalist, was its 16th Master, and
Strype (who came here from Jesus), James Shirley the last of the
dramatists,[197] Ray the naturalist, and Addenbrooke the founder of the
well known hospital of that name at Cambridge, were also educated here.
The hall[198] was founded for a master and 3 fellows, and now maintains
6 fellows and 26 scholars.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Jesus College 1495.]
The next college is a solitary instance of the adaptation of monastic
architecture to collegiate purposes in Cambridge. Alcock Bishop of Ely
and joint lord chancellor with Rotherham obtained from Alexander VI.
(1496/7) the dissolution of the ancient Benedictine nunnery of S.
Rhadegund, and founded there a college which he dedicated to the
_Blessed Virgin Mary, S. John Evangelist, and the glorious Virgin S.
Rhadegund_. Its name of Jesus College records the growing cult of the
name of Jesus, and the substitution was approved by the founder
himself.[199]
If at Queens’ we are in a xv century manor-house, at Jesus we are in a
monastery; and might well imagine ourselves for a moment back in one of
the busiest centres of old Cambridge if we pace the cloisters just
before hall time when the stir is suggestive of the life of a great
monastery. Even the legend “Song Room” over a doorway falls in with the
illusion. James I. said that if he lived in the university he would pray
at King’s, eat at Trinity, and study and sleep at Jesus.
The chapel is the original conventual church[200] as rebuilt by Alcock.
It contains xii century work, and represents the transition from Norman
to Early English. The character of the college has been consistently
evangelical in spite of the fact that Bancroft the Laudian archbishop
before Laud, was here, and that he migrated here from Christ’s on
account of the latter’s reputation for Puritanism. Cranmer was scholar,
and fellow until his marriage, and was readmitted fellow when his wife
died a year later. Archbishops Bancroft and Sterne, Laurence Sterne,
Bale Bishop of Ossory, Strype, Fulke Greville, Fenton, Fawkes (the
poet), Hartley, and S. T. Coleridge were members. The college which was
founded for 6 fellows and 6 scholars, now maintains 16 fellows and some
20 scholars. The statutes
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF JESUS COLLEGE]
were indited by James Stanley Bishop of Ely, stepson of Lady Margaret,
and modified by his successor Nicholas West. Jesus College scholars were
commended by the founder to the perpetual tutelage of the bishops of
Ely, who when they lie there are said to lie in their own house.[201]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Christ’s College A.D. 1505.]
Ten years later a most interesting foundation was made. A college called
God’s House had, as we have seen, been founded in the reign of Henry VI.
and was appropriated by that monarch as part of the site of King’s
College. The foundation was a far-off echo of the plague in the previous
century, and when the king took possession of the site he appears to
have intended to endow a considerable college in its place in the parish
of S. Andrew where he erected another God’s House.[202] It was this
design, left unfulfilled (for the house only supported four of the
sixty scholars whom Henry VI. had himself proposed to maintain there)
that John Fisher, chancellor of the university and Bishop of Rochester,
brought to the notice of Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of the first
Duke of Somerset, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the wife of Edmund
Tudor and mother of Henry VII.; and on the site of God’s House she
erected her own Christ’s College, and made John Sickling its Proctor
first Master. The quadrangle was encased in stone in the xviii century,
but the gateway with its statue and armorials of the founder, and the
oriel over the entrance to the Master’s lodge recall the founder’s time.
Facing the gateway are the hall, the old combination room, and the
lodge, and above were a set of rooms reserved for the founder’s own use;
a turret staircase led therefrom to both hall and garden, as was the
custom in a master’s lodge. On the east of this “Tree court” is a
building in the renascence style, thought to be one of the finest
examples in England, and to have been the work of Inigo Jones (1642).
The gold plate of the college was a bequest of Lady Margaret’s and there
is none finer in the university. Christ’s is also noted for its gardens.
No college has been richer in great men. Milton was here for seven
years, Henry More the Platonist, Latimer the scholar-bishop and martyr,
Leland the antiquary, Nicholas Saunderson, Paley of the “Evidences,”
Archbishops Grindal and Bancroft, Bishop Porteous,
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY OF CHRIST’S COLLEGE FROM ST. ANDREW’S STREET
The Gateway is coeval with the founding of the College, and dates from
the first decade of the sixteenth century.]
Sir Walter Mildmay,[203] Charles Darwin, and Sir John Seeley. Lightfoot
the great Hebraist of his century, and Cudworth, were both Masters in
the xvii century; and in the previous century Exmew the Carthusian
martyr (1535) and Richard Hall (afterwards Canon of Cambray), Fisher’s
biographer, were inmates. Here Milton wrote his hymn on the Nativity,
and here he formed his friendship with Edward King--fellow of the
college--in whose memory _Lycidas_ was written.
The college was endowed for 12 fellows at least, half of whom were to
hail from those northern counties in which both Lady Margaret and Fisher
were interested; the total endowment was for 60 persons. There are now
15 fellowships, 30 scholarships (£30 to £70) and some 4 sizarships of
the value of £50 a year.[204]
Grammar, the original study of God’s House,[205] and arts were to be
studied in addition to theology, but excluding law and medicine; and for
the first time in college statutes lectures on the classical orators and
poets are provided for, an attention to polite letters for their own
sake which is supposed to have been due to the influence of Erasmus.
[Sidenote: The Lady Margaret.]
The Lady Margaret, for with this title alone her memory is preserved at
both universities, has, perhaps, no rival in Cambridge as both an
interesting and an important figure in its history. She appears to have
been one of the first in that age to understand that the university was
to replace the monastery as the channel of English learning, and to
endow colleges rather than religious houses. The two splendid
foundations which owe their existence to her bear upon them a stronger
personal impress than others. Alone of non-resident founders she
retained for her own use a lodge in the college she founded. An anecdote
when she was staying at Christ’s, preserved for us by Fuller, comes
across the centuries vivid with her personality. There is no episode in
any university to compare with the scholastic partnership of Lady
Margaret and Bishop Fisher, her chaplain, perpetual chancellor of the
university, and Master of Michaelhouse. Both were in their measure
“reformers before the reformation,” both joined to the spirit of piety
an abounding appreciation of the spirit of knowledge. At Cambridge and
Oxford she founded those readerships in theology known as the Lady
Margaret Professorships, and at Cambridge she instituted the Lady
Margaret preachership. She died on 29 June 1509, and Erasmus wrote her
epitaph in Westminster Abbey.[206]
[Sidenote: Cardinal Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and perpetual
chancellor of the university.]
Fisher lived many years after her, and completed the foundation of S.
John’s. He pronounced that discourse at her obsequies which is our chief
source of information about her.[207] Fisher was imprisoned, like Thomas
More, for refusing to admit the
[Illustration: THE FELLOWS’ BUILDING IN CHRIST’S COLLEGE
This building is in the Second Court. The design is attributed to Inigo
Jones. Through it we pass into the Fellows’ Garden, where we shall find
the famous mulberry tree sacred to Milton.]
royal supremacy in things ecclesiastical; covered with rags, and worn
with neglect and ill-treatment, but consoled by a filial and courageous
letter from his sons at S. John’s, he was led out to die on June 22,
1534, the New Testament in his hand open at the words: “This is eternal
life, to know Thee the only true God.” He stands alone among the bishops
of England to give his life for the principle for which the layman
Thomas More laid down his. Pole in a letter to Charles V. narrates that
Henry VIII. had said he supposed “that I” (Pole) “had never in all my
travels met one who in letters and virtue could be compared to the
Bishop of Rochester.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: S. John’s College, A.D. 1509.]
We next come to the most splendid foundation hitherto realised at
Cambridge. The site chosen for a college which held its place through
the xvi century as the first and most brilliant society in the
university, could not have been more appropriate. It was that of S.
John’s Hospital, the first home of Cambridge students, the nucleus of
the university, erected soon after the Conquest in the heart of the
Norman town, and whence the first endowed scholars in christendom set
forth to found a college.[208]
The whole history of the university is epitomised in the street which
has S. John’s at one end of it and Peterhouse at the other: the bishops
of Ely have firm hold of either end, and lying against S. John’s is that
Pythagoras House which Merton bought from the Dunnings when he was
planning his famous foundation in the xiii century. We have seen that it
was at S. John’s Hospital that Balsham introduced secular scholars in
the same century, who should become _unum corpus et unum collegium_ with
the canons. The experiment did not succeed, and the canons saw the
scholars depart with great relief to the other end of what was to prove
the great street of colleges, whose limits were determined by this early
conflict between seculars and religious.
In what year the Ely scholars were settled at S. John’s remains
uncertain, although there is no more important date in Cambridge
history. Simon Montacute, Bishop of Ely, “who knew very well” as the
historian of S. John’s observes, says that the scholars had continued
there _per longa tempora_, and Baker
[Illustration: MILTON’S MULBERRY TREE IN THE FELLOWS’ GARDEN, CHRIST’S
COLLEGE
King James I. is said to have introduced the culture of the mulberry
tree, and it is probable that the one in this garden is the last
survivor of a number bought in 1609. Milton was admitted to this College
in 1625.]
considers that in no construction of words can this be understood
otherwise than as referring to the beginning of Hugh Balsham’s prelacy
at Ely.[209] The licence permitting the seculars to be engrafted on the
old stock with their own endowment, is dated the ninth year of Edward I.
(1280)[210] and the transference to Peterhouse took place three years
after; but the date of the royal licence is no proof that the work to
which it refers was initiated rather than completed and crowned in that
year; Margaret of Anjou, for example, obtained her licence when three
sides of the quadrangle at Queens’ were nearing completion.[211] In any
case the few months intervening between December 23, 1280 and the
decision to remove to Peterhouse could not be described as a “long
time,” and as Balsham had become bishop of the diocese in 1257 it is
most probable that he at once set about what it must certainly be
supposed he had at heart while still subprior of Ely.
With S. John’s we have the first of the large colleges. Henceforth
Trinity and John’s are “the big colleges” the others are “the 14 small
colleges.” It now consists of four large courts, three of which are of
brickwork. The first court was erected between 1509-1616 on the pattern
of the quadrangle at Christ’s. The founder’s grandson Henry VIII., whose
coronation she lived to witness, not only sequestrated a large part of
the funds she had destined for the building, but fifteen years later
beheaded Fisher her executor. The latter himself subscribed to the fund
and was able before he died to erect a college for a Master and 21
fellows--the original design being for 50 fellows. But what thus fell
short of the spirit of the earlier design has since been amply repaired,
and a series of benefactors have made the college one of the most useful
in England, with that large influence on the nation and large power of
helping poorer students which its founders had so greatly at heart.
The Second Court was built chiefly at the expense of Mary Countess of
Shrewsbury in 1595-1620. The Third Court was begun in 1623, with funds
provided by Williams then Bishop of Lincoln, and finished by benefactors
some of whom remained anonymous. The last Court was built in 1826 and is
joined to the college by the “Bridge of Sighs.” Beyond this is the
beautiful “wilderness” commemorated by Wordsworth.
---- Scarcely Spenser’s self
Could have more tranquil visions in his youth
he tells us, than he had had loitering in Cambridge nights under a
“fairy work of earth,” a certain lovely ash, wreathed in ivy. This is
the site of the infirmary of the canons, the only portion of whose
Hospital to be preserved was adapted as a college infirmary and was at
the north side of the First Court: it was destroyed in 1863 when the
present large chapel was built, which is the work of Gilbert Scott, and
is 193 feet long. The large hall
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY AND TOWER OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
The Kirke White memorial is seen in the foreground, and behind it are
the Divinity Schools; to the left is the Gateway of St. John’s, with the
Tower behind it. The enclosed space in the foreground was formerly the
site of All Saints’ Church, pulled down in 1865.]
measures 108 feet, and the portrait of Lady Margaret presides over the
high table. The new combination room, which is now entered from the
second court, was built in 1864, and is 93 feet long. The west side of
the Third Court is cloistered, and from here leads the covered bridge,
called from its resemblance to the bridge at Venice “the Bridge of
Sighs.” The stone bridge near it supplanted the old timber bridge in
1696. As at Queens’, there is a long gallery on the first floor of the
Second Court. Nowhere has the original modest “master’s lodging”
undergone more change than here. The lodging--two rooms over the old
combination room, with an oriel, on the first court--was gradually
extended, again as at Queens’, along the gallery, and ran along part of
the next court. Finally Scott built the present lodge, outside the
courts altogether.
Christ’s and S. John’s are both profusely ornamented with the Tudor and
Beaufort badges of the founder, and with her name-device the
_marguerite_.[212] The ancient gateway has a canopied statue of the
Evangelist. To the north and south of the new chapel porch are statues
of Lady Margaret and of Fisher, and 16 statues of the benefactors and
great members of the college: Mary Cavendish Countess of Shrewsbury,
Sarah Alston Duchess of Somerset, Williams Archbishop of York, and
Linacre who founded the Physics lecture here and at Merton Oxford,
appear among the former. Among the latter are Roger Ascham (fellow)
(those asterisked are effigied); Sir John Cheke (fellow); *Bentley;
*Cecil Lord Burleigh; *Lucius Lord Falkland[213]; Fairfax, the
parliamentary general; *Wentworth Lord Strafford; *Stillingfleet,
*Overall,[214] *Gunning, and Selwyn, prelates; *William Gilbert; *Brook
Taylor the naturalist; *Clarkson the opponent of the slave trade; Cave
the ecclesiastical historian; Metcalfe the most brilliant of its
masters[215]; Matthew Prior, Grindal the classic, Cecil Lord Salisbury,
Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, Kirke White, Rowland Hill, Henry Martyn the
missionary, Horne Tooke, Castlereagh, Palmerston, Wilberforce, Erasmus
Darwin, Colenso, Herschell, Liveing, Adams the discoverer of Neptune,
Benjamin Hall Kennedy, and *Baker the historian of the college. Fisher
arranged a small chapel leading from the college chapel for his own
resting place.[216] The site of S. John’s chapel is as old an
ecclesiastical site as Jesus chapel: the xvi century edifice was
constructed close to the xii century canons’ church, and the fine modern
chapel is on the same site.
The licence for the college dates from 1511; the building was opened in
1516; and the statutes were drawn up by Fisher.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL FROM THE FIRST
COURT
In the corner on the right is seen the Doorway of the Chapel, with the
tower rising above it. On the left is part of the Hall with a fine oriel
window.]
There are now 56 fellowships, 60 foundation scholars each receiving £50
annually, and 9 sizars £35 annually.
* * * * *
The next college which claims our attention must rank among the more
interesting foundations on account of its origin rather than of its
subsequent history.
[Sidenote: Magdalene College, A.D. 1542.]
Near S. John’s Hospital there was a site traditionally connected with
the lectures of Abbot Joffred’s monks in 1109, and which in fact was
afterwards Crowland Abbey property. When a monastic order possessed no
convent in a university town, the monks were obliged to reside in
lodgings, and this led, as we have already seen (i. p. 49) to the
foundation of monastic hostels for their reception. There were two such
hostels at Cambridge--Ely hostel and Monks’ hostel. Ely hostel was the
direct outcome of Benedict XII.’s Constitution in 1337[217] which
reconfirmed an earlier injunction of Honorius III. 1216-27 requiring the
Benedictines and Augustinians to send students in rotation from the
monastery to the university, and provided that monks should live at the
universities under a prior of Benedictines. It was purchased in 1340 (or
earlier) by John de Crawden prior of Ely for the Ely monks and was made
over to Bateman Bishop of Norwich seven years later for his foundation
of Trinity Hall.
Ely then had been the pioneer in providing this accommodation, which
served for Ely monks alone, and which, as we see, was speedily
abolished. Those few Houses which still elected to send their monks to
Cambridge[218] maintained them there thenceforth under the care of “the
prior of students”; and it was owing to the energy of one of these
Cambridge priors that Monks’ hostel was projected in 1428, at a time
when, as is then stated, no house existed for Crowland or other
Benedictine monks, and the religious either shared the hostels with
seculars or lived in lodgings in the town. The site for Monks’ hostel
consisted of two messuages granted in that year to the abbot of Crowland
by the Cambridge burgesses. Crowland, Ely, Ramsey, and Walden each built
portions for their own students.[219] Nearly a hundred years later, on
the eve of the Reformation, Edward Stafford Duke of Buckingham refounded
this hostel as Buckingham College. It was not
[Illustration: THE SECOND COURT OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
The doorway on the right leads into the First Court. The Dining Hall is
in the building on the right and the Combination Room on the left of the
picture. In the background is the Chapel Tower with the sunset light
upon it]
completed at the time of his attainder two years afterwards (1521) and
the property escheated in due course as a cell of Crowland Abbey to the
crown.[220]
How soon Monks’ hostel became “the monks’ hostel of Buckingham” is by no
means clear. That the Dukes of Buckingham were early patrons must be
admitted on the evidence; for even if the house was not known as
Buckingham College in 1465, it was known as “the hostel called Bokyngham
college” in 1483 while it was still Crowland property, and both hall and
chapel were probably the gift of “deep revolving, witty Buckingham” the
second Duke Henry.
“I have in this world sustained great damage and injury in serving the
king’s highness, which this grant shall recompense.” So wrote Lord
Chancellor Audley in a letter begging for a share of the plunder when
Henry had determined on the suppression of the monasteries. The share he
wanted and got was Walden Abbey in Essex on the borders of
Cambridgeshire, and here he established himself on the site which his
son was to transform into the mansion of Audley-End. He did more; he
proposed to himself, apparently, some sort of expiation to balance the
“recompense,” and in 1542 changed Buckingham into Magdalene College
which he re-endowed. We have seen that Walden Abbey was itself one of
the builders of Monks’ hostel.
The mastership of the college is in the gift of the owner of Audley-End
(now Lord Braybrooke). Nothing of the xv century building remains. A
window of Pugin’s adorns the chapel[221] replacing the old altar-piece
which is now in the library. The combination room leads from the
musicians’ gallery of the pleasant hall, the only instance of this
arrangement in Cambridge.[222] In the time of Fuller, Magdalene was a
college of reading men: “The scholars of this college, though farthest
from the schools, were in my time the first to be observed there, and to
as good purpose as any.”[223] Twenty years ago it was the fashionable
college, and its members lived in private lodgings, attending neither
hall nor chapel. Magdalene is in the parish of S. Giles, and it has been
conjectured that it occupies the site of the house of the canons of S.
Giles before they removed to Barnwell. There is however no evidence for
this, and there are no documents at Magdalene earlier than Stafford’s
time.[224]
Archbishop Grindal,[225] Robert Rede chief justice in 1509, Cumberland
Bishop of Peterborough, and Kingsley were educated here. So was Pepys,
the diarist, who bequeathed to the college his extraordinary
collection
[Illustration: THE COMBINATION ROOM, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
This Gallery is used by the Fellows and is 93 feet long. It contains
portraits of many College worthies. The approach to it is by a Turret
Staircase in the Second Court. Its panelled walls and rich plaster-work
ceiling make it one of the finest specimens of its kind left in
England.]
of books, engravings, maps, and plans. The Pepysian library is now
preserved in a separate hall, in the donor’s own bookshelves constructed
after a plan of his own. It is by far the most interesting thing in the
college, and would be unique anywhere. It is to be hoped we may soon
have an official catalogue of its contents.
Magdalene is a small college, it has about 40 inmates, of whom 5 are
fellows. In Fuller’s time it held 140 persons, 11 being fellows and 22
scholars, the rest being as usual the college officers, domestics, and
students.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Trinity College A.D. 1546.]
With Trinity College are joined together in indissoluble matrimony the
two great periods of college building, and the culminating point of the
renascence is reached: so that Trinity, alone, represents Cambridge
architecturally and morally in its historical character of a university
of the rebirth from its dawn to its meridian.
[Sidenote: King’s Hall A.D. 1337.]
When Henry VIII., whose effigy adorns the great gate, proposed to make a
vast college on this site, he was proposing to expand the “great
college” built by Edward III. whose effigy graces the older gateway
within the court. Edward II. had maintained thirteen students at
Cambridge as early as 1317 and the number was increased later to
thirty-two: it was however left to his son to carry out the design of a
“House-of-Scholars of the King.”[226] We have already had frequently to
refer to this building, in which new interest has been awakened since
the restoration (in 1904-6) of part of the old Hall lying behind King
Edward’s gateway towards the bowling green, and presenting architectural
features fully justifying its xiv century fame as the most considerable
collegiate enterprise thitherto undertaken. The Hall lay to the north
west of the present quadrangle, covering the space now occupied by the
ante-chapel,[227] Edward’s gate, and the Master’s lodge. The acquisition
of the site affords a most interesting glimpse into contemporary
Cambridge history: for no site represented such various interests and
recalled so many of the great local names. The first plot of ground
obtained was a messuage of Robert de Croyland’s in 1336. Eight years
later Edmund Walsyngham’s house was purchased; the house of Sir John de
Cambridge who was knight of the shire and alderman of the guild of S.
Mary was sold to the college in 1350 by his son Thomas; and the next
year saw the purchase from Thomas son of Sir Constantine de Mortimer, of
a waste parcel of land next the river and S. John’s Hospital, called the
Cornhythe, which abutted on the last named property. Croyland’s and
Walsyngham’s houses were first adapted, and formed a small irregular
quadrangle. Later in the xiv century a new (irregular) court was
constructed on the north of the present chapel. The original entrance
was situated where the sundial now is; here stood the Great Gate, the
present
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY WINDOW, ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, FROM THE BRIDGE
OF SIGHS
From this spot beautiful views are obtained up and down the river.]
Entrance Gate being built as late as 1535 to give King’s Hall a frontage
on the High Street. The Hall rebuilt in the later xiv century and added
to in the xvth was however only the nucleus of Henry VIII.’s college. To
the south west stood Michaelhouse; this too was absorbed in the new
building, and its second dedication to the holy and undivided Trinity
was retained in Henry’s college. Seven other buildings--all university
hostels--were also absorbed--Gregory’s, Crouched, Physwick, S.
Margaret’s, Tyled, Gerard’s, and Oving’s. The present kitchen occupies
part of the site of Michaelhouse; Physwick stood between the Queen’s
Gate and Trinity Street; and the other hostels were grouped round these
in S. Michael’s and King’s Hall Lanes.[228]
The work which had been begun by Lady Margaret at Christ’s and S.
John’s--the final substitution of the college for the monastery
school--was now completed by her grandson, the great despoiler of the
monasteries, who appears to have designed Trinity College as a splendid
atonement for the destruction of so many homes of learning. It was
largely endowed with abbey lands, and Henry’s undeniable interest in
erudition seems to have found its ultimate satisfaction in a foundation
into which there entered every element of that “new learning” which was
humanistic before it was Protestant. That provision was here to be made
for a wider field of knowledge than any hitherto contemplated in or out
of a university, seems amply proved by the words of the founder; who,
after declaring that the college is intended for the “development and
perpetuation of religion” (a well-chosen form of words?), continues
thus: “_for the cultivation of wholesome study in all departments of
learning, knowledge of languages_, the education of youth in piety,
virtue, self-restraint, and knowledge; charity towards the poor, and the
relief of the afflicted and distressed.” The programme was so liberal
that Mary herself endowed the college with monastic property, and
Elizabeth completed the chapel which her sister had begun.
No building, indeed, in either university suggests in the same way and
in the same degree that delightful mental combination of form and space
which is the mark of the “Cambridge mind” in science if it is not so in
literature. As we pass into the great court the buildings we see neither
shut out the light nor hem in the thoughts. The enclosure they suggest
is that formal enclosure of poi
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