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.

[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

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

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

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

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

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