There can be little doubt that the statutes which Bishop Montagu gave to the college represent the wishes of his predecessor, for the Peterhouse statutes are actually modelled on the fourth of the codes of statutes given by Merton to his college, and dated 1274. The formula “ad instar Aulæ de Merton” is a constantly recurring phrase in Montagu’s statutes. The true principle of collegiate endowments could not be more plainly stated, and certainly these statutes may be regarded as the embodiment of the earliest conception of college life and discipline at Cambridge. A master and fourteen perpetual fellows,[27] “studiously engaged in the pursuit of literature,” represent the body supported on the foundation; the “pensioner” of later times being, of course, at this period provided for already by the hostel. In case of a vacancy among the Fellows “the most able bachelor in logic” is designated as the one on whom, cæteris paribus, the election is to fall, the other requirement being that, “so far as human frailty admit, he be honourable, chaste, peaceable, humble, and modest.” “The Scholars of Ely” were bound to devote themselves to the “study of Arts, Aristotle, Canon Law, Theology,” but, as at Merton, the basis of a sound Liberal Education was to be laid before the study of theology was to be entered upon; two were to be admitted to the study of the civil and the canon law, and one to that of medicine. When any Fellow was about to “incept” in any faculty, it devolved upon the master with the rest of the Fellows to inquire in what manner he had conducted himself and gone through his exercises in the schools, how long he had heard lectures in the faculty in which he was about to incept, and whether he had gone through the forms according to the statutes of the university. The sizar of later times is recognised in the provision, that if the funds of the Foundation permit, the master and the two deacons shall select two or three youths, “indigent scholars well grounded in Latin”—juvenes indigentes scholares in grammatica notabiliter fundatos—to be maintained, “as long as may seem fit,” by the college alms, such poor scholars being bound to attend upon the master and fellows in church, on feast days and other ceremonial occasions, to serve the master and fellows at seasonable times at table and in their rooms. All meals were to be partaken in common; but it would seem that this regulation was intended rather to conduce towards an economical management than enacted in any spirit of studied conformity to monastic life, for, adds the statute, “the scholars shall patiently support this manner of living until their means shall, under God’s favour, have received more plentiful increase.”[28]

An interesting feature in these statutes is the regulation with regard to the distinctive dress of the student, showing how little regard was paid at this period, even when the student was a priest, to the wearing of a costume which might have been considered appropriate to the staid character of his profession.

In order to repress this laxity and want of discipline, Archbishop Stratford, at a later period in the year 1342, issued an order that no student of the university, unless he should reform his “person and apparel” should receive any ecclesiastical degree or honour. It was doubtless in reference to some such order as this that one of the statutes of Peterhouse ran to this effect:—

Peterhouse College

“The Philosophy of Clothes,” especially in its application to the mediæval universities, is no doubt an interesting one, and may even—so, at least, it is said by some authorities—throw much light upon the relations of the universities to the Church. The whole subject is discussed in some detail in the chapter on “Student Life in the Middle Ages,” in Mr. Rashdall’s “History of the Universities of Europe,” to which, perhaps, it may be best to refer those of our readers who are desirous of tracing the various steps in the gradual evolution of modern academic dress from the antique forms. There it will be seen how the present doctor’s scarlet gown was developed from the magisterial “cappa” or “cope,” a sleeveless scarlet cloak, lined with miniver, with tippet and hood attached of the same material—a dress which, in its original shape, is now only to be seen in the Senate House at Cambridge, worn by the Vice-Chancellor on Degree days; how the present gown and hood of the Master of Arts and Bachelor is merely a development of the ordinary clerical dress or “tabard” of the thirteenth century, which, however, was not even exclusively clerical, and certainly not distinguished by that sobriety of hue characteristic of modern clerical tailordom—clerkly prejudice in the matter of the “tabard” running in favour of green, blue, or blood red; and how the modern “mortar-board,” or square college cap,—now usurped by undergraduates, and even choristers and schoolboys—was originally the distinctive badge of a Master of Faculty, being either a square cap or “biretta,” with a tuft on the top, in lieu of the very modern tassel, or a round cap or “pileum,” more or less resembling the velvet caps still worn by the Yeomen of the Guard, or on very state occasions by the Cambridge or Oxford doctors in medicine or law. The picturesque dress of university students of the thirteenth century, still surviving in the long blue coat and yellow stockings, and red leather girdle and white bands of the boys of Christ’s Hospital, is sufficient to show how much we have lost of the warmth and colour of mediæval life by the almost universal change to sombre black in clerical or student costume, brought about by the Puritan austerity of the sixteenth century.

To return to the fabric of Bishop Hugh de Balsham’s College. We have seen how a handsome hall (aulam perpulchram) was built with the 300 marks of the Bishop’s legacy. This is substantially the building of five bays, which still exists, forming the westernmost part of the south side of the Great Court of the College. The three easternmost bays are taken up by the dining-hall or refectory, the westernmost is devoted to the buttery, the intervening bay is occupied by the screens and passage, at either end of which there still remain the original north and south doorways, interesting as being the earliest example of collegiate architecture in Cambridge. The windows of this hall on the south side date from the end of the fifteenth century. The north-east oriel window and the buttresses on the north side of the hall were added by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1870, who also built the new screen, panelling, and roof. At about the same time the hall was decorated and the windows filled with stained glass of very great beauty by William Morris. The figures represented in the windows are as follows (beginning from the west on the north side): John Whitgift, John Cosin, Rd. Tresham, Thos. Gray, Duke of Grafton, Henry Cavendish; in the oriel—Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Hugh de Balsham, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton; on the south side—Edward I., Queen Eleanor, Hugh de Balsham, S. George, S. Peter, S. Etheldreda, John Holbroke, Henry Beaufort, John Warkworth.

After the building of this hall the College evidently languished for want of funds for more than a century. But in the fifteenth century the College began to prosper, and a good deal of building was done. The character of the work is not expressly stated in the Bursar’s Rolls—of which there are some thirty-one still existing of the fifteenth century, and a fairly complete set of the subsequent centuries—but the earliest buildings of this date are probably the range of chambers forming the north and west side of the great court. The kitchen, which is immediately to the west of the hall, dates from 1450. The Fellows’ parlour or combination room, completing the third side of the quadrangle, and immediately east of the dining-hall, was built some ten years later.

Then follows a description of each portrait—there are thirty in all—with its accompanying distich. As an example, we may give that belonging to the portrait of Dr. Andrew Perne:

The Parish Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate, had from the first been used as the College Chapel of Peterhouse. Indeed, the earliest college in Cambridge was the latest to possess a private chapel of its own, which was not built until 1628. All that remains, however, of the old Church of S. Peter is a fragment of the tower, standing at the north-west corner of the present building and the arch which led from it into the church. This probably marks the west end of the old church, which, no doubt, was much shorter than the present one. It is said that this old church fell down in part about 1340, and a new church was at once begun in its place. This was finished in 1352 and dedicated to the honour of the blessed Virgin Mary. The church is a very beautiful one, though of an unusual simplicity of design. It is without aisles or any structural division between nave and chancel. It is lighted by lofty windows and deep buttresses. On the south side and at the eastern gable are rich flowing decorated windows, the tracery of which is designed in the same style, and in many respects with the same patterns, as those of Alan de Walsingham’s Lady Chapel at Ely. Indeed, a comparison of the Church of Little S. Mary with the Ely Lady Chapel, not only in its general conception, but in many of its details, such as that of the stone tabernacles on the outer face of the eastern gable curiously connected with the tracery of the window, would lead a careful observer to the conclusion that both churches had been planned by the same architect. The change of the old name of the church from S. Peter to that of S. Mary the Virgin is also, in this relation, suggestive. For we must remember that it was built at a time—the age of Dante and Chaucer—when Catholic purity, in the best natures, united to the tenderness of chivalry was casting its glamour over poetic and artistic minds, and had already led to the establishment in Italy of an Order—the Cavalieri Godenti—pledged to defend the existence, or, more accurately perhaps, the dignity of the Virgin Mary, by the establishment everywhere throughout western Europe of Lady Chapels in her honour. Whether Alan de Walsingham, the builder of the Ely Lady Chapel, and the builder of the Church of Little S. Mary at Cambridge—if he was not Alan—belonged to this Order of the Cavaliers of S. Mary, we cannot say; but at least it seems probable that the Cambridge Church sprang from the same impulse which inspired the magnificent stone poem in praise of S. Mary, built by the sacrist of Ely.

At this period Peterhouse consisted of two courts, separated by a wall occupying the position of the present arcade at the west end of the chapel. The westernmost or principal court is, save in some small details, that which we see to-day. The small eastern court next to the street has undergone great alteration by the removal of certain old dwelling-houses—possibly relics of the original hostels—fronting the street, which left an open space, occupied at a later period partly by the chapel and by the extension eastward of the buildings on the south side of the great court to form a new library, and subsequently by a similar flanking extension on the north.

The earliest of these buildings was the library, due to a bequest of Dr. Andrew Perne, Dean of Ely, who was master of the College from 1553 to 1589, and who not only left to the society his own library, “supposed to be the worthiest in all England,” but sufficient property for the erection of a building to contain it. Perne had gained in early life a position of importance in the University—he had been a fellow of both S. John’s and of Queen’s, bursar of the latter College and five times vice-chancellor of the University—but his success in life was mainly due to his pliancy in matters of religion. In Henry’s reign he had publicly maintained the Roman doctrine of the adoration of pictures of Christ and the Saints; in Edward VI.’s he had argued in the University pulpit against transubstantiation; in Queen Mary’s, on his appointment to the mastership of Peterhouse, he had formally subscribed to the fully defined Roman articles then promulgated; in Queen Elizabeth’s he had preached a Latin sermon in denunciation of the Pope, and had been complimented for his eloquence by the Queen herself. No wonder that immediately after his death in 1589 he should be hotly denounced in the Martin Marprelate tracts as the friend of Archbishop Whitgift, and as the type of fickleness and lack of principle which the authors considered characteristic of the Established Church. Other writers of the same school referred to him as “Old Andrew Turncoat,” “Old Father Palinode,” and “Judas.” The undergraduates of Cambridge, it is said, invented in his honour a new Latin verb, pernare, which they translated “to turn, to rat, to change often.” It became proverbial in the University to speak of a cloak or a coat which had been turned as “perned,” and finally the letters on the weathercock of S. Peter’s, A.P.A.P., might, said the satirists, be interpreted as Andrew Perne, a Protestant, or Papist, or Puritan. However, it is much to be able to say that he was the tutor and friend of Whitgift, protecting him in early days from the persecution of Cardinal Pole; it is something also to remember that he was uniformly steadfast in his allegiance to his College, bequeathing to it his books, with minute directions for their chaining and safe custody, providing for their housing, and moreover, endowing two college fellowships and six scholarships; and perhaps charity might prompt us to add, that at a time when the public religion of the country changed four times in ten years, Perne probably trimmed in matters of outward form that he might be at hand to help in matters which he truly thought were really essential.

The Perne Library at Peterhouse has no special architectural features of any value; its main interest in that respect is to be found in the picturesque gable-end with oriel window overhanging the street, bearing above it the date 1633, which belongs to the brickwork extension westward at that date of the original stone building. The building of the library, however, preluded a period of considerable architectural activity in the college, due largely to the energy of Dr. Matthew Wren, who was master from 1625 to 1634. It is recorded of him that “seeing the public offices of religion less decently performed, and the services of God depending upon the services of others, for want of a convenient oratory within the walls of the college,” he began in 1629 to build the present chapel. It was consecrated in 1632. The name of the architect is not recorded. The chapel was connected as at present with the buildings on either side by galleries carried on open arcades. Dr. Cosin, who succeeded Wren in the mastership, continued the work, facing the chapel walls, which had been built roughly in brick, with stone. An elaborate ritual was introduced into the chapel by Cosin, who, it will be remembered, was a friend and follower of Archbishop Laud. A Puritan opponent of Cosin has written bitterly that “in Peter House Chappell there was a glorious new altar set up and mounted on steps, to which the master, fellows, and schollers bowed, and were enjoyned to bow by Dr. Cosens, the master, who set it up; that there were basons, candlesticks, tapers standing on it, and a great crucifix hanging over it ... and on the altar a pot, which they usually call the incense pot.... And the common report both among the schollers of that House and others, was that none might approach to the altar in Peter House but in sandalls.”[32]

It is not surprising, therefore, to read at a little later date in the diary of the Puritan iconoclast, William Dowsing:—

These to-day are all things of the past. The interior of the Chapel is fitted partly with the genuine old mediæval panelling, possibly brought from the parochial chancel of Little S. Mary’s, or from its disused chantries, now placed at the back of the stalls and in front of the organ gallery, partly with oakwork, stalls and substalls, in the Jacobæan style. The present altar-piece is of handsome modern wainscot. The entrance door is mediæval, probably removed from elsewhere to replace the doorway defaced by Dowsing. The only feature in the chapel which can to-day be called—and that only by a somewhat doubtful taste—“very magnifical,” is the gaudy Munich stained-glass work inserted in the lateral windows, as a memorial to Professor Smythe, in 1855 and 1858. The subjects are, on the north side, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” “The Preaching of S. John the Baptist,” “The Nativity”; and on the south side, “The Resurrection,” “The Healing of a Cripple by SS. Peter and John,” “S. Paul before Agrippa and Festus.” The east window, containing “The History of Christ’s Passion,” is said by Blomefield to have been “hid in the late troublesome times in the very boxes which now stand round the altar instead of rails.”

CHAPTER V

THE COLLEGES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

THE dates of the foundation of the two Colleges, Clare and Pembroke, which, after an interval of some fifty and seventy years respectively, followed that of Peterhouse, and the names of Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Clare, and of Marie de Valence, Countess of Pembroke, who are associated with them, remind us that we have reached that troublous and romantic time which marked the close of the long and varied reign of the Great Edward, and was the seed-time of those influences which ripened during the longer and still more varied reign of Edward III. Between the year 1326, which was the date of the first foundation of Clare College, the date also of the deposition and murder of Edward II., and the year 1348, which is the date of the foundation of Pembroke and the twenty-first year of Edward III., the distracted country had passed through many vicissitudes. It had seen the great conflict of parties under the leadership of the great houses of Lancaster, Gloucester, and Pembroke, culminating in the king’s deposition and in the rise of the power of the English Parliament, and in its division into the two Houses of Lords and Commons. It had seen the growth of the new class of landed gentry, whose close social connection with the baronage on the one hand, and of equally close political connection with the burgesses on the other, had welded the three orders together, and had given to the Parliament that unity of action and feeling on which its powers have ever since mainly depended. It had seen the Common Law rise into the dignity of a science and rapidly become a not unworthy rival of Imperial Jurisprudence. It had seen the close of the great interest of Scottish warfare, and the northern frontier of England carried back to the old line of the Northumbrian kings. It had seen the strife with France brought to what at the moment seemed to be an end, for the battle of Crecy, at which the power of the English chivalry was to teach the world the lesson which they had learned from Robert Bruce thirty years before at Bannockburn, was still in the future, as also was the Hundred Years’ War of which that battle was the prelude. It had seen the scandalous schism of the Western Church, and the vision of a Pope at Rome, and another Pope at Avignon, awakening in the mind of the nations an entirely new set of thoughts and feelings with regard to the position of both the Papacy and the Church. The early fourteenth century was indeed an age of great events and of great men; but it was not an age, at least as far as England was concerned, of great scholars. There was no Grosseteste in the fourteenth century. Petrarch, the typical man of letters, the true inspirer of the classical Renaissance, and in a sense the founder of really modern literature, was a great scholar and humanist, but he had no contemporary in England who could be called an equal or a rival. His one English friend, Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, book lover as he was—for his Philobiblon we all owe him a debt of gratitude—was after all only an ardent amateur and no scholar. When Petrarch had applied to Richard for some information as to the geography of the Thule of the ancients, the Bishop had put him off with the statement that he had not his books with him, but would write fully on his return home. Though more than once reminded of his promise, he left the disappointed poet without an answer. The fact was, that Richard was not so learned that he could afford to confess his ignorance. He corresponds, in fact, to the earlier humanists of Italy—men who collected manuscripts and saw the possibilities of learning, though they were unable to attain to it themselves. There is much in his Philobiblon of the greatest interest, as, for example, his description of the means by which he had collected his library at Durham College, and his directions to students for its careful use, but despite his own fervid love and somewhat rhetorical praise of learning, there is still a certain personal pathos in the expression of his own impatience with the ignorance and superficiality of the younger students of his day. Writing in the Philobiblon of the prevalent characteristics of Oxford at this time, he writes:—

It is to be feared that the decline of learning, which at this period was characteristic, as we thus see, of Oxford, was equally characteristic of Cambridge. Certainly there was no scholar there of the calibre of William of Ockham, or even of Richard of Bury, or of the Merton Realist, Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not indeed until more than a century later when we have reached the age of Wycliffe, the first of the reformers and the last of the schoolmen, that the name of any Cambridge scholar emerges upon the page of history.

Clare College and Bridge

But meanwhile the collegiate system of the University was slowly being developed. Some forty years after the foundation of Peterhouse, in the year 1324, Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Canon of Bath and Wells, obtained from Edward II. permission to found at Cambridge the College of “the Scholars of St. Michael.” The college itself, Michaelhouse, has long been merged in the great foundation of Trinity, but its original statutes still exist and show that they were conceived in a somewhat less liberal spirit than that of the code of Hugh de Balsham. The monk and the friar are excluded from the society, but the Rule of Merton is not mentioned. Two years afterwards, in 1326, we find thirty-two scholars known as the “King’s Scholars” maintained at the University by Edward II. It seems probable that it had been the intention of the King in this way to encourage the study of the civil and the canon law, for books on these subjects were presented by him, presumably for the use of the scholars, to Simon de Bury their warden, and were subsequently taken away at the command of Queen Isabella. The King had also intended to provide a hall of residence for these “children of our chapel,” but the execution of this design of establishing a “King’s Hall” was left to his son Edward III. The poet Gray, in his “Installation Ode,” has represented Edward III.—

in virtue of his foundation of King’s Hall, which was subsequently absorbed in the greater society, as the founder of Trinity College. But the honour evidently belongs with more justice to his father. It was, however, by Edward III. that the Hall was built near the Hospital of S. John, “to the honour of God, the Blessed Virgin, and all the Saints, and for the soul of the Lord Edward his father, late King of England, of famous memory, and the souls of Philippa, Queen of England, his most dear consort, and of his children and progenitors.”[34]

The statutes of King’s Hall give an interesting contemporary picture of collegiate life. The preamble moralises upon “the unbridled weakness of humanity, prone by nature and from youth to evil, ignorant how to abstain from things unlawful, easily falling into crime.” It is required that each scholar on his admission be proved to be of “good and reputable conversation.” He is not to be admitted under fourteen years of age. His knowledge of Latin must be such as to qualify him for the study of logic, or of whatever other branch of learning the master shall decide, upon examination of his capacity, he is best fitted to follow. The scholars were provided with lodging, food, and clothing. The sum allowed for the weekly maintenance of a King’s scholar was fourteen pence, an unusually liberal allowance for weekly commons, suggesting the idea that the foundation was probably designed for students of the wealthier class, an indication which is further borne out by the prohibitions with respect to the frequenting of taverns, the introduction of dogs within the College precincts, the wearing of short swords and peaked shoes (contra honestatem clericalem), the use of bows, flutes, catapults, and the oft-repeated exhortation to orderly conduct.

Following upon the establishment of Michaelhouse and King’s Hall, in the year 1326 the University in its corporate capacity obtained a royal licence to settle a body of scholars in two houses in Milne Street. This college was called University Hall, a title already adopted by a similar foundation at Oxford. The Chancellor of the University at the time was a certain Richard de Badew. The foundation, however, did not at first meet with much success. In 1336 its revenues were found insufficient to support more than ten scholars. In 1338, however, we find Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Clare and granddaughter of Edward I., coming to the help of the struggling society. By the death of her brother, the Earl of Gloucester, at the battle of Bannockburn, leaving no issue, the whole of a very princely estate came into the possession of the Lady Clare and her two sisters. Having, by a deed dated 6th April 1338, received from Richard de Badew, who therein calls himself “Founder, Patron, and Advocate of the House called the Hall of the University of Cambridge,” all the rights and titles of University Hall, the Lady Clare refounded it, and supplied the endowments which hitherto it had lacked. The name of the Hall was changed to Clare House (Domus de Clare). As early, however, as 1346 we find it styled Clare Hall, a name which it bore down to our own times, when, by resolution of the master and fellows in 1856, it was changed to Clare College. The following preamble to the statutes of the College, which were granted in 1359, are perhaps worthy of quotation as exhibiting, in spite of its quaint confusion of the “Pearl of Great Price” with “the Candle set upon a Candlestick,” the pious and withal businesslike and sensible spirit of the foundress:—

Clare College and Bridge.

The distinguishing characteristic of these statutes is the great liberality they show in the requirements with respect to the professedly clerical element. This, as the preamble, in fact, suggests, was the result of a desire to fill up the terrible gap caused in the ranks of the clergy by the outbreak of the Black Death, which first made its appearance in England in the year 1348, and caused the destruction of two and a half millions of the population in a single year.[36]

The Scholars or Fellows are to be twenty in number, of whom six are to be in priest’s orders at the time of their admission. The remaining fellows are to be selected from bachelors or sophisters in arts, or from “skilful and well-conducted” civilians and canonists, but only two fellows may be civilians, and only one a canonist. The clauses relating to the scheme of studies are, moreover, apparently intended to discourage both these branches of law.

However, the controversy was settled in favour of Clare-Hall by a letter from the King.

A tradition has long prevailed that Clare-Hall was the College mentioned by the poet Chaucer in his “Reeve’s Tale,” in the lines—

Pembroke College.

This is in allusion to the somewhat doubtful story thus told by Fuller—

Pembroke College

All that authentic history records is that the Earl of Pembroke died suddenly whilst on a mission to the Court of France in June 1324. His widow expended a large part of her very considerable fortune both in France and England on works of piety. In 1342 she founded the Abbey of Denny in Cambridgeshire for nuns of the Order of S. Clare. The Charter of Foundation of Pembroke College is dated 9th June 1348. It is to be regretted that the earliest Rule given to the College, or to the Aula seu Domus de Valence Marie, the Hall of Valence Marie, as it was at first called, is not extant. A revised rule of the conjectural date of 1366, and another of perhaps not more than ten years later, furnished, however, the data upon which Dr. Ainslie, Master of the College from 1828 to 1870, drew up an abstract of its constitution and early history.[38] The most interesting feature of this constitution is the provision made in the first instance for the management of the College by the Franciscans, and its abolition on a later revision. According to the first code—“the head of the College was to be elected by the fellows, and to be distinguished by the title of the Keeper of the House.” There were to be annually elected two rectors, the one a Friar Minor, the other a secular. This provision of the two rectors was abolished in the later code, and with it apparently all official connection between the College and the Franciscan Order, and it may be perhaps conjectured all association also with the sister foundation at Denny, concerning which the foundress, in her final Vale of the earlier code, had given to the fellows of the House of Valence Marie the following quaint direction, that “on all occasions they should give their best counsel and aid to the Abbess and Sisters of Denny, who had from her a common origin with them.”

Pembroke College Oriels & Entrance

The exact date at which the building of the College was begun is not known, but it was probably not long after the purchase of the site in 1346. Many of the original buildings which remained down to 1874 were destroyed in the reconstruction of the College at that time. It is now only possible to imagine many of the most picturesque features of that building, of which Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Cambridge in 1564, enthusiastically exclaimed in passing, “O domus antiqua et religiosa!” by consulting the print of the College published by Loggan about 1688. Of the interesting old features still left, we have the chapel at the corner of Trumpington Street and Pembroke Street, built in 1360 and refaced in 1663, and the line of buildings extending down Pembroke Street to the new master’s lodge and the Scott building of modern date. The old chapel has been used as a library since 1663, when the new chapel, whose west end abuts on Trumpington Street, was built by Sir Christopher Wren. The cloister, called Hitcham’s Cloister, which joins the Wren Chapel to the fine old entrance gateway, and the Hitcham building[39] on the south side of the inner court, are dated 1666 and 1659 respectively. All the rest of the College is modern.

The early foundation of Pembroke College had some connection, as we have seen, with the Franciscan Order. The early foundation of Gonville Hall, which followed that of Pembroke in 1348, had a somewhat similar connection with the Dominicans. Edward Gonville, its founder, was vicar-general of the diocese of Ely, and rector of Ferrington and Rushworth in Norfolk. In that county he had been instrumental in causing the foundation of a Dominican house at Thetford. Two years before his death he settled a master and two fellows in some tenements he had bought in Luteburgh Lane, now called Free School Lane, on a site almost coinciding with the present master’s garden of Corpus, and gave to his college the name of “the Hall of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin.” But he died in 1351, and left the completion of his design to his executor, Bishop Bateman of Norwich. Bateman removed Gonville Hall to the north-west corner of its present site, adjoining the “Hall of the Holy Trinity,” which he was himself endowing at the same period. However, he too died within a few years, leaving both foundations immature. The statutes of both halls are extant, and exhibit an interesting contrast of ideal—the one that of a country parson of the fourteenth century, moved by the simple desire to do something for the encouragement of learning, and especially of theology, in the men of his own profession—the other that of a Bishop, a learned canonist and busy man of state, long resident at the Papal court at Avignon, regarded by the Pope as “the flower of civilians and canonists,” desirous above all things by his College foundation of recruiting the ranks of his clergy, thinned by the Black Death, with men trained, as he himself had been, in the canon and civil law. It was the Bishop’s ideal that triumphed. Gonville’s statutes requiring an almost exclusively theological training for his scholars were abolished, and the course of study in the two halls assimilated, Bateman, as founder of the two societies, by a deed dated 1353, ratifying an agreement of fraternal affection and mutual help between the two societies, as “scions of the same stock”; assigning, however, the precedence to the members of Trinity Hall, “tanquam fratres primo geniti.”[40] The fellows were by this agreement bound to live together in amity like brothers, to take counsel together in legal and other difficulties, to wear robes or cloaks of the same pattern, and to consort together at academic ceremonies. Thus Gonville Hall was fairly started on its way. It ranked from the first as a small foundation, and though it gradually added to its buildings and acquired various endowments, it did not materially increase its area for two centuries. The ancient walls of its early buildings—its chapel, hall, library, and master’s lodge—are all doubtless still standing, though coated over with the ashlar placed on them in 1754. The ancient beams of the roof of the old hall are still to be seen in the attics of the present tutor’s house. The upper room over the passage which leads from Gonville to Caius Court is the ancient chamber of the lodge where the early masters used to sleep, very little changed. The old main entrance to the College was in Trinity Lane, a thoroughfare so filthy in the reign of Richard II. that the King himself was appealed to, in order to check the “horror abominabilis” through which students had to plunge on their way to the schools. From time to time new benefactors of the College came, though for the most part of a minor sort; some of whom, however, have left quaint traces behind them. Of such was a certain Cluniac monk, John Household by name, a student in 1513, who in his will dated 1543 thus bequeaths—“To the College in Cambrydge called Gunvyle Hall, my longer table-clothe, my two awter (altar) pillows, with their bears of black satten bordered with velvet pirled with goulde: also a frontelet with the salutation of Our Lady curely wroughte with goulde; and besides two suts of vestements having everythinge belonging to the adorning of a preste to say masse: the one is a light greene having white ends, and the other a duned Taphada,” whatever that may be. He also leaves his books, “protesting that whatsoever be founde in my bookes I intend to dye a veray Catholical Christen man, and the King’s letheman and trewe subjecte.” This might seem to speak well, perhaps, for the catholicity of the College in the thirty-fourth year of Henry VIII., and yet thirteen years earlier Bishop Nix of Norwich had written to Archbishop Warham: “I hear no clerk that hath come out lately of Gunwel Haule but saverith of the frying panne, though he speak never so holely.” Anyhow about this time the College became notorious as a hotbed of reformed opinions. It was, however, at this time also that a young student was trained within its walls, who, after a distinguished career at Cambridge—it would be an anachronism to call him senior wrangler, but his name stands first in that list which afterwards developed into the Mathematical Tripos—passed to the university of Padua to study medicine under the great anatomist, Vesalius, ultimately becoming a professor there, and returning to England, and to medical practice in London, and having presumably amassed a fortune in the process, formed the design of enlarging what he pathetically describes as “that pore house now called Gonville Hall.” On September 4, 1557, John Caius obtained the charter for his new foundation, and the ancient name of Gonville Hall was changed to that of Gonville and Caius College. In the following year the new benefactor was elected Master, and the remaining years of his life were spent, on the one hand, in quarrelling with Fellows about “College copes, vestments, albes, crosses, tapers ... and all massynge abominations;” and, on the other, in designing and carrying out those noble architectural additions to the College which give to the buildings of Caius College their chief interest.

Gate of Honour & Gate of Virtue Caius College