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Table of Contents

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

IN Saxon times our schools of learning were grouped round York the Roman centre of Britain, which represented not only the Roman tradition but the vigorous Christianity of the north. It is this auspicious combination which nourished for over a hundred years the university spirit before universities, carried through Alcuin this spirit to the Continent, and eventually brought learning hand in hand with Christianity to Germany. Whatever may be true as to the distribution of talent in England later in its history, in the vii and viii centuries our great school was to be found at York, and England’s learned men hailed from the kingdom of Northumbria.

The School of York.

York and Rome.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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

The town of 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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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

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

MARKET SQUARE This picture represents what is called Half Market, which takes place on Wednesday. Market day, properly speaking, is on Saturday, when the square is filled with stalls. The church is Great St. Mary’s, and King’s College Chapel is seen in the distance on the left.

probable original.[16] The kings of England patronised this market, Henry III. sending for his fish to Cambridge even when he was staying at Oxford; and Chaucer is careful to note that the Cambridge miller was an angler, skilled in mending his nets.[17] The isle of Ely, so-called because cut off by river and mere from the rest of Cambridgeshire, was proverbial for the turbulence of its population, and the men of Ely drew the men of Cambridge into their quarrels, or harried them on their own account. Cambridge Castle was built as an outpost against the English earls who with Hereward resisted the Conqueror at Ely; it was at Ely that another determined stand was made by Simon de Montfort’s followers after Cambridge had been regained for John; and Henry III. had to bring relief to the university town when its neighbours burnt and plundered it during the years 1266–1270. The two centres were inseparable for weal or woe, and the intellectual as well as the political life of Cambridge was coloured for centuries by the activities of its neighbour.

The fen 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]

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.

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

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]

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]

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

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

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

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

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]

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

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]