with the Jews; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few; they were
preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand and on the
left; many of them learned more harm than good. The elder men, and they
who had consciences and hearts, shook their heads, and asked what could
be done? For a long time the principle of _laissez faire_ prevailed:
the young fellows were left to the tender mercies of the townsfolk.
There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days. Gradually a kind
of joint-stock arrangement came into vogue. Worthy people seemed to
have hired a house which they called a _hostel_ or hall, and sub-let
the rooms to the young fellows; the arrangement appears to have been
clumsily managed, and led to dissensions between town and gown; the
townsmen soon discovered that the gownsmen were gainers by the new
plan, and they themselves were losers. They grumbled, protested,
quarrelled. But it was a move in the right direction, and a beginning
of some moral discipline was made, and that could not but be well.
These _hostels_ were set up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, and how long before we cannot tell; but it was
at Oxford that the first _college_, as we understand the term, rose
into being. It was Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, who was the
father of the collegiate system in England. So far from embarking upon
a new experiment without careful deliberation, he spent twelve years of
his life in working out his ideas and in elaborating the famous _Rule
of Merton_, of which it is not at all too much to say that its
publication constituted an era in the history of education and learning
in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who
survived him nine years, appears to have been moved with a desire to do
for Cambridge what Merton had done for Oxford. Balsham is spoken of as
the founder of St. Peter's College, and in one sense he was so. The
bishops of Ely were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop Balsham asked
himself what could be done, and set himself to deal with the problems
which presented themselves for solution in the condition of his own
University. He was not a great man, that seems clear enough: his
schemes were crude; he bungled. The truth seems to me to be that the
feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and there are indications
that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fashion were opposed to anything
like _secular education_. We hear of money being left to support
_priests_ studying theology, and of an experiment for introducing
scholars as residents in the Hospital of St. John. The canons were to
take in the young scholars as _boarders_ into their house, and look
after their conduct and morals. The plan did not answer. It was an
attempt to put new wine into old bottles. There came an explosion.
Cambridge in the thirteenth century had not the _men_ that Oxford had,
so Oxford kept the lead. Perhaps there was some soreness. Did
ecclesiastics shake their heads as they saw the walls of Balliol
College rise, and learnt that there was just a little too much
importance given to mere scholarship, and no prominence given to
theology in those early statutes of 1282? Did they, without knowing
why, anticipate with anxiety the awakening of a spirit of free thought
and free inquiry among those scholars of the Merton, Rule? Did the
orthodox party resort to prophecy, which is seldom very complimentary
or cheerful in its utterances?
This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there was a
stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to assert themselves
and take their place among the learned. John Giffard started his great
college for the reception of student monks at Oxford. It became, and
for centuries continued to be, the resort of the Benedictine order, and
was supported by levies from a large number of the old monasteries. The
inference is forced upon us that the English monasteries no longer
stood in the front rank as seats of learning. Students and scholars
would no longer go to the monks; the monks must go to the scholars. But
the establishment of a seminary for the reception of young monks at
Oxford tended to the strengthening of the ecclesiastical influence in
that University. Cambridge lost in the same proportion that Oxford
gained. Even the great Priory of Norwich sent its promising young monks
to Qxford, passing by the nearer and more conveniently situated
University. As early as 1288 we find entries in the Norwich Priory
Rolls of payments for the support of the schools and scholars at
Oxford. It was long after this that Cambridge offered any similar
attraction to the "religious."
Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of what we
now understand by a _college_. It was a novelty in English
institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in societies that
were essentially religious in their character. Some of those societies,
and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet homes of learning as
well as of devotion; but the main business-the _raison d'être_ of monks
and nuns and canons-was the practice of asceticism, the keeping up of
unceasing worship in the church of the monastery--the endeavour to be
holier than men of the world need be, or the endeavour to make the men
of the world holier than they cared to be. The religious orders were
religious or they were nothing. Each new rule for the reformation of
those orders aimed at restoring the primitive idea of self-immolation
at the altar--a severer ritual, harder living, longer praying. Nay! the
new rules, in not a few instances, were actually aimed against learning
and culture. The Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton
would not call his society of scholars a _convent_, as the old monkish
corporations had been designated. That sounded too much as though the
mere promotion of pietism was his aim; he revived the old classical
word _collegium_. There had been _collegia_ at Rome before the imperial
times; though some of them had been religious bodies, some were
decidedly not so. They were societies which held property, pursued
certain avocations, and acted in a corporate capacity for very mundane
objects. Why should not there be a _collegium_ of scholars? Why should
students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other
people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by
his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old
conventual type, but to enter upon a new departure.
The scholars of the new college were to take no vows; they were not to
be worried with everlasting ritual observances. Special chaplains, who
were presumably not expected to be scholars and students, were
appointed for the ministration of the ceremonial in the church. Luxury
was guarded against; poverty was not enjoined. As long as a scholar was
pursuing his studies _bonâ fide_, he might remain a member of the
college; if he was tired of books and bookish people, he might go.
When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it to
himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up; sometimes it gets
improved upon; sometimes very much the reverse. For a wise man acts
upon a hint, and it germinates; a fool only half apprehends the meaning
of a hint, and he displays his folly in producing a caricature. Hugh de
Balsham seems to have aimed at improving upon Merton's original idea.
He meant well, doubtless; but his college of Peterhouse, the first
college in Cambridge, was a very poor copy of the Oxford foundation.
Merton was a man of genius, a man of ideas; Balsham was a man of the
cloister. Moreover, he was by no means so rich as his predecessor, and
he did not live to carry out his scheme. The funds were insufficient.
The first college at Cambridge was long in building. Cambridge, in
fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there was none of the dash and
enthusiasm, none of the passion for progress, which characterized
Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress his
strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred, no
commanding intellect like that of Roger Bacon to attract and dazzle and
lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and eager spirits who
felt that a new era had begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine;
no John Wielif to kindle a new flame--say, rather, to take up the torch
which had dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which
the others had run so well. What a grand succession of men it was!
Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose at
Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the reign
of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no fewer than seven
colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them have survived to
our own days, and two were eventually absorbed by the larger foundation
which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of raising, and which now stands
forth in its grandeur, the most magnificent educational corporation in
the world.
* * * * * * *
Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the original
buildings in which the _University_, as a teaching body, pursued its
work, but which also provided the _houses_ in which the _colleges_ of
scholars lived and laboured?
Unhappily, we know very little of the University buildings during this
early period. All the industry of Mr. Clark has not availed to
penetrate the thick obscurity; but this at least is pretty certain,
namely, that the earliest University buildings at Cambridge were very
humble structures clustering round about the area now covered by the
University schools and library, that it was not till the middle of the
fourteenth century that any attempt was made to erect a building of any
pretension, and that the "Schools Quadrangle was not completed till 130
years after the first stone was laid." The University of Cambridge was
for ages a very poor corporation; it had no funds out of which to build
halls or schools or library. The ceremonies at _commencement_ and on
other great occasions took place in the churches, sometimes of the
Augustinian, sometimes of the Franciscan friars. In these early times
the gownsmen dared not contemplate the erection of a senate-house
wherein to hold their meetings. When the fourteenth-century schools
were planned their erection was doubtless regarded as a very bold and
ambitious experiment. The money came in very slowly, the work stopped
more than once, and when it proceeded it was only by public
subscription that the funds were gathered. In 1466, William Wilflete,
Master of Clare Hall and Chancellor of the University, actually made a
journey to London to gather funds from whatever quarters he could, and
he dunned his friends, and those on whom the University had any claim,
so successfully that on June 25 of that year a contract for proceeding
with the work was drawn up and signed, but it was nearly nine years
after this before the schools were finally completed, together with a
new library over them, by the special munificence of Archbishop
Rotherham, who had further enriched the library with numerous volumes
of great value.
The tie which bound the members of the _University_ together was much
weaker than that which united the members of the same _college_. The
colleges were, in almost every case, founded by private munificence,
and in most cases were commenced during the lifetime of the several
founders; but when we come to look into the sources of the college
revenues we find that the actual gifts of money, or indeed of lands,
was less than at first sight appears. A very large proportion of the
endowments of these early colleges came from the _spoliation of the
parochial clergy_. Popular writers in our own time declaim against the
horrible sin of buying and selling church preferment, as if it were a
modern abomination. Let a man only spend half an hour in examining the
_fines_ or records of transfers of property in England during the
fourteenth century and he will be somewhat surprised to discover what a
part the buying and selling of advowsons played in the business
transactions of our forefathers five centuries ago. Advowsons were
always in the market, and always good investments in those days, But
not only so. A pious founder could do a great deal in the way of making
perpetual provision for the mention of his name by posterity at a small
cost if he took care to manipulate ecclesiastical property with
prudence. There was a crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson
could _appropriate_ the tithes of a benefice to the support of any
corporation which might be considered a _religious_ foundation. The old
monasteries had benefited to some extent from this disendowment of the
secular clergy, the Augustinian canons, during the twelfth century,
being the chief gainers by the pillage. When the rage for founding
colleges came in, and the awful ravages of the Black Death had
depopulated whole districts, the fashion of alienating the revenues of
the country parsons and diverting them into the new channel grew to be
quite a rage. The colleges of secular priests living together in
common, or what it is now the fashion to call a clergy house, might be
and were strictly _religious_ foundations; and could the colleges of
scholars, of teachers and learners who presumably were all priests, or
intended for the priesthood, be regarded as less _religious_ than the
others? So it came to pass that the tithes of parish after parish were
diverted into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which
were professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the
seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy. In
order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was
arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished!
* * * * * * *
Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge alone!
Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford had attracted
the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the fast ones. How
else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's stringent order in 1342
for the repression of the dandyism that prevailed among the young
scholars? These young Cantabs of the fourteenth century were exquisites
of the first water. Their fur-trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their
shoes of all the colours of the rainbow; their dainty girdles,
bejewelled and gilt, were a sight to see. And then their hair!
positively curled and powdered, and growing over their shoulders, too;
and when they passed their fingers through the curls, look you, there
were rings on their fingers! Call you these scholars? Chaucer's "Clerk
of Oxenforde" was of a very different type:--
For all that he might of his frendes hentc
On books and in learning he it spente.
Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so many
colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new
collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of
readers no part of Mr. dark's great work will prove so attractive as
the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on "The
Component Parts of a College." Here we have traced out for us in the
most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate idea,
from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had no
particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one
another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of
their arrangements.
At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their
favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming
that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is
almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was adopted
very gradually.
Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older
universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are
themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be
propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of
the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an
attempt to supersede them.
More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first
necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this
being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in
Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was consecrated
in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess of Pembroke in
1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the precincts of her new
college; and, so far from these convenient adjuncts to a collegiate
establishment having been considered an essential in early times, no
less than eight of the college chapels at Cambridge and four at Oxford
date from a time after the Reformation. In the fourteenth century and
later the young scholars, as a rule, attended their parish church.
Sometimes the college added on an aisle for the accommodation of its
members; sometimes it obtained a _licence_ to use a room in which
Divine Service might be conducted for a time; once the founder of a
college erected a collegiate quire in the middle of the parish church,
a kind of gigantic _pew,_ for the accommodation of his scholars.
Downing College has never had a chapel to the present hour.
Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has been
more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the fourteenth
century the master of a college was but _primits inter pares,_ and the
distance between him and his _fellows_ or _scholars_ was less than that
which exists now between the Commanding officer of a regiment in
barracks and his brother officers. The master had no sinecure; the
discipline of the place depended upon him almost entirely, for in those
days the monarchial idea was in the ascendant; the king was a real
king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real master. Everything
was referred to him, everything originated with him, everything was
controlled by him. But as for the accommodation assigned to him in the
early colleges, it was very inferior indeed to that which every
graduate at Trinity or St. John's expects to find in our time. The
Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted by the statutes to dine apart if
he pleased, and to reside outside the precincts of the college if he
chose to provide for himself another residence; but this was clearly an
exceptional case, for the master was at this time the actual founder of
the college, and Adam de Brune might be presumed to know what was good
for his successors in the office for which he himself had made
provision. But for generations the master enjoyed no more than a couple
of _chambers_ at the most, and it was not till the sixteenth century
that an official residence was provided, and then such residence
consisted only of _lodgings_ a little more spacious and convenient than
those of any of the fellows, and in no case separated from the main
buildings of the college. Even when masters of colleges began to marry
(and the earliest instance of this seems to have been Dr. Heynes,
Master of Queens' College, in 1529), it was long before the master's
wife was so far recognized as to be received within the precincts; and
as late as 1576, when the fellows of King's complained of their
provost's wife being seen within the college, Dr. Goad replied that she
had not been twice in the college "Quad" in her life, as far as he
knew. When the great break-up came in the next century, then the
establishment of the master demanded increased accommodation for his
family, and the master's lodge began to grow slowly, until university
architects of the nineteenth century displayed their exalted sense of
what was due to the dignity of a "head of a house" by erecting two such
palaces as the lodges of Pembroke and St. John's Colleges; for the
glorification of the artist, it may be, but whether for the advantage
of the college, the university, or the occupants of the aforesaid
lodges may be reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge _is
at this moment let,_ presumably for the benefit of the head of the
house, whose official residence it is; and, if things go on as they are
tending, the day may come--who knows how soon?--when Cambridge shall at
last be able to boast of a really good hotel, "in a central and very
desirable situation, commanding a delightful view of"--what shall we
say?--"fitted up with every convenience, and formerly known as the
Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College."
I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture run
to seed.
* * * * * * *
If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a
single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of
investigation which he has pursued, or to summarize at all
satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so
masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning
over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations
alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and
ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence of
their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark of
imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished guide
can lead them. Do you think that such a work as this tells us no more
than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed their present
form, and court was added to court, and libraries and museums and
lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed by the
professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by the masons
and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.
Horizons rich with trembling spires
On violet twilights, lose their fires
if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The
authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else
that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great
national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and
crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the marks
of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the
questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of
a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful
searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these
homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years.
Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life;
and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the
indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark
could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and
collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the
student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.
How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what
whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have
rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their
sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man
is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen
has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our
dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they
were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical
discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon
to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a figure which to us
would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social,
and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our
forefathers that they could not conceive of such a _terminus ad quern_
as serves us as a _terminus a quo._ In other words, we _begin_ at a
point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the
more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in
all essentials is for ever repeating herself--impossible though it may
be to put the clock back for ourselves.
How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of
building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of
Cambridge--that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the
realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery--never seemed to have thought
that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old monasteries
there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who passed into the
cloister came there once for all--to live _and die_ within the walls of
his monastery. The scholar who came to get all the learning he could,
and who settled in some humble hostel or some unpretentious college of
the old type, came to spend some few years there, but no more. He came
to live his life, and when there was no more life in him--no more
youthful force, activity, and enthusiasm-there was no place for him at
Cambridge, There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their
work. Die? No! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he
should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should go. No
college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead!
Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly--the lad of
feeble frame and delicate organization-to stand that rugged old
Cambridge life. "College rooms" in our time suggest something like the
_ne plus ultra_ of aesthetic elegance and luxury. We find it hard to
realize the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was expected
to have two or three _chamber fellows_ who shared his bedroom with him;
and that his _study_ was no bigger than a study at the schoolhouse at
Rugby, and very much smaller than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a
more modern public school. At the hostels, which were of course much
more crowded than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege
of the few. What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed
receptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as
late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than seventy
members of the college "accommodated" (!) in twenty-eight chambers.
This was before the second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet
these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their
predecessors of two hundred years before.
"In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and
closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or tiled;
and their halls and ceilings were unplastered." We have express
testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the master's lodge
had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of the sixteenth
century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed, dated July 3,
1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's College, "the
wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only one chair; that
the tables were supported on trestles; and that those who used them sat
on forms or stools." As for the chambers and studies, not only were
they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but
their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there
were not even lath and plaster between the tiles and the beams of the
roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible how vitality could have been
kept up in the winter under such conditions. The cold must have been
dreadful.