dr caius’ ingenious contention that cambridge was founded in 3538 b.c. by cantaber, a spanish prince, has never received the support which its audacity deserves. the town cannot pretend to so great an antiquity, nor is its roman origin even certain. it stood in the middle of a country intersected by roman lines of road; in no part of england are roman and british remains more plentiful and more interesting. the via devana, the great highroad from colchester to chester, was the road which runs through the modern town from the station to magdalene bridge, and continues in a straight line to godmanchester and huntingdon. the via iceniana, or icknield way, which ran straight across england from the eastern counties, parts company with the cambridge road on newmarket heath, and pursues an undulating course south-westward to royston and hitchin. ermine street, the old north road, ran through caxton, ten miles west of cambridge, and met the via devana at huntingdon. at gogmagog hills, five miles out of the town, we can trace the remains of vandlebury[2] camp, which commanded the course of the roman roads, and looked over the southern fens and the essex border. the familiar name of grantchester is certainly of roman origin. instances might be multiplied to show how important this country was to roman strategy. but there is no direct evidence to prove that cambridge of to-day represents the ancient camboritum. the castle hill, that odd mound from which so good a view of the town is obtained, is supposed to be in its origin saxon; it formed an important outpost against the danes, who have left so many traces of their occupation in norfolk and suffolk. and the municipal history of cambridge certainly begins with saxon times, and it was the seat of one of the earliest gilds. mr atkinson, who has so admirably traced the municipal constitution of the town, gives us some details of the purpose and form of the cambridge gild of thanes. it was what we should call to-day a friendly society; its members afforded each other mutual help. such gilds became common in cambridge as in every town during the middle ages; they were the great aids to municipal life, and we shall find that some of them grew rich and powerful enough to found a college on their own account.
our business is, however, with the university. one cannot fix a deliberate date of foundation. universities, like every other great design, have small beginnings, and the origin of schools at cambridge was probably insignificant. cambridge is on the border of the fenland, and the[3] fenland contained the richest abbeys in england. besides the great house of ely, where the bishop was by virtue of his office abbot, there were, within easy reach of cambridge, the four benedictine abbeys of peterborough, ramsey, thorney and crowland, all of them in the very first rank of english houses. life in the fens was hard and dismal, and even peterborough, the medehampstead or goldenburgh of saxon times, must have been largely under water for a great part of the year. the towns on the borders, cambridge or stamford, formed an excellent asylum for those brethren who were too weak to endure the unhealthy mists of the nene and welland wash. during the middle ages, cambridge bristled with small religious houses, cells depending on the greater abbeys; and in these the young monks of crowland and the other houses received their education. this was the beginning of the university. the academic life was the life of the cloister. the teaching consisted of the ordinary medieval sciences, aristotle and the scholastic logic. in after years, erasmus deprecated the attachment of cambridge pedants to aristotle and their unreadiness to accept the new learning. cambridge never was quite so famous a nursery of schoolmen as oxford; her history is somewhat more peaceful. nor, when the medieval theology fell into discredit, did she produce a teacher with the european fame of wyclif. her history, however, has a chronology almost parallel with that of oxford. out of the monastic system was evolved the freer life[4] of colleges. oxford led the way with university and merton; cambridge followed with peterhouse. the college, as distinct from the monastery, was a place of retreat whose aim was learning; the aim of the monastery was self-discipline. it is needless to say that these colleges were established upon a clerical basis: each was a society consisting of a master and a certain number of fellows. their constitution was that of a public school; the modern undergraduate system was a much later development. the early founders had no idea of a college in the modern sense; a society principally composed of laymen, and a large body of undergraduates who to all intents and purposes are the college. the one link which connects our colleges of to-day with the original foundations is the existence of a college chapel, uniting the various members of the institution for the prime object of the learned society, the glory of god.
medieval cambridge lay, as our cambridge still lies, east of the river, which flowed in a course more or less corresponding to its present direction. it was enclosed by the king’s ditch, a stream at a tangent to the main river. this started from the mill pool at the bottom of silver street, and was crossed by trumpington street at the trumpington gate, close to pembroke. in fact, it followed the present mill lane and downing street pretty closely, keeping to the left, until it reached barnwell gate at the bottom of petty cury. from barnwell gate it followed the present hobson street, ran[5] across sidney gardens and down park street, skirted midsummer common and rejoined the cam about a hundred and fifty yards below magdalene bridge. within this elliptic space the old town was contained. if you stood at the round church, you would see the two familiar main thoroughfares separate as they do to-day. that to the left, bridge street and sidney street, was called conduit street: it led to the king’s ditch at barnwell gate. that to the right, st john’s street and trinity street, led to the principal medieval foundations. on the right hand of it was the hospital of st john; on the left the jewry and all saints’ church, with its tower projecting over the roadway, like st john maddermarket’s at norwich. just beyond on the right was king’s hall, with king’s hall lane leading to the river. the next turning, st michael’s lane, the present trinity lane, led in the same direction to garret hostel bridge. in st michael’s lane was michael house, and st michael’s and king’s hall lanes were connected by the narrow and dirty street called foul lane. these two colleges and the tortuous lanes connecting them occupied the site of trinity. the main street, after passing st michael’s church, came to great st mary’s church, and proceeded along king’s parade as high street. on either side of this thoroughfare was an indiscriminate mass of houses—the great court of king’s did not exist. its site was then a labyrinth of narrow alleys and beetling tenements. a winding lane led across the space now[6] occupied by the lawn east of king’s chapel, to the schools, and skirting them, ran into the street leading from michael house to the mill pool, called milne street. of this street, which passed clare and crossed king’s where gibbs’ building stands, we still preserve the original course in queen’s lane. it was connected with the parallel high street by piron lane, which occupied the north side of the court at king’s, and st austin’s lane, which was the modern king’s lane. several lanes led from milne street down to the river. milne street was terminated by small bridges street, now silver street, which crossed the river from newnham and joined high street at st botolph’s church.
on the other side of high street the confusion was even worse. many people can remember the days when the broad thoroughfares on either side of great st mary’s were filled with tumble-down houses. this picturesque and unsanitary state of things was almost the last remnant of medieval cambridge. in this rabbit-warren lived many of the tradespeople. the names of the lanes between high street and the market place are sufficient testimony. the sheerer’s row, north of great st mary’s, was continued by the shoemaker’s row, which is now market street. the market place was so largely blocked up by this dense mass of houses that it occupied not more than half of its present site. in its centre was the conduit; west of the conduit was the cross. the tolbooth and prison were on the south of the space, where the[7] guildhall is. in front of the tolbooth were the shambles, and, east of this savoury neighbourhood petty cury, the little cookery, led to barnwell gate. from the market place, peas hill led, as now, to bene’t street, and bene’t street led back to high street, just where king’s parade joins trumpington street. free school lane, at the back of saint bene’t’s church and corpus, was called luthburgh lane, and the original buildings of corpus opened into this and not into trumpington street, as at present. just before reaching pembroke, high street was brought to a stop by trumpington gate, just as conduit street was finished by barnwell gate. on the other side of the king’s ditch were the church of st peter and the foundation of peterhouse.
another point which the visitor to medieval cambridge would notice would be the abundance of religious houses. great towns, such as london or bristol, were well off in this way, but cambridge could not compare in size with these cities. there are few of these houses whose remains we cannot trace in one or other of the colleges. it became, in the fifteenth century, the fashion to appropriate the monasteries to purposes of learning. all the great colleges absorbed some of these institutions. the chief were outside the king’s ditch. if accounts are true, the monastery of the augustinian canons at barnwell must have formed a splendid object in any prospect of cambridge. to reach it, one would pass through meadows, with the nunnery of st mary and st rhadegund away to the[8] left. in the southern part of barnwell, beyond barnwell gate, was the house of black friars, on one side of preachers’ street, the faubourg which stretched outside the town boundaries and formed the southern approach to cambridge. this friary is now emmanuel college. outside trumpington gate was a house of gilbertine canons; and opposite it was the house of friars of the sack, which became incorporated with peterhouse. in cambridge itself the friars were well represented. the grey friars occupied the site of sidney sussex college; the white friars, that picturesque order which reckoned elijah as its patriarch, had a house on part of the site of queens’ college. the austin friars lived on a piece of ground very nearly corresponding to the university laboratories, which was entered from bene’t street, just where that street meets peas hill. all these friaries were bounded on one side by water: the carmelite house met the river; the franciscan and augustinian houses abutted on the ditch. of these monastic buildings in the town we have scarcely any trace; their position is merely distinguishable. the dominican house was swept away by the founders of emmanuel, and no one could detect any monastic remains in the prosaic aspect of that eminently puritan college. at jesus, however, alcock successfully preserved the plan of the nunnery; and the college which we see is in substance a monastic building. barnwell priory, with the exception of a small chantry-chapel, has disappeared. the augustinian[9] hospital of st john has been blotted out by st john’s college; its beautiful piscina, incorporated in sir gilbert scott’s chapel, is its only relic. and, actually, the only building which has been allowed to stand without alteration is the remote and melancholy lepers’ chapel at stourbridge, a beautiful norman building, which was attached to the hospital of st mary magdalene.
stourbridge is a good mile beyond jesus college. in the field close by the leper’s chapel was held the famous stourbridge fair, the english counterpart of beaucaire and nijni-novgorod. there is no doubt that the medieval cambridge owed its fame in a very large measure to this annual mart. it was the most important of a series of fairs in the eastern counties—tombland fair at norwich and the marts of lynn and wisbech have still a certain celebrity—and its interest is largely enhanced by the fact that, after the dissolution of the leper’s hospital, its original proprietor under a charter of king john, the university had an official connection with it. it lasted for a month, from august 24th to september 28th, and during that period received visits from all the principal merchants in england. it was opened by the vice-chancellor in person and was patronised, perhaps rather noisily, by the university generally. its commercial importance is to be gathered from a passage in defoe’s tour of great britain, quoted by mr atkinson in his interesting account of the fair. hops and wool were the two great staples[10] of trade, and stourbridge fair determined the price of hops in england. it was thus not a mere place of pleasure, but resembled the great nomadic markets of the east. anybody who has been to lynn mart or to stourbridge fair itself in its sorry old age knows that to-day the great business of the fairs consists in steam roundabouts and side-shows. the roundabout is a late development, but the side-show has an honourable antiquity. stourbridge fair boasted, within the last century, a theatre where legitimate shaksperian drama was admirably performed by a norwich company. the performances were largely attended by the university, and enterprising ladies like mrs frere of downing were to be seen there with fashionable parties. the story is often told of “rare richard farmer,” master of emmanuel, how he and a few friends, ardent lovers of shakspere, attended the stourbridge theatre night after night, occupying a bench especially reserved for them.
at stourbridge fair university and town took joint management of the proceedings. they did not, however, love one another very cordially, and the town resented the rights which the university enforced with some arrogance. “town and gown rows” were, in the ordinary course of things, not very common. when they broke out, they were serious; but usually the university was much to blame. for example, in james i.’s time, george ruggle, fellow of clare, wrote a play in derision of the town’s folk, to which the college, with the worst taste,[11] invited the mayor and corporation. but that the town, at any rate in medieval times, watched the growth of the university with favour, is sufficiently proved by the refoundation of corpus christi college, the work of townspeople. the university repaid the debt in subsequent years by foundations like perse’s grammar school and addenbrooke’s hospital. we must remember that, ecclesiastically, the connection of town and university was for some centuries very close. the church of st mary by the market was not merely the chapel of king’s hall; it was also a parish church, and a large and important gild of merchants had their chapel within its walls. at first, the colleges were entirely opposed to the monastic spirit. they did not worship in their own chapels, but joined in the devotions of the ordinary congregations, going to church just as the grammar school of any town in england attends the parish church, as a matter of course. the extreme youth of the scholars completes the comparison. but, as the colleges grew in riches and numbers, they reverted to the monastic ideal, and each built its own chapel. the town and university drew apart from each other, and the university became the more important body. moreover, while the learning of the university grew, the trade of the town diminished. the gradual diversion of trade from the eastern counties, the decay of ports like lynn, with whose commerce cambridge was inseparably linked, all the changes in the physical geography of the fens, reduced the importance of the[12] town. it would be unfair to assert that cambridge, as a whole, exists for the sake of the university; but there is no doubt that the nucleus of the town, its whole western quarter, is devoted to that purpose, and that, without the university, it would be of little more importance than huntingdon or st ives—of less importance, probably, than ely or wisbech, which are still at the head of an excellent water-way.
cambridge, no less than oxford, took her part in the religious commotions of the sixteenth century. she was deeply concerned in the revival of learning. she shares with oxford the honour of enrolling waynflete and foxe among the members of the university. bishop fisher belongs entirely to her, and, in consequence, cambridge was the university which the lady margaret favoured more conspicuously. erasmus taught in her schools. even before the dissolution, she showed, by her appropriation of religious houses to scholastic purposes, the growth of that liberal spirit which is thought to be her intellectual distinction. we shall see how pious churchmen like bishop alcock and a medieval devotee like lady margaret did not scruple to sweep away monasteries for the sake of learning. even monasteries themselves, in these later days, followed up their own initiative and endowed colleges. several abbeys united to found buckingham college. alcock, by virtue of his episcopal office, was abbot of the great monastery of ely. in the great struggle which followed the revival of learning as its natural outcome,[13] cambridge contributed her martyrs to both sides. fisher died in the defence of a rigid principle. on the other hand, cambridge prepared those three reformers who suffered for their opinions at oxford. cranmer was a fellow of jesus, ridley was master of pembroke, latimer belonged to the societies of christ’s and clare. it is not at all surprising that their influence, combined with the constant importation of genevan teachers, rendered cambridge very susceptible for a time to reformed doctrine of a foreign type. but the final result of the reformation in the university is shown by the intellectual freedom of her greatest sons. bacon and sir isaac newton are the obvious examples of this, but their illustrious personalities should not allow us to forget the brilliant ingenuity of the cambridge platonists; while, side by side with the greatest of all we may place the name of john milton.
milton, whose life is very largely bound up with cambridge, brings us to another critical point in university history. it is difficult to estimate the attitude of cambridge as a whole to the civil wars. oxford remained faithful to the king, but, while cambridge possessed no college so unanimously loyal as st john’s at oxford, there were one or two colleges, such as sidney and emmanuel, whose sympathies were undeniably puritan. an university cannot help a certain amount of conservatism, and cambridge sacrificed a great deal in the stewart cause. a few years ago, at the exhibition of plate in the fitzwilliam[14] museum, one realised the substantial cost of that sacrifice. but the fens and the whole neighbourhood were devoted to the interest of the parliament, and there were actually few who surrendered themselves as martyrs to the royalist cause. on the religious side of the question, however, cambridge has a good deal to show. some of the most eminent caroline divines are hers. lancelot andrewes, john cosin, jeremy taylor, peter gunning, to mention no other names, were all cambridge men. george herbert and nicholas ferrar were men of some academical distinction. but, if it is true that architecture is the best witness to history, no town in england shows more trace of the puritan spirit than cambridge. while the oxford buildings of the seventeenth century are gravely gothic and semi-ecclesiastical, the only building of this type in cambridge is the picturesque chapel at peterhouse. the library of st john’s, beautiful though it is, is a hybrid example of the order. other seventeenth century work, the work of ralph symons, for example, the court of clare, and wren’s masterpieces at trinity and emmanuel, are frankly domestic. men such as i have mentioned above, belong to a coterie, but do not represent the general temper of their age.
during the eighteenth century the state of the university was more or less torpid. it was the age of combination rooms and good port, of hard-and-fast social distinctions and formal gatherings. the universities, during this period, lost their touch with english life, and were not even[15] the forcing-houses of wit. this is especially true of cambridge. the first half of the century is absorbed in the great quarrel between bentley and his society. bentley is unquestionably the most commanding figure of his time at cambridge; for newton by this time belonged chiefly to london. but bentley was hated by the great company of wits, who had, for the most part, little to do with either university. pope, swift, fielding and richardson, the four writers who had the greatest influence on their century, were connected with neither oxford nor cambridge. and, from 1750 to 1790, there is very little to relieve the general dulness which settled over cambridge. mr john willis clark, in a delightful and only too short chapter, has revived for us the social etiquette and pleasures of the period. but the pleasures themselves are remarkable, for the most part, for their unconscious humour. and even the epigrams, in spite of their uniform cleverness, are a trifle heavy.
the french revolution woke cambridge from this long sleep. it was an active stimulant to the imagination. the fall of the bastille had its effect upon wordsworth at st john’s and coleridge at jesus; its immediate result, the general cry for independence, moved byron at trinity. the romantic enthusiasm set in, and with it that love for a liberal education apart from mechanical scholarship which is so prominent a factor in both oxford and cambridge to-day. in short, the modern life of the university[16] began; cambridge began once more to play its part in english intellectual life. wordsworth and tennyson, of all poets, have done most to stimulate the minds of their countrymen, and both owe no small portion of their personal influence to cambridge. and, side by side with this intellectual revival, one cannot fail to notice the spiritual revival inaugurated by the wesleys at oxford, and naturalised by charles simeon at cambridge. this simply means the awakening of the university to the other side of her responsibilities. in the oxford movement, which was the logical result of this revival, cambridge had very little share. her traditions were somewhat different from those of oxford, and her theological tendencies took what is usually known as a “broader” direction. her position is indicated by the names of f. d. maurice and charles kingsley. at the same time, her school of theology, under ellicott, lightfoot, hort and westcott, has preserved its scientific basis and cannot be surpassed in any university. and time would fail to tell of what triumphs she has won in other fields. darwin in biology, thomson in electricity, adams in astronomy, are names which tell their own tale. with these main activities, too, others have grown. the energies of the university have been expanded in every direction. the multiplication of open scholarships and prizes, the university extension system, the foundation of colleges for women, are only a few of the ways in which her influence has been doubled throughout great britain. and[17] in all this surely her founders and benefactors have full recompense for their labours—in the love which the university excites in her sons and in the contribution of each member to the corporate action of the whole body.
