THE KITCHEN WALL, PETERHOUSE

Housed in dwellings mean enough to the eye and as certainly ungracious to the nose, the young scholars of those early days lived a life of what we should now call intolerable discomfort. Coarse vesture, scanty food, long hours in the "common schools", such were the dominant features in the student life of every youth who sought to acquire the book learning of his day.

Nor did the foundation of the first few colleges sensibly alter these unhappy conditions. The aim of their founders was the removal by benefaction of some of the worst hardships to which the young scholar was then subjected. Thus provision was made for the bare necessaries of life—lodging, food, and raiment. Poverty was, of course, the first statutory qualification for membership. That the prosecution of certain studies was enjoined upon the beneficiaries, testifies less to a desire to further this or that branch of knowledge than to a not unnatural anxiety lest these young men should fall into idleness or other evil habits.

What was the town and what the university into which this new element of scholastic life now entered? Cambridge had a navigable river pouring its waters into the North Sea at the natural port of Lynn. Moreover, the town marked the junction of two Roman roads.

 It was a fertile spot; and its situation had struck the Conqueror as one of strategic importance. Here, therefore, he built a castle, the mound of which remains to this day. The structure itself was dismantled gradually during the fifteenth century. Some of the stone was used for the building of King's Hall, and some for King's College. "Hereby", writes Fuller in 1655, "that stately structure, anciently the ornament of Cambridge, is at this day reduced next to nothing." But during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries men might still look at that Norman keep and take heart of grace. Under its shadow had grown up a prosperous market town. On the one hand it was the greatest Fish Mart, on the other a town noted for one of the most important Fairs in the country. This Fair was held in a field hard by the village of Barnwell, that is to say, within two miles of the University town itself; it began on the feast of St. Bartholomew and lasted until the fourteenth day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (Aug. 24—Sept. 14). It still survives as the principal pleasure show and Horse Fair of the shire.

With these advantages Cambridge, as a town, rose rapidly in importance. The Jews appeared in 1106; and during that and the succeeding century most of the religious orders had established themselves in the place. The Templars were the first to appear. They built their church sometime between 1120 and 1140. It is the earliest of the four round churches which have come down to us.

Our universities, like most other English institutions, were not made—they grew; and all we can say of the origin of Cambridge is, that before the thirteenth century was far advanced references to it as a "stadium generate" or University creep into the state documents of the time. A migration from Oxford took place in 1209, and in 1231 a letter from King Henry III to the Mayor and bailiffs makes mention of a great influx of scholars "both from the regions near home and from beyond the seas". This document is also interesting as showing that the finding of lodgings was a matter of no little difficulty to the scholars. The King has to request the townspeople to deal properly with the students in all such transactions. When, therefore, Walter de Merton, the founder of the College in Oxford which bears his name, bought land at both Universities and endowed students in those schools, his benefaction came none too soon.

His house and scholars at Cambridge are mentioned in a document as early as 1259; and it was not till 1274 that he removed these scholars to the other University. Ten years later was founded the first exclusively Cambridge College. It was to consist of a Master and fourteen Fellows, together with a number of "bible clerks"—young men whose duty it was to read to the Society at meal times. This College was dedicated to St. Peter, and was known as "the House of the scholars of St. Peter", or Peterhouse. The founder was Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely.

The reasons which dictated Merton's change of policy can only be conjectured. To attempt to set up a stable society in an obviously unstable community must have seemed to many a risky project. A university was a body of students who possessed in actual property little more than the gowns upon their backs. At a word of plague or rapine they could, and indeed did, migrate elsewhere.

 A college with buildings and land could not as easily or as profitably take flight. From the point of view of a would-be benefactor, Cambridge, standing as it did "on the edge of the great wild"—to use Mr. J. W. Clark's words—might well seem to possess a less favourable situation than Oxford. It had, in the past, suffered a great deal from attack; and if the educationists of those days thought twice before running the risk of seeing their good works brought to nought in Cambridge, the subsequent history of the University very nearly bore out their worst fears; for the revolting peasants who followed the celebrated Wat Tyler entered Cambridge in considerable numbers, and, being joined by the great mass of the townsfolk, broke into Corpus Christi College.

They burnt its archives, together with every other book and paper they could lay their hands on; and not content with this damage "done and committed", they repaired to St. Mary's and the Common Schools, where, seizing the University chests, they destroyed the muniments and made away with the funds.