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 [Sidenote: 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] [Sidenote: 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.