Both our universities doubtless count a school life of eight centuries at least: but a school life, the activity of teachers and scholars, is not the same thing as a university life. We have already said that Oxford owed its history to the constant communication between it and London, to its accessibility from the capital which made it the frequent resort not only of our kings but, what is more to our purpose, of scholars European and English.[59] The ferment created by their lectures no doubt kept alive the desire for knowledge and the spirit of enquiry among the motley population of the town; a moral atmosphere which in its turn attracted students. At Cambridge everything was the opposite of this. S. Frideswide’s at Oxford was a poor religious house, but it was in the heart of the town; the monastery at Ely was a great religious house, but its school was many miles from the university. Cambridge, as we have seen, was accessible to no great centre, there was nothing to attract the traveller who if he visited it almost certainly went out of his way to do so. Nevertheless some influences were at work in the xii century which determined the transformation of Cambridge into a _studium generale_, a university. The river near the town, as I have already said, gave rise to one of the greatest fairs in England, and Mr. J. W. Clark is disposed to see in the concourse of people brought together by Stourbridge fair the determining factor in our university history. The fair was called after the Stour a stream lower down the river, and was held in a large cornfield near Barnwell. It began on the feast of S. Bartholomew, August 24, and lasted till the fourteenth day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14). These five weeks of revelry proved more disturbing to Cambridge studies than the May term of to-day; xiii century scholars spent their money at Stourbridge fair as Isaac Newton spent his in the xviith; there he acquired his prism in August 1661 and a book on “Judicial Astrology” the geometry and trigonometry of which were then as ‘Greek’ to him. Sea-borne goods which had probably always been brought inland up the river to this point, formed the nucleus of the fair at Stourbridge. It is generally agreed that three other English fairs exceeded the Cambridge fair in importance, those at Bristol, Bartholomew’s in London, and Lynton. Defoe however describes it as the largest in Europe, greater than that at Nuremberg or than the Frankfort mart. It [Sidenote: A.D. 1211.] was already highly prosperous when King John made over its dues to the leper hospice of S. Mary Magdalene; and it has been suggested that this was the ancient fair to which Irish merchants brought their cloth in the time of Athelstan.