One of the odd things about Merton’s movements is that though he began buying land in Oxford the year after the Malden foundation (1265), he made his chief acquisition in Cambridge as late as 1269, and that a year later when he issued a revised set of statutes (1270) he still makes no allusion to any change of locality. It is possible that in 1265 when he wrote “at Oxford or at any other university” he had in mind the tentatives then being made to found an English university in some other town. It was in fact in 1262, the 45th year of the reign of Henry III., that Cambridge students had migrated to Northampton with the king’s licence to found a university. The traditional bickerings between southerners and northerners three years previously had been the cause of the exodus, and the Cambridge scholars found many Oxonians already there who had migrated from Oxford after their quarrel with the papal legate in 1238 but had obtained no licence to institute a university. The licence accorded to the masters and scholars of Cambridge university was withdrawn four years later on a representation being made to Henry III. that a university at Northampton must prove prejudicial to Oxford.[87] Migrations of students to other towns took place throughout the xiii century. They begin in 1209 when there was a general exodus from Oxford not only to Cambridge but to the town of Reading. Thirty years later the Oxonians migrated to Northampton and Salisbury, being followed to the former in 1262 as we have just seen by many Cambridge “masters and scholars.” These migrations certainly indicate that Oxford and Cambridge were not yet regarded as such permanent homes of English scholarship that other sites could not be substituted. The event which most impressed the popular imagination occurred when both universities had attained to European fame--the exodus in the reign of Edward III. from Oxford to Stamford which caused the king in 1333 to issue his royal letters forbidding any one to teach there. It had been prophesied that the studies pursued at Oxford would be transferred to Stamford, and the Cambridge floods gave rise to another prophecy, recorded by Spenser, which showed that the Stamford incident still occupied men’s minds. The flat Lincolnshire country would, it was said, become completely flooded, and Stamford then would ---- shine in learning more than ever did Cambridge or Oxford England’s goodly beames. No migration took place from Cambridge after the foundation of its first college. But before we enter upon this period of its history, and find ourselves in the brilliant epoch which was so soon to overtake the university in the xiv century, let us see what arrangements were made for the accommodation of the scholar population previous to the existence of colleges.