Blessed Virgin “observing their offices in S. Mary’s church.” These guilds or confraternities--which existed all through the middle ages as they had existed in classical Rome with precisely similar features--were to be found, as we know, especially among the artisan class, and took the place of our modern trades unions and mutual insurance societies. Like every enterprise of the ages of faith they had a semi-religious character, were usually attached as its “sisters and brethren” to some church, and owed their members not only material assistance but spiritual, paying for masses to be offered for the repose of the souls of all deceased brethren. [Sidenote: Corpus Christi A.D. 1352.] It was two such guilds which forgetting their differences and laying aside all emulations, joined together in the middle of the xiv century in order to found and endow a college in their town. The brethren of the guilds had been planning this enterprise since 1342, and in the following years those who possessed contiguous tenements in the parishes of S. Benet and S. Botolph pulled them down “and with one accord set about the task of establishing a college there.”[155] “By this means _they cleared a site for their college square in form_.”[156] Here then, as in the case of King’s Hall and Pembroke, the earliest collegiate buildings designed as such, the plan was quadrangular. Sometimes, as in the case of Trinity Hall, the adjacent buildings for completing the court could not be at once obtained, in others, as at Corpus itself and Clare, the courts are irregular, owing to the same difficulty of getting the foursquare space. Corpus Christi college presents us, indeed, with the unique and perfect example in Cambridge of the ancient college court. By March 1352 a clear space, 220 feet long by 140 wide, had been cleared, and the guilds worked with so much good will that they had nearly finished the exterior wall of their college in the same year. “The building of the college as it appears at the present day,” writes John Jocelyn, “with walls of enclosure, chambers arranged about a quadrangle, hall, kitchen, and Master’s habitation, was fully finished in the days of Thomas Eltisley, the first Master [1352-1376] and of his successor” [1376-1377]. This original court is what we see also to-day: the buildings are in two floors, the garrets were added later. The hall range contains the Master’s lodging with a _solarium_ above it, a door and passage leading thence to the hall. The three other sides were devoted to scholars’ chambers. S. Benet’s served as the scholars’ church, and the gate was on this side of the court. Before the reign of Henry VIII. there was but little glass or panelling in either story of the building. But in Jocelyn’s time the Master’s and fellows’ rooms were “skilfully decorated” with both. The fellows and scholars together panelled, paved, decorated, plastered, and glazed the public rooms of the college, in one case