The sights and sounds in the streets suggested a new epoch--something already achieved and something about to be achieved. Something of stir before an awakening. The English language which was to prove in the hands of its masters one of the finest vehicles of literary expression began everywhere to be heard in place of the French of Norfolk and Stratford-atte-Bowe. The softer southern speech prevailed over [Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE GATEWAY AND CHAPEL--TWILIGHT EFFECT The Gateway and Screen on the left hand, and beyond it the Chapel. In the distance the Senate House, Caius College, and the Tower of St. John’s College Chapel.] the northern, but the dialects of East Anglia and the Ridings of Yorks were perhaps most frequently heard. The canons of S. John and S. Giles, from the Norman side of the town, might be met in their black cloaks, the Gilbertine canons, from the Saxon side, all in white with the homely sheepskin cape. The Carmelites had already exchanged their striped brown and white cloak--representing Elijah’s mantle singed with fire as it fell from the fiery chariot--for the white cloak to which they owe their name of Whitefriars. The Romites of S. Austin wore a hermit’s dress.[163] Benedictine monks from Ely and Norwich could certainly be seen in the streets of Cambridge,[164] and the Benedictine nuns of S. Rhadegund rode and walked abroad in the black habit as it was the universal custom in that great order for nuns to do. The Dominicans looked like canons in their black _cappa_, the Franciscans like peasants in their coarse grey tunic roughly tied with cord. Besides the Carmelites and Austinfriars there were the Bethlemite friars in Trumpington street and Our-Lady friars by the Castle; the former could be distinguished at a distance by the red star of five rays on their cloaks with a sky blue circle in its centre--the star of Bethlehem; but both these communities wore the habit--black over white--of the Dominicans. Scholars poor and rich jostled each other in the schools and in the public ways, wearing the long and short gowns of the day, the _cote_ which had just come into fashion, or the habit of their order. There were doctors in the three faculties wearing scarlet gowns and the doctor’s bonnet or _camaurum_, and there was a sprinkling of doctors and of students from Orléans, Padua, Pavia, and Paris.