Assuming the year of the poet’s birth to have been 1340 he would have been going to the university, according to the custom of those days, about the year 1353, and his place in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household was probably already assured him when he went to Cambridge.[168] He was back in her service in his seventeenth year and therefore could not have had time to study at both universities: and we may add to this that although his general knowledge, which he had no time to acquire in later life, suggests that he received a university education, there is not a tittle of evidence to support the idea that Chaucer went to Oxford. One more conjecture: had he got his information about prioress’s French from the religious of the convent of S. Leonard of Stratford-atte-Bowe whom we find owning land in Cambridge from the days of Edward I.? [Sidenote: The Schools. The High Street and School Street.] It is to this period of the history of Cambridge that the first university buildings as distinguished from collegiate buildings belong. During the chancellorship of Robert Thorpe, Knight, Master of Pembroke (1347-64) and Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, afterwards Chancellor of England, the “schools quadrangle” was projected in that street of colleges, unrivalled in Europe, which prolonging the Trumpington Road as King’s Parade or Trinity Street or S. John’s Street was anciently known as the “School street” of the university. It was also the high street of the Saxon town of which S. Benet’s tower was the nucleus, but whether the original Saxon town lay on this side of the river, or whether, as frequently happened in the xi century, the Saxon population retreated here leaving the Castle district to their Norman conquerors, we have no means of determining.[169] There were, then, no public buildings up to the xiv century. The Greyfriars or the Austinfriars gave hospitality to the university on public occasions, and the only brick and mortar evidence of a university lay in the hostels and colleges. The “Schools” now erected were halls for lecturing and scholastic disputations; the north, west, and east sides were completed by the middle of the next century, the south side being added in accordance with a decision taken in 1457 to build “a _new_ school of philosophy and civil law, or a library.”[170] This was erected on university ground (on the south) next to the school of canon law (west). Over this last was the original library room (the “west room” 1457) and “a chapel of exceeding great beauty.” The quadrangle contained the Divinity school (north) with the Regent and non-regent houses; opposite was the Sophisters’ school with the _libraria communis_ or _magna_; on the entrance side were the Chancellor’s (Rotherham’s) Library, Consistory court and Court of the Proctors and Taxors; and facing this the Bachelors’ school and the school of Medicine and Law; the old “west room” having been converted into a school, by grace of the Senate, in 1547.[171]