Another point which the visitor to medieval Cambridge would notice would be the abundance of religious houses. Great towns, such as London or Bristol, were well off in this way, but Cambridge could not compare in size with these cities. There are few of these houses whose remains we cannot trace in one or other of the colleges. It became, in the fifteenth century, the fashion to appropriate the monasteries to purposes of learning. All the great colleges absorbed some of these institutions. The chief were outside the King’s Ditch. If accounts are true, the monastery of the Augustinian Canons at Barnwell must have formed a splendid object in any prospect of Cambridge. To reach it, one would pass through meadows, with the nunnery of St Mary and St Rhadegund away to the left. In the southern part of Barnwell, beyond Barnwell Gate, was the house of Black Friars, on one side of Preachers’ Street, the _faubourg_ which stretched outside the town boundaries and formed the southern approach to Cambridge. This friary is now Emmanuel College. Outside Trumpington Gate was a house of Gilbertine Canons; and opposite it was the house of Friars of the Sack, which became incorporated with Peterhouse. In Cambridge itself the Friars were well represented. The Grey Friars occupied the site of Sidney Sussex College; the White Friars, that picturesque order which reckoned Elijah as its patriarch, had a house on part of the site of Queens’ College. The Austin Friars lived on a piece of ground very nearly corresponding to the University laboratories, which was entered from Bene’t Street, just where that street meets Peas Hill. All these friaries were bounded on one side by water: the Carmelite house met the river; the Franciscan and Augustinian houses abutted on the ditch. Of these monastic buildings in the town we have scarcely any trace; their position is merely distinguishable. The Dominican house was swept away by the founders of Emmanuel, and no one could detect any monastic remains in the prosaic aspect of that eminently Puritan college. At Jesus, however, Alcock successfully preserved the plan of the nunnery; and the college which we see is in substance a monastic building. Barnwell Priory, with the exception of a small chantry-chapel, has disappeared. The Augustinian hospital of St John has been blotted out by St John’s College; its beautiful piscina, incorporated in Sir Gilbert Scott’s chapel, is its only relic. And, actually, the only building which has been allowed to stand without alteration is the remote and melancholy Lepers’ Chapel at Stourbridge, a beautiful Norman building, which was attached to the Hospital of St Mary Magdalene.