For the beginnings of Christ’s College we must go back to the year 1436. William Bingham, Rector of St John Zachary in the city of London, founded a small hostel or Grammar College in connection with Clare, and placed it on a site which is now occupied by the western part of King’s College Chapel and a portion of the great court of King’s. Four years later, Henry VI.’s great experiment forced Bingham to seek other quarters, which he eventually found in Preachers’ Street, the thoroughfare leading from the Barnwell Gate to the Dominican Friary. Here he re-founded his college under the picturesque name of God’s House, which it had already borne in its former position. But, like so many similar institutions, its revenues languished. Bingham’s society was to consist of a master with the title of Proctor, and of twenty-four scholars. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the house maintained only four scholars besides the Proctor. There is a story that the great John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was bred at this hostel; and that his affection for it was the cause which moved him to bring its destitution to the notice of his friend, Lady Margaret Beaufort. It is, at all events, more than certain that Fisher, who guided his patroness in her pious resolves, called her attention to the case, and so laid the foundation, as it were, of Christ’s and St John’s. There is no satisfactory evidence as to the time at which she conceived the idea of founding St John’s. Probably, the notion of a college had taken her fancy long before, and it is not unlikely that the opportunity of founding two colleges presented itself at one time. At any rate, her first work was to re-establish God’s House in 1505. The task of converting St John’s Hospital into St John’s College required several years of preliminaries and formalities. But in God’s House she had a college already to her hand. Henry VI. had apparently promised Bingham some compensation for the removal of the house, but the greater work of founding King’s and the civil troubles which soon engrossed the crown had prevented him from fulfilling his promise. The Lady Margaret, devoted to the memory of the “royal saint,” endowed the society on the scale approved by him, and provided funds for the maintenance of a master, twelve fellows and forty-seven scholars. And “from her singular devotion to the name of Jesus Christ”—the same motive which had prompted Alcock to call his foundation Jesus College—she founded the college under the invocation of Christ. We have thus two colleges at Cambridge which recall the popular devotion of the Name of Jesus, then lately established and approved.