The story of the nunnery of S. Rhadegund, which, under the auspices of Bishop Alcock, became Jesus College, is an interesting one. Luckily, the material for that history is fairly complete. The nuns bequeathed a large mass of miscellaneous documents--charters, wills, account rolls--to the College, and the scrupulous care with which they were originally housed, and not less, perhaps, the wholesome neglect which has since respected their repose in the College muniment room, have fortunately preserved them intact to the present time, and have enabled the present tutor of the College, Mr. Arthur Gray, to reconstruct a fairly complete picture of this isolated woman's community in an alien world of men in pre-Academic Cambridge, and of the depravation and decay which came of that isolation, and which ended in the first suppression in England of an independent House of Religion. I am indebted for the following particulars to Mr. Gray's monograph on the priory of S. Rhadegund, published a year or two ago by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, and to the first chapter of his lately published College History. Who the nuns were that first settled on the Green-Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and whence they came thither, and by what title they became possessed of their original site, the documents they have handed down to us across the centuries apparently do not record. It is true that in the letters patent of Henry VII. for the dissolution of the nunnery and the erection of a college in its room it is asserted--evidently on the representation of Bishop Alcock--that S. Rhadegund's Priory was "of the foundation and patronage of the Bishop, as in right of his Cathedral Church of Ely." The nun's "original cell" was no doubt of the Benedictine Order, and the great Priory of Ely, fifteen miles away down the river, was also Benedictine, and the good Bishop may have been right in his assertion of the connection between the two, but it is a little doubtful whether he could have given chapter and verse for his assertion. What is certain is this, that Nigel, the second Bishop of Ely, in the opening years of Stephen's reign, gave to the nuns their earliest charter. It is addressed with Norman magnificence "to all barons and men of S. Etheldrytha, cleric or lay, French or English," and it grants for a rent of twelve pence, "to the nuns of the cell lately established without the vill of Cantebruge," certain land lying near to other land belonging to the same cell. To the friendly interest of the same Bishop it seems probable that the nuns owed their first considerable benefaction. This was a parcel of ground, consisting of two virgates and six acres of meadow and four cottars with their tenure in the neighbouring village of Shelford, granted to them by a certain William the Monk. The fact that after seven centuries and a half the successors of the nuns of S. Rhadegund, the Master and Fellow