Cambridge (England) -- History; University of Cambridge -- History
To-day the completely restored church, the work at varying intervals
from 1849 to 1869 of Salvin and Pugin and Bodley, forms one of the most
beautiful and interesting college chapels in Cambridge. An important
series of stained glass windows were executed by Mr. William Morris from
the designs of Burne-Jones between 1873-77. In 1893 the Rev. Osmund
Fisher, a former Dean of the College, at this time elected an Honorary
Fellow, remembering to have seen in his undergraduate days of fifty
years before indications of old Gothic work in the wall of the cloister,
during some repair of the plaster work, obtained leave of the Master to
investigate the wall. This led to the discovery of the beautiful triple
group of early English arches and doorway which formed the original
entrance to the chapter house of the Nunnery, one of the most charming
bits of thirteenth century architectural grouping in all Cambridge.
Bishop Alcock was probably a better architect than he was an educational
reformer. He was successful enough in converting the fabric of the
dissolved Nunnery into college buildings. It may be doubted whether he
was equally successful in translating his friend Archbishop Rotherham's
ideal of a grammar school college into a working institution. In the
constitution which he gave to his college there were to be places found
for both Fellows and boys--_Scholares and Pueri_--but the _Scholares_
were obviously to be men, and the _Pueri_ simply schoolboys, for they
were to be under fourteen years of age on admission; and _Juvenes_,
undergraduate scholars, did not enter into his plan. The amended
statutes of his successors, Bishops Stanley and West, gave some
definition to the founder's scheme, but they did not materially modify
it. Within fifty years, in fact, from its foundation, Jesus College, as
Alcock had conceived it, had become an anachronism, and the claustral
community of student priests with their schoolboy acolytes, not
seriously concerned with true education, and unvivified by contact with
the real student scholar, came near to perishing, as a thing born out of
due season. The dawn of what might seem to be a better state of things
only began with the endowment of scholarships--scholarships, that is to
say, in the modern sense--in the reign of Edward VI. It was only,
however, with the university reforms of the nineteenth century that the
proportion of college revenue allotted to such endowment fund was
reasonably assessed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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