The literary revival had no doubt been quicker and more brilliant at Oxford, but Cambridge, owing to Fisher's cautious and careful supervision, and his foundation of the Lady Margaret Colleges of Christ's and S. John's, was the first to give to the New Learning a permanent home. [Illustration: The Chapel, Christ's College] The religious bias of the Countess of Richmond had inclined her to devote the bulk of her fortune to an extension of the great monastery of Westminster. But Bishop Fisher knew that active learning rather than lazy seclusion was essential to preserve the Church against the dangerous Italian type of the Renaissance, and he persuaded her to direct her gift to educational purposes. He pointed out that the Abbey Church was already the wealthiest in England, "that the schools of learning were meanly endowed, the provisions of scholars very few and small, and colleges yet wanting to their maintenance--that by such foundations she might have two ends and designs at once, might double her charity and double her reward, by affording as well supports to learning as encouragement to virtue." The foundation of Christ's College in 1505 is an enduring memorial of the wisdom of the Bishop and the charity of the Lady Margaret. There is a tradition that Fisher, who undoubtedly had joined Michaelhouse before taking his B.A. degree in 1487, had, upon his first entering Cambridge, been a student of God's House. However that may be, it was to this small foundation he turned as the basis of his projected new college. God's House, an adjunct of Clare-Hall, founded by William Byngham, Rector of S. John Zachary, in London, in 1441, stood originally on a plot of land at the west end of King's Chapel, adjoining the Church of S. John Zachary. In the changes which were necessary to secure a site for King's College, the Church of S. John and God's House were removed. In return for his surrender, Byngham had received license from Henry VI. to build elsewhere a college. Land was accordingly secured on what is now the site of the first and second courts of Christ's College, and in the charter of the new God's House, dated 16th April 1448, it is stated that Byngham had deferred the foundation owing to his ardent desire that "the King's glory and his reward in heaven might be increased" by his personal foundation of God's House. Henry could not resist such an argument, and thus God's House became, and Christ's College, as its successor, claims to be, of Royal Foundation. The little foundation, however, was always cramped by lack of means. Within fifty years of its first foundation the time had evidently come for a reconstitution of God's House.