The Parish Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate, had from the first been used as the College Chapel of Peterhouse. Indeed, the earliest college in Cambridge was the latest to possess a private chapel of its own, which was not built until 1628. All that remains, however, of the old Church of S. Peter is a fragment of the tower, standing at the north-west corner of the present building and the arch which led from it into the church. This probably marks the west end of the old church, which, no doubt, was much shorter than the present one. It is said that this old church fell down in part about 1340, and a new church was at once begun in its place. This was finished in 1352 and dedicated to the honour of the blessed Virgin Mary. The church is a very beautiful one, though of an unusual simplicity of design. It is without aisles or any structural division between nave and chancel. It is lighted by lofty windows and deep buttresses. On the south side and at the eastern gable are rich flowing decorated windows, the tracery of which is designed in the same style, and in many respects with the same patterns, as those of Alan de Walsingham's Lady Chapel at Ely. Indeed, a comparison of the Church of Little S. Mary with the Ely Lady Chapel, not only in its general conception, but in many of its details, such as that of the stone tabernacles on the outer face of the eastern gable curiously connected with the tracery of the window, would lead a careful observer to the conclusion that both churches had been planned by the same architect. The change of the old name of the church from S. Peter to that of S. Mary the Virgin is also, in this relation, suggestive. For we must remember that it was built at a time--the age of Dante and Chaucer--when Catholic purity, in the best natures, united to the tenderness of chivalry was casting its glamour over poetic and artistic minds, and had already led to the establishment in Italy of an Order--the _Cavalieri Godenti_--pledged to defend the existence, or, more accurately perhaps, the dignity of the Virgin Mary, by the establishment everywhere throughout western Europe of Lady Chapels in her honour. Whether Alan de Walsingham, the builder of the Ely Lady Chapel, and the builder of the Church of Little S. Mary at Cambridge--if he was not Alan--belonged to this Order of the Cavaliers of S. Mary, we cannot say; but at least it seems probable that the Cambridge Church sprang from the same impulse which inspired the magnificent stone poem in praise of S. Mary, built by the sacrist of Ely.