The colleges of Cambridge owe their foundation to many and various sources. We have already seen two of the most ancient tracing their origin to the liberality and foresight of wise bishops, two others to the widowed piety of noble ladies, one to the unselfish goodness of a parish priest. Later we shall find the stately patronage of kings and queens given to great foundations, and on the long roll of university benefactors we shall have to commemorate the names of great statesmen and great churchmen, philosophers, scholars, poets, doctors, soldiers, "honoured in their generation and the glory of their days." One college, however, there is which has a unique foundation, for it sprang, in the first instance, from that purest fount of true democracy, the spirit of fraternal association for the protection of common rights and of mutual responsibility for the religious consecration of common duties, by which the Cambridge aldermen and burgesses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were striving by their guild life, to cherish those essential qualities of the English character--personal independence and faith in law-abidingness--which lie at the root of all that is best in our modern civilisation, and were undoubtedly characteristic of the English people in the earliest times of which history has anything to tell us. The history of the guild life of Cambridge is one of unusual interest. The story breaks off far oftener than we could wish, but in the continuity of its religious guild history Cambridge holds a very important place, second only perhaps to that of Exeter. All the Cambridge guilds of which we know anything seem to have been essentially religious guilds, so prominent throughout their history remained their religious object. It is only indeed in connection with one of the earliest of which we have any record, the guild of Cambridge Thegns in the eleventh century, associated in devotion to S. Etheldreda, the foundress saint of Ely, that we find any secular element. That Guild does indeed offer to its members a secular protection of which the later guilds of the thirteenth century knew nothing, for they were religious guilds pure and simple. It is true that in the first charter of King John, dated 8th Jan. 1201, there appears to be a confirmation to the burgesses of Cambridge of a _guild merchant_ granting to them certain secular rights of toll. But there does not appear to be any historical evidence to show that the Guild Merchant of Cambridge ever took definite shape, or stood apart in any way from the general body of burgesses. King John's charter simply secured to the town those liberties and franchises which all the chief boroughs of England enjoyed at the beginning of the thirteenth century.[46] [Illustration: The Churches of S. Edward & St. Mary--the Great from Peas Hill]