It is not known whether the University of Cambridge began with a few teachers taking up their residence in the town, giving instruction, and attracting students and other teachers, or whether it started ready-made by a migration of a body of discontented teachers and students from some existing school. I believe the former view to be correct. If so, we may reasonably assume that a considerable proportion of the earliest adult students were previously living in monastic houses here or in the neighbouring fenland monasteries at Ely, Peterborough, or Croyland. It has been suggested that at first the lectures were given in the local grammar-schools: this is probable, and would fit in with the secular organization of the University and the fact that boys learning Latin grammar (glomerels) were reckoned among its students. Probably the movement was started with the sanction and direct encouragement of the bishop of Ely, certainly it was not directly monastic, and more likely the teachers were secular clerks and not monks. I conjecture that at first the lecturers were strangers to the locality, but this in no way implies that a fragment of another university, students as well as teachers, migrated here as an organized body. Whatever the origin of the University, its members organized themselves for mutual aid and protection as a _Studium_ on the model of that at Paris, with which it seems later to have been frequently in touch. If we may trust ancient traditions quoted by Bulaeus and Peacock, the early University had also some connection with the studium of Orleans: this is possible but speculative. Bologna represented another type of organization which, however, was not adopted anywhere in England. The University of Cambridge existed in working order in 1209, and in my opinion its origin may be safely assigned to some time in the previous twenty years. Of its external history during the century following its organization we know little: we read of its chancellor in 1225, of French students coming to it in 1229, of special privileges conferred by the crown in 1231 and 1251, of its recognition by the pope in 1233, and finally of a papal grant in 1318--exceptional in extent--of all rights which were or could be enjoyed by any university in Christendom. Oxford went through somewhat similar stages. The two universities were closely connected, and by 1333 their position had become so firmly established that they agreed not to recognize any other studium in the kingdom, and in fact after that year no other university was established in England until less than a century ago.