Highways and Byways in Cambridge and ElyConybeare, John William Edward
History
Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely
Conybeare, John William Edward
Cambridgeshire (England) -- Description and travel; Isle of Ely (England) -- Description and travel
At the beginning of the next it had the good fortune to be taken up by
Lady Margaret, who increased the number of residents maintained in it
from five to sixty, and changed the name from "God's House" to
"Christ's College." At the same time she planned out the principal
court, as it now exists. Unlike St. John's, it was at least partly
completed before her death, for the historian Fuller tells a pretty
story of how she here beheld from a window the dean administering to
one of the scholars the corporal chastisement which was at that day
the recognised means of discipline,[106] and called out to him
"_Lente! Lente!_" ("Gently! gently!") The College is appropriately
full of her memory: her portrait adorns the Hall; on the front of the
Gate Tower stands her statue, between the Plantagenet Rose and the
Tudor Portcullis, and beneath it are carved her armorial bearings, as
at St. John's, with the addition of the crest, a demi-eagle of gold
rising out of a crown.[107] On either side are the three feathers of
the Prince of Wales. These same arms, emblazoned, are over the inner
gateway that leads into the Gardens, with her own beautiful motto,
"_Souvent me souvient_" ("Oft I bethink me"). And in the Library under
a glass shade is a reproduction of the upper part of her person, with
the hands folded in prayer, from her monument in Westminster Abbey.
[Footnote 106: The rod retained its use in this connection till the
eighteenth century. In the seventeenth, during the period of Puritan
ascendancy, it was made a University enactment that if any
undergraduate should "by day or night enter any river, ditch, lake,
pond, mere, or any other water within the County of Cambridge, whether
for the sake of swimming or of washing," he should be flogged in his
College hall. It must be remembered that students then entered at
least five years earlier than now.]
[Footnote 107: This crest is absent from the Johnian gate-tower, but
is found above the iron gate leading into the Backs.]
But, to the ordinary visitor, the memory of even Lady Margaret is, at
Christ's, overshadowed by the mightier memory of John Milton, who was
in residence here for seven years, from 1625 till, in 1632, he became
a Master of Arts. In residence along with him was his "Lycidas," whose
real name was Edward King. In the gardens an ancient mulberry tree, so
old that its stem has to be encased in a pyramid of turf, and its
remaining arms jealously shored up, is called by his name. The
tradition that he himself planted it is probably unfounded, but it was
actually there in his day, one of the score of these trees which, by
the desire of King James the First, were placed in the gardens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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