Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely — John Shaqi
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
The next generation saw Augustinian Canons settled in the town itself,
at the Hospital (now the College) of St. John; and Benedictine nuns at
the Priory of St. Radegund just beyond the King's Ditch, where their
conventual church is still used as the Chapel of Jesus College. A
century later, and friars of all the Orders came flocking into
Cambridge; the Grey Franciscans, the Black Dominicans, the White
Carmelites, the Austin Friars, the Friars of the Sack, the Friars of
Bethlehem. The sites occupied by the first three of these names are
to-day represented by the Colleges of Sidney, Emmanuel, and Queens'.
Friars always made for the chief centres of life, and by the
thirteenth century Cambridge had become emphatically such, by the rise
of that institution destined to give it a perennial fame, the
University.
How this rise of the University came about is an as yet unsolved
problem in history. As in the case of Oxford, the great name of Alfred
was invoked, by unscrupulous mediaeval fabricators, as concerned in its
foundation. And it is possible that there may be really traceable some
distant connection with that great saint and hero. For Alfred actually
did found amidst the ruins of Ely, after its sack by the Danes, a
small College of priests, which lived on to be the nucleus of the
restored Abbey in the days of his grandson Edgar the Peaceful. And it
is also historical fact that this restored Abbey was specially
renowned for the famous school attached to it--so famous as to count
amongst its scholars more than one future monarch. Furthermore we know
that the Ely monks taught in Cambridge also, and this may well have
been the first germ of the University.
At any rate it is certain that, in 1209, when the schools of Oxford
were for a while closed by the Government, as the outcome of a more
than usually outrageous "rag," large numbers of the students migrated
to Cambridge; which seems to point to the place having already some
educational repute. From henceforward, at all events, it attained
European reputation in this respect, for, in 1229, we find another
batch of expelled students, this time from Paris, settling themselves
here, and yet another swarm of Oxonians twenty years later.
The University had now become an organic body, with its Chancellor,
its masters, and its scholars or "clerks," so called because, being
not wholly illiterate, the Law considered them as potential members of
the clerical profession, and gave them special immunities accordingly.
They were not amenable to lay jurisdiction, but only to the milder
"Courts Christian," in which the death-penalty was never inflicted. It
seems not infrequently to have been deserved; for the earliest
undergraduates were, at first, an utterly lawless lot, and made
themselves most unpleasant neighbours to the "burgesses" of the Town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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