This was in 1440. He at once put hand to the work, and that same year signed the Charters for both Colleges; the Head of each being called "Provost," in order, as he said, "to weld the two Colleges together in a bond of everlasting brotherhood,"--a bond which actually lasted in its entirety till 1870, and of which traces even yet remain. The acquisition of the sites involved complicated legal transactions which occupied several years; but by 1444 Eton was sufficiently advanced to receive its first Scholars, a colony brought by William of Waynflete from Winchester; and by 1446 Henry was able to dedicate the first stone of his Cambridge chapel. Every dimension of this glorious edifice he himself worked out with the utmost minuteness, and set down, as he would have it completed, in that notable record of his purposes still preserved in the College Library, and known as his "Will." The word had not in those days its present purely posthumous signification, but was used of any formal disposition of a man's estate, or any part of it, to some given purpose. In this document, "one of the most remarkable works in the English language," as Mr. J. W. Clark styles it, the King describes his future College so accurately that a complete plan and elevation of the whole can be drawn from it. We thus learn that Gibbs' Building represents what was meant to be the western side of an enclosed court, with a fountain in the midst of it. The Chapel was to form the northern side of this court; the entrance, with its turreted gate-tower, the eastern; the Hall and Library, the western. The great lawn before us was not to be, as now, an empty space, but was to be occupied, partly by a small "kitchen court" containing the various offices (bake-house, brew-house, etc.), partly by a cloistered cemetery between the Chapel and the river, from the western side of which was to rise a pinnacled tower, 220 feet high, the rival to that at Magdalen, Oxford, which was already being planned by William of Waynflete. Another turreted gate-tower, on the very bank of the river, was to give access to the College Bridge (further north than the present one). Had this plan been carried out in its entirety, King's would indeed have been, as the historian Stow puts it, "such that the like colledge could scarce have been found again in any Christian land." [Illustration: _Queens' College Gateway._]