The University of Cambridge

A New History

G.R. Evans

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780857730244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The intertwined stories of the great English 'Varsity' universities have many colourful aspects in common, yet each also boasts elements of true distinctiveness. So while the histories of Oxford and Cambridge are both characterised by seething town and gown rivalries, doctrinal conflicts and heretical outbursts, shifts of political and religious allegiance and gripping stories of individual heroism and defiance, they are also narratives of difference and distinctiveness. G R Evans explores the remarkable and unique contribution that Cambridge University has made to society and culture, both in Britain and right across the globe, and will subsequently publish her history of Oxford University to complete a major new history of the two universities. Ranging across 800 years of vivid history, packed with incident, Evans here explores great thinkers such as John Duns Scotus - the 13th century Franciscan Friar who gave his name his name to 'dunces' - and celebrates the extraordinary molecular breakthroughs of Watson and Crick in the 20th century. Moving from the radical new thinking of the Cambridge Platonists and the brilliant scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton to the discovery of the Double Helix and the notorious 'Garden House Hotel Riot' of 1970, the book is published to co-incide with the 800th anniversary of the University's foundation in 1209. The first short history of its kind, it will be a lasting and treasured resource for all Cambridge alumni/ae.

Where is the University?

It is a standing joke that tourists ask to be told where the University is, because it seems to be scattered everywhere in the city. The central area of Cambridge, where the Old Schools and the Senate House now stand, was first occupied in the fourteenth century by the University’s ‘schools’, buildings designed for lecturing and holding teaching-disputations. These were allocated by subjects to students working for their first degrees in Arts or to the sometimes much older graduate students studying for ‘higher degrees’ which were then taught courses and not at all like modern research degrees. On March 1459, the land known as Thornton’s Ground was leased to the University for 99 years by Corpus Christi College. The rent was to be two shillings a year. The School of Civil Law seems to have stood there at the time. The University Church of Great St. Mary’s was hard by and on the other side the old market place. An adjacent piece to the west was leased to the University in 1421 for two silver pennies. The record shows a good deal of acquiring and exchanging from this period as Henry VI sought land for the ambitious construction of King’s College in the fifteenth century. It was going to take up a sizeable chunk of the centre of the small town and start a rivalry for land between the University and the colleges.

The tiny centre of Cambridge is full of corners and alleyways that evoke memories, but students of earlier centuries might not have had the same picture of the place at all. The shops and pubs of the twentieth century were for the most part not the ones medieval students went to. Few of the buildings of Cambridge which will be familiar to any student or resident or traveller now alive met medieval eyes, though the medieval churches are still there and portions of medieval walls still stand, though some of them are now built into quite different structures. But the very streets have moved, as bargains were struck and land was leased or bought to provide a footing for the ambitions of those who began to build the great colleges. Land and property-hungry colleges and their would-be founders have been making deals for land throughout the history of the University. For example, Robert Willis, who made a painstaking study of the ‘architectural history’ of the University of Cambridge, published in three volumes in 1886, notes that

[t]he site of Peterhouse is bounded on the east by Trumpington Street; on the south by an estate bequeathed to Caius College by the Lady Ann Scroope, called Lammas Leys; on the west by Coe Fen; on the north by the churchyard of St. Mary the Less, anciently St. Peter, and by some dwelling-houses. The southern portion of this extensive ground ... originally belonged to the White Canons of S. Edmund of Sempringham, whose house ... was directly opposite it on the east side of Trumpington Street ... [and] purchased by Peterhouse in the reign of Elizabeth, at which time it was laid out as a garden.¹

The controversy over Butt Close, involving Clare Hall and King’s College illustrates the intensity of the jostling for space. Butt Close is now part of the College garden just across the river. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, what was then Clare Hall was planning some substantial rebuilding and reorganization of its limited space in the town centre. Its old quadrangle was right up against King’s College Chapel. Clare Hall wanted to move it to its present position; it asked King’s College for permission to use a piece of King’s land as a passageway so that Clare’s members could conveniently get across the river.² The King himself wrote to King’s College, to ask it to grant a lease to Clare. A complex arrangement of renewable twenty-year leasing was thrashed out from 1651, with a yearly rent of £5 to be paid by Clare to King’s. In return, the narrow piece of land alongside King’s College Chapel which belonged to Clare was to be leased to King’s, both for twenty years. The intention was that these leases would be renewed. In 1823, Clare exchanged the White Horse Inn, which it owned and which is now the site of the part of King’s College next to St. Catherine’s College, for Butt Close, so there were still battles being fought between the colleges over these and other scraps of city-centre land at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Schemes were not always carried through even where there was a splendid vision, a positive Master Plan on offer from a well-known architect. The famous library of Trinity College was first conceived quite differently by Christopher Wren (1632–1723) from the way in which it was eventually built.³ He thought of laying down a square foundation and then making the building circular with a dome or cupola – not unlike the appearance of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. Still, King’s was not to be outdone. It commissioned one of Wren’s pupils, Nicholas Hawksmoor, (c. 1661–1736), to produce designs in 1714, but they did not win approval and the College invited James Gibbs to try instead in 1723. His ideas for buildings, forming the sides of a rectangle but not joined at the corners, coupled with inadequate funds, left King’s looking distinctly unfinished in the early nineteenth century.⁴ St. Catherine’s was to have had a library, too, which would have closed the quadrangle opening onto King’s Parade.⁵

Other schemes were vastly more ambitious still. Nicholas Hawksmoor thought of rearranging the whole of the centre of Cambridge to provide it with wide streets and demolishing St. Edmund’s Church to make way for them and to create a site for a brand new University Church. He planned a Senate House for this Roman forum, all to be classical and spacious and dignified. St. Mary’s, left standing, would do for the townspeople.⁶

The Senate House was eventually built, but not for nearly a century after the idea was first floated in 1640. James Burrough, Master of Caius and designer of a number of college buildings, put forward the plan which was eventually adopted for a Senate House facing a mirror building on the opposite side of what is now Senate House Yard, though that was not built in the end because it was thought that it would spoil the view of King’s College Chapel. The Senate House itself was built between 1719 and 1730, to the design of James Gibbs,⁷ and standing at the head of King’s Parade, it became one of Cambridge’s most iconic buildings, after King’s College Chapel.

On my right the Senate House, sitting set-square and slide rule, topped by its mathematical pots, logically placed on the corners of the equilateral triangles that alone break the even balustrade of its roof. Behind me, the rows of stone griffins, checked eternally in mid-leap by the jealous walls of Caius. A flat water of a sky ... I wanted to stick around Cambridge for a spell. I didn’t want to go down that day,⁸

wrote Andrew Sinclair (b.1935) in his student novel My Friend Judas in 1959, suddenly realizing that the place held for him the record of an enormously important period of his life.

From place to context

May was brilliant with sunshine. They sat on the Mill bridge with their tankards and their Players’ Number Three and talked of doing some serious work the next day. They lay on the Backs with their books face down on their chests and promised themselves that relaxation was the best way of preparing for an approaching examination. One day they took a punt and went with Barbara and Helga, up to Granchester for tea.⁹

That was in the 1950s, too, in a Cambridge showing the preoccupations of its times. We shall find throughout this last century a sharpening of its ‘perennial character’ with changing contemporary notes and emphases.

John Cowper Powys remembered how his father took him to the shops when he brought him up to Corpus Christi College in 1891 ‘and the particular type of purchases he made, wherewith to start me in my first experience of housekeeping’.¹⁰ He was deeply affected by things he saw and experienced, if not by the course itself:

In reading for the Historical Tripos – in which I ultimately obtained a very moderate Second Class – I must confess I was only once really thrilled by any of the University teachers. This was by Professor Seeley, a far-sighted and indeed a rather Goethean person ... but I shall never forget – as he gave one particular lecture upon the Athenian view of life – the reverberating unction with which ... he uttered the word ‘Ecclesia’.¹¹

The beauty of Cambridge was what caught at his throat, and he was powerfully affected by a historical nostalgia. John Powys’s rooms at Corpus Christi College were

part and parcel of one of the most romantic relics of medieval scholasticism that I have ever seen ... I hardly realized what I was enjoying as I swam about in this bottomless pool of antiquity. The Corpus Old Court had the look ... of some enchanted Ruin in a fairly-like forest of Old Romance. ‘Over the ancient roofs of the interior of the Old Court there rose a church Tower that was older than William the Conqueror’.

When he dined in Hall, ‘it was wonderful to be eating my meal in so medieval a manner’.¹²

He later wrote with a wry sense of the absurdities when as a young graduate he

dined on Saturday and Sunday at the high table, and drank port afterwards with the Dons in what they call the Combination Room. The Tutor sits in an armchair on one side of the fireplace and the Dean on the other, and by means of a sort of pulley they cause the Decanters to move of themselves backwards and forwards along the chimney piece, which is an odd sight.¹³

The privileged young who were his fellow students were not all charming companions. They could be thuggish. He writes of ‘Third Year Rapscallions’ and how

at the beginning of our Chapel services – these were compulsory then – they lounged in, swollen with insolence, pale with dissipation, brimming over, in fact, with what Homer calls ‘hybrus’, and with the barest relics of their undergraduate gowns hanging in weary effrontery from their drooping shoulders.¹⁴

He became a bit of a rapscallion himself. John Powys left Corpus after he had taken his degree to keep an assignation with a ‘pretty person’ in London at the Haymarket Theatre. He was expecting a letter from his father ‘containing money wherewith to pay my College bills’. Impatient to be off, he gave instructions to the College Porter to open this letter and distribute the money and to send his luggage after him. It may be guessed what happened.¹⁵

His mixed experience was not going to put off other members of the family from going to Cambridge. This was an era when a College might be ‘in the family’. The cost of being a Cambridge student at the beginning of the twentieth century can be quantified at about £160. A Professor would be paid about £500.¹⁶ So to send more than one son (and John Powys came from a large family) would cut a considerable hole in a family’s resources.

He wrote to his brother Llewelyn in 1903 from Cambridge. ‘We were talking about you last night; Pearce of course thinks you would be unpatriotic to the family College if you did not come to Corpus. He says that Pembroke is overcrowded and Clare very rowdy’. In such subtle ways, the genius of place and the sense of membership and of ownership were interconnected in the experience of Cambridge.

* * *

Running their own show

The ‘little world’ of Cambridge in 1908

The Great Court is the centre of the universe and King’s Parade is Paradise and the backs the Elysian Fields – Lytton Strachey¹⁷

More readers will be former students or non-students than will have been Cambridge dons. But what the dons did spun the plot. So they will carry one of the main story-lines and we shall begin with Francis Cornford’s little classic, published close to the year of Cambridge’s last centenary, the Microcosmographia Academica, where Cambridge is indeed a world of its own, hot with internal politics. That habit of seeing itself as the centre of the universe did not have the negative connotations for Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) that it has now.

Francis Cornford (1874–1943) was a successful student of Classics at Trinity, coming near the top of the list in both parts of Cambridge’s two-part degree examination, the Tripos (so-called because it is taken over three years) in 1895 and 1897. Within two years of graduating, he had become a Fellow of Trinity College. It was in the light of the observation of these few years of donnish life that in 1908, he wrote his elegant 20-page satire full of the paradoxes of Cambridge society.

It was an important feature of the academic democracy which had always run Cambridge that the youngest members had the same vote as the older ones and could join in with the fun and controversy as soon as they felt inclined. Indeed, in earlier centuries, the Regent Masters had all been young, recent graduates, doing their required stint of teaching in completion of the requirements for their degrees:

The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it; and ‘sound scholar’ is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called ‘brilliant’ and forfeit all respect.¹⁸

This is a description of a world in which scholarship was taken very seriously but it was important not to admit it, when the very nature and purpose of scholarship was under radical review. Cornford was having a not very sly dig at the habit of respecting obscure and what would now be called ‘irrelevant’ learning. This intellectual self-consciousness has persisted. A little affectation was still expected in Frederic Raphael’s post-war Cambridge. (‘Adam was eating cornflakes and reading Brideshead Revisited when Donald return...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Cambridge in living memory: the last hundred years
• Could Cambridge remain in a world of its own?
• 2 How it all began
• 3 Cambridge and the Tudor Revolution
• 4 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cambridge: puritans and scientists
• 5 The nineteenth-century transformation
• Cambridge graduates: good men, good citizens
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography