1 As well as the copy held at the Principal Probate Registry, a copy of the Will is also held at Cambridgeshire Archives.

2 The majority of this material is now in the Cambridge University Library and forms the basis of my forthcoming monograph on Willis, to be published by Boydell and Brewer in Spring 2013.

3 McKitterick, David, A History of the Cambridge University Press, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2004), III, p. 89.Google Scholar

4 Willis, Robert and Clark, John Willis, ed. Watkin, David, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar

5 The various studies of Willis make only passing reference to his work on Cambridge. The 1988 edition of The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge includes an introduction by David Watkin, but, again, this is primarily general and biographical.

6 Marsden, Ben, ‘“The Progeny of these Two ‘Fellows’”: Robert Willis, William Whewell and the Sciences of Mechanism, Mechanics and Machinery in Early Victorian Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science, 37.4 (2004), pp. 401-34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Buchanan, Alexandrina, ‘The Science of Rubbish: Robert Willis and the Contribution of Architectural History’, in Gothic and the Gothic Revival. Papers from the 26th Annual Symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, ed. Salmon, Frank (Manchester, 1998), pp. 25–35.Google Scholar

8 Buchanan, Alexandrina, ‘“Complete, Thorough and Undeniable”: Robert Willis and the Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral ’, in British Archaeological Association Transactions XXXV for 2009, ed. Bovey, Alixe (forthcoming).Google Scholar

9 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library [hereafter CUL], MS Add. 5091, Notes and extracts dealing with Cambridge and its history, f. 193.

10 Report of the lecture in the Gentleman's Magazine , 42 (August 1854), p. 175.Google Scholar

11 CUL, MS Add. 5066A, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark material on Queens’ College, f. xxxix, and CUL, MS Add. 5061, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark, material on Peterhouse, Clare, Pembroke and Caius Colleges, Trinity Hall and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ff. 138-138b. The Conclusion books are the records of the Governing Body meetings of the President and Fellows, now (and probably then) kept in the President's Lodge. I am grateful to Dr Jonathan Holmes and Dr Richard Rex of Queens’ College for this information.

12 CUL, MS Add. 5073, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark, material on Trinity College, f. 26.

13 Hall, C. and Lovatt, R., ‘The Site and Foundation of Peterhouse’, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 78 (1989), pp. 5–46.Google Scholar For further information on the condition of college archives in the nineteenth century, see Darwall-Smith, Robin and Riordan, Michael, ‘Archives for Administrators or Archives for Antiquarians? A History of Archive Cataloguing in Four Oxford Colleges’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 30.1 (2009), pp. 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Chapman, F. R. (ed.), Sacrist Rolls of Ely, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1907).Google Scholar

15 See Alexandrina Buchanan, biography of Robert Willis (forthcoming, 2013), especially ch. 7, and Meadows, P., ‘Cathedral Restoration: Fabric and Furnishings 1836-1980’, in A History of Ely Cathedral, ed. Meadows, P. and Ramsay, N. (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 308-11.Google Scholar

16 Willis, Robert, The Architectural History of York Cathedral (London, 1848), pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

17 For biographies of Baker and Cole, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

18 Caius, John, De Antiquitate Cantabrigiensis Academiae (London, 1568)Google Scholar; Historia Cantabrigiensis Academiae (London, 1574)Google Scholar; The Works of John Caius, MD […] with a Memoir of his Life, ed. Venn, J. (Cambridge, 1912)Google Scholar; Thomas Parne (Cambridge University Librarian, d.1751); Robert Mason (1588 or 1589-1662); Masters, Robert, History of the College of Corpus Christi and the B. Virgin Mary (Cambridge, 1753)Google Scholar. Masters's account had formed the basis of a simultaneously extended and reduced edition: Lamb, John, Masters’ History of the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the University of Cambridge. With Additional Notes and a Continuation to the Present Time (London, 1831)Google Scholar. For further information, see Brooke, C. N. L., ‘Cambridge and the Antiquaries’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 79 (1992), pp. 1–12 Google Scholar.

19 Cronne, H. A., ‘Edward Augustus Freeman, 1823-1892’, History, 28.107 (1943), pp. 78–92 (p. 83).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Reported in the Gentleman's Magazine , 209 (July 1860), pp. 51–56.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 Dallaway, James, Observations on English Architecture, Military, Ecclesiastical, and Civil (London, 1806), p. 171.Google Scholar

23 Delano-Smith, Catherine and Kain, R. J. P., English Maps: A History (London, 1999), p. 239.Google Scholar

24 Report of the lecture in the Gentleman's Magazine , 42 (August 1854), p. 175.Google Scholar

25 Hugo, Victor, Notre Dame de Paris (Paris, 1831).Google Scholar See especially the chapter entitled ‘Ceci Tuera Cela’, which was first included in the 8th edition of 1832.

26 John Willis Clark, ‘Robert Willis’, Dictionary of National Biography.

27 Cambridge, 1, Preface, pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

28 Willis, Robert, The Architectural History of the Conventual Buildings of the Monastery of Christ Church in Canterbury (London, 1869), pp. 82–93.Google Scholar

29 Cambridge, 1, Preface, p. xli.

30 Saturday Review, 62.1619 (6 November 1886), pp. 620-21.

31 ‘It is not as a social historian that we revere Willis’: Watkin, ‘Introduction’, Cambridge, p. xv.

32 The fullest report is of the lecture at the Royal Institution; see The Fine Arts’ Journal (1847), pp. 474–75.Google Scholar The Archaeological Institute lecture formed the basis of his ‘Description of the Ancient Plan of the Monastery of St Gall, in the Ninth Century’, Archaeological Journal, 5 (1848), pp. 85–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 See, for example, the plan of Fountains Abbey by Atkinson, T., published in Burton, J., Monasticon Eboracense: and the Ecclesiastical History of Yorkshire (York, 1758)Google Scholar, which achieved wide currency by being reproduced in the works of the prolific author T. D. Whitaker.

34 For this suggestion, see Watkin, , ‘Introduction’, Cambridge, I, p. xvi.Google Scholar

35 Cobban, A., The King's Hall within the University of Cambridge in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969), pp.49–50.Google Scholar Willis also failed to stress that the colleges began as graduate bodies — he believed they were charitablebodies for poor students, regardless of level.

36 CUL, MS Add. 5028, Notes regarding the history and architecture of monastic collegiate foundations in Oxford, ff. 129-41; CUL, MS Add. 5081, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark.

37 Cambridge, 1, p. 286. Josselin, John, Historiola Collegii Corporis Christi, ed. Clark, J. W., Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Octavo Publications, 17 (Cambridge 1880).Google Scholar

38 Willis, Robert, Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially of Italy (Cambridge, 1835), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

39 CUL, MS Add. 5059, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark, ff. 104 and 109. Only the Oxford plans are dated, but the Cambridge ones clearly belong to the same series. CUL, MS Add. 5060, f. xxviia, letter from Parker, 18 October 1860.

40 For example, Pembroke, CUL, MS Add. 5061, f. 112.

41 Lobel, M. D., ‘The Value of Early Maps as Evidence for the Topography of English Towns’, Imago Mundi, 22 (1968), pp. 50–61.Google Scholar

42 Turner, Thomas Hudson and Parker, John Henry, Some Account of Domestic Architecture in England, 3 vols (London, 1851-59).Google Scholar

43 Report of the lecture in the Gentleman's Magazine , 209 (July 1860), p. 55.Google Scholar

44 Ibid.

45 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, True Principles of Pointed, or Christian, Architecture (London, 1841), pp. 51–54.Google ScholarPubMed

46 Winstanley, D. A., Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 83–84 Google Scholar; Searby, Peter, A History of the University of Cambridge, Volume 3, 1750-1870 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 112.Google Scholar

47 Cambridge, III, pp. 328-31, and CUL, MS Add. 5078, Papers of Robert Willis and John Willis Clark, ff. 1-3 and 27-28.

48 Jessopp, A., ‘The Building up of a University’, The Nineteenth Century, 20 (July-December 1886), pp. 724-41 (p. 736).Google Scholar

49 The evidence for Willis's political views will be discussed in my forthcoming biography.

50 Cambridge University Commission, Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies, and Revenues of the University and Colleges of Cambridge: Together with the Evidence, and an Appendix (London, 1852-53). House of Commons Commissioners Reports, XLIV, no. 1559, p. 65.Google Scholar

51 Letter from George Peacock to Robert Willis dated 29 August 1852 found in CUL, MS Add. 5023, Papers of Robert Willis, f. 94.

52 Contrast, for example, the conservative Corrie's, George Elwes Brief Historical Notices of the Interference of the Crown with the Affairs of the English Universities (Cambridge and London, 1839)Google Scholar with the reformist Peacock's, George Observations on the Statutes of the University of Cambridge (London and Cambridge, 1841).Google Scholar

53 Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd edn (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 519 Google Scholar, and Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, City of Cambridge (London, 1959), part 1, p. xcv and part 2, pp. 363-64, 334 and 357.Google ScholarPubMed

54 The old chapel, now the Memorial Library.

55 Cambridge, 1, p. 189.

56 Compare CUL, MS Add. 5035, Papers of Robert Willis, f. 601 with Cambridge, I, pp. 48-49. The glass was described by Pevsner as having ‘big, coarse, insensitive figures in rich colours’ ( Pevsner, N., Cambridgeshire, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 132 Google Scholar). Willis may have had a role in the Peterhouse glazing, where he was certainly responsible for an early experiment in installing secondary glazing: Gentleman's Magazine, 42 (September 1854), p. 284.Google Scholar

57 ‘Review of The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge’, Edinburgh Review, 164.336 (October 1886), pp. 382–415.Google Scholar Paley had been a member of the Cambridge Camden Society and was keen to associate Willis with its activities, failing to mention that he had resigned as vice-president within two years of its foundation.

58 Report of the lecture from an unidentified local paper, CUL, MS Add. 5091, ff. 185-88.

59 Cunningham, Colin, ‘Practicality versus Preservation: Alfred Waterhouse and the Cambridge Colleges’, Architectural History, 37 (1994), pp. 130-52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Ingram, James, Memorials of Oxford, 3 vols (Oxford, 1837), I, Preface, p. v.Google Scholar

61 The lecture is known only from the report, written by Willis himself, in The Cambridge Chronicle (May 1861). Willis's notes are in CUL, MS Add. 5091, ff. 177-80.

62 Shipley, A. E., ‘J.’ A Memoir of John Willis Clark (London, 1913), pp. 110-11.Google Scholar For his temper, see pp. 216-17.

63 Clark's earlier works include: A Long Vacation Ramble in Norway and Sweden. By X and Y—Two Unknown Quantities (with Dunning, J. W., Cambridge, 1857)Google Scholar; ‘Annals of the Church of S. Mary the Less, Cambridge’, The Ecclesiologist, 18 (1857)Google Scholar; Remarks on Trinity College Chapel (privately printed, 1867)Google Scholar. A list of Clark's publications was compiled by J. D. Pickles in a pamphlet issued in 2001 to commemorate the centenary of the publication of his The Care of Books: Clark, J. W.. A Celebration. Trinity College Cambridge (Cambridge, 2001).Google Scholar Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who supplied me with a copy of this work.

64 Cambridge, I, Preface, p. xxxix. Compare with CUL, MS Add. 5060, f. 1.

65 Cambridge, I, Preface, p. xli.

66 Review in The Times, issue 31786 (15 June 1886), p. 6.

67 Palaeography was formally taught at the Ecole de Charles, first founded in 1821 in order to teach students to read medieval documents, but which soon became a training ground for archivists and building inspectors, rather than historians: Moore, Lara Jennifer, Restoring Order: The Ecole de Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (Duluth, MI, 2001), pp. 25–27.Google Scholar Palaeography first started to be taught in England by Hubert Hall at the London School of Economics in 1896: Shepherd, Elizabeth, ‘Developing a New Academic Discipline: UCL's Contribution to the Research and Teaching of Archives and Records Management’, Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 58.1-2 (2006), pp. 10–19 (p. 11).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Cambridge, I, p. 17, fn. 2: ‘I do not understand why Professor Willis assigns so short a length to this room’. The clue is mentioned in Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of Cambridge (London, 1959), pt 2, p. 164.Google Scholar

69 Pfaff, Richard William, Montague Rhodes James (London, 1980), p. 58.Google Scholar

70 Needham, Paul, The Bradshaw Method, 7th Hanes Lecture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988).Google Scholar

71 Bradshaw, Henry, ‘List of the Founts of Type and Woodcut Devices used by Printers in Holland in the Fifteenth Century’, from the Collected Papers of Henry Bradshaw (Cambridge, 1886), pp. 258-80 (p. 260).Google Scholar

72 ‘If you would treat your subject as a branch of natural history, all the productions of a press as a genus, and each book in particular as a species, there would be some chance of arriving at some satisfactory results. The points of diagnosis would readily present themselves, and […] the real points of differentiation would be brought out.’ Letter from Henry Bradshaw to J. W., dated 10 May 1866, in Henry Bradshaw's Correspondence on Incunabula withJ.W. Holtrop and M.F.A.G. Campbell, ed. Wytze, and Hellinga, Lotte, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1968), I, p. 89.Google Scholar

73 Robert Willis, unpublished note in CUL, MS Add. 5023, f. 6: ‘One building thoroughly and minutely examined in structure & history affords more genuine instruction than cursory review of an hundred. Let us proceed to search for the Landmarks’. Bradshaw, Henry, ‘The University Library’, originally printed in the Cambridge University Gazette, February and March 1869, in the Collected Papers, pp. 181–205 (p. 186)Google Scholar: ‘The next landmark we come upon is an inventory of books and other precious things […] in 1473’. Bradshaw originated the collational formula — see Thomas Tanselle, G., ‘Titlepage Transcription and Signature Collation Reconsidered’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), pp. 45–81 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 62-63, and Needham, , The Bradshaw Method, Appendix, pp. 24–33.Google Scholar

74 Stokes, Roy, Henry Bradshaw 1831-1886, The Great Bibliographers Series, no. 6 (Metuchen, NJ and London, 1984), interest in architecture mentioned on p. 11.Google Scholar

75 Willis had produced an account of the architectural history of the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem for Williams's The Holy City, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, 1849) 11, pp. 129–294 Google Scholar, whilst Bradshaw (a fellow Old Etonian and King's man) had been employed by Williams at St Columba's College at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, from 1853, until Williams resigned as Warden in 1856 (see ODNB).

76 Benson, A. C., ‘Henry Bradshaw’, in The Leaves of the Tree. Studies in Biography (London, 1911), pp. 212-29 (p. 213).Google Scholar

77 James, M. R., Eton and King's: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875-1925 (London, 1926), p. 176.Google Scholar

78 Cannon, S. F., Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978), ch. 1.Google Scholar

79 Thomas Tanselle, G., ‘Bibliography and Science’, Studies in Bibliography, 27 (1974), pp. 55–89 Google Scholar; Slee, Peter R. H., Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800-1914 (Manchester, 1986), pp. 132-33Google Scholar; Buchanan, Alexandrina, ‘Science and Sensibility: Architectural Antiquarianism in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Producing the Past. Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700-1850, ed. Myrone, Martin and Peltz, Lucy (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 169-86Google Scholar; Bentley, Michael, ‘The Age of Prothero: British Historiography in the Long Fin de Siècle, 1870-1920’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 20 (2010), pp. 171-93 (p. 180).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

80 For Willis's opposition (in his old age) to proposed reforms to science teaching at Cambridge, see his evidence to the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science, London, 1872 [C. 536], pp. 298-300. For his contrast between architectural and geometrical study, see Willis, Robert, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem (London, 1849), p. 119.Google Scholar

81 Ranke is singled out as an omission from Bradshaw's reading by Prothero, G. W., A Memoir of Henry Bradshaw (London, 1888), p. 24 Google Scholar; it is, nevertheless, telling that Prothero, one of the historians particularly associated with reforming History as an academic discipline and who himself studied in Germany, should have troubled to write a full-scale biography of his King's colleague. Another member of the Bradshaw circle whose scholarship was clearly indebted to Germany was Karl Pearson: see Porter, Theodore M., Karl Pearson. The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton and Oxford, 2004), pp. 26 and 92-96.Google Scholar

82 Slee, , Learning and a Liberal Education, ch. 5 (see also his ‘History as a Discipline in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1848-1914’ (doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1983))Google Scholar; Softer, Reba, Discipline and Power: The University, History and the Making of an English Elite 1870-1930 (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar; Wilkes, John, ‘“A Mist of Prejudice”: The Reluctant Acceptance of Modern History at Cambridge, 1845-1873’, in Teaching and Learning in Nineteenth-Century Cambridge (History of the University of Cambridge, Texts and Studies n. 4), ed. Smith, Jonathan and Stray, Christopher (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 45–60.Google Scholar

83 McKitterick, , History of the Cambridge University Press, p. 91.Google Scholar

84 Bradshaw's annotated proofs may be found in CUL, Cam.bb.886.1 and Cam.bb.886.4. A particular interest in the impact of title pages was noted by William Martin Conway (1856-1937), whose Woodcutters of the Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1884) was promoted by Bradshaw and whose title page underwent no fewer than eighteen revisions: Conway, W. M., Episodes in a Varied Life (London, 1932), pp. 55–56.Google Scholar

85 In reality, however, sales were slow: McKitterick, , History of the Cambridge University Press, p. 92.Google Scholar

86 Cambridge (1988), I, Introduction, p. xliii.

87 CUL, MS Add. 5060, f. 41: ‘But as the plan & arrangements of the buildings must be considered as well as their construction & style it will be necessary in the first place to sketch the nature & history of the communities for whose use these were intended & as this however has been in various ways already presented by university historians & in the controversies & commission reports that have been so lately laid before the world I shall be as brief as possible, merely confining my remarks to those parts of the subject that belong to my peculiar purpose’.