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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Towards the end of his long career Abbot John Whethamstede, for many years the most celebrated Benedictine monk in England, took the opportunity of a letter he was writing to the prior of Tynemouth to engage in rhetorical but equally eulogistic praise of the ‘extraordinary melodies in praise of the Muses’ to be found not only at ‘the Cabalinian font which gushes forth in the midst of Oxford’ but also from ‘the Cirrean stream which runs near the suburbs of Cambridge’. Few historians of England’s two medieval universities have found it altogether easy to share the undiscriminating enthusiasm of the venerable abbot of St Albans for both Oxford and Cambridge. Gordon Leff — not of course at all alone in this — has done much to elucidate the intellectual and institutional life of the university of Oxford only to find the medieval history of his own university of Cambridge so much less rewarding that it rarely figures in his published work at all. Quite why, for at least the first two centuries of their existence, the Cambridge schools should have always remained less numerically significant and academically influential than their Oxford counterparts is still perhaps a more difficult question to answer than is usually assumed. Even more difficult to explain are the changing patterns of recruitment, patronage, endowment and intellectual activity which during the course of the mid and later fifteenth century at long last eradicated Cambridge’s inferior academic status and established an approximate degree of parity and prestige between the two universities. Without much doubt it was only then, during the century or so before the Reformation, that the historian encounters what Mr Malcolm Underwood has recently diagnosed as perhaps the most remarkable and influential of all ‘Cambridge phenomena’. Indeed if one had to choose a particular point in time when that ‘phenomenon’ must at last have become obvious to all contemporaries, even at Oxford, one might do worse than choose the years between 1505 and 1508, when Lady Margaret Beaufort’s transformation of God’s House into Christ’s College ‘took place against the background of an unprecedented number of royal visits’.* It was on one of those occasions, almost certainly on 22 April 1506, that Henry VII rode towards Cambridge, where ‘within a quarter of a mylle, there stode, first of all the four Ordres of Freres, and after odir Religious, and the King on Horsbacke kyssed the Crosse of everyche of the Religious, and then there stode all along, all the Graduatts, aftir their Degrees, in all their Habbitts, and at the end of them was the Unyversyte Cross’.
1 Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, ed. Riley, H. T. (RS, 1872-3), 2, pp. 313–14Google Scholar; a reference I owe to Clark, J. G., ‘Intellectual life at the Abbey of St Albans, and the nature of monastic learning in England, c. 1350 – c. 1440: the work of Thomas Walsingham in context’ (Oxford University D. Phil, thesis, 1997), p. 256.Google Scholar
2 For the most recent survey, placing particular emphasis on the dramatic increase (from seven to sixteen) in the number of academic college foundations at Cambridge between the creation of God’s House in 1439 and of Trinity College in 1546, see Leader, pp. 218–32, 264–91, 341–51: cf.Lovatt, R., ‘The triumph of the colleges in late medieval Oxford and Cambridge: the case of Peterhouse’, History of Universities, 14 (1998), pp. 95–7Google Scholar; Taylor, J., ‘The Diocese of York and the university connexion, 1300–1520’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 39–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Jones, M K. and Underwood, M G., The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 227–30.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 229; Underwood, M., ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’, in Bradshaw, B. and Duffy, E., eds, Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989), p. 43, a 22.Google Scholar
5 Ashmole, E., The Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672), pp. 558–9Google Scholar; Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 281.Google Scholar
6 For a recent full-scale survey of much of the documentary as well as the architectural and archaeological evidence for the history of the four mendicant houses in Cambridge, see Vintén Mattich, J. L. W., ‘Friars and Society in Late Medieval East Anglia’ (Cambridge Ph. D. thesis, 1995)Google Scholar; cf.Moorman, J. R. H. The Grey Friars in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1952)Google Scholar; Zutshi, P. and Ombres, R., ‘The Dominicans in Cambridge, 1238–1538’, AFP, 60 (Rome, 1990), pp. 313–73Google Scholar; Zutshi, P., The Dominicans in Cambridge, 1238–1538: A Catalogue of a Commemorative Exhibition (Cambridge University Library, 1988).Google Scholar
7 Rashdall, , Universities, 1, pp. 536–9Google Scholar; Smith, C. E., The University of Toulouse in the Middle Ages: Its Origins and Growth to 1500 AD (Milwaukee, WI, 1958), pp. 87, 118, 213Google Scholar; Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 542–55Google Scholar. It need hardly be said that this paper is an attempt, perhaps foredoomed to failure, to discover whether the acute shortage of original sources for the history of the monastic orders at medieval Cambridge will always make it impossible to compare and contrast their significance with that of their Oxford counterparts. Without the generous assistance of Professor Christopher Brooke, Mrs Catherine Hall, and Drs Joan Greatrex, Roger Lovatt, Tessa Webber, and Patrick Zutshi, it would be more inadequate still.
8 Pantin, , Chapters, 3, pp. 317–24Google Scholar; Grace Book A, pp. vii-ix; Peek, H. and Hall, G, The Archives of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 27–8, 31Google Scholar; BRUC, pp. xiii-xv.
9 Brundage, J. A., ‘The Cambridge Faculty of Canon Law and the Ecclesiastical Courts of Ely’, in Zutshi, P., ed., Medieval Cambridge: Essays on the Pre-Reformation University (Wood-bridge, Suffolk, 1993), p. 22Google Scholar; cf.Brooke, C. N. L., ‘Monk and Canon: Some patterns in the religious life of the twelfth century’, in Sheils, W. J., ed. Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, SCH, 22 (1985), pp. 124–5Google Scholar; Rashdall, , Universities, 3, pp. 274–7.Google Scholar
10 Liber Memorandorum Ecclesie de Bemewelle, ed. Clark, J. W. (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 71, 73Google Scholar; BRUC, p. 17.
11 Liber Memorandorum de Bernewelle, pp. Ivi, 71, 94–5, 146–7; VCH, Cambridge and Isle of Ely, 2 (1948), pp. 238–9.
12 Liber Memorandorum de Bemewelle, p. 94; Hackett, M. B., The Original Statutes of Cambridge University: The Text and its History (Cambridge, 1970), p. 64.Google Scholar
13 Chapters of the Augustinian Canons, ed. Salter, H. E., Oxford Historical Society, 74 (1922), p. 69Google Scholar; Cooper, , Annals, 1, pp. 121, 142, 153, 171–2Google Scholar; VCH, Cambridge, 3 (1959), pp. 58–9; Leader, p. 15.
14 BRUC, p. 20; , C. H. and Cooper, T., Athenae Cantabrigienses (2 vols, Cambridge, 1858-61), 1, pp. 28, 51, 82, 109, 219Google Scholar; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 243, 247.
15 Baskerville, G., English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (London, 1937), p. 41Google Scholar. Despite the exceptionally detailed regulations for the care of the priory’s books recorded in the Observances in use at the Augustinian Priory of St Giles and St Andrew at Barnwell, ed. J. W. Clark (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 62–9, only eight of these have been identified: see Webber, T. and Watson, A. G., eds, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons (Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 6; British Academy, 1998), pp. 5–7Google Scholar. In sharp contrast to Osney Abbey near Oxford, no serious consideration was ever given after 1538 to the possibility of adapting the very extensive precincts of Barnwell Priory for alternative educational or religious use.
16 Stokes, H. P., Outside the Trumpington Gates (CAS, Octavo Publications, 44 [1908], pp. 57–63Google Scholar; Golding, B., Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130-c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995), p. 172.Google Scholar
17 The heads of England’s major religious houses cannot have been unmindful of the fact that three monastic houses (the Benedictine Collège de Saint-Denis, the Cistercian Collège de St Bernard and the Cluniac Collège de Cluny) had been securely established at the university of Paris by the 1260s: see T. Sullivan, The Visitation of the Collège de Cluny, Paris, 1386’, History of Universities, 11 (1992), p. 2; cf. Dobson, ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 544–9; idem, The Foundation of Gloucester College in 1283’, Worcester College Record (Oxford, 1985).
18 CPL, 1 (1198-1304), p. 516; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 254–5; Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 171–3.
19 Liber Memorandorum de Bemewelle, p. 212.
20 CPL, 6 (1404-15), p. 126; Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 250Google Scholar; Golding, , Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 173–7Google Scholar; VCH, Cambridge, 2, pp. 253–6.
21 See, e.g., BRUC, pp. 34, 116, 124, 244, 418, 527. For justifiable doubts as to whether St Edmund’s Priory was ever open to students other than Gilbertine canons, see Golding, , Gilbert of Sempringham, pp. 174–5.Google Scholar
22 Valor ecclesiasticus (Record Commission, 1810–34), 3, p. 506; VCH, Cambridge, p. 256.
23 BRUC, p. 71; Dickens, A. G., Robert Holgate, Archbishop of York and President of the King’s Council in the North, St Anthony’s Hall Publications, York, 8 (1955), pp. 3–10Google Scholar; Cross, G and Vickers, N., Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 150 (1995), p. 395.Google Scholar
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26 Cal. Patent Rolls, 1422–29, p. 475; Magdalene College, pp. 4–5.
27 By 1482 such delays had made the Cistercians ‘the centre of gossip for the whole of Oxford’: see Talbot, , ‘English Cistercians’, p. 214Google Scholar; Dobson, , ‘Religious (Oxford)’, pp. 552–5.Google Scholar
28 Grace Book A, pp. 51–2; BRUC, pp. 110, 503, 517. For evidence that many Augustinian canons studying at Oxford lived in an ‘external master’s school and/or hall’, see Forde, S., ‘The educational organization of the Augustinian Canons in England and Wales, and their university life at Oxford, 1325–1448’, History of Universities, 13 (1994), pp. 33–7.Google Scholar
29 Bentham, J., The History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely (2nd edn, Norwich, 1812), p. 220Google Scholar; Greatrex, p. 401; Crawley, C., Trinity Hall the History of a Cambridge College, 1350–1975 (Cambridge, 1976), p. 28Google Scholar. For the later history of this Ely Hostel, see Stokes, H. P., The Mediaeval Hostels of the University of Cambridge, CAS, Octavo Publications, 49 (1924), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar
30 Venn, J., et al, Biographical History of Gonville and Cuius College, 1349–1897, 8 vols (Cambridge, 1897-1998), 3, pp. 332–3Google Scholar; Aston, T. H., ‘The medieval alumni of the University of Cambridge’, Past and Present, 86 (1980), pp. 54–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cobban, A B., The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (London, 1988), p. 320.Google Scholar
31 The following estimates are based on an analysis of the biographical information about Cambridge monks and canons available in BRUC as well as (for the period between 1500 and 1540) the much less reliable Cooper, , Athenae, 1Google Scholar, and , J. and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses to 1751, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1922-7)Google Scholar. For Dr Peter Cunich’s much more authoritative ‘A biographical list of Benedictine monks at Cambridge University from the earliest times until 1540’, see Magdalene College Cambridge, MS R. 2. 15.
32 Hockey, S. F., Quarr Abbey and its Lands, 1132–1631 (Leicester, 1971), p. 245Google Scholar. Two of the three (only) Cistercian monks who appear in the pages of BRUC had previously been scholars of St Bernard’s College, Oxford (ibid., pp. 285, 562, 607).
33 BRUC, pp. 22, 422, 460, 634, 655–6; Colvin, H. M, The White Canons in England (Oxford, 1951), pp. 321–6Google Scholar. The common assumption that Bishop Richard Redman, much the most celebrated White Canon of late medieval England, studied at Cambridge or Oxford is shown to be completely without evidence in Gribbin, J. A., ‘The Premonstra-tensian Order in late medieval England’ (Cambridge University Ph. D. thesis, 1998), pp. 188, 196.Google Scholar
34 BRUC, p. 20.
35 Chapters of Augustinian Canons, pp. 70–1.
36 The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212–1301, ed. A. Gransden (London, 1964), p. 140; Hackett, Original Statutes, p. 131, n. 2; BRUC, p. 685.
37 Greatrex, J., ‘Monk students from Norwich Cathedral Priory at Oxford and Cam bridge, c. 1300 to 1530’, EHR, 106 (1991), pp. 561–2, 579–83Google Scholar. There is no evidence that Cardinal Adam de Easton, the most distinguished of all English university monks by the time of his death in 1397, had any personal connection with Cambridge at all (Greatrex, pp.502-3).
38 Visitations of the Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1436–1449, ed. Thompson, A. H., CYS, 24, 33 (1919, 1927), 2, pp. 270, 273, 330Google Scholar; Account Rolk of the Obedientiaries of Peterborough, ed. Greatrex, J., Northamptonshire Record Society, 33 (1983), pp. 15, 92, 95, 104, 213, 216, 247.Google Scholar
39 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 170, p. 22; Pantin, , Chapters, 2, p. 76.Google Scholar
40 Graham, R., ‘The English Province of the Order of Cluny in the fifteenth century’, in idem, English Ecclesiastical Studies (London, 1929), pp. 53–4Google Scholar; BRUC, pp. 177, 181, 26s, 615.
41 Magdalene College, p. 3; Aston, , ‘Medieval alumni’, pp. 55–6.Google Scholar
42 Willis and Clark, 2, pp. 351–66. ‘The following very summary account of Buckingham College is especially indebted to Dr Cunich’s recent and much more detailed discussion of its history in Magdalene College, pp. 1–30.
43 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 149, 172–3.Google Scholar
44 Cal. Patent Rolb, 1422–29, p. 475. In addition to enjoying particularly warm relations with Bishop Langley, Prior Wesssington – in the company of the then abbot of Crowland — had played a prominent role at the extraordinary assembly of English Black Monks convoked at Westminster by Henry V in May 1421: there is however no evidence that issues relating to university education at Oxford or Cambridge were on the lengthy agenda at that time: Dobson, R. B., Durham Priory, 1400–1450 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 223–4, 240–4Google Scholar; Pantin, , Chapters, 2, pp. 98–134.Google Scholar
45 Magdalene College, pp. 4–5, 29, 31–3. By at least 1432 the Cambridge borough treasurers had begun to receive an annual payment of 18 from the abbot of Crowland for the fishponds or ‘pondyards’ on the site: see Cambridge Record Office, Treasurers’ Accounts, 1432–3, 1435–6, 1436–7; Cambridge Borough Documents, 1, ed. W. M. Palmer (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 40, 57.
46 Cooper, , Annals, 1, p. 227Google Scholar; Magdalene College, pp. 7–9.
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49 Magdalene College, pp. 8–14; Pantin, , Chapters, 3, p. 116.Google Scholar
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51 McDowall, R. W., ‘Buckingham College’, Proceedings of CAS, 44 (1950), pp. 5–12Google Scholar; Willis and Clark, 2, pp. 359–87; Magdalene College, pp. 14–19.
52 These very approximate estimates are calculated from the entries in BRUC, Cooper’s Athenae and Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses. Cf. Aston, ‘Medieval Alumni’, p. 19; and Magdalene College, pp. 3, 20, 27.
53 Knowles, D. and Hadcock, R. N., Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (revised edn, London, 1971), p. 123Google Scholar; Cooper, , Athenae, 1, pp. 18, 61, 68, 69, 70, 186–7.Google Scholar
54 Rowntree, C., ‘Studies in Carthusian history in later medieval England’ (York University D. Phil, thesis, 1981), pp. 147–51.Google Scholar
55 Grace Book B, ii, p. 99; John Hope, W. St, The History of the London Charterhouse (London, 1925), pp. 150–1Google Scholar; Wines, A. R, ‘The London Charterhouse in the later Middle Ages: an institutional history’ (Cambridge University Ph. D. thesis, 1998), pp. 218–19.Google Scholar
56 Grace Book B, ii, pp. 99, 170–1; Venn, , Alumni Cantabrigienses, 2, pp. 113, 322, 413; 3, p. 182; 4, p. 354Google Scholar; Rowntree, , ‘Studies in Carthusian history’, pp. 148–9Google Scholar. Not one of these Carthusians is known to have been the author of devotional or indeed any other treatises.
57 Account Rolb of Peterborough, pp. 88, 92, 95, 97, 104, 106, 240, 247; The Letter Book of Robert Joseph, monk-scholar of Evesham and Gloucester College, Oxford, 1530–3, ed. H. Aveling and W. A. Pantin, Oxford Historical Society, ns, 19 (1967), p. 265; BRUO 1501–1540, p. 192.
58 See, c.g., BRUC, pp. 115, 220, 298, 424, 443, 520, 534, 609. By the late fifteenth century, if not earlier still, most religious houses seem to have been free to decide to which of the two universities they would send their students (Forde, ‘Educational organization of Augustinian Canons’, pp. 29–30).
59 Between 1458 and 1479 at least five St Mary’s monks graduated from Cambridge with the degree of either B. Th. or D. Th. (BRUC, pp. 316, 374. 5°3. 587. 616). Cf.Taylor, , ‘Diocese of York and university connexion’, pp. 50–1.Google Scholar
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61 Leader, pp. 39, 106. The early history of incorporation at Cambridge is discussed in Hackett, , Original Statutes, pp. 54, 122–3, 146.Google Scholar
62 Grace Book A, p. 97; BRUO, 1, p. 413; 2, pp. 1282–3; Harvey, B. F., ‘The monks of Westminster and the University of Oxford’, in Boulay, F. R. H. Du and Barron, C. M, eds, The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (London, 1971), pp. 112, 126, 128Google Scholar. Cf. the career of William Codenham, alias Buntyng, a Bury St Edmunds monk and Oxford B. Th. who then incepted in theology at Cambridge in 1494–5, three years before he became abbot of his monastery (BRUO, 1, p. 454).
63 BRUO, 1, p. 101; 2, p. 1126; Gribbin, , ‘Premonstratensian Order’, p. 187–90Google Scholar. It seems hard to believe that the unusually mobile career of Thomas Mersche, a Gilbertine canon from Lincoln who studied theology at Cambridge and other universities for many years before being appointed apostolic penitentiary at Rome in 1426, can have been anything but highly exceptional (BRUC, p. 402).
64 The late T. H. Aston’s numerical analysis (‘Medieval Alumni’, p. 63) of the higher degrees obtained by members of the various religious orders who studied at late medieval Cambridge almost certainly over-emphasises the gradual decline of theology to a supposed ‘modest position’.
65 CclR, 1500–09, P.139; Harvey, , ‘Monks of Westminster’, pp. 126–7Google Scholar; Letters and Papers, 14, pt ii, pp. 60–1.
66 Greatrex, pp. 387–465, 478–576; idem, ‘Monk students from Norwich’, pp. 579–83.
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70 For some representative examples of the highly variable (apparently more variable than at Oxford) number of years of study specified by the Cambridge university graces required for admission to a higher degree, see Grace, Book A, pp. 15, 30, 95Google Scholar; B, 1, pp. 134, 144, 145; T. pp. 54, 65.
71 Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1420–1436, ed. Thompson, A. H., CYS, 17 (1915). p. 91.Google Scholar
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75 Whether the protective head covering was to take the form of a hat or a handkerchief seems not entirely certain: Grace Book A, p. 107; Greatrex, p. 486; Cooper, , Athenae, p. 19.Google Scholar
76 Greatrex, pp. 423–4, 444, 447, 454, 465. Walter Hothom, a monk of St Mary’s Abbey, York, was licensed to preach within the diocese of York in 1478, apparently long before he had completed his theology studies at Cambridge [Grace Book A, p. 95; BRUC, p. 316).
77 Pantin, , Chapters, 2, p. 156Google Scholar; Letters and Papers, 2, pt ii, appx, p. 1544; Chapters of Augustinian Canons, pp. 131–43.
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80 BRUC, pp. 36, 316; cf.Ker, N. R., ed., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd edn, Royal Historical Society (London, 1964), pp. 228, 321.Google Scholar
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84 Thus of the three largest library catalogues transcribed in Webber and Watson, Libraries of Augustinian Canons, only that for Llanthony (Secunda) provides much evidence of the provenance (often Oxford) of the books catalogued.
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