CHAPTER IV. STUDENT LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. CHAP. IV. OUR researches into our university history during the Middle Ages are now approaching their completion. We have armodern and rived at the boundary line which, by general consent, has Changes which sever mediæval times. been drawn between the old and the new order of things,the time when the traditions of the past began to give place to those widely differing conceptions which the fifteenth century ere it closed saw rising upon Europe. Momentous and startling as have been the changes of the present century, it may yet be questioned whether they do not yield in importance to those that ushered in the Reformation. The downfall of dynasties, the manifest shifting of the centres of political power, even the triumphs of modern science and art, can scarcely compare with influences like those that readjusted the whole range of man's intellectual vision, and transformed his conception of the universe. It was then that the veil was lifted from the face of classic Greece, and the voices which had slumbered for centuries woke again; that the accents of ancient Hellas blended with those of regenerated Italy; while Teutonic invention lent its aid in diffusing with unprecedented rapidity both the newly discovered and the nascent literature. 'Another nature and a new mankind' stood revealed beyond the Atlantic wave. The habitable globe itself dwindled to but a point in the immensity of space; and the lamps of heaven now glimmered with a strange and awful light from the far recesses of infinity. But before we turn to trace out and estimate the changes thus brought about in the culture and mental tendencies of the age, it yet remains to attempt a somewhat more connected CHAP. IV. view than we have as yet been able to gain of the characteristics of university life in the period already traversed. Hitherto we have passed by many interesting minor facts in order to bring out more distinctly the general outline, -the principle indeed which has guided our whole treatment of the subject. We shall now endeavour to bring together a variety of details which tend to illustrate the life and habits of those times, and to give a portraiture of the ordinary student's experiences at Cambridge in the Middle Ages. Such a piecing together will form, at best, but a very defective whole. The mosaic will be wanting both in colour and completeness. But we shall but share the difficulties that beset all similar endeavours to revivify the forms and fashions of a distant age. physical as æval Cam A brief survey of the physical aspects of the locality will outline of the not be irrelevant to the sketch we are about to attempt. pects of mediThe river Cam1, formerly known as the Grant, is formed by bridgeshire. the union of two minor streams; of which one, the Rhee, rises near Ashwell in Hertfordshire, the other at Little Henham in Essex. The point of junction is between Hauxton and Grantchester. As it approaches Cambridge the stream The CAM. widens, but rarely attains to much depth until the town is passed, after which it flows on in greatly increased volume by Chesterton, Waterbeach, Upware, and Harrimere, until Ely is reached. At Harrimere it changes its name to that of the Ouse, a change however which no longer represents the actual point of confluence; at the present time the stream still, save on the occurrence of unusual floods, pursues its course by way of Ely and Prickwillow to Denver before a drop of Ouse water mingles with its current. The cause of this deviation is an important fact in the history of the river system of the whole district. The tract known as the Fen The Fen 1 The Celtic word kam, which long survived in English, means crooked. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Sicinius says of the logic of Menenius Agrippa's arguments, 'This is clean kam;' whereupon Brutus adds, Merely' Country. Rivers by which it is traversed. Ancient course of he Ouse. CHAP. IV. Country is traversed by the Nen, the Great Ouse, and the Little Ouse. Of these the first, which now flows in a navigable stream by March, Upwell, and Outwell, and discharges itself into the Ouse near Denver sluice, formerly on arriving at Peterborough turned to the right, and making a circuit through Whittlesey, Ugg, and Ramsey Meres, passed them in a nearly direct course by March to Wisbeach. The second enters the fens near Earith. At this place it formerly bifurcated: the larger stream flowing by Harrimere, Ely, and Littleport, then by what is now called the Welney river to Wisbeach, where in conjunction with the Nen it flowed on to the sea. The other stream flowed towards the west, and is now known as the West Water: its course is from Earith to Benwick, where it formed a junction with the Nen. At the present time however both these channels are closed to the Ouse, which is conveyed in a straight line by the Bedford rivers to Denver, where they form a junction with the Little Ouse and are conveyed in its channel to the sea'. Wisbeach' accordingly constituted the natural outlet of the principal waters whose course lay through the great tract known as the Bedford Level; and such was the 'plenteous Ouse' when The course Spenser in his Faery Queene described it as coming described by Spenser. The Bedford 'far from land, By many a city and by many a town, Into his waters as he passeth downe, The Cle, the Were, the Grant, the Sture, the Rowne. Thence doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowne He doth adorne, and is adorn'd of it With many a gentle Muse and many a learned wit.' Of the Bedford Level, the whole extent of which amounts to some 400,000 acres, nearly half lies in the county of Cambridge, representing the fen country. Originally, it is probable, the inundations to which it was exposed were far 1 See paper by Prof. C. C. Babington, Cam. Antiq. Soc. Pub. 111 69. 2 The name, it has been plausibly conjectured, is a corruption of Ousebeach. 3 Faery Queene, iv xi 34. inundations times. less extensive and disastrous than those of a later period. CHAP. IV. The Romans, it has been conjectured, brought their science to bear upon the difficulty and mitigated the evil. Others have supposed that the gradual silting up of the channel directly communicating with the Wash sufficiently accounts for the increase of the inundations in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. It would seem certain that with the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII many of the precautions which the monks had vigilantly enforced were no longer observed, and the evil became greatly aggravated. The fens of England,' it has been said, 'enter largely into its early history,' and the remark is specially true of Cambridgeshire and its university. In Dugdale's elaborate work, the History of Embanking and Extent of the Draining, there is a map representing the Bedford Level at in former the time of an inundation. The waters are to be seen extending in one continuous sheet from Downham Market to Horningsey Common, from Peterborough to Mildenhall,— a few tracts of higher ground about Ely, Littleport, Soham, Haddenham, Wingford, Chatteris, and Whittlesea, appearing like islands in the midst'. On the frontier of this country Cambridge stands, and often shared, though in a less degree, the disastrous consequences of such visitations. In the year 1273 the waters rose five feet above the bridge in what is now known as Bridge Street; in 1290 the Carmelite Friars removed from Newnham into the parish of St. John's, driven from their extensive precincts in the former locality by floods which frequently rendered their attendance at lectures or at market impracticable; in 1520, Garret Hostel bridge, now known as the town bridge, was carried away by the waters. Even so late as the close of the sixteenth century, when legislation had but feebly grappled with the growing evil, 1 The termination -ey or -y denotes in Saxon an island; and such were formerly Childerley, Denny, Ely, Horningsey, Ramsey, Suthrey, Thorney, Wittlesea, etc.; while the pasture-land called meare must once have been the bed of an inland lake. Taylor, Words and Places, p. 372. 2 The most important work as to public utility, prior to the Reformation, was the great channel made by bishop Morton, which served the double purpose of discharging the overflowing of the Nene, and affording the convenience of water-carriage from Wisbech to Peterborough. CHAP. IV. tradition was wont to foretell that all Holland was destined to be submerged by the waters of the Welland and the Ouse, and that the abode of learning would be transferred from Cambridge to Stamford'. Gradual growth of the town of Cambridge. From facts like these we are better able to understand how it was that, in times before the university existed, the town that still represented the Camboritum of the Romans was confined to the left bank of the river, where upon the rising ground above, secure from inundations, rose the little church of St. Peter (St. Peter's juxta castra), which together with some three or four hundred tenements, many of them fallen into decay, composed the Grantbrigge of the time of the Norman invasion. It is worthy of remark that there is nothing in Domesday Book that lends the slightest countenance to the theory that anything resembling a university existed in those days. The Norman occupation gave however additional importance to the town. Twenty-seven houses were pulled down to make way for the new castle; then followed the erection of the church of St. Giles by Picot, the sheriff of the county; and probably soon after, that of the 'school of Pythagoras,' undoubtedly a structure of this period, and probably the residence of a Norman gentleman. But the attractions of a river in those days It has been said that after the dis- 1 'And after him the fatal Welland shall see Stamford, though now homely hid, | Then shine in learning, more then ever did | Cambridge or Oxford, England's goodly beames.' Spenser, Faery Queene, Iv xl 35. The old saws' here referred to are those mentioned by Antony Wood, see p. 135. 'Holland', or 'Little Hol land,' as it was sometimes called, is a division of the county of Lincoln, the S. E. portion, having the North Sea on the east. The poet's meaning, I apprehend, is that inasmuch as an inundation of this country could not fail to extend southwards, and greatly to aggravate the evils to which Cambridgeshire was periodically liable, the latter county would be rendered comparatively uninhabitable; while Stamford, as lying without the Bedford Level and on the rising land above the Welland, would be beyond the reach of the waters. |