Jesus College
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CD LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ClMS COLLEGE HISTORIES CAMBRIDGE JESUS COLLEGE m gantbitattp of COLLEGE HISTORIES JESUS COLLEGE BY AKTHUR GRAY, M.A. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF JESUS COLLEGE PRESIDENT OF THE CAMBRIDGE ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY LONDON F. E. ROBINSON & CO. 20 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY 1902 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE NUNS OF SAINT RADEGUND - I II. THE FOUNDER AND HIS WORK - - 28 - III. THE REFORMATION 5 1 IV. ELIZABETH AND JAMES - ?O V. REBELLION AND COMMONWEALTH - - 98 VI. RESTORATION DAYS - - 122 VII. BETWEEN THE REVOLUTIONS - 141 VIII. THE JESUS UNITARIANS - 163 IX. THREE FRIENDS - 189 X. THE GOTHIC RENASCENCE - - 2O7 XI. WITHIN LIVING MEMORY - - 222 APPENDIX - -235 INDEX - - - - - - 242 120065 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE - - I. VIEW BY LOGGAN (circa 1 688) Frontispiece - II. NORTH TRANSEPT OF THE CHAPEL Facing 24 III. ENTRANCE TO THE CLOISTERS 38 IV. THE HALL - - 92 V. A CORNER OF THE LIBRARY 134 VI. VIEW FROM THE FELLOWS' GARDEN l6o VII. THE CHAPEL, LOOKING WEST 2l8 VIII. ENTRANCE OF THE NUNNERY CHAPTER- HOUSE ... 234 INTRODUCTION THE writer of a College history must cut his coat accord- ing to the measure of his cloth. A knowledge of the conditions of his task should make the historian of Jesus take a modest view of its importance ; for, though the tree sprung from Alcock"s acorn has now grown to some size and not a little vigour, for the best part of its existence it was overshadowed by taller neighbours in the academic grove. In fact, except in some short periods of unwonted prosperity, Jesus was, until recent ' 1 times, emphatically a small college, low in revenues, and in numbers competing with Peterhouse and Magda- lene rather than with Caius or Christ's. Nor does the College figure much in the annals of the University. A survey of its history from the first leaves the impres- sion that it generally kept quietly out of the main channel of University affairs. Geographical position may have had something to do with this aloofness, but I think that more is to be attributed to the fact that the shadows of Ely have been a little repressive to vigour and spontaneity in Jesus. The College of Cranmer and Bancroft, of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, may certainly claim to have con- tributed, in proportion to its size, at least as many vi INTRODUCTION names as any other to the roll of famous men whom Cambridge has nurtured. But the greatest of Jesus men cracked the academic shell early in life, and took no considerable part in shaping the destinies of the University. Jesus has had no Fisher or Parker, no Cheke or Bentley. It never marched in advance of the rest of the University, and it produced no leaders of forlorn hopes or confessors in unpopular causes. Except in the two periods of the Great Rebellion and the French Revolution, there are not many incidents in the annals of the College to relieve them of monotony. But my book is principally for Jesus men, and they, it may be hoped, will find matter of interest in details which are of small concernment to the general reader. On the other hand, the materials for illustrating the domestic life of the College are, I think, exceptionally ample. In sketching the daily lives and changing ' ' manners of dons and undergraduates in successive periods I have endeavoured to give my subject more interest and continuity than was to be got by treating it as a bundle of biographies of minor celebrities. Much of the matter contained in the chapter on the nunnery is taken from my Priory of Saint Radegund, published by the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 1898. In that chapter I have given my reasons for intruding the subject in a College history. Here I would only add that I have ill accomplished my purpose if I have not made it clear in Chapter II. that the College of Alcock's design was to have been of a totally different plan from that of any other Cambridge college. His scheme for breathing the evangelizing spirit into the dry bones of monasticism had some promise of success INTRODUCTION vii about it in 1496. The lapse of a generation made it a barren anachronism. But the monastic type remained far on into the history of the College, and leaves a trace of itself at this day. The undergraduate, as I have shown, scarcely got a footing in the place before the of Elizabeth and the fact at reign ; that the beginning of the twentieth century Jesus, relatively to its total endowment, is poor in foundation scholarships is in a principal degree due to Alcock^s designed omission of the scholar from the society which he constructed on the monastic model. That this exceptional position of Jesus has not hitherto been recognised is to be ascribed to the circumstance that the earliest existing statutes of the College those of Bishop Stanley, which, no doubt, were in their main features a re-enactment of Alcock^s unaccountably disappeared from observation for some generations. They have never been printed, and they exist in a single copy written in a hand of the eighteenth century. It has been assumed in all recent works on Cambridge that the earliest extant statutes of Jesus were the so-called West statutes, printed in Documents relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge ; ' ' but the West statutes are, as I have shown, of post- Reformation date. To the Master and Fellows of my College are due my grateful thanks for committing the key of the muniment room from time to time to my custody with a liberality for which, I fear, they find no warrant in the statutes. To the Rev. Osmond Fisher, late Fellow and tutor, now Honorary Fellow of the College, I am much indebted for valuable information about times for which he is the sole living witness. And to Mr. C. J. B. viii INTRODUCTION I am under Gaskoin, M.A., of Jesus College, special his kindness in devoting, for my advantage, obligation for the of the University many of his vacation days to study wills which are deposited at Peterborough. that 'ETrtTroi^ evpitrrcero is the only apology of a volume to the pre- offer for the many imperfections been of which more hours should have paration many are at the of a College tutor. given than disposal Or THE UNIVERSITY } CHAPTER I THE NUNS OF SAINT RADEGUND THROUGHOUT the four centuries of its existence Jesus College has been known by an alias. In the letters patent for its incorporation, which Bishop Alcock obtained from VII. it is licensed as ' the King Henry , College of the Blessed Mary the Virgin, St. John the Evangelist, and the glorious Virgin, St. Radegund, ' near Cambridge/ The now accepted name, Jesus 1 College, has no place in the letters patent; yet it appears, beside the ampler form, in some of the earliest muniments of the new foundation, and even in the fifteenth century had supplanted it in common speech. For then, just as now, the road which leads from Cam- to Barnwell was as Jesus bridge known Lane ; then, also, there was a now forgotten Jesus parish, wherein the College farmers dwelt, and, as contemporary evidence ' ' shows, heard their divine service in Jesus church, and buried their dead in Jesus churchyard. Bishop Stanley, in the preamble of the statutes which he gave to the College about the year 1514, says that the College church was dedicated to the Name of Jesus ; but he did not forget that it had an older ascription, and elsewhere he speaks of it as the church of St. Radegund. 1 2 JESUS COLLEGE had been its name ; Since the days of Henry II. that a saint but Radegund herself usurped the honour due to of older claim, and at best was but the junior partner from of St. Mary, whose patronage of the site dates Stephen's reign. With these two saints, Mary and Radegund, Bishop Alcock, in his dedication of the College, associated a But the third, his name-saint, John the Evangelist. two former are the real Oeoi evroTrioi of Jesus College. An unbroken tradition of seven centuries and a half connects their names with its site, and confers on it a ' ' better title to the epithets ancient" and religious' than can be claimed by any other College in the University 4 ancient,' for the antiquity of its origin far transcends ' 1 that of the University itself, and religious, since the aspect of its buildings and the seclusion of its position recall unmistakably that religious household from which it sprang, the Benedictine nunnery of St. Mary and St. Radegund. The story of this nunnery, which is to be the subject of the present chapter, may seem remote from the pur- pose of a college history. If it be so, the apology for its intrusion here must be partly its intrinsic interest, partly the light which it throws on some peculiarities which from the outset distinguished Jesus from other Cambridge colleges, and are not altogether obliterated to-day. The nuns bequeathed a large mass of miscel- laneous documents charters, wills, account-rolls, etc. to the College, and the scrupulous care with which they were originally housed, and, not less, the wholesome neglect which has since respected their repose in the College treasury, have fortunately preserved them THE NUNS OF ST. RADEGUND 3 intact to the present time. Their interest lies in the which us of picture they give pre-academic Cambridge ; of an isolated woman's community in an alien world of men and of the and ; depravation decay which came of that isolation, and which ended in the first suppression in England of an indigenous house of religion.