was divided—a system unreasonably borrowed from Paris, where men of various nationalities were actually in residence. For the purposes of the system, both at Oxford and Cambridge, England was conventionally assumed to be divided by the river Trent into two nations," Northern and Southern, to one or the other of which every undergraduate necessarily belonged by reason of his birthplace. This arrangement obviously gave special encouragement to faction fights, one of which, in 1261, was peculiarly murderous, and all but brought the University to ruin. The two proctors of the present day are a survival from this ancient convention. From the beginning the University officials had been granted, by royal charter in 1231, special privileges with regard to the town; the "taxers," for example, having power to regulate the rent of lodgings for the students, and the proctors being supreme over the weights and measures used in the market. The former authority still survives (vested in the Lodging-house Syndicate), and even the latter has not long been obsolete. Amongst his official insignia there is still handed on to the Senior Proctor of each year the archaic cylinder of sheet iron, a yard in length and an inch in diameter, which was of old the standard test for the dimensions of every roll of butter sold in Cambridge.

§ 12. Before the thirteenth century closed was introduced that system of collegiate education destined to exercise so absorbing an influence on the whole constitution of the University. The earliest students must have been mere casual lodgers in the houses of townsmen; but the idea of starting lodging-houses, or "hostels," for their sole benefit would immediately suggest itself to private enterprise. Such Hostels soon sprang up in large numbers, and continued, though gradually choked to death by the growth of the Colleges, for many years. Even late in the sixteenth century, one of the effects

of the Reformation most lamented by Dr. Caius is the extinction (through the decreased numbers of the students) of nearly all these abodes. To this day the name of Garret Hostel (now a court in Trinity College) remains to remind us of these ancient institutions. In our time, indeed, the institutions themselves have once more been revived, such being the formal position of both St. Edmund's Hall and Selwyn College.1

§ 13. The position, indeed, of the last-named corporation-the latest-founded of our Cambridge colleges with regard to University recognition-is precisely that of our earliest college at the date of its foundation. The College was then, in respect to the University system, simply a better-organized and permanently-endowed Public Hostel, such as the earlier private lodging-houses of whose existence the authorities were just beginning to take cognizance. Little was it then foreseen that this new idea would carry all before it, until the University itself came to be considered a mere aggregate of colleges, and every University official was required to belong to one or other of these newly engrafted corporations.

§ 14. The collegiate idea, however, was fruitful in such vast practical advantages that it was bound to carry all before it. The unattached student, rioting and starving in his unregulated lodgings, under no sort of discipline or tutorial direction, could not hold his own in the schools against the carefully-trained and comfortablyharboured Scholar of a College, his superior in physical, intellectual, and, above all, moral advantages. Hitherto such advantages had only been attainable by the young Dominican or Franciscan novice in his cloister; their extension to the mere secular undergraduate was due to

1 These are denominational institutions, the former Roman Catholic, the latter Anglican.

2 Cambridge, Oxford, and Paris were the only Universities in Europe which admitted members of the Mendicant Orders to a degree.

the genius of two remarkable men-Walter de Merton at Oxford, Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, at Cambridge. § 15. As usual, Oxford, "the place of great movements, as Cambridge is the place of great men," took the lead. Merton College was founded in 1265, with a code of statutes so good that when Hugh de Balsham followed at Cambridge, by the creation of Peterhouse, twenty years later, he adopted them bodily. He had, indeed, endeavoured to adopt them in his previous abortive attempt to graft his new College upon the ancient Hospital of St. John-an attempt so fruitful in quarrels between the old and the new members of the foundation that the latter were speedily removed to their present abode, at what was then the extreme southern end of the town.

§ 16. The mention of this great expansion of Cambridge, as a town, recalls us to the course of civil events during this first period of University development. The ravages of Galfrid de Mandeville in the reign of Stephen were succeeded by over half a century of peace, during which the county was only vexed by the proceedings of William Longchamps, the high-handed Chancellor of Richard Cœur de Lion, who was Bishop of Ely 11891192. For some not very intelligible reason, in the course of his quarrels with the Archbishop of Rouen, he put under interdict part, at least, of his own diocese, so that no burial of the dead could take place. Strange to say, this outrage was submitted to by all concerned; so that when Queen Eleanor, the widow of Henry II., came, in 1192, to visit her dowry manors in the county, she was shocked to find "human bodies lying everywhere through the fields unburied," and grieved by the tears and wailings of the mourners, who implored her intervention. "Being of a tender-hearted disposition" (as Richard of Devizes tells us, in spite of her dealings with Fair Rosamond)," she forthwith postponed her own affairs" to the task of removing this grievance; which she

succeeded in doing, "for who could be so steel-hearted that that woman could not bend him to her wishes ?"

§ 17. This episode may remind us that there were a few spots in the county where this peculiar method (so strangely in favour amongst the ecclesiastics of this period) of putting pressure on adversaries by interdicting their dependents from the consolations of religion failed of its effect. The Houses of the Templars and Hospitallers were exempt, even from the ban of the Pope himself. Thus, the Preceptory of the latter Order at Shingay, in the south-western district of our county, was the only place for miles around at which Church services could be attended by the living, or burial secured for the dead, during the six years (1208-1214) when this ghastly spiritual weapon was made use of by the Pope in the dismal days of King John. Local tradition still remembers the "fairycart" (i.e., the feretorium, or wheeled bier) which, by night, carried to Shingay the bodies of those who were denied funeral rites elsewhere.

18. To the historian this Preceptory is of special interest, owing to the fact that a report of its revenues, made to the Grand Master of the Order in 1338, still exists in the Record Office at Malta. That it should yet be found there, in spite of the straits to which the Order was reduced when driven thither from Rhodes by the Turkish arms, shows with what care the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem preserved their records. We thus learn that the Preceptory or "bailiwick" of Shingay was worth £187 12s. 8d. per annum, being only surpassed in value by three others in England. The total comprised the following items:

610 acres of arable land at Is. 6d. per acre,

(These last were in the adjoining parishes of Arrington and Croydon, where the land is poor, lying on the hillside.)

70 acres of meadow at 2s. per acre,

60 acres of common pasture at Is. per acre. (Agricultural rents, as these figures show, were as high in this period as at any time; each shilling in the above list approximately representing £1 in present money.) There was also a watermill (returned as worth 10s. per annum in Doomsday), supplemented by a windmill (at this date a comparatively recent invention), both together bringing in £2 10s. yearly. The manor-house was worth £1 per annum, and its dovecotes 13s. 4d. The Preceptory also held the rectories of Wendy and Sawston, worth £13 6s. 8d. and £33 6s. 8d. respectively. The work of the "customary tenants" (i.e., the "villains" who held their land by payment of certain accustomed services in lieu of rent)1 is valued at £13 9s. yearly; the fines, etc., levied at the manorial courts at £25; while the "voluntary" fees of those who sought the good offices-spiritual or temporal -of the Knights amounted to no less than £23 6s. 8d.

§ 19. The yearly expenses of the House amounted to £70 18s. 8d., the chief item being food. Of wheat, So quarters at 3s. was the annual allowance; of barley (for brewing), 120 quarters at 2s.; of oats (for the stable), 120 quarters at Is. Meat, fish, etc., came to 3s. 6d. per week. This provided for the regular household and their guests, the doors of the House being open (as the Founder had desired) to all comers. The regular inmates were the Preceptor, two knights, two chaplains, the Vicar of Shingay, and the servants, who, besides their keep, received wages-men getting 13s. 4d. a year, boys 6s. 8d., very nearly equivalent to what are paid now. The Vicar of Shingay received 20s., the Preceptor £12; while each knight was allowed clothing to the value of £1 6s. 8d., and 8s. for pocket-money.

The House was habitually tenanted by Knights; but there was a period when for these were substituted the

1 See below, § 52.