On a certain morning in the summer of the year 1510 John Eccleston, Doctor in Divinity and Master of Jesus College in Cambridge, stood at the door of his lodge looking into the cloister court. There was a faint odour of extinguished candles in the air, and a bell automatically clanked in unison with its bearer’s step. It was carried by a young acolyte, who lagged in the rear of a small band of white-robed figures who were just disappearing from sight at the corner of the passage leading to the entrance court. They were the five Fellows of the newly-constituted College.
As they disappeared, the Master, with much deliberation, spat into the cloister walk.
To spit behind a man’s back might be accounted a mark of disgust, contempt, malice—at least of disapproval. Such were not the feelings of Dr. Eccleston.
It is a fact known all over the world, Christian and heathen, that visitants from the unseen realm cannot endure to be spat at. The Master’s action was prophylactic. For supernatural visitings of the transitory, curable kind the rites of the Church are, no doubt, efficacious. In inveterate cases it is well to leave no remedy untried.
With bell, book and candle the Master and Fellows had just completed a lustration of the lodge. The bell had clanked in the Founder’s Chamber and in the Master’s oratory. The Master’s bedchamber had been well soused with holy water. The candle had explored dark places in cupboards and under the stairs. If It was there before it was almost inconceivable that It remained there now. But one cannot be too careful.
Two days previously a funeral had taken place in the College. It was a shabby affair. The deceased, John Baldwin, late a brother of the dissolved Hospital of Saint John, was put away in an obscure part of the College churchyard—now the Master’s garden—behind some elder bushes which grew in the corner bounded by the street and the “chimney.” The mourners were the grave-digger, the sexton and the parson of All Saints’ Church. Though brother John had died in a college chamber the society of Jesus marked its reprobation of his manner of living by absenting themselves from his obsequies.
Brother John had been a disappointment: uncharitable persons might say he was a fraud. He had got into the College by false pretences. In life he had disgraced it by his excesses, and, when he was dead, he had perpetrated a mean practical joke on the society. It is not well for a man in religious orders to joke when he is dead.
How did it come that brother John Baldwin, late Granger of the Augustinian Hospital of Saint John, died in Jesus College?
The Hospital of Saint John was dissolved in the year 1510, to make room for the new college designed by the Lady Margaret. Bishops of Ely for three centuries and more had been its patrons and visitors, and dissolute James Stanley, bishop in 1510, fought stoutly for its maintenance. But circumstances were too strong for the bishop. The ancient Hospital was hopelessly bankrupt. The buildings were ruinous: there was not a doit in the treasury chest: the household goods were pawned to creditors in the town. The Master, William Tomlyn, had disappeared, none knew whither, and only two brethren were left in the place. One of them was John Baldwin: the other was the Infirmarer, a certain Bartholomew Aspelon.