The Coming of the Friars

by Augustus Jessopp

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If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of investigation which he has pursued, or to summarize at all satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence of their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark of imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished guide can lead them. Do you think that such a work as this tells us no more than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed their present form, and court was added to court, and libraries and museums and lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed by the professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by the masons and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.

Horizons rich with trembling spires
On violet twilights, lose their fires

if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.

How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a figure which to us would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social, and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our forefathers that they could not conceive of such a _terminus ad quern_ as serves us as a _terminus a quo._ In other words, we _begin_ at a point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in all essentials is for ever repeating herself--impossible though it may be to put the clock back for ourselves.

How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of Cambridge--that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery--never seemed to have thought that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old monasteries there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who passed into the cloister came there once for all--to live _and die_ within the walls of his monastery. The scholar who came to get all the learning he could, and who settled in some humble hostel or some unpretentious college of the old type, came to spend some few years there, but no more. He came to live his life, and when there was no more life in him--no more youthful force, activity, and enthusiasm-there was no place for him at Cambridge, There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their work. Die? No! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should go. No college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead!

Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly--the lad of feeble frame and delicate organization-to stand that rugged old Cambridge life. "College rooms" in our time suggest something like the _ne plus ultra_ of aesthetic elegance and luxury. We find it hard to realize the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was expected to have two or three _chamber fellows_ who shared his bedroom with him; and that his _study_ was no bigger than a study at the schoolhouse at Rugby, and very much smaller than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a more modern public school. At the hostels, which were of course much more crowded than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege of the few. What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed receptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than seventy members of the college "accommodated" (!) in twenty-eight chambers. This was before the second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their predecessors of two hundred years before.

"In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or tiled; and their halls and ceilings were unplastered." We have express testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the master's lodge had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of the sixteenth century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed, dated July 3, 1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's College, "the wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only one chair; that the tables were supported on trestles; and that those who used them sat on forms or stools." As for the chambers and studies, not only were they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster between the tiles and the beams of the roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible how vitality could have been kept up in the winter under such conditions. The cold must have been dreadful.

At four only of five earlier and smaller colleges was there any fire-place in the hall, and the barbaric braziers in which first charcoal and afterwards coke was burned, were actually the only heating apparatus known in the immense halls of Trinity and St. John's till within the last twenty years! The magnificent hall of Trinity actually retained till 1866 the brazier _which had been in use for upwards of 160 years!_ The clumsy attempt to fight the bitter cold which was usual in our mediaeval churches and manor-houses, by strewing the stone floor with rushes, was carried out too in the college halls, and latterly, instead of rushes, sawdust was used, at least in Trinity. "It was laid on the floor at the beginning of winter, and turned over with a rake as often as the upper surface became dirty. Finally, when warm weather set in, it was removed, the colour of charcoal!" Well might the late Professor Sedgwick, in commenting upon this practice, exclaim; "The dirt was sublime in former years!"

Yet in the earliest times a lavatory was provided in the college halls, and a towel of eight or nine yards long, which at Trinity, as late as 1612, was hung on a hook--the refinement of hanging a towel on a _roller_ does not appear to have been thought of. These towels were for use _before_ dinner; _at_ dinner the fellows of Christ's in 1575 were provided with table-napkins. If they wiped their fingers on the table-cloth they were fined a penny. The temptation must have been strong at times, for _no forks were in use_--not even the iron-pronged forks which some of us remember in hall in our young days. The oldest piece of furniture in the college halls were the stocks, set up for the correction of refractory undergraduates who should have been guilty of the enormity of bathing in the Cam or other grave offence and scandal.