Cambridge

by M. A. R. Tuker

Classes of students.

The learned body which congregates in the combination rooms is the ecclesia docens of the university; the learning body—the ecclesia discens—includes all members of the university below the degree of M.A., and is divided into four or five classes. The most important of these from the academic point of view is the scholar, and for at least two centuries after colleges were built the only resident students were these students on the foundation.[340] To them were joined in course of time the pensioners, youths who paid for their board and lodging, the class which now makes up the great majority of undergraduates. Two other classes were added. The peers and eldest sons of peers with other fellow-commoners—a class which has fallen into practical desuetude but is not obsolete—and the sizars. The peers enjoyed some privileges which would not be coveted nowadays—they could make themselves conspicuous on all occasions by their clothing, and they could take a degree without working for it. The younger sons of peers and the richer undergraduates also messed at the fellows’ table, and were therefore called “fellow-commoners”: the advantages of this arrangement did not end with the better treatment in hall, for the companionship of the fellows and seniors of his college must have proved a welcome stimulus to an intelligent young man.[341] Lastly, there were and are the “sizars,” the poorer students, not on the foundation of the college, who pay smaller fees and receive their commons gratis.[342] The sizar of fifty years ago used to wait on the fellows at dinner and dine off the broken victuals, reinforced by fresh vegetables and pudding.

When Macaulay summed the advantages of a Cambridge fellowship he omitted perhaps the chief, the college residence which like “the good dinner” is to be had “for nothing.” Fellows and scholars receive their college quarters gratis; but the rest of the undergraduate population pays for its lodging. It is housed in its 17 colleges, the new hostels which are springing up on all sides, and the licensed lodgings in the town. The cost of the college bed and sitting room a term varies from £3 to three times this sum. Service adds £2 or £3 a term. Small lodgings with service can be had in the less good streets for £5-£7; good rooms from £8 to £10, while more than £12 is only charged in the best positions, or near the big colleges. The expense of college rooms is augmented by the prepayments for furniture (the average valuation of the permanent furniture is £20, but the sum may be as low as £10 or as high as £40), by the “caution money,” about £15, returned at the end of the term of residence, the admission fee (varying with the college from 6/8 to £5) and the matriculation fee £5. During residence there is also an annual payment of £9-15 towards the upkeep of the college and its servants, and the tuition fee, which covers all lectures in one’s own college, and varies from £18 to £24 a year.

It was to obviate the necessity of paying these fees that the system of non-collegiate students, familiarly called “non-colls,” was devised in 1869. While the expenses of an undergraduate who is a member of a college average about £165 a year, £60 in excess of this and £60 less representing the higher scale of expenses on the one hand and the minimum on the other, the undergraduate who lives in lodgings and is not a member of any college can live for £78 a year (if he does not require “coaching” or private tuition which costs about £9 a term) and it is just possible to take the B.A. degree after a three years’ residence which has cost you at the rate of £55 a year.

Fifty years ago the minimum cost of living at Cambridge for a pensioner was £150 and double this sum involved no extravagant outlay. A fellow-commoner required £800 a year and could not live on less than £500. These were the aristocratic days of English universities and they were in sharp contrast to the time when scholars were poor, begged their way to and from college, and were included among vagabonds in the statute of 1380 directed against mendicancy. But the entertainment in those days was also widely different. Two fellows shared not only a room but a bed, or a two-bedded room would be shared by a fellow and two poor scholars. It was not till the xvi century that each fellow had a bed to himself and a room to himself if space permitted.[343] The dining hall was a comfortless room where rude fare was served at a tresselled board to guests who sat upon wooden stools. The conditions of the xiii and xiv centuries were not greatly bettered in the xvth and xvith, and Erasmus found it hard to stomach the fare at Queens’ College at a time when the Cambridge ale appears to have been no improvement on the “wine no better than vinegar” which came from the surrounding vineyards.

Early discipline.

The little lads who thronged the streets of Cambridge in the xiii century were under little or no discipline. They ran up debts with the Jews, who had established themselves there in the opening years of the previous century, fought the townsmen, and had few duties to society beyond making their own beds, a work certainly performed by university scholars in the xiii and xiv centuries and enjoined on the boys of the famous schools founded in the xvth. It was this custom of doing your own work, at least until you became an advanced student when the little boys did it for you, which was the origin of “fagging” in our two most ancient schools connected respectively with our two universities—Eton and Winchester.[344] Even this amount of work, however, was not expected of fellow-commoners in the xvi century, who frequently got out of hand, though few of them have left us so delightful a reminder of their misdeeds as the young Earl of Rutland has done in a letter to his mother who had complained of his behaviour: “I do aseure your Ladyship that the cariage of myselfe both towardes God and my booke, my comeliness in diet and gesture, shall be such as your Ladyship shall hear and like well of.”

With the great era of college building in the succeeding century, the founders’ statutes make their appearance; and in days when monks were birched and nuns were slapped the college stocks held in durance vile the fellow who had presumed to bathe in any stream or pool of Cambridgeshire, while the college hall resounded to the strokes of the birch which visited the scholar for the same offence. College discipline was supplemented by university discipline, and the academic authorities shared legal powers with the town authorities until recently. The jurisdiction of the university extended not only to matters affecting its members, but to a conusance in actions which affected the townsmen.[345] The last attempt to exercise the right of imprisoning undesirable characters in the “Spinning House” was made by the vice-chancellor in 1893; but the incarceration of a young woman on this occasion caused so much indignation in the town that it led to the final disallowance of all the vice-chancellor’s powers, in this direction, which were waived by the university in 1894.