Sunday at Cambridge.
But the round of work and play comes to an end with Sunday, and the university has preserved the festival aspect of this day, the day when continental beadles and gens d’armes don their fine plumes and when what is bright and gay rather than what is dull and grave is mated to the idea of a day of rest. The college courts—the outdoor centre and rallying point of college life—are thronged with men gay in surplice or gown[372] as they were thronged on that Sunday 370 years ago when Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester found two hundred dons assembled “as is their wont” and buttonholed the men who were likely to pleasure his grace in the matter of the divorce. That fine day in the xvi century was no doubt a repetition of many fine days in the centuries preceding it, for it is always fine in Cambridge on Sunday. And Sunday after Sunday the undergraduate has received a lesson in dignities, as he circled becapped and begowned on the cobbled paths round the greater luminaries becapped and begowned tranquilly stepping on the college grass. The modern undergraduate does not remember a time when a pathway ran across the turf from corner to corner of the college courts, as it did in Clare Hall, in the old court of Corpus, and in William of Wykeham’s foundation at Oxford. On “scarlet days” the courts are still more gay, for the doctors then appear in their scarlet.[373]
The gowns in the court clothe the learned and the unlearned, and make a present of as brave an academic appearance to the rowdiest of non-readers as to the future senior wrangler. The academic year is divided into 3 terms of 8 or 9 weeks each: half the year only is therefore passed at Cambridge. For serious study the intervals are too long and the ‘long vacation term’ has become the reading man’s term par excellence; all the colleges are then half full, the numbers being swelled by the medical students. The multiplication of extra-collegiate scholarships has not told all one way. Parents who used to make sacrifices to send a son to the university now count upon a scholarship, with the result that on the principle of ‘light come light go’ less use is made of opportunities. The university authorities look to the “advanced students” (of whom there are now 60 or 70 in residence) who are staying up for research work or come from other universities, for solid academic achievement.
Class from which the academic population has been drawn.
There is no more interesting enquiry connected with our subject than that concerning the classes from which the academic population has been recruited at different epochs, and the careers for which the university has fitted its members.
The Church has always remained the most constant client of academic advantages: it was the churchmen who on the decline of the monasteries and when the universities were established as learned corporations, exchanged the cloister for the college education. The dissolution of the monasteries and the breach with Rome left the universities as the only representatives of the faculty of theology; and during the last century, especially, if a man were destined for the Church he went—ipso facto—to Cambridge or Oxford even though he were the only member of his family to do so. In the xv as in the xvi centuries it was chiefly men destined for the faculties of theology and law who frequented the universities, and then, as always in their history, the poorest scholar lived side by side with the youth of family and influence.
The lawyers, perhaps, have gone in equal proportions to a university or to one of the Inns of Court; many have gone to both. The great change to be observed is as regards students of the third faculty, medicine. In the xix century the doctor and the tradesman’s son did not go to a university; but this century, as we have seen, has already been marked by the enormous accession of medical students at Cambridge. The gradual growth of a powerful middle class resulted in the later xvi century in filling the universities with the sons not only of the older yeomanry of our shires but of the new Merchant Adventurers, often themselves men of gentle blood and coat armour. It is perhaps from this century that the idea began to prevail that an academic education was the proper education of a gentleman. Of this century it was true as it had been true of no other that “the civil life of all English gentlemen” is begun at Oxford or Cambridge. Statesmen and ministers, the political and the diplomatic careers, were recruited at the universities, and university-trained canonists and lawyers like Cranmer and More, and churchmen like Wolsey and Gardiner were chosen to be the ambassadors and secretaries of state. Ascham complains to Cranmer that sons of rich men “who sought only superficial knowledge” and “to qualify themselves for some place in the State” overran the university, and both universities soon became, in Macaulay’s words, the training ground not only of all the eminent clergy, lawyers, physicians, poets, and orators, but of a large proportion of the “nobility and opulent gentry” of the country.
In England men belonging to what have, hitherto, been the governing classes have always sought advantages which would doubtless be less apparent in countries where nobility and gentry are synonyms and where government is not carried on by means of two such institutions as the House of Commons and the House of Lords. A noblesse which gives no scions to the professions or to a representative chamber has seldom sought academic distinction. The man destined for parliament for the diplomatic service and the government office—occupations which an acute American observer has said are chosen by Englishmen as the business of their lives “without studying any other profession”[374]—prepared himself in no other way than by three or four years spent at the university, with or without graduating there. It was not however till the nineteenth century opened that the distinctively aristocratic trend of a university was defined. Throughout that century the university was par excellence the seminary of the English gentleman, and the parson. A few bankers’ sons might be put into their fathers’ counting houses, a few government officials might place their sons at an early age in a government office, but the exception only proved the rule.
Examples.
xvi c.
xvii c.
Let us look at some examples of the class from which Cambridge was recruited through the xvi and xvii centuries. Hugh Latimer (b. 1491) was the son of a yeoman farmer; Sir Thomas Wyatt (b. 1503) was the son of a knight. The father of Matthew Parker (b. 1504) was a Norwich merchant; Bacon (b. 1561) and his brother, fellow-commoners of Trinity, were sons of the Lord Keeper and nephews of Burleigh. Fletcher (b. 1579) the dramatist, was the son of the Bishop of London, and his cousins the poets were sons of Elizabeth’s Master of the Requests and ambassador to Russia.[375] In the xvii century Herrick the poet (b. 1591) was the son of a goldsmith established in London; Waller (b. 1605) a nephew of Hampden’s, a man of large private fortune; Cowley (b. 1618) was