The Oxford roll of non-graduates is not less distinguished: Sir Thomas More, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney, Wolsey, Massinger and Beaumont the dramatists, Shaftesbury, Gibbon, Shelley—while Halley the astronomer took his M.A. by royal mandamus, and Locke’s degree was irregular. Dublin university has not a dissimilar tale to tell; Burke failed to distinguish himself there, and Swift was given a degree speciali gratia.
CHAPTER VI
GIRTON AND NEWNHAM
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York with the monastery of Ely—English women and education—the four “noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at Cambridge—the rise of the movement for university education—two separate movements—Girton—Newnham—rise of the university lecture movement—Anne Clough—the Newnham Halls and Newnham College—the first triposes—the “Graces” of 1881—social life at the women’s colleges—character and choice of work among women—the degree—status of women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford—and status elsewhere.
THE foundation of the women’s colleges is of sufficient importance to call for a chapter in any history of the university, even if they did not in themselves awaken so much general interest. Cambridge cannot be otherwise than proud of its position as pioneer university in the higher education of the women of the country; the women’s colleges count as one of its glories and stand to it in the relation which Spenser gave to the river Ouse:
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowne
He doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it.
They belong to its atmosphere of vitality and growth, their presence adds something to that air of newness and renewal which has never been absent from the university town.
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby were of the same blood, kin to Edwin and Oswy. They founded two of those famous double monasteries for women and men, one of which became the greatest school in England, the other the nursing mother of the university of Cambridge.[441] The histories of the School of York and of the School which was to rise on the banks of the Granta had therefore been linked together since the vii century by Hild and Etheldreda. Was any prevision vouchsafed to Hild, that mother of scholars, of the day just twelve hundred years later when two women’s colleges were to rise by the side of the great school in the diocese of Ely? The centre of learning which had Etheldreda of Ely for one of its patrons was certainly propitious to women; but Cambridge had another patroness—whose name was among the earliest to be invoked in the town after the coming of the Normans—that Rhadegund who ruled the first nuns and the first double monastery in France, who was ordained a deacon by S. Médard, in whose convent study came next to prayer, who lectured each day to her spiritual children, and whose learning is recorded with admiration by one of her monks, the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus.[442]
Perhaps there is no country with a long history where women have played a smaller part on the national stage than England. But a conspicuous exception must be made—in education they have played a great part, and this part was nowhere greater than in Cambridge. We have the little group of college builders who lived in contiguous centuries—Elizabeth de Clare, Marie de Saint-Paul, Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond—to prove it: but the activity of the xiv and xv centuries was equally apparent between the viith and xth. It was Saxon nuns who carried learning to Germany, and the rôle of the great abbesses in those centuries, while it must be reckoned among the exceptions to the inconspicuous part played by women in English history, also served prominently the cause of education.[443]
The “two noble and devoute countesses” who built Clare and Pembroke, and whom Margaret of Anjou desired to imitate, realised perhaps more than anyone else in the xiv century the extraordinary joy of launching those first foundations with their promise for the