[39] All branches of the Augustinians were represented at Cambridge: the Augustinian canon at Barnwell, the hospitaller at S. John’s, and the hermit-friar at the Austin friary. ‘The friars heremites of the order of S. Austin’ were settled in Suffolk from the middle of the xiii c., probably by Richard de Clare Earl of Gloucester and Lord of the honour of Clare. One of their chief benefactors was Elizabeth de Burgh. See Clare College chap. ii. p. 64.
[40] Confraternities and friars “of the Sack,” known as Sacconi in their birthplace, Italy, and so called because of the loose gown or ‘sack’ common to begging friars and confraternities, and also because of the large sacks which they sometimes carried when begging for the poor, were associations due to the preaching of S. Francis and especially of S. Antony of Padua in the first quarter of the xiii c. So that the Cambridge friars, dispersed after the Council of Lyons in 1307, were one of the earliest of these communities; and it is interesting to find them addicted to scholarship.
[41] Matthew Paris, anno 1257. Concessa est mansio fratribus Bethleemitis in Cantabrigia, silicet in vico qui ducit versus Trumpintonam.
[42] They were begging friars following the rule of S. Austin.
[43] They had held land in Cambridge for over 100 years “of the gift of the earl of Mandeville.” At the Suppression they were seized of land in Haslyngfeld, co. Cambridge. Cf. ii. p. 96.
[44] The property was situated “in Henney,” a well-known part of Mill Street in the parish of S. John Baptist, and included the stone house on the high street by S. Michael’s rectory house which passed to the family of Sir John Cambridge in 1311 was by him bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, and became the nucleus of Gonville Hall. The prior of Anglesey is found leasing this land in the reign of Edward III., and selling it to Henry VI. in 1447. The priory lay between Cambridge and Newmarket.
[45] Rot. Hund. ii. 360. Cf. also ibid. p. 370.
[46] pp. 25 n., 49 and ii. p. 90.
[47] Another piece of this ground was conveyed by Henry VI. (who bought it of the university in the same year) to Trinity Hall in 1440 (and became the college garden). It is there described as “a void ground” pertinent priori et confratribus sancti Johannis in Anglia. Crouched hostel had already been pulled down for the schools. Like other hostels in Mill Street—God’s house, S. Nicholas, and Austin’s (see King’s and Christ’s Colleges) it stood, as we see, on open ground: “a certain garden of the hostel of the Holy Cross” we hear of in 1421.
[48] It is supposed that monks from Denney and Tyltey came here to study. The former was in fact a cell to Ely abbey before Marie de Chatillon transferred the Franciscans of Waterbeach thither. The two ‘nuns of the Order of S. Clare’ who were friends of Erasmus at Cambridge were probably inmates of Denney. In Rot. Hund. two other communities are recorded: the moniales de Pato, of whom we know nothing—there is a Paston in Norfolk and another in Northants.; and ‘the monks of the Holy Trinity at Cambridge’ who are mentioned in the Oxford Hundred Rolls of the 7th year of Edw. I.: the name affords another instance of the antiquity and popularity of this dedication to the Trinity, which we find at Michaelhouse, Trinity Hall, Trinity church, and in the guild of the Trinity at Cambridge.