[226] The university statute providing for the commemoration of benefactors and others, directs that mass be said every 5th of May for Edward II. as founder of King’s Hall.
[227] Which is on the site of the hall, pulled down in 1557 to make room for the chapel.
[228] For changes made in the Mill Street district in the xv c. when the School’s Quadrangle and King’s College were built, cf. pp. 24, 24 n., 25 n., 97 n., 101.
[229] There was a fellows’ “parloure” in King’s Hall as early as 1423-4.
[230] There is a fine series of most valuable portraits in the Lodge; among them one of Mary, and the standing portrait of the young Henry VIII. which Wordsworth made the subject of a poem. A careful list of university portraits appears at the end of Atkinson’s volume, but such a list—useful and valuable as it is—tucked away somewhere in a book on Cambridge is not an adequate homage to so important a source of university history as these portraits. The loan exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1884-5 was the first attempt to collect the Cambridge pictures: the example was followed by Oxford in 1904-6, and the Catalogue of portraits then published is a model of what can and should be done.
No complete list of the portraits of either university, however, at present exists. Many canvasses remain unidentified or misidentified; some are doubtless perishing for want of care, and the artist’s name has long disappeared from many more. The work therefore that remains to be done is a big one, but is eminently worth the doing.
[231] A sedan coach is preserved in the entrance hall of Trinity Lodge, and is used to transport visitors from the Gateway to the Lodge when the Master entertains. It is the college tradition that the coach was presented by Mrs. Worsley, wife of the then Master of Downing, to Christopher Wordsworth Master of Trinity, and brother of the poet (1820-41).
[232] This is the largest college library but it is not the most ancient. Peterhouse led the way in the xiii century with divinity and medicine books of Balsham’s. In 1418, 380 volumes were catalogued, containing “from six to seven hundred distinct treatises.” Here were to be found books on law, medicine, astrology, and natural philosophy, as well as the preponderating theological tomes. Trinity Hall was another famous xiv century library, and Pembroke has a catalogue of books in that and the next century amounting to 140 volumes. In the xv century Queens’ had 224, and S. Catherine’s 137 (in 1472 and 1475). In 1571 the French ambassador to this country deemed the library at Peterhouse “the worthiest in all England” Cf. the university library, p. 98.
[233] His name appears in the House List of King’s Hall.
[234] The tithes of Great S. Mary’s and Chesterton both belonged to King’s Hall, on which the advowson of S. Peter’s Northampton was bestowed, as Cherry Hinton had been bestowed on Peterhouse. The rectory of Chesterton, which had pertained till then to the monastery of Vercelli, was given by Eugenius IV.