There were other friars in Cambridge. The friars of the Sack[40] or De poenitentia Jesu, were established in S. Mary’s parish in 1291, then in the parish of S. Peter. This was one of the spurious orders of Franciscans suppressed, as a result of the Council of Lyons, in 1307. The Barnwell Chartulary, however, has recorded for us that “these brethren of the Sack gathered together many scholars and good, and multiplied exceedingly until the time of the Council of Lyons.”
Other religious houses at Cambridge.
The Bethlemite friars came over here in 1257, and appear to have had only one house in England, that in Trumpington Street.[41] Our-Lady-friars (Fratres de Domina) are first heard of about thirty years later (1288). They were settled near the castle (and are hence called in the Barnwell Chartulary: Fratres beatae Mariae ad Castrum) and are only heard of at Cambridge and at Norwich where they arrived before 1290 and were there established at the time of the plague.[42] The Cambridge burgesses had an ancient leper hospital at Stourbridge, under the dedication of “S. Mary Magdalene for lepers.” In the closing years of the xiv century Henry Tangmer, alderman of the Guild of Corpus Christi, founded the Hermitage of S. Anne and Hospital of Lazars. About the same time (1395) the Benedictine nuns of S. Leonard of Stratford-le-Bowe granted a curtilage in Scholars’ Lane to the university.[43] The Priories of Anglesey S. John of Jerusalem and Tyltey and the abbeys of Crowland (p. 12) and Denney all held land in Cambridge.
The prior and convent of Anglesey, a Cambridgeshire house of Regular Canons, owned land here as early as 1278-9, and were of some importance in the town in the xiv century.[44] The land held by the knights of S. John was not part of the confiscated Templar property, all of which escheated to the Order, but was purchased by them early in the reign of Edward I.[45] It lay in the university centre between Mill Street and School Street (“Milnestrete alias Seynt Johnstrete”) and was a parcel of open land on which was their patronal church of S. John Baptist, and Crouched or S. Crosse’s Hostel.[46] In 1432 William Hulle, preceptor of Swenefeld, Templecombe, and Quenyngton, and prior of the English Langue, sold this ground to the university for the schools quadrangle, and the New Schools of Canon Law were built upon it.[47] The
knights’ property was on the west of the schools quadrangle, the property of the nuns of Stratford-le-Bowe on the east. Denney and Tyltey both owned land on the site of Christ’s Pieces and elsewhere in the xv century. The former was a Franciscan nunnery founded by Marie de Chatillon Countess of Pembroke (p. 69) on land which was claimed from her by the knights of S. John as part of the sequestrated Templar property. It lay on the borders of the fen between Cambridge and Ely. The latter was a Cistercian house in Essex.[48]