The rôle reserved for these houses and congregations in the earlier history of the university was subordinate. By the time that every Benedictine house was required by the Constitution of Honorius III. (1216-1227) to send some of its students to the universities, learning had already passed from the monastery to the university, and the monks’ hostel at Cambridge[49] signalised the change. The part taken by the friars is not less instructive. The refusal of the Carmelites (throughout the xiii century) to pursue the academic course is valuable evidence of the conflict between secular and religious studies at the rise of the university. The Franciscans were the most important of the mendicants in England, and as such took a paramount place at both Cambridge and Oxford; but at the former their action was inconspicuous, and there is nothing to indicate that they were at any time or in any sense “nursing fathers” to Cambridge university whatever they may have been elsewhere.
The moment when they made their appearance was at least as propitious historically as it had been at Oxford, and the independent growth of Cambridge, its escape from the intellectual thraldom of that scholasticism of which the Franciscans were the chief exponents, are hence doubly significant. The quarrels which arose in the early xiv century between the officials of the university and the friars prove that the religious societies which shared its academic life did by no means act in permanent harmony with it. Thus in 1303 the chancellor quarrelled with the Franciscans and Dominicans and excommunicated two of the friars, and later in the century the university had to prohibit novices in the Cambridge friaries from proceeding to their degrees under eighteen years of age. Then, as now, the Franciscans were accustomed to recruit very little lads for the noviciate, all of whom probably received their education at the public Cambridge schools of grammar and theology, and might be seen strutting about as full-fledged “masters of arts before they were masters of themselves.”[50]
Before the xiii century closed—from the date of Hugh de Balsham’s death—the university ceased to receive any help from monastic learning, for the monks avoided Cambridge, and even Norwich priory sent its students to Oxford.[51] Less than a hundred years elapsed, and we find Gaunt, Pembroke, and Scrope—the court party—opposing the pretensions and the temporalities of the clergy in the company of Cambridge men. Pembroke—the representative of the house of Valence[52]—is their spokesman, and it is Scrope
A.D. 1371.
and Sir Robert Thorpe, Master of a Cambridge college, who take the Purse and the Seals from the hands of their episcopal holders Brantingham and William of Wykeham. This movement, as Stubbs points out, was independent of Wyclif’s; and it is remarkable that while William of Wykeham was influencing Oxford the theories for which he stood were being repulsed at Cambridge.
Cambridge and the jurisdiction of Ely.
There remains the relation of the university to the see of Ely. The episcopal jurisdiction of Ely in the university did not long survive the building of colleges. The scholars refused to plead in the archdeacon’s court, and Balsham upheld them—their statutes already provided as much.[53] Bishop Montacute also set limits to diocesan authority.[54] In 1317 John XXII. withdrew the university from the spiritual jurisdiction not only of the diocesan but of the provincial archbishop; but it was the friction arising from the failure of some of the bishops of Ely to recognise the spiritual independence of the chancellor which resulted in the celebrated court held at Barnwell priory at the instance of Martin V., in 1430, under the presidency of its prior. Two forged bulls of Honorius and Sergius[55] were cited as vii century evidence of the spiritual liberties of Cambridge, and the Pope in a third bull set the question for ever at rest in favour of the university. The solemn visitation of the colleges which had taken place under the auspices of Archbishop Arundel in 1401 was probably the result of the temporary victory obtained by the Primate when the chancellor refused to take an oath of obedience to him.
The early college statutes were as eager to repel the religious as the rule of Benedict, the father of western monasticism, was to repel the clergyman.[56] The statutes of Michaelhouse (1334), the earliest which have reached us intact, provide that neither monk nor friar should obtain admittance to the college. The statutes of Peterhouse enact that no one deciding to enter a religious order can remain on the foundation. It must at the same time be clearly realised that some of the earliest colleges were little more than clerical seminaries.[57] What is peculiar to Cambridge is that there a monk made the earliest attempt to endow learning for the secular clergy—a monk who was also a bishop, the ever-memorable Hugh Balsham. The non-monastic direction taken was by no means as yet an anti-monastic one; but at the rise of both universities, as soon as scholars were endowed and endowed houses began to be built for them, the monastic and the academic careers were regarded as incompatible vocations. It was the separation of the clerk from the religious, the recognition by Balsham of the secular scholar and of an endowed foundation for such scholars which was neither a religious house nor an episcopia, that transformed a more or less fortuitous concourse of students and teachers—a mere amplification, as at Oxford, of the school system of other great centres—into a chartered corporation of scholars—a university.[58]
II
School and university—Stourbridge fair—the university in the xiii century—Foundation of endowed scholars—hostels.
Both our universities doubtless count a school life of eight centuries at least: but a school life, the activity of teachers and scholars, is not the same thing as a university life. We have already said that Oxford owed its history to the constant communication between it and London, to its accessibility from the capital which made it the frequent resort not only of our kings but, what is more to our purpose, of scholars European and English.[59] The ferment created by their lectures no doubt kept alive the desire for knowledge and the spirit of enquiry among the motley population of the town; a moral atmosphere which in its turn attracted students. At Cambridge everything was the opposite of this. S. Frideswide’s at Oxford was a poor religious house, but it was in the heart of the town; the monastery at Ely was a great religious house, but its school was many miles from the university. Cambridge, as we have seen, was accessible to no great centre, there was nothing to attract the traveller who if he visited it almost certainly went out of his way to do so. Nevertheless some influences were at work in the xii century which determined the transformation of Cambridge into a studium generale, a university. The river near the town, as I have already said, gave rise to one of the greatest fairs in England, and Mr. J. W. Clark is disposed to see in the concourse of people brought together by Stourbridge fair the determining factor in our university history. The fair was called after the Stour a stream lower down the river, and was held in a large cornfield near Barnwell. It began on the feast of S. Bartholomew, August 24, and lasted till the fourteenth day after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14). These five weeks of revelry proved more disturbing to Cambridge studies than the May term of to-day; xiii century scholars spent their money at Stourbridge fair as Isaac Newton spent his in the xviith; there he acquired his prism in August 1661 and a book on “Judicial Astrology” the geometry and trigonometry of which were then as ‘Greek’ to him. Sea-borne goods which had probably always been brought inland up the river to this point, formed the nucleus of the fair at Stourbridge. It is generally agreed that three other English fairs exceeded the Cambridge fair in importance, those at Bristol, Bartholomew’s in London, and Lynton. Defoe however describes it as the largest in Europe, greater than that at Nuremberg or than the Frankfort mart. It