A.D. 1211.
was already highly prosperous when King John made over its dues to the leper hospice of S. Mary Magdalene; and it has been suggested that this was the ancient fair to which Irish merchants brought their cloth in the time of Athelstan.
Why so uncommercial a district became the site of one of the greatest fairs in Europe, and why a studium generale became established there, are problems both of which we cannot resolve. There always remains at the bottom some virtue in the apparently unpropitious city on the banks of the Granta which as an Italian would say fece da sè. But Mr. J. W. Clark’s suggestion has at least placed the two problems in juxtaposition: the growing importance of the schools and the growing importance of the fair both meet us in the opening lustres of the xiii century; the fair, that is, has its roots in the preceding century when the fate of the embryo seat of learning lay in the balance. How should a fair, how should an extraordinary concourse of people, help to consolidate a university? Simply because this was the age of peripatetic teaching, because it was the custom all through the middle ages for wandering scholars to find themselves where men gathered together, and to claim for a theorem of Roscellinus or a doctrine from Araby brought by the crusaders the ear of a crowd which had just been entertained by the Norman jongleur.
Earliest references to Cambridge university.
Our first glimpse of the Cambridge schools shows us an immigration of the scholars of one university to the other. In 1209,
A.D. 1209 10th of John.
in consequence of an unjust retaliation upon the students, Oxford was depleted and its scholars found their way to Cambridge.[60] Nine years later we have a rescript of Henry III.’s (1218) ordering all those clerks
A.D. 1218 2nd of Henry III.
who had adhered to Louis to depart the realm. In the eleven years which elapsed between this and 1229 the Franciscans had established themselves at Cambridge, and in that year as a result of Henry’s invitation to
A.D. 1229 13th of Henry III.