Cambridge

by M. A. R. Tuker

the northern, but the dialects of East Anglia and the Ridings of Yorks were perhaps most frequently heard. The canons of S. John and S. Giles, from the Norman side of the town, might be met in their black cloaks, the Gilbertine canons, from the Saxon side, all in white with the homely sheepskin cape. The Carmelites had already exchanged their striped brown and white cloak—representing Elijah’s mantle singed with fire as it fell from the fiery chariot—for the white cloak to which they owe their name of Whitefriars. The Romites of S. Austin wore a hermit’s dress.[163] Benedictine monks from Ely and Norwich could certainly be seen in the streets of Cambridge,[164] and the Benedictine nuns of S. Rhadegund rode and walked abroad in the black habit as it was the universal custom in that great order for nuns to do. The Dominicans looked like canons in their black cappa, the Franciscans like peasants in their coarse grey tunic roughly tied with cord.

Besides the Carmelites and Austinfriars there were the Bethlemite friars in Trumpington street and Our-Lady friars by the Castle; the former could be distinguished at a distance by the red star of five rays on their cloaks with a sky blue circle in its centre—the star of Bethlehem; but both these communities wore the habit—black over white—of the Dominicans. Scholars poor and rich jostled each other in the schools and in the public ways, wearing the long and short gowns of the day, the cote which had just come into fashion, or the habit of their order. There were doctors in the three faculties wearing scarlet gowns and the doctor’s bonnet or camaurum, and there was a sprinkling of doctors and of students from Orléans, Padua, Pavia, and Paris.

A large number of the inmates of the colleges round, and of the scholars walking the streets, wear the clerical tonsure, many scores have the coronal tonsure of the friar—yet the feeling in the air is secular. Cambridge has always suggested a certain detachment; neither zeal—perfervid or sour—nor the pressure of tradition upon living thought has had its proper home there. It has not represented monastic seclusion nor hieratic exclusion, and it did so at this moment of its history less than ever. The dawn of the coming renascence shone upon the walls at which we have been looking. The modern world has been born of the birth-pangs which have since convulsed Europe, and the walls which were then big with the future are now big with the past. But it is the greatness of Cambridge that amidst the multiple suggestiveness of its ancient halls of learning, tyranny of the past has no place. About it the dawn of the renascence still lingers; and the early morning light which presided at its birth still defines the shadows and seems to temper the noon-day heat, as light and shade alternate in its history.

Chaucer at Cambridge.

We have taken it for granted that Chaucer was walking the streets of Cambridge with us. We have no direct evidence as to where Chaucer studied; but our indirect evidence is sufficient. In the “Canterbury Tales” Chaucer introduces us to two Cambridge scholars and to a clerk of Oxenforde; and if one considers what would nowadays be called the internal evidence of the Reeve’s Tale it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Chaucer was at Cambridge. How else should he know Trumpington so well? Its brook, its bridge, its mill, its fen? He knows about the “gret colledge” which had risen a few years previously; he knows that its Master is called “the warden,” that its scholars are also its “fellaws.” He has learnt there the dialect of Yorkshiremen, and reproduces not only their turns of speech but characteristic terms—as bete, kime, jossa—in the East Anglian dialect. If we turn to the Miller’s Tale all this local colouring is to seek. A “clerke of Oxenforde,” indeed, was no unfamiliar figure in the xiv century, especially to a Londoner. Familiarity with the aspect of Cambridge and its neighbourhood was a very different matter.

Chaucer was probably himself of East Anglian origin. His grandfather Robert and John his father were both of Ipswich and London, and when he was kidnapped by his mother’s family “Thomas Stace of Ipswich” is the kidnapper. There are two events of his young life known to us, and both suggest that he was at Cambridge. One of these we hear about from his evidence in the famous Scrope and Grosvenor suit in 1386. An upstart knight—Sir Robert Grosvenor—whose name Chaucer had never heard before, had displayed the arms of the Scropes, and Chaucer testifies in the Court of Chivalry action which ensues that he had often seen Henry le Scrope use the proud armorials “azure, a bend or” in the French wars where they had been companions in arms twenty-seven years before (1359). Now this great Yorkshire family were connected with Cambridge from Chaucer’s time: Richard le Scrope, the son of his old comrade, was chancellor of the university in 1378.[165] Two members of the same family were chancellors in the next century, and the intermarriage of the Scropes with the Gonvilles is recorded there to this day in Scrope or “Scroope Terrace.”[166] Is it not probable that Geoffrey Chaucer knew Henry Scrope at Cambridge and formed there the friendship which moved him to testify in his behalf thirty years later?

This conjecture does not become less probable when we turn to the other incident in his early life, which came to light in 1866 with a fragment of the household accounts of the wife of Lionel Duke of Clarence. Here the name of Geoffrey Chaucer is mentioned (in 1357) as that of a junior member of her household. His early connexion with the house of Edward is therefore an historical fact like his later friendship with John of Gaunt. Now in 1352 Lionel Plantagenet had married Elizabeth de Burgh the grand-daughter and namesake of the founder of Clare Hall Cambridge. The “gret colledge” about which Chaucer tells us in the Reeves Tale is called “Soler Hall” and “Soler Hall,” so Caius records, was the ancient name for Clare. Remembering, however, the incomplete condition of Clare and of other foundations at this date the present writer supposes the “gret colledge” to have been King’s Hall, the first imposing architectural undertaking in the university and the building which must par excellence have attracted attention in the middle of the xiv century.[167] It may also have been Chaucer’s own college, and in this connexion it is worthy of notice that with the exception of the half-dozen “minor scholars” at Pembroke, King’s Hall was at this time the only college which educated lads in their teens.

Assuming the year of the poet’s birth to have been 1340 he would have been going to the university, according to the custom of those days, about the year 1353, and his place in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household was probably already assured him when he went to Cambridge.[168] He was back in her service in his seventeenth year and therefore could not have had time to study at both universities: and we may add to this that although his general knowledge, which he had no time to acquire in later life, suggests that he received a university education, there is not a tittle of evidence to support the idea that Chaucer went to Oxford.