There are now 56 fellowships, 60 foundation scholars each receiving £50 annually, and 9 sizars £35 annually.
The next college which claims our attention must rank among the more interesting foundations on account of its origin rather than of its subsequent history.
Magdalene College, A.D. 1542.
Near S. John’s Hospital there was a site traditionally connected with the lectures of Abbot Joffred’s monks in 1109, and which in fact was afterwards Crowland Abbey property. When a monastic order possessed no convent in a university town, the monks were obliged to reside in lodgings, and this led, as we have already seen (i. p. 49) to the foundation of monastic hostels for their reception. There were two such hostels at Cambridge—Ely hostel and Monks’ hostel. Ely hostel was the direct outcome of Benedict XII.’s Constitution in 1337[217] which reconfirmed an earlier injunction of Honorius III. 1216-27 requiring the Benedictines and Augustinians to send students in rotation from the monastery to the university, and provided that monks should live at the universities under a prior of Benedictines. It was purchased in 1340 (or earlier) by John de Crawden prior of Ely for the Ely monks and was made over to Bateman Bishop of Norwich seven years later for his foundation of Trinity Hall.
Ely then had been the pioneer in providing this accommodation, which served for Ely monks alone, and which, as we see, was speedily abolished. Those few Houses which still elected to send their monks to Cambridge[218] maintained them there thenceforth under the care of “the prior of students”; and it was owing to the energy of one of these Cambridge priors that Monks’ hostel was projected in 1428, at a time when, as is then stated, no house existed for Crowland or other Benedictine monks, and the religious either shared the hostels with seculars or lived in lodgings in the town. The site for Monks’ hostel consisted of two messuages granted in that year to the abbot of Crowland by the Cambridge burgesses. Crowland, Ely, Ramsey, and Walden each built portions for their own students.[219] Nearly a hundred years later, on the eve of the Reformation, Edward Stafford Duke of Buckingham refounded this hostel as Buckingham College. It was not
