Charles William Stubbs

“Re unius
Exemplo omnium quoquot extant
Collegiorum, fundatori.”—Epitaph of Walter de Merton.

The Early Monastic Houses in Cambridge—Student Proselytising by the Friars—The Oxford College of Merton a Protest against this Tendency—The Rule of Merton taken as a Model by Hugh de Balsham, Founder of Peterhouse—The Hospital of S. John—The Scholars of Ely—Domestic Economy of the College—The Dress of the MediÆval Student—Peterhouse Buildings—Little S. Mary’s Church—The Perne Library—The College Chapel.

THE first beginnings of the University of Cambridge are, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, largely traceable to a monastic inspiration. The first beginnings of the Cambridge Colleges, on the other hand, are as certainly traceable to the protest which, as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, it became necessary to make against the proselytising tendencies of the monastic Orders. At a time when, as we have seen, the University authorities took no cognisance whatever of the way in which the student was lodged, and when even the unsatisfactory hostel system—eventually organised, as it would appear, by voluntary action on the part of the students themselves—did not exist, the houses of the monastic Orders were already well established. We have described the fully-equipped house of the Augustinian Canons at Barnwell. Within the town the Franciscans had established themselves, as early as 1224, in the old synagogue, and fifty years later had erected, on the present site of Sydney College, a spacious house, which Ascham long afterwards described as an ornament to the University, and the precincts of which were still, in the time of Fuller, to be traced in the College grounds. In 1274 the Dominicans had settled where Emmanuel now stands. About the middle of the century the Carmelites, who had originally occupied an extensive foundation at Newnham, but were driven from thence by the winter floods, settled near the present site of Queens. Towards the close of the century the Augustinian Friars took up their residence near the site of the old Botanic Gardens. Opposite to the south part of the present gardens of Peterhouse, on the east side of Trumpington Street, were the Gilbertines, or the Canons of S. Gilbert of Sempringham, the one purely English foundation. In 1257 the Friars of the Order of Bethlehem settled also in Trumpington Street, and in 1258 the Friars of the Sack, or of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, settled in the parish of S. Mary the Great, removed soon afterwards to the parish of S. Peter without the Trumpington Gate.

It was natural, therefore, that these well-equipped houses should hold out great attractions and opportunities to the needy and houseless student, and that complaint should shortly be made that many young and unsuspicious boys were induced to enrol themselves as members of Franciscan, or Dominican, or other Friars’ houses long before they were capable of judging the full importance of their action. One cannot read the biographies of even such strong personalities as those of Roger Bacon or William of Occam without surmising that their adoption of the Franciscan vow was the result rather of the exigency of the student and the proselytising activity to which they were exposed, than of any distinct vocation for the monastic life, or of their own deliberate choice. “Minors and children,” as Fuller says in his usual quaint vein, “agree very well together.” To such an extent at any rate had the evil spread at Oxford that, in a preamble of a statute passed in 1358, it is asserted, as a notorious fact, that “the nobility and commoners alike were deterred from sending their sons to the University by this very cause; and it was enacted that if any mendicant should induce, or cause to be induced, any member of the University under eighteen years of age to join the said Friars, or should in any way assist in his abduction, no graduate belonging to the cloister or society of which such friar was a member should be permitted to give or attend lectures in Oxford or elsewhere for the year ensuing.”[24] It is not perhaps, therefore, surprising to find that the earliest English Collegiate foundation—that of Walter de Merton at Oxford in 1264—should have expressly excluded all members of the religious Orders. The dangers involved in the ascendency of the monks and friars were already patent to many sagacious minds, and Bishop Walter de Merton, who had filled the high office of Chancellor of England, and was already by his position an adversary of the Franciscan interest, was evidently desirous of establishing an institution which should not only baffle that encroaching spirit of Rome which had startled Grosseteste from his allegiance, but should also give an impulse to a system of education which should not be subservient to purely ecclesiastical ideas. This is obviously the principle which underlies the provisions of the statutes of his foundation of Merton College. Bishop Hobhouse in his Life of Walter de Merton has thus carefully interpreted this principle:—

“Our founder’s object I conceive to have been to secure for his own order in the Church, for the secular priesthood, the academical benefit which the religious orders were so largely enjoying, and to this end I think all his provisions are found to be consistently framed. He borrowed from the monastic institutions the idea of an aggregate body living by common rule, under a common head, provided with all things needful for a corporate and perpetual life, fed by its secured endowments, fenced from all external interference, except that of its lawful patron; but after borrowing thus much, he differenced his institution by giving his beneficiaries quite a distinct employment, and keeping them free from all those perpetual obligations which constituted the essence of the religious life.... His beneficiaries are from the first designated as Scholares in scholis degentes; their employment was study, not what was technically called “the religious life” (i.e. the life of a monk).... He forbade his scholars even to take vows, they were to keep themselves free of every other institution, to render no one else’s obsequium. He looked forward to their going forth to labour in seculo, and acquiring preferment and property.... Study being the function of the inmates of his house, their time was not to be taken up by ritual or ceremonial duties, for which special chaplains were appointed; neither was it to be bestowed on any handicrafts, as in some monastic orders. Voluntary poverty was not enjoined, though poor circumstances were a qualification for a fellowship. No austerity was required, though contentment with simple fare was enforced as a duty, and the system of enlarging the number of inmates according to the means of the house was framed to keep the allowance to each at the very moderate rate which the founder fixed. The proofs of his design to benefit the Church through a better educated secular priesthood are to be found, not in the letter of their statutes, but in the tenour of their provisions, especially as to studies, in the direct averments of some of the subsidiary documents, in the fact of his providing Church patronage as part of his system, and in the readiness of prelates and chapters to grant him impropriation of the rectorial endowments of the Church.”

Such was the Regula Mertonensis, the Rule of Merton, as it came to be called, which served as the model for so many subsequent statutes.

This Regula Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely (1257-1286), evidently had before him, when some twenty years after his consecration to the bishopric, he proceeded, by giving a new form to an earlier benefaction of his own, to open a new chapter in the history of the University of Cambridge.

Hugh de Balsham, before his elevation to the bishopric, had been sub-prior of the Ely monastery, and at first sight therefore it might seem a little surprising that he should have thought of encouraging a system of education which was not to be subject to the monastic rule. But Hugh de Balsham was a Benedictine monk, and the Benedictines in England at this time were the upholders of a less stringent and ascetic discipline than that of the mendicant orders, and were, in fact, endeavouring in every way to counteract their influence. It had been the aim of Bishop Balsham, in the first instance, to endeavour to bring about a kind of fusion between the old and the new elements in university life, between the Regulars and the Seculars. But this first effort was not fortunate. About the year 1280 he introduced a body of secular scholars into the ancient Hospital of S. John. This Hospital of the Brethren of S. John the Evangelist had been founded, in the year of 1135, by Henry Frost, a wealthy and charitable burgess of the city, and placed under the management of a body of regular canons of the Augustinian Order. At a somewhat later time, Bishop Eustace, the fifth Bishop of Ely, added largely by his benefactions to the importance of the house. It was he who appropriated to the hospital the Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate. Hugh of Northwold, the eighth bishop, is said, at least by one authority, to have placed some secular scholars there, who devoted themselves to academical study rather than to the services of the Church, and he certainly obtained for the Hospital certain exemptions from taxation in connection with their two hostels near S. Peter’s Church. The endowment of the secular students was still further cared for by Bishop Hugh de Balsham. In the preamble to certain letters patent of Edward I. (1280) authorising the settlement, the Bishop, after a wordy comparison, in mediÆval phrase, of King Edward’s wisdom with that of King Solomon, is credited with the intention of introducing “into the dwelling place of the secular brethren of his Hospital of S. John studious scholars who shall in everything live together as students in the University of Cambridge, according to the rule of the scholars of Oxford who are called of Merton.”[25] This document fixes the date of the royal license, on which there can be little doubt that action was immediately taken. The change of system was most unpalatable to the original foundationers and led to unappeasable dissension. The regulars, it may be conjectured, were absorbed in their religious services and in the performance of the special charitable offices of the Hospital; while the scholars were, doubtless, eager to be instructed in the Latin authors, in the new Theology, in the civil and the canon law, perhaps in the “new Aristotle,” which at this time was beginning to excite so much enthusiasm among western scholars. Anyhow, the two elements were too dissimilar to combine. Differences arose, feuds and jealousies sprang up, and eventually the good bishop found himself under the necessity of separating the Ely scholars from the Brethren of the Hospital. This he did by transplanting the scholars to the two hostels (hospicia) adjoining the Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate, assigning to them the Church itself and certain revenues belonging to it, inclusive of the tithes of the church mills. This was in the year 1284, and marks the foundation of Peterhouse as the earliest of Cambridge colleges. The Hospital of S. John, thus freed from the scholarly element, went quietly on its career, to become, as we shall see later, the nucleus of the great foundation of S. John’s College. It may have been a disappointment to Bishop Hugh that he had not been able to fuse together the two dissimilar elements—“the scholars too wise, and the brethren possibly over-good”—in one corporation. But, as Baker, the historian of S. John’s College, has said: “Could he but have foreseen that this broken and imperfect society was to give birth to two great and lasting foundations, he would have had much joy in his disappointment.”

In the year 1309 the new foundation of “the Scholars of the Bishops of Ely” obtained certain adjoining property hitherto occupied by the Friars of the Sack (De Penetentia Jesu), an Order doomed to extinction by the Council of Lyons in 1274. Its slender resources were further added to on the death of its founder by his bequest of 300 marks for the erection of new buildings. With this sum a considerable area to the west and south of the original hostels was acquired, and a handsome hall (aulam perpulchram) was built. This hall is substantially the building still in use. It was left, however, to his successor in the Bishopric of Ely, Simon Montagu (1337-1345), to give to the new college its first code of statutes. Bishop Simon, one is glad to think, did not forget the good intentions of Bishop Hugh, for in his code of statutes, dated April 1344, he thus speaks of his predecessor:—

“Desirous for the weal of his soul while he dwelt in this vale of tears, and to provide wholesomely, as far as in him lay, for poor persons wishing to make themselves proficient in the knowledge of letters, by securing to them a proper maintenance, he founded a house or College for the public good in our University of Cambridge, with the consent of King Edward and his beloved sons, the prior and chapter of our Cathedral, all due requirements of law being observed; which House he desired to be called the House of S. Peter or the Hall (aula) of the scholars of the Bishops of Ely at Cambridge; and he endowed it and made ordinances for it (in aliquibus ordinavit) so far as he was then able; but not as he intended and wished to do, as we hear, had not death frustrated his intention. In this House he willed that there should be one master and as many scholars as could be suitably maintained for the possessions of the house itself in a lawful manner.”[26]

There can be little doubt that the statutes which Bishop Montagu gave to the college represent the wishes of his predecessor, for the Peterhouse statutes are actually modelled on the fourth of the codes of statutes given by Merton to his college, and dated 1274. The formula “ad instar AulÆ de Merton” is a constantly recurring phrase in Montagu’s statutes. The true principle of collegiate endowments could not be more plainly stated, and certainly these statutes may be regarded as the embodiment of the earliest conception of college life and discipline at Cambridge. A master and fourteen perpetual fellows,[27] “studiously engaged in the pursuit of literature,” represent the body supported on the foundation; the “pensioner” of later times being, of course, at this period provided for already by the hostel. In case of a vacancy among the Fellows “the most able bachelor in logic” is designated as the one on whom, cÆteris paribus, the election is to fall, the other requirement being that, “so far as human frailty admit, he be honourable, chaste, peaceable, humble, and modest.” “The Scholars of Ely” were bound to devote themselves to the “study of Arts, Aristotle, Canon Law, Theology,” but, as at Merton, the basis of a sound Liberal Education was to be laid before the study of theology was to be entered upon; two were to be admitted to the study of the civil and the canon law, and one to that of medicine. When any Fellow was about to “incept” in any faculty, it devolved upon the master with the rest of the Fellows to inquire in what manner he had conducted himself and gone through his exercises in the schools, how long he had heard lectures in the faculty in which he was about to incept, and whether he had gone through the forms according to the statutes of the university. The sizar of later times is recognised in the provision, that if the funds of the Foundation permit, the master and the two deacons shall select two or three youths, “indigent scholars well grounded in Latin”—juvenes indigentes scholares in grammatica notabiliter fundatos—to be maintained, “as long as may seem fit,” by the college alms, such poor scholars being bound to attend upon the master and fellows in church, on feast days and other ceremonial occasions, to serve the master and fellows at seasonable times at table and in their rooms. All meals were to be partaken in common; but it would seem that this regulation was intended rather to conduce towards an economical management than enacted in any spirit of studied conformity to monastic life, for, adds the statute, “the scholars shall patiently support this manner of living until their means shall, under God’s favour, have received more plentiful increase.”[28]

An interesting feature in these statutes is the regulation with regard to the distinctive dress of the student, showing how little regard was paid at this period, even when the student was a priest, to the wearing of a costume which might have been considered appropriate to the staid character of his profession.

In order to repress this laxity and want of discipline, Archbishop Stratford, at a later period in the year 1342, issued an order that no student of the university, unless he should reform his “person and apparel” should receive any ecclesiastical degree or honour. It was doubtless in reference to some such order as this that one of the statutes of Peterhouse ran to this effect:—

Peterhouse College

“The Philosophy of Clothes,” especially in its application to the mediÆval universities, is no doubt an interesting one, and may even—so, at least, it is said by some authorities—throw much light upon the relations of the universities to the Church. The whole subject is discussed in some detail in the chapter on “Student Life in the Middle Ages,” in Mr. Rashdall’s “History of the Universities of Europe,” to which, perhaps, it may be best to refer those of our readers who are desirous of tracing the various steps in the gradual evolution of modern academic dress from the antique forms. There it will be seen how the present doctor’s scarlet gown was developed from the magisterial “cappa” or “cope,” a sleeveless scarlet cloak, lined with miniver, with tippet and hood attached of the same material—a dress which, in its original shape, is now only to be seen in the Senate House at Cambridge, worn by the Vice-Chancellor on Degree days; how the present gown and hood of the Master of Arts and Bachelor is merely a development of the ordinary clerical dress or “tabard” of the thirteenth century, which, however, was not even exclusively clerical, and certainly not distinguished by that sobriety of hue characteristic of modern clerical tailordom—clerkly prejudice in the matter of the “tabard” running in favour of green, blue, or blood red; and how the modern “mortar-board,” or square college cap,—now usurped by undergraduates, and even choristers and schoolboys—was originally the distinctive badge of a Master of Faculty, being either a square cap or “biretta,” with a tuft on the top, in lieu of the very modern tassel, or a round cap or “pileum,” more or less resembling the velvet caps still worn by the Yeomen of the Guard, or on very state occasions by the Cambridge or Oxford doctors in medicine or law. The picturesque dress of university students of the thirteenth century, still surviving in the long blue coat and yellow stockings, and red leather girdle and white bands of the boys of Christ’s Hospital, is sufficient to show how much we have lost of the warmth and colour of mediÆval life by the almost universal change to sombre black in clerical or student costume, brought about by the Puritan austerity of the sixteenth century.

To return to the fabric of Bishop Hugh de Balsham’s College. We have seen how a handsome hall (aulam perpulchram) was built with the 300 marks of the Bishop’s legacy. This is substantially the building of five bays, which still exists, forming the westernmost part of the south side of the Great Court of the College. The three easternmost bays are taken up by the dining-hall or refectory, the westernmost is devoted to the buttery, the intervening bay is occupied by the screens and passage, at either end of which there still remain the original north and south doorways, interesting as being the earliest example of collegiate architecture in Cambridge. The windows of this hall on the south side date from the end of the fifteenth century. The north-east oriel window and the buttresses on the north side of the hall were added by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1870, who also built the new screen, panelling, and roof. At about the same time the hall was decorated and the windows filled with stained glass of very great beauty by William Morris. The figures represented in the windows are as follows (beginning from the west on the north side): John Whitgift, John Cosin, Rd. Tresham, Thos. Gray, Duke of Grafton, Henry Cavendish; in the oriel—Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Hugh de Balsham, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton; on the south side—Edward I., Queen Eleanor, Hugh de Balsham, S. George, S. Peter, S. Etheldreda, John Holbroke, Henry Beaufort, John Warkworth.

After the building of this hall the College evidently languished for want of funds for more than a century. But in the fifteenth century the College began to prosper, and a good deal of building was done. The character of the work is not expressly stated in the Bursar’s Rolls—of which there are some thirty-one still existing of the fifteenth century, and a fairly complete set of the subsequent centuries—but the earliest buildings of this date are probably the range of chambers forming the north and west side of the great court. The kitchen, which is immediately to the west of the hall, dates from 1450. The Fellows’ parlour or combination room, completing the third side of the quadrangle, and immediately east of the dining-hall, was built some ten years later.

Cole has given the following precise description of this room:—

Then follows a description of each portrait—there are thirty in all—with its accompanying distich. As an example, we may give that belonging to the portrait of Dr. Andrew Perne:

These panel portraits were removed from their framework in the eighteenth century, and framed and hung in the master’s lodge, but have since been re-hung for the most part in the college hall, and their Latin distichs restored according to Cole’s record of them. The windows of the Combination Room have been filled with stained glass by William Morris, representing ten ideal women from Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women.”

On the upper storey of the combination room was the master’s lodge. The situation of these rooms at the upper end of the hall is almost as invariable in collegiate plans as that of the buttery and kitchen at the other end. The same may be said of that most picturesque feature of the turret staircase leading from the master’s rooms to the hall, parlour, and garden, which we shall find repeated in the plans of S. John’s, Christ’s, Queen’s, and Pembroke Colleges. About the same period (1450) the range of chambers on the north side of the court was at its easternmost end connected by a gallery with the Church of S. Mary, which remained in use as the College chapel down to the seventeenth century. This gallery, on the level of the upper floor of the College chambers, was carried on arches so as not to obstruct the entrance to the churchyard and south porch from the High Street, by a similar arrangement to that which from the first existed between Corpus Christi College and the ancient Church of S. Benedict.

The Parish Church of S. Peter, without the Trumpington Gate, had from the first been used as the College Chapel of Peterhouse. Indeed, the earliest college in Cambridge was the latest to possess a private chapel of its own, which was not built until 1628. All that remains, however, of the old Church of S. Peter is a fragment of the tower, standing at the north-west corner of the present building and the arch which led from it into the church. This probably marks the west end of the old church, which, no doubt, was much shorter than the present one. It is said that this old church fell down in part about 1340, and a new church was at once begun in its place. This was finished in 1352 and dedicated to the honour of the blessed Virgin Mary. The church is a very beautiful one, though of an unusual simplicity of design. It is without aisles or any structural division between nave and chancel. It is lighted by lofty windows and deep buttresses. On the south side and at the eastern gable are rich flowing decorated windows, the tracery of which is designed in the same style, and in many respects with the same patterns, as those of Alan de Walsingham’s Lady Chapel at Ely. Indeed, a comparison of the Church of Little S. Mary with the Ely Lady Chapel, not only in its general conception, but in many of its details, such as that of the stone tabernacles on the outer face of the eastern gable curiously connected with the tracery of the window, would lead a careful observer to the conclusion that both churches had been planned by the same architect. The change of the old name of the church from S. Peter to that of S. Mary the Virgin is also, in this relation, suggestive. For we must remember that it was built at a time—the age of Dante and Chaucer—when Catholic purity, in the best natures, united to the tenderness of chivalry was casting its glamour over poetic and artistic minds, and had already led to the establishment in Italy of an Order—the Cavalieri Godenti—pledged to defend the existence, or, more accurately perhaps, the dignity of the Virgin Mary, by the establishment everywhere throughout western Europe of Lady Chapels in her honour. Whether Alan de Walsingham, the builder of the Ely Lady Chapel, and the builder of the Church of Little S. Mary at Cambridge—if he was not Alan—belonged to this Order of the Cavaliers of S. Mary, we cannot say; but at least it seems probable that the Cambridge Church sprang from the same impulse which inspired the magnificent stone poem in praise of S. Mary, built by the sacrist of Ely.

At this period Peterhouse consisted of two courts, separated by a wall occupying the position of the present arcade at the west end of the chapel. The westernmost or principal court is, save in some small details, that which we see to-day. The small eastern court next to the street has undergone great alteration by the removal of certain old dwelling-houses—possibly relics of the original hostels—fronting the street, which left an open space, occupied at a later period partly by the chapel and by the extension eastward of the buildings on the south side of the great court to form a new library, and subsequently by a similar flanking extension on the north.

The earliest of these buildings was the library, due to a bequest of Dr. Andrew Perne, Dean of Ely, who was master of the College from 1553 to 1589, and who not only left to the society his own library, “supposed to be the worthiest in all England,” but sufficient property for the erection of a building to contain it. Perne had gained in early life a position of importance in the University—he had been a fellow of both S. John’s and of Queen’s, bursar of the latter College and five times vice-chancellor of the University—but his success in life was mainly due to his pliancy in matters of religion. In Henry’s reign he had publicly maintained the Roman doctrine of the adoration of pictures of Christ and the Saints; in Edward VI.’s he had argued in the University pulpit against transubstantiation; in Queen Mary’s, on his appointment to the mastership of Peterhouse, he had formally subscribed to the fully defined Roman articles then promulgated; in Queen Elizabeth’s he had preached a Latin sermon in denunciation of the Pope, and had been complimented for his eloquence by the Queen herself. No wonder that immediately after his death in 1589 he should be hotly denounced in the Martin Marprelate tracts as the friend of Archbishop Whitgift, and as the type of fickleness and lack of principle which the authors considered characteristic of the Established Church. Other writers of the same school referred to him as “Old Andrew Turncoat,” “Old Father Palinode,” and “Judas.” The undergraduates of Cambridge, it is said, invented in his honour a new Latin verb, pernare, which they translated “to turn, to rat, to change often.” It became proverbial in the University to speak of a cloak or a coat which had been turned as “perned,” and finally the letters on the weathercock of S. Peter’s, A.P.A.P., might, said the satirists, be interpreted as Andrew Perne, a Protestant, or Papist, or Puritan. However, it is much to be able to say that he was the tutor and friend of Whitgift, protecting him in early days from the persecution of Cardinal Pole; it is something also to remember that he was uniformly steadfast in his allegiance to his College, bequeathing to it his books, with minute directions for their chaining and safe custody, providing for their housing, and moreover, endowing two college fellowships and six scholarships; and perhaps charity might prompt us to add, that at a time when the public religion of the country changed four times in ten years, Perne probably trimmed in matters of outward form that he might be at hand to help in matters which he truly thought were really essential.

The Perne Library at Peterhouse has no special architectural features of any value; its main interest in that respect is to be found in the picturesque gable-end with oriel window overhanging the street, bearing above it the date 1633, which belongs to the brickwork extension westward at that date of the original stone building. The building of the library, however, preluded a period of considerable architectural activity in the college, due largely to the energy of Dr. Matthew Wren, who was master from 1625 to 1634. It is recorded of him that “seeing the public offices of religion less decently performed, and the services of God depending upon the services of others, for want of a convenient oratory within the walls of the college,” he began in 1629 to build the present chapel. It was consecrated in 1632. The name of the architect is not recorded. The chapel was connected as at present with the buildings on either side by galleries carried on open arcades. Dr. Cosin, who succeeded Wren in the mastership, continued the work, facing the chapel walls, which had been built roughly in brick, with stone. An elaborate ritual was introduced into the chapel by Cosin, who, it will be remembered, was a friend and follower of Archbishop Laud. A Puritan opponent of Cosin has written bitterly that “in Peter House Chappell there was a glorious new altar set up and mounted on steps, to which the master, fellows, and schollers bowed, and were enjoyned to bow by Dr. Cosens, the master, who set it up; that there were basons, candlesticks, tapers standing on it, and a great crucifix hanging over it ... and on the altar a pot, which they usually call the incense pot.... And the common report both among the schollers of that House and others, was that none might approach to the altar in Peter House but in sandalls.”[32]

It is not surprising, therefore, to read at a little later date in the diary of the Puritan iconoclast, William Dowsing:—

These to-day are all things of the past. The interior of the Chapel is fitted partly with the genuine old mediÆval panelling, possibly brought from the parochial chancel of Little S. Mary’s, or from its disused chantries, now placed at the back of the stalls and in front of the organ gallery, partly with oakwork, stalls and substalls, in the JacobÆan style. The present altar-piece is of handsome modern wainscot. The entrance door is mediÆval, probably removed from elsewhere to replace the doorway defaced by Dowsing. The only feature in the chapel which can to-day be called—and that only by a somewhat doubtful taste—“very magnifical,” is the gaudy Munich stained-glass work inserted in the lateral windows, as a memorial to Professor Smythe, in 1855 and 1858. The subjects are, on the north side, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” “The Preaching of S. John the Baptist,” “The Nativity”; and on the south side, “The Resurrection,” “The Healing of a Cripple by SS. Peter and John,” “S. Paul before Agrippa and Festus.” The east window, containing “The History of Christ’s Passion,” is said by Blomefield to have been “hid in the late troublesome times in the very boxes which now stand round the altar instead of rails.”