WE have seen that it is of the essence of a university that it should be both a learned and a learning body, and that from the first the academic group consisted of “masters” or licensed teachers, and of scholars maintained on the college foundations. Contemporaneously with the growth of the college we find at the head of the university a chancellor, and at the head of the college its principal or “Master.”[318]

A chancellor was originally a cathedral officer whose business it was to grant licences to teach.[319] His connexion with schools of learning seems to be due entirely to the authority which diocesans exercised in the granting of these licences, especially in the faculties of theology and canon law. It is then as a bishop’s officer that he makes his appearance at our universities; at Cambridge as the local officer of the Bishop of Ely, at Oxford as the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln. “The chancellor and masters” of the university of Cambridge are first heard of together in Balsham’s rescript, in the year 1276;[320] but Henry III.’s A.D. 1275-6.

A.D. 1270. letter to the university written six years earlier is addressed to “the masters and scholars of Cambridge university.” It may then be assumed that before this date the chancellor was still an episcopal emissary rather than an academic chief, but that from about this time he began to be chosen by themselves from among the regent-masters of the university, although with the approval of the Bishop of Ely. This approval was not dispensed with until in 1396 a member of the noble family of Zouche became chancellor; and the chancellor’s independence of the Bishop of Ely for confirmation of his title was made absolute by A.D. 1402. Boniface IX. six years later.

The office was annual. The same man, however, was often appointed again and again, and Guy de Zouche himself had been chancellor in 1379 and again in 1382. Bishop Fisher who retained the chancellorship until his death in 1534 was the first chancellor appointed for life.[321] As soon as it became customary to elect as chancellor of the university some personage who would be able to represent its interests in the world outside, a vice-chancellor performed all those functions which before fell to the chancellor, and the position and functions of the present vice-chancellor are exactly equal to those of the old academic chancellor.[322] The first political chancellor succeeded the greatest of what, for distinction, I have called the academic chancellors of the university. Thomas Cromwell took the post left vacant by Fisher’s martyrdom and held it till his own downfall in 1540. The chancellorship is now held by the owner of a traditional Cambridge name, Spencer Cavendish 8th duke of Devonshire.

The chancellor is appointed “for two years” or such further time “as the tacit consent of the university permits.” Under this proviso the appointment is practically for life. The vice-chancellor is appointed from among the heads of houses, and the office is annual. In each case the appointment is in the hands of the senate, or legislative body of the university which consists of all resident masters of arts and of those non-resident M.A.’s who have kept their names upon the university register.

The meetings of the senate take place in the Senate House and are called congregations. In these, degrees are conferred and “graces” are considered; a “grace” being the name for all acts of the senate, or motions proposed for its acceptance.

Resident members of the senate form the “electoral roll,” and elect the council.[323] Lastly the executive body consists of the chancellor, the high steward,[324] the vice-chancellor, a commissary appointed by the chancellor, and the sex viri who adjudicate on all matters affecting the senior members of the university, are elected “by grace of the senate,” and hold their office for two years.

The university has sent two members to parliament since the first year of James I. The exercise of the parliamentary suffrage belongs to the whole senate and is the one exception to the rule which obliges every member to record his vote personally in the Senate House.[325] The total number of members of the senate is 7192; the total number of members of the university is 13,819, this latter including all bachelors of arts and undergraduates in residence, and all B.A.’s whose names are on the books pending their proceeding to the degree of M.A.

After the vice-chancellor no officers are so much in evidence as the proctors. Their duties are twofold: they conduct the congregations of the senate, and they maintain discipline among the undergraduates. There are 2 proctors elected annually, to whom are joined 2 pro-proctors, and 2 additional pro-proctors. The pro-proctors have not the standing of the proctors as university officials, but they exercise the same authority over the men.[326] Other executive officers are the public orator, who is “the voice of the senate”[327]; the university librarian, the registrary, the university marshal (appointed by the vice-chancellor) and the bedells.

If the proctor is the procurator of the academic society, the bedell is the executor of its mandates. The bedells attend the (chancellor or) vice-chancellor on all public occasions, bearing silver maces, and, like the beadles of all guilds and corporations, they summon members of the senate to the chancellor’s court.[328] For bedel or bedell is an obsolete form of beadle retained in the ancient corporations of Oxford and Cambridge. As a town or parish officer the beadle brought messages and executed the mandates of the town or parish authority. The apparitor of a trades guild was also called a “bedel,” and it is, no doubt, as a guild officer that he appears in our universities and has taken so firm a footing there.

The bedell was the servant of a faculty, and also of a “nation” in the continental universities: hence at Cambridge one was the bedell of theology and canon law, the other of arts. They arranged and announced the day and hour of lectures. For many centuries Cambridge had an esquire and a yeoman bedell; but the latter was abolished in 1858. Apparently the yeoman bedell was not a member of the university, and he may have been a townsman.[329] The two esquire bedells of the present day are nominated by the council of the senate, and elected by the latter body.[330]

Distinct from the university authorities are the college authorities. The foremost of these is the Master of each college. This officer used to be primus inter pares, the senior among the fellows or teaching body of his house. The change to the later “splendid isolation” of the “Head” is expressed architecturally in the relative positions of the Master’s lodging, as we can see it to-day in the old court of Corpus—the simple room leading to the dining hall and the college garden with a garret bedroom above it—and the palatial dwellings which in one or two of the colleges no longer form part of the main buildings. It is one which has a curious chronological parallel with the change that took place in the relative positions of a cathedral dean and chapter after the Reformation. The old college Master, like the old university chancellor, and the cathedral dean, was, officially and residentially, part and parcel of the body he represented. After the Reformation all these positions were shifted. The college Master became in appearance, what the cathedral dean had become in fact, “a corporation sole,” while the university chancellor was translated to supra-academic spheres, and no longer resided even in the university city. “Sixty years since,” writes a present member of the university, “society at Cambridge was divided broadly into two classes—those who were Heads and those who were not.” Ludicrous stories are told of the pride which inflated “the Heads,” who at times resented being accosted not only by the inferior undergraduate but by the fellows of their own college. The provost of King’s of just a hundred years ago was referred to familiarly by his irreverent juniors as ‘Tetoighty.’[331]

Heads of colleges have not only the statutory powers conferred on them by their college, but as assessors to the vice-chancellor they join with him in the government of the university. Their powers were largely increased by the statutes of 1570 which Whitgift procured from Elizabeth; and in 1586-7 it was decided that the vice-chancellor should always be chosen from their number.[332] The modern “Head” emulates the old academic Master, is primus inter pares amongst his fellow collegians, and is no longer dreadful to his juniors.

There are only two exceptions to the title of Master held by all heads of colleges. The head of King’s College, like the head of Eton, is styled Provost, and the head of Queens’ College is styled President.[333]

The vice-master is called the president. His position is like that of a prior under an abbot, or a subprior in a priory: the one representing the college outside and ruling over the community, the other ruling in the house and having the authority in all which concerns its management.

With the Master and vice-Master are associated the fellows, the dean, the tutors, lecturers, chaplains, and the bursar.[334]

“I can never remember the time when it was not diligently impressed upon me that, if I minded my syntax, I might eventually hope to reach a position which would give me three hundred pounds a year, a stable for my horse, six dozen of audit ale every Christmas, a loaf and two pats of butter every morning, and a good dinner for nothing, with as many almonds and raisins as I could eat at dessert,” writes Trevelyan in his “Life and Letters” of Macaulay whose appreciation of a Cambridge fellowship fell nothing short of reverence.

The fellows are the foundation graduates, as the scholars are the foundation undergraduates of a college. They are more; they are, corporately, its masters and owners. Financially, a fellowship is represented by the dividend on the surplus revenue of a college.[335] As this surplus revenue varies while the fellows are a fixed number, the value of fellowships varies, but may not now exceed £250 a year. A fellow enjoys as a rule other emoluments, as tutor, lecturer, librarian, bursar, of his college, so that his pecuniary position is by no means represented by the value of the simple fellowship. All fellowships are now bestowed for a term of years; life fellowships being held by those only who are on the staff of their college, who have served it, that is, in a tutorial or other official capacity.

Until the last quarter of the xix century fellows had to be bachelors. The rule against married officials was first relaxed, after the Reformation, in favour of heads of houses; Dr. Heynes, President of Queens’ in 1529, having been the first married Master.[336] Fifty years later the fellows of King’s complained that the wife of their provost had been seen taking the air on the sacred grass of the college court, where, nevertheless, her husband declared she could not have set her foot twice in her life. Early in George III.’s reign a movement was afoot among the fellows of a different character: in 1766 Betham of King’s writes to Cole that the university had been in a most violent flame: “young and old have formed a resolution of marrying”; “the scheme is—a wife and a fellowship with her.” In the “sixties” certain colleges began to admit married fellows, while in others a fellow might marry if he held university office, as professor or librarian. No fellowship nowadays is confined to unmarried men.

This is one of three radical changes which the university has undergone in the last thirty years. The abolition of the Religious Test Act which severed the strict connexion of our universities with the Church of England, the marriage of fellows, and the appointment of men not in clerical orders to fill the chief university and college offices, have gradually changed the face of university life, secularising it and socialising it, bestowing on it, definitely, a lay and undenominational character which is perhaps not so far from its primitive ideal as sticklers for the connexion of the universities with the Church would have us believe. It is no longer an advantage to be in orders at Cambridge: they do not help you to a fellowship for this is given to the best man in open competition; even heads of colleges need no longer be clergymen, and only one collegiate office, that of the dean, is still preferably bestowed on a parson. The results are curious. Clerical fellows are popular, but theology is a neglected subject in the big colleges and the theological chairs are not centres of influence. At the same time every college enjoys clerical patronage, which can be exercised in favour of its deserving sons; and every college, besides its dean, appoints chaplains for the maintenance of the chapel services.[337] Clerical fellows, it is true, are now in a minority, but there seems to be no reason why the clerical don should cease to abound, as he has always abounded, in our university cities. A university education has become more not less valuable for a clergyman now that it enables him to meet men whose beliefs differ widely from his own; now that the right to display an academic hood in church is no longer prized as its chief advantage.[338]

Among the ‘dons’ the centre of social life has always been the combination room. It represents that pledge of civilisation the with-drawing-room, the room contiguous to the banqueting-hall, where the pleasures of the spirit steal an advantage over the pleasures of the table. The rudeness which marked the period of the early renascence, from court to convent, in England, clung also to our academic life, and it is not till the last quarter of the xvi century that we find the fellows first provided with table napkins, and learn that the enterprising college which made the innovation exacted a fine of a penny from those who continued to wipe their fingers on the tablecloth. The temptation to this latter practice must indeed have been great; for the fork which made its appearance at the dawn of the renascence in France was unknown in England two hundred years later. It is only in the course of the next, the xviith, century that the combination room emerges as a more or less luxurious apartment; the subsequent addition of newspapers, magazines, and easy chairs marking in turn the rise of journalism and the higher standard of comfort. The dons of Charles II.’s time who had to be content with the “London Gazette” supplemented the lack of news by social clubs. “The Ugly Faces” club dined periodically in what was then the ugliest of college halls—Clare. “The Old Maids’ Club” flourished in the early xix century, with Baker the antiquary, Tonstall, and Conyers Middleton as members. The first “news letter” was however laid on the table of Kirk’s coffee-house in Charles’s reign. The first flying-coach, following the example of Oxford which had run a coach to London in one day, sped to the Capital in 1671.[339]

When the xix century opened there was no general society in Cambridge. It was more out of the way of polite England than Oxford, and many dons whose homes were at a distance spent the whole year in their colleges, emphasising the faults and therefore detracting from the virtues of small learned societies. The dons in the xvi century, say at S. John’s College, had been a brilliant company who bestowed as much on the Elizabethan age as they took from it: but the xviii century closed upon a period of dulness and reaction, in which the rudeness of material civilisation met a social uncouthness little calculated to recall the university of Spenser, of Burleigh, of Bacon. The intimacy between the fellows and their head was a thing of the past; the familiarity between scholar and don had been replaced by “donnishness” which kept the undergraduate at arm’s length; the blight of the artificial and stilted, the sterile and pompous aristocratism of just a century ago had settled down upon the university. Isolated in this eastern corner of England, just before the enormous impulse to travelling brought by railways, just after the cosmopolitan spirit which took even the Englishman abroad—the sense of a debt to Italy, of a continental comradeship—had finally ceased to exist, Cambridge dons at the dawn of the xix century had perhaps fathomed the lowest social depths. But before this century passed a social change more wonderful than the material changes around them metamorphosed university society. The unmannerly don married; and the sex which makes society, the sex which suffers no social deterioration when left to its own devices—the aristocratic sex—was introduced as the don’s helpmeet. More still—worse still—she was introduced in the same quarter of a century as what the weak-kneed among us cry out upon—his rival. It is the same donnish bachelor, separated by a gulph from the social amenities, wedded to ingrained habits and some eradicable prejudices, who suffered women to come to Cambridge and take what they could of the intellectual advantages he himself enjoyed. The historian of the great movements of the age we live in will record with interest this proof of the traditional open-mindedness which has never deserted the Cantabrigian, which has never failed to respond to the sacred dual claims of the age and the intellect.

The learned body which congregates in the combination rooms is the ecclesia docens of the university; the learning body—the ecclesia discens—includes all members of the university below the degree of M.A., and is divided into four or five classes. The most important of these from the academic point of view is the scholar, and for at least two centuries after colleges were built the only resident students were these students on the foundation.[340] To them were joined in course of time the pensioners, youths who paid for their board and lodging, the class which now makes up the great majority of undergraduates. Two other classes were added. The peers and eldest sons of peers with other fellow-commoners—a class which has fallen into practical desuetude but is not obsolete—and the sizars. The peers enjoyed some privileges which would not be coveted nowadays—they could make themselves conspicuous on all occasions by their clothing, and they could take a degree without working for it. The younger sons of peers and the richer undergraduates also messed at the fellows’ table, and were therefore called “fellow-commoners”: the advantages of this arrangement did not end with the better treatment in hall, for the companionship of the fellows and seniors of his college must have proved a welcome stimulus to an intelligent young man.[341] Lastly, there were and are the “sizars,” the poorer students, not on the foundation of the college, who pay smaller fees and receive their commons gratis.[342] The sizar of fifty years ago used to wait on the fellows at dinner and dine off the broken victuals, reinforced by fresh vegetables and pudding.

When Macaulay summed the advantages of a Cambridge fellowship he omitted perhaps the chief, the college residence which like “the good dinner” is to be had “for nothing.” Fellows and scholars receive their college quarters gratis; but the rest of the undergraduate population pays for its lodging. It is housed in its 17 colleges, the new hostels which are springing up on all sides, and the licensed lodgings in the town. The cost of the college bed and sitting room a term varies from £3 to three times this sum. Service adds £2 or £3 a term. Small lodgings with service can be had in the less good streets for £5-£7; good rooms from £8 to £10, while more than £12 is only charged in the best positions, or near the big colleges. The expense of college rooms is augmented by the prepayments for furniture (the average valuation of the permanent furniture is £20, but the sum may be as low as £10 or as high as £40), by the “caution money,” about £15, returned at the end of the term of residence, the admission fee (varying with the college from 6/8 to £5) and the matriculation fee £5. During residence there is also an annual payment of £9-15 towards the upkeep of the college and its servants, and the tuition fee, which covers all lectures in one’s own college, and varies from £18 to £24 a year.

It was to obviate the necessity of paying these fees that the system of non-collegiate students, familiarly called “non-colls,” was devised in 1869. While the expenses of an undergraduate who is a member of a college average about £165 a year, £60 in excess of this and £60 less representing the higher scale of expenses on the one hand and the minimum on the other, the undergraduate who lives in lodgings and is not a member of any college can live for £78 a year (if he does not require “coaching” or private tuition which costs about £9 a term) and it is just possible to take the B.A. degree after a three years’ residence which has cost you at the rate of £55 a year.

Fifty years ago the minimum cost of living at Cambridge for a pensioner was £150 and double this sum involved no extravagant outlay. A fellow-commoner required £800 a year and could not live on less than £500. These were the aristocratic days of English universities and they were in sharp contrast to the time when scholars were poor, begged their way to and from college, and were included among vagabonds in the statute of 1380 directed against mendicancy. But the entertainment in those days was also widely different. Two fellows shared not only a room but a bed, or a two-bedded room would be shared by a fellow and two poor scholars. It was not till the xvi century that each fellow had a bed to himself and a room to himself if space permitted.[343] The dining hall was a comfortless room where rude fare was served at a tresselled board to guests who sat upon wooden stools. The conditions of the xiii and xiv centuries were not greatly bettered in the xvth and xvith, and Erasmus found it hard to stomach the fare at Queens’ College at a time when the Cambridge ale appears to have been no improvement on the “wine no better than vinegar” which came from the surrounding vineyards.

The little lads who thronged the streets of Cambridge in the xiii century were under little or no discipline. They ran up debts with the Jews, who had established themselves there in the opening years of the previous century, fought the townsmen, and had few duties to society beyond making their own beds, a work certainly performed by university scholars in the xiii and xiv centuries and enjoined on the boys of the famous schools founded in the xvth. It was this custom of doing your own work, at least until you became an advanced student when the little boys did it for you, which was the origin of “fagging” in our two most ancient schools connected respectively with our two universities—Eton and Winchester.[344] Even this amount of work, however, was not expected of fellow-commoners in the xvi century, who frequently got out of hand, though few of them have left us so delightful a reminder of their misdeeds as the young Earl of Rutland has done in a letter to his mother who had complained of his behaviour: “I do aseure your Ladyship that the cariage of myselfe both towardes God and my booke, my comeliness in diet and gesture, shall be such as your Ladyship shall hear and like well of.”

With the great era of college building in the succeeding century, the founders’ statutes make their appearance; and in days when monks were birched and nuns were slapped the college stocks held in durance vile the fellow who had presumed to bathe in any stream or pool of Cambridgeshire, while the college hall resounded to the strokes of the birch which visited the scholar for the same offence. College discipline was supplemented by university discipline, and the academic authorities shared legal powers with the town authorities until recently. The jurisdiction of the university extended not only to matters affecting its members, but to a conusance in actions which affected the townsmen.[345] The last attempt to exercise the right of imprisoning undesirable characters in the “Spinning House” was made by the vice-chancellor in 1893; but the incarceration of a young woman on this occasion caused so much indignation in the town that it led to the final disallowance of all the vice-chancellor’s powers, in this direction, which were waived by the university in 1894.

University discipline is in the hands of the vice-chancellor and his court,[346] and the proctors. College discipline in those of the dean[347] and tutors. Two proctors perambulate the town every night, each accompanied by two servants known to the undergraduate as the proctor’s “bull-dogs.” They take the name of any offending student and bring him up next morning if necessary before the vice-chancellor. They can also send men back to their college or rooms, enter lodgings, and exact fines. When the youth of 19 or 20 leaves the higher forms of a public school and comes to the university, he is treated as a man, and leads a man’s life guided by himself. But he becomes also a member of a great society, existing for certain purposes. If he is a man, he is a very young one; and if he guides his own life he has only just begun to do so. He lives in his own house—for his college room, like the Englishman’s dwelling, is his castle—but he must be at home by 10 p.m.

This is the first point of discipline. The gates of colleges and the outer doors of lodgings are shut at 10, and any one who presents himself after that hour, without his tutor’s permission, has his name taken by the college porter, or by the lodging proprietor who acts in loco janitoris. He must also dine in hall, if not every day at least five times in the week, which must include Sunday. The third restriction on his liberty is (or at least was originally) a care for his soul. The obligation to attend chapel so many times a week resolves itself now into two attendances in the week and generally two on Sunday. No means of enforcing this are however taken nowadays, and the men are generally left free to judge for themselves in this respect, though ‘moral suasion’ is exercised by the deans except in the case of nonconformists and conscientious objectors. Fifty years ago 8 “chapels” were expected; but if a pensioner kept 6 and a fellow-commoner 4, he was left untroubled by his dean. In New England at the same epoch no less than 16 attendances at chapel every week were required, seven at unseasonable hours; a burden which was tolerated with more cheerfulness by the New Englander than were the 8 “chapels” by his Cambridge contemporary.

The licensing of all lodgings and places of entertainment[348] to which undergraduates may go, is the hold which the university has over the town. Its sanctions for the undergraduate are fines and expulsion; breaches of

college rules being visited by “gating” and expulsion. A man can be expelled for any cause which in the judgment of the university or the college warrants it. If a man thus expelled from the university society refuses “to go down”—to leave Cambridge—he cannot live in any licensed lodging house in the town.[349] A man may also be sent down for a term, which is called “rustication,” an epithet which suggests to him that he has forfeited the society of men of polite learning. If a man misbehaves himself he can be “gated,” i.e. the porter receives instructions not to let him out after a certain hour—and it may be any hour the authorities choose to fix and for any length of time.

The college tutor is the official who supervises the undergraduate’s academic career. He advises him what subject to read for, what examinations to take, what books to master. The career of a mediocre man is often made and that of a first-rate man heightened by an able tutor, and Cambridge has boasted some very great men in this capacity. The mathematical genius of Newton was quickened by having for his tutor Isaac Barrow; Whichcote of Emmanuel, Laughton of Clare, and Shilleto of Trinity were eminent as tutors and “coaches”; and “coaching” supplements, for a very backward or a very advanced student, the lectures of college and university.[350]

The academic appearance of a university owes much to the traditional cap and gown worn by all its members. A bonnet and gown are very ancient appanages of the learned professions of divinity law and medicine—they were the dignified apparel of doctors in the three faculties. Short hose had not become fashionable when universities sprang into existence, and the clerk or scholar even if he were not destined for major was very usually in minor orders: the gown is therefore a fitting distinction for those learned societies which have never ceased their corporate existence, and have carried into modern times, as a special dress, items of attire which like clerical vestments, the cassock, the monastic habit, and the friar’s tunic were proper to the age which saw their rise.

The distinctive features of academic dress are simply survivals of this ordinary dress of the period: the ceremonial hood is the hood which was worn in everyday life in the xiith the xiiith xivth and xvth centuries.[351] If we had looked in at the priory church of Barnwell on a day when the novices made their profession we should have seen each one enter dressed in the black habit or gown, a cloak of fur, and the “amess[352] over his head”: and when he walked out he was already vested with the capa nigra of the canon. Here, then, we have all the elements of early academic dress; the homely Gilbertine canons, so familiar in the Cambridge thoroughfares, wore it in white; for it was the dress of the more respectable, the decently clad, clergy and clerks as well as of those most respectable and regular clergy, the canons. The dress of the better looked-after scholars on the college foundations differed but little from this. No doubt the scholars of Peterhouse habitually wore the clerical vestis talaris[353]—the gown to the ankle—but the special item of academic attire adopted at Cambridge appears to have been the capa nigra.[354] The majority of scholars in the hostels and grammar schools observed no general rule as to costume,[355] but the scholars of any standing wore the black cappa of the canon; and the hood, lined with sheepskin or minever, was becoming—even in the xiv century—the habitual, and therefore distinctive, dress of foundation scholars when they “commenced” bachelor or master.[356] The hood indeed was probably restricted to an academic use before this century closed, for there is a statute of the year 1413 ordering hoods of kid or lambskin to be worn. The incepting Cambridge bachelor,[357] then, wore a cappa, a fine hood was gradually restricted to the master of arts.

The soft bonnets or caps—of doctors, bishops, jurists, canons—are derivatives of the hood, as is the stiff cap—the biretta, as is the mitre itself. The xviii century Cambridge student still wore a soft round cap, like that worn to-day by the Italian university student and quite recently adopted in France: but the Paduan doctors had adopted the stiff square cap in the xvi century, and our own students revolted against the round cap in 1769, and thereupon accomplished the feat which neither Archimedes “nor our Newton” had attempted:

The chancellor of the university wears a black and gold robe. Scarlet is the colour of the doctors’ gowns, as it still is of the papal doctors of divinity. The physician of Chaucer’s time wore his furred scarlet gown, and scarlet gowns and corner caps were worn by the Cambridge doctors when the Cromwells entertained James I. on his way from the north in 1603.

The master wears a full-sleeved gown of stuff or silk; the bachelor’s gown has two flowing bands hanging loose in front; the undergraduate’s gown is both scantier and shorter than these; but ‘Advanced Students’ wear the bachelor’s gown, without the loose bands. The academic gown of English universities is now black, but the earlier violet gown of Trinity is recorded in the present blue gown of its undergraduates, a blue gown being also worn by the neighbouring college of Gonville and Caius.[359] The gowns of certain colleges are distinguished by little pleats in the stuff or bars of velvet.

Peers and eldest sons of peers, in the first half of the xix century, wore the black silk gown and tall silk hat of an M.A.,[360] and on great occasions a more splendid dress adorned with gold tassels and lace. Fellow-commoners wore a gown with gold or silver lace and a black velvet cap; the younger sons of peers being known as “Hat-fellow-commoners” because they wore the M.A.’s silk hat instead of the velvet cap.

Most of the pensioners at Cambridge in the xviii century (but not the fellow-commoners) used to wear a sleeveless gown called a “curtain.”[361] Neither the clerical cassock nor the capa nigra in fact account for the undergraduate’s dress of later or present times; the original of which, I think, is to be found in the sleeveless gown or coat, called soprana, of the ecclesiastical colleges founded between the xv and xvii centuries. Two of the peculiarities of the soprana are still traceable. The bands of the bachelor’s gown may be seen attached to the black coat of the Almum Collegium founded in 1457 by Cardinal Capranica, to the violet and black dress worn by the Scotchmen,[362] to the red coat of the college founded by Ignatius Loyola, and the blue of the Greek College founded by Gregory XIII.; while one string, adorned with the papal arms, is left on the soprana worn by the Vatican seminarists: these are leading strings, denoting the state of pupilage.[363] The Cambridge scholar’s and bachelor’s gown is black—the descendant of the full black cappa—but as we have just seen the coat or gown of the ecclesiastical colleges is of different colours, and the ancient gowns of Trinity and Caius still record this variation.

Every one in statu pupillari must wear cap and gown after nightfall, on Sunday,[364] at examinations and lectures (except laboratory demonstrations), when visiting the vice-chancellor or any other official on academic business, in the library, the Senate House, and the university church: professors and others usually wear the gown while lecturing, and all dons wear it in chapel and hall.

A twentieth century undergraduates’ day does not differ from those recorded in his diary by Wordsworth’s brother when he was a freshman at Trinity in 1793.[365] This is how he was employed during the Reign of Terror and within a few days of the execution of Marie Antoinette:—“Chapel. Lectures. Considered of a subject for my essay on Wednesday se’nnight. Drank wine with Coleridge. Present the Society. Chapel. Read ‘Morning Chronicle.’ Found in it an ode to Fortune, by Coleridge, which I had seen at Rough’s yesterday. Read ratios and variable quantities, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” It was indeed rather in its outer than in its inner circumstance that the life even of the xiii and xiv century undergraduate differed from that of the xxth. Then as now he listened to doctors in their faculties and his own college seniors expounding the mysteries of art and science; then, as now, he supplemented these lectures with private reading, then, seated upon a wooden stool in a corner of a crowded room, or in the college library, or best of all in the college meadows; now, in a comfortable arm chair or stretched upon a sofa in his private sitting room.[366] Then, as now, he caroused or discussed “the universe” with his friends, as his nature suggested. Then, as now, he made early acquaintance with the river Granta and knew each yard of the flat roads round the university town. Even the periodical outbreak between “town and gown” belongs as much to the xiii century as to the most recent history in the xxth.[367]

Lectures take place in the morning, “coaching” and private study usually in the late afternoon and evening. Two to four is the chosen time for recreation, and the chief recreations of the Cantab used to be the road and the river. The latter runs familiarly past the windows of his college rooms, and invites him as he steps forth from the threshold of his college court. Boating, swimming, or fishing, the student of a bye-gone day found in the Granta a never-failing and an inexpensive resource. Cambridge fish as we have seen has always been famous, and the Merton scholars poached upon the townsmen’s fishing rights long before the xiii century was out.

“Your success in the Senate House” said a well-known tutor “depends much on the care you take of the three-mile stone out of Cambridge. If you go every day and see no one has taken it away, and go quite round it to watch lest any one has damaged its farthest side, you will be best able to read steadily all the time you are at Cambridge. If you neglect it, woe betide your degree. Exercise, constant, and regular, and ample, is absolutely essential to a reading man’s success.” And the reading men have taken the lesson to heart. No roads until the era of bicycles were better tramped than the flat Cambridge roads which lend themselves so well to this form of recreation; pair after pair of men, tall and small, a big and a little together, used to keep themselves informed as to their state of repair, or lose the sense of space and time in discussions on the modern substitute for “quiddity” and essentia, or the social and biological problems which are newer even than these.

Once back in his college the persons on whom the undergraduate’s comfort most depends are the college cook the bedmaker and the “gyp.” The last calls him, brushes his clothes, prepares his breakfast, caters for him, serves his luncheon, waits on him and his friends, and carries back and forth the little twisted paper missives which, as an American noticed fifty years ago, Cambridge undergraduates are perpetually exchanging. All these services the gyp may have to perform for a number of other men. The only woman servant is the “bedmaker” whose name sufficiently describes her official business, but who for the great majority of modern students discharges the functions of gyp. The college kitchen is a busy centre. Here is prepared not only the hall dinner but all private breakfasts and luncheons served in college rooms; and most of the college kitchens supply luncheons and dinners to residents in the town if required. Dinner in hall costs from one shilling and tenpence to two shillings and a penny, according to the college; bread and butter called “commons” can be had from the buttery for 6d. a day; a breakfast dish at a cost of from 6d. to 1/; and at some college halls a luncheon is served at a small fixed charge.[368]

A hundred years ago the undergraduate dressed for “hall” with white silk stockings and pumps and white silk waistcoat. A few wore powder, the others curled their hair, and he was a bucolic youth indeed who omitted at least the curling. “Curled and powdered” the Cambridge scholar wore his hair even in the xiv century provoking the indignation of primates and founders. A hundred and fifty years ago beer was served for breakfast, and only Gray and Walpole drank tea. Even fifty years ago the food was roughly served and in an overcrowded hall. It was however abundant, and extras like soup, confectionery, and cheese could be “sized for” i.e. brought you at an extra charge. The food provided consisted of plain joints and vegetables, with plenty of beer. The fellows’ table and the side tables of the bachelors were better served.

“The wine,” the famous entertainment which followed the old four o’clock dinner fifty years ago, has yielded place to coffee and tea. In the May term teas assume new proportions; for during the term which is fateful to the reading man as that preceding the tripos examination, the idle man turns work time into play, invites his friends and relatives up to Cambridge, and entertains his sisters at “the races.” It is not indeed to be supposed that the majority of undergraduates are to be found keeping themselves awake with black coffee, a damp towel bound about their brows, while they burn the midnight oil. Even the harmless necessary “sporting of one’s oak” is no longer “good form.” In days when you advertise for a curate and a schoolmaster who is a good athlete the very thin literary proclivities of the bulk of Englishmen cannot be held to be on the increase. What one might legitimately hope for is that athletics should prove a safety-valve to the natural “rowdyism” of the non-reading man; so that if school and university sports cannot make a scholar they might at least turn out something not unlike a gentleman. Last October (1905) proved a “record” in the number of men “going up,” and November proved “a record” in the number of men who should have been “sent down.” What took place is fresh in our memories; and it will not quickly be forgotten that while the undergraduates of one university were shouting their disgrace, a well-known bishop was signalising (and exaggerating) the disgrace of the other; and we may choose between the merits of leaguing with the town blackguard to kick policemen at Cambridge or indulging the vice which changed the name of “wines” at Oxford to “drunks.” At the rejoicings for Mafeking the iron railings and posts were torn up along the ‘backs,’ and everything combustible from drays to handcarts was “commandeered” to make a bonfire on Market hill, where many panes of glass in the surrounding houses were smashed. Proctors’ “bull-dogs” were rolled over in the mud, and the proctors treated to the dignity of a “chairing.”[369] The bonfire on Market hill is a development of a traditional ritual more amusing and less dangerous: you drag out your own and your friends’ furniture and make a bonfire in the middle of the college “court.”

Would it be impossible, among so many good rules, to make cap and gown obligatory at both universities between the hours of 9 and 12? The spectacle of youths hugging golf clubs on the Oxford station at ten o’clock in the morning cannot be extraneous to examination results which show that not 3 men in 4 who matriculate, take the B.A. At Cambridge there is good promise in the large increase of scientific students who take advantage of the facilities afforded by its laboratories: more men entered for the “doctors’ college” in October 1905 than for any other, except of course Trinity; and even “the sporting college” has been a principal contributor to the number of medical graduates. Since 1883 there has been a board of Indian Civil Service studies, and the universities between them send up far the larger number of candidates for this service. A board of agricultural studies was instituted in 1899, a diploma in agriculture is now awarded, also one in sanitation, and geographical studies are encouraged by prizes. Since 1899, when the tripos was divided, the Historical has become one of the larger triposes and in 1905 had the highest number of entries after the Natural Sciences.[370]

The traditional rivalry in sports has of course been that between the two universities. The inter-university boat race was begun in 1836, and the first 4 races were won by Cambridge, as was also the first race rowed in outriggers in ’46. Of the 64 races run, Oxford has won 6 more than Cambridge; Cambridge has won 5 out of the last 6, and has also won by the greater number of lengths (in ’49 by “many,” and in 1900 by 20).[371] The great inferiority of the ‘Cam’ to the ‘Isis’ is partly compensated by the excellent style of rowing which Eton

traditions carry on into Cambridge. The happy connexion between Cambridge and Eton established by Henry VI. has never ceased to link the most aristocratic English school with the more democratic of the English universities, and many boys come to the “light blue” university already wearing her favours. In football and golf the two universities have shown equal prowess; Cambridge cricket is superior (the inter-university match was started in 1839 and Cambridge won the first 6 matches), and in athletics (1868-1906) Cambridge took the lead until the Rhodes scholars arrived at the sister university.

The Union Society forms another distraction well calculated to turn out the English ideal of a university man—a man, id est, ready for public affairs. It was founded in 1815 by the union of three already existing debating societies, the present building was erected in 1866 and fitted up as a club. Stratford Canning (Lord Stratford de Redcliffe) and Blomfield, afterwards Bishop of London, belonged to one of these earlier “spouting clubs” in 1806, where Palmerston and Ellenborough both “laid the foundation” of their parliamentary fame. The college ball and the college concert are also crowded into the student’s seven weeks of residence in the May term, taking the place of the plays which formed the staple entertainment in the xvi and xvii centuries. The modern “A.D.C.” has been rendered famous by the “Greek Plays” which were inaugurated twenty-five years ago with a performance of “Ajax.”

But the round of work and play comes to an end with Sunday, and the university has preserved the festival aspect of this day, the day when continental beadles and gens d’armes don their fine plumes and when what is bright and gay rather than what is dull and grave is mated to the idea of a day of rest. The college courts—the outdoor centre and rallying point of college life—are thronged with men gay in surplice or gown[372] as they were thronged on that Sunday 370 years ago when Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester found two hundred dons assembled “as is their wont” and buttonholed the men who were likely to pleasure his grace in the matter of the divorce. That fine day in the xvi century was no doubt a repetition of many fine days in the centuries preceding it, for it is always fine in Cambridge on Sunday. And Sunday after Sunday the undergraduate has received a lesson in dignities, as he circled becapped and begowned on the cobbled paths round the greater luminaries becapped and begowned tranquilly stepping on the college grass. The modern undergraduate does not remember a time when a pathway ran across the turf from corner to corner of the college courts, as it did in Clare Hall, in the old court of Corpus, and in William of Wykeham’s foundation at Oxford. On “scarlet days” the courts are still more gay, for the doctors then appear in their scarlet.[373]

The gowns in the court clothe the learned and the unlearned, and make a present of as brave an academic appearance to the rowdiest of non-readers as to the future senior wrangler. The academic year is divided into 3 terms of 8 or 9 weeks each: half the year only is therefore passed at Cambridge. For serious study the intervals are too long and the ‘long vacation term’ has become the reading man’s term par excellence; all the colleges are then half full, the numbers being swelled by the medical students. The multiplication of extra-collegiate scholarships has not told all one way. Parents who used to make sacrifices to send a son to the university now count upon a scholarship, with the result that on the principle of ‘light come light go’ less use is made of opportunities. The university authorities look to the “advanced students” (of whom there are now 60 or 70 in residence) who are staying up for research work or come from other universities, for solid academic achievement.

There is no more interesting enquiry connected with our subject than that concerning the classes from which the academic population has been recruited at different epochs, and the careers for which the university has fitted its members.

The Church has always remained the most constant client of academic advantages: it was the churchmen who on the decline of the monasteries and when the universities were established as learned corporations, exchanged the cloister for the college education. The dissolution of the monasteries and the breach with Rome left the universities as the only representatives of the faculty of theology; and during the last century, especially, if a man were destined for the Church he went—ipso facto—to Cambridge or Oxford even though he were the only member of his family to do so. In the xv as in the xvi centuries it was chiefly men destined for the faculties of theology and law who frequented the universities, and then, as always in their history, the poorest scholar lived side by side with the youth of family and influence.

The lawyers, perhaps, have gone in equal proportions to a university or to one of the Inns of Court; many have gone to both. The great change to be observed is as regards students of the third faculty, medicine. In the xix century the doctor and the tradesman’s son did not go to a university; but this century, as we have seen, has already been marked by the enormous accession of medical students at Cambridge. The gradual growth of a powerful middle class resulted in the later xvi century in filling the universities with the sons not only of the older yeomanry of our shires but of the new Merchant Adventurers, often themselves men of gentle blood and coat armour. It is perhaps from this century that the idea began to prevail that an academic education was the proper education of a gentleman. Of this century it was true as it had been true of no other that “the civil life of all English gentlemen” is begun at Oxford or Cambridge. Statesmen and ministers, the political and the diplomatic careers, were recruited at the universities, and university-trained canonists and lawyers like Cranmer and More, and churchmen like Wolsey and Gardiner were chosen to be the ambassadors and secretaries of state. Ascham complains to Cranmer that sons of rich men “who sought only superficial knowledge” and “to qualify themselves for some place in the State” overran the university, and both universities soon became, in Macaulay’s words, the training ground not only of all the eminent clergy, lawyers, physicians, poets, and orators, but of a large proportion of the “nobility and opulent gentry” of the country.

In England men belonging to what have, hitherto, been the governing classes have always sought advantages which would doubtless be less apparent in countries where nobility and gentry are synonyms and where government is not carried on by means of two such institutions as the House of Commons and the House of Lords. A noblesse which gives no scions to the professions or to a representative chamber has seldom sought academic distinction. The man destined for parliament for the diplomatic service and the government office—occupations which an acute American observer has said are chosen by Englishmen as the business of their lives “without studying any other profession”[374]—prepared himself in no other way than by three or four years spent at the university, with or without graduating there. It was not however till the nineteenth century opened that the distinctively aristocratic trend of a university was defined. Throughout that century the university was par excellence the seminary of the English gentleman, and the parson. A few bankers’ sons might be put into their fathers’ counting houses, a few government officials might place their sons at an early age in a government office, but the exception only proved the rule.

Let us look at some examples of the class from which Cambridge was recruited through the xvi and xvii centuries. Hugh Latimer (b. 1491) was the son of a yeoman farmer; Sir Thomas Wyatt (b. 1503) was the son of a knight. The father of Matthew Parker (b. 1504) was a Norwich merchant; Bacon (b. 1561) and his brother, fellow-commoners of Trinity, were sons of the Lord Keeper and nephews of Burleigh. Fletcher (b. 1579) the dramatist, was the son of the Bishop of London, and his cousins the poets were sons of Elizabeth’s Master of the Requests and ambassador to Russia.[375] In the xvii century Herrick the poet (b. 1591) was the son of a goldsmith established in London; Waller (b. 1605) a nephew of Hampden’s, a man of large private fortune; Cowley (b. 1618) was

son to a city grocer; Marvell (b. 1620) son to a Yorkshire clergyman; while Temple was the son of an Irish Master of the Rolls. In the latter half of the xvii century we still hear of “the farmer’s son newly come from the university”[376]—Bentley was one of them—and at the same time we hear that Tuckney, Whichcote’s tutor, “had many persons of rank and quality” under him at Emmanuel College. In the xviii century, Pepys’ (b. 1703) father was a tailor, the Wordsworths were sons of a north country attorney, Sir William Browne (b. 1692) was the son of a physician.

Men of low origin were sent up, and have always been sent up, to the universities through the beneficence of patrons, and the poor tailor Stow was enabled to write his history owing to the patronage of Archbishop Parker who sent him to Oxford. Through the xv and early xvi centuries the monastic and other convent schools supplied university students. Bale (b. 1495) had been educated by the Norwich Carmelites, Coverdale (b. 1487) had been an Austinfriar at Cambridge. At the present day the big grammar schools, and in especial the Norwich grammar school which educated Nelson, send every year a contingent of students, as they have done since the reign of Edward VI. If we take the sporting representatives sent from the two universities the year before last, 23 from Oxford and 21 from Cambridge, we shall find that one third of the Cambridge men hailed from the greater public schools, Eton, Charterhouse, and Rugby.[377] Our colonies are also a recruiting ground, and with them Cambridge is favourite university.[378]

The number of undergraduates entered this academic year (1906-7) was the largest on record, totalling 1021. The reputation and the popularity of colleges of course wax and wane: for the past two years the largest number of entries (excluding Trinity) has been for Caius and Pembroke, Emmanuel coming next, and then S. John’s.[379] The number of non-collegiate students is steadily increasing.

There are no ‘high Church’ centres among the colleges, and there is no ‘broad Church’ movement among the undergraduates. The ‘broad Church’ movement is among the younger dons and in connexion with the University Settlement. There are nonconformists in every college, but the reunion with Christendom which begins at home finds no advocates among other university men. As usual there is at Cambridge no particular ‘school’ of religious thought. There is however just now a decided religious movement among the undergraduates, almost exclusively connected with the ‘high Church’ parish of S. Giles. The majority of the men make little religious profession, but there is no violent reaction such as agitated Oxford in the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ and the yearly increasing number of scientific students inclines to a pantheistic rather than a materialistic standpoint.

The undergraduate population is decidedly conservative, as the university has always been. At the present moment both sides of the fiscal controversy are represented, the distinguished Cambridge economist Dr. Cunningham advocating tariff reform, while the Professor of Political Economy is a free-trader.

The “slumming” movement made an early appeal to the younger members of the university. Their present work in south London was begun over twenty years ago, and “Cambridge House” has existed for ten years in a district which has been called “the largest area of unbroken poverty in any European city.” The workers are all laymen, 11 out of the 17 colleges being represented by resident Cambridge men, while an undergraduate secretary in every college assists in furthering the movement.

We saw at the beginning of this chapter that the aspect of the university had changed with the marriage of fellows, tutors, and officials; and in time this factor must greatly modify the conditions of life at our universities. Both of these are now overrun with children’s schools, and there can be little doubt that all the boys (and many of the girls) will go to college. The natural profession for many of these, owing to the father’s influence with his college and the son’s inherited inclinations, will be academic. It would certainly not be to the advantage of our seats of learning if they became in this sense close corporations. It is obvious that this would mean less movement of ideas and less opportunity for the outside world to affect the university; and if a large number not only of the teachers but of the scholars belonged to such a caste as this, if the profession of teaching were handed down from father to son, the situation would not be unlike that which threatened Europe when Gregory VII. interposed and made the Christian world his executor in enforcing clerical celibacy. A new tuitional field would be open to the young graduate in the numerous schools of Cambridge and Oxford, but this would only accentuate the vicious circle of an education which might come to suggest the ecclesiastical seminary rather than the English university. Perhaps, too, a young man loses more than half the social and worldly advantages of a college life if when

he “goes up to the university” he does not change his habitat.

The married fellow cannot begin life again elsewhere after the 5 or 10 years’ teaching at his college which used to precede his departure for a benefice: the old bachelor, if he stayed on, no longer taught, and new men took his place in the lecture room. But now a fellow cannot renounce the lecture room, for he and his family cannot live on the fellowship. Lecturers are therefore often men past the prime of life, and moreover men who no longer live in daily contact with the undergraduate. New blood comes in seldom, and percolates slowly. On the other hand valuable men stay who would under the old system have left. The influx of the “monstrous regiment” will not however, one hopes, diminish an advantage at present possessed by the seniors at our centres of learning—a general equality of fortune which frees university society from the laborious vulgarity that travails the soul elsewhere, from the general “ponderousness,” as someone has called it, of English life. At least Gray’s advice to Wharton not to bring his wife to Cambridge would now be quite out of place; the “few” women are no longer “squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves or other people,” and the men are no longer “not over agreeable neither.”