CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE
dress and tonsure is specially enjoined on the master
and all the scholars of Peterhouse. In the statutes of
the second college founded, that of Michaelhouse (af-
terwards absorbed in Trinity), the religious provisions
are particularly prominent. All the fellows were to
be in Holy orders and students of theology, and the
provisions for Divine service are elaborate and minute.
In Cambridge, as at Oxford, the earliest colleges made
use of the nearest parish church as their place of wor-
ship, and Pembroke, which dates from 1347, was the
first which had from the beginning a chapel for its
members within its own precincts. Thirteen of the
existing colleges are pre-Reformation foundations,
and three more were established in the sixteenth
century. The three hundred subsequent years of
Protestantism have produced but a single benefactor
to emulate the pious achievements of Catholic times;
and Downing College, founded in 1800, is the only
one which has had its rise in the seventeenth, eigh-
teenth, or nineteenth centuries. The modern revival
of hostels has not been markedly successful, two out
of three fovinded having been closed in recent years;
nor has the institution of the non-collegiate system
(introduced in 1869) attracted a great number of
students, in spite of the advantages it offers of a con-
siderably more economical university career.
Many of the features of the collegiate discipline and internal government as originally instituted are due to the fact of the earlier colleges having been largely modelled on the monasteries. Magdalene (like Glouces- ter, now Worcester, College, Oxford) was actually established for students belonging to the Benedictine Order, the young monks resorting thither from Croy- land, Ely, Ramsey, and other East Anglian abbeys; while Emmanuel was built in 1584 on the site of a former Dominican house, becoming afterwards, curi- ously enough, the favourite resort of Puritan students. To the semi-monastic origin of the colleges must be traced such rules as those enjoining on the fellows celibacy and the clerical status, which were in force until almost the close of the nineteenth century. The final abolition of the restrictions as to marriage and clerical orders was brought about only in 1881, when new statutes were issued by the Cambridge com- missioners in conformity with an act of Parliament passed four years previously. All religious tests have been abolished within the same period, except for de- grees in divinity, examinations and degrees in the other faculties being now thrown open to students of every creed. The Anglican element is still strongly represented in the governing body, more than half the heads of houses, for example, being (1907) clergy- men of the established Church.
Looking back on the past three centuries of the history of the university, one is struck by the long succession of eminent men whom Cambridge has pro- duced, notwithstanding the narrow and cramping in- fluence of a system which, during a great part of that time, rigidly "excluded non-members of the Church of England from every position of influence and emolu- ment, and even from the benefits of a degree. A list by no means exhaustive includes, among philosophers and men of science, Bacon, Newton, Herschel, Adams, Darwin, Rayleigh, and Kelvin; among statesmen, Burleigh, Strafford, Cromwell, Pitt. Palmerston, Dev- onshire, and Balfour; among scholars and men of let- ters, Erasmus, Bentley, Porson, Paley, Sterne, Ben Johnson, Lytton, Macaulay, and Thackeray; among lawyers, Coke, Littleton, Ellenborough. and l.ynd- hurst; among historians, Hume and Acton; and I hist , not least) among the galaxy of poets who are perhaps the brightest gems in Cambridge's crown of famous men, Spenser, Milton, Herbert, Dryden, Cowley, Ot- way, Prior, Gray, Coleridge, Byron. Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Apart from the unbroken chronicle of the intellectual achievements of her sons, the university as such has never during the six centuries and more
of her existence figured prominently in history. Her
part in politics has been on the whole unimportant,
and her tendency, in matters both of Church and
State, has ever been towards moderation and an
avoidance of extremes. Her relations with kings and
rulers have been friendly, if not always cordial; dur-
ing the troubles of the Civil War she was loyal, but not
with the exuberant loyalty of Oxford, to Charles I;
her colleges sent him their plate, but they came later
easily into the obedience of the Commonwealth. So
in religious matters she has never been in the forefront
of the great religious movements which have orig-
inated at Oxford and have shaken England to its
centre. She has bred eminent divines both high and
low in their ecclesiastical views; but her chief glory
has been, and is, in that stamp of churchmen who
form the broad, or liberal, section of the Anglican
body. Ellicott and Alford, Yaughan and Kingsley,
Lightfoot and Maurice, are names as typical of Cam-
bridge as those of Newman and Pusey, Wilberforce
and Liddon and Bright, are characteristic of Oxford.
It remains to add that the corporate existence of
Cambridge University dates from the thirteenth year
of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when it was incor-
porated under the designation of "The Chancellors,
Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cam-
bridge". The endowment of the first professorships
dates from an earlier period of the same century, the
Lady Margaret professorship of divinity having been
founded in 1502 by Margaret, mother of Henry VII.
Henry VIII established in 1540 the five regius pro-
fessorshipsof divinity, civil law, physics, Hebrew, and
Greek. Thirty-nine professorships have since been
founded, making a total of forty-five, in addition to
assistants, demonstrators, and readers.
II. Constitution and Government. — (A) The University. — Nothing is more difficult to foreigners than to understand the constitution of such a uni- versity as that of Cambridge, complicated as it is by the dual and simultaneous existence of the central governing body with its complete organization and staff of officials, and of the separate colleges, each an autonomous corporation, with its own officers, its own property, and its own statutes, and yet all con- stituting an essential part of the university as a whole. The combined university and college system of Cam- bridge and of Oxford is in fact unique, and is in as marked contrast with the pure university system pre- vailing in Germany, France, and Scotland, as well as of the most recently founded universities in England, as it is with the pure college system of some univer- sities in the United States. The supreme legislative and governing power of the whole body (for the stat- utes of the several colleges are subject to the para- mount authority of the university laws) is vested in the senate, whose place of meeting is called the senate- house. The constituent members of the senate are the chancellor, vice-chancellor, doctors of the six sev- eral faculties, bachelors of divinity, and all masters of arts, law, surgery, and music, who have their names on the university register. The matters to which the jurisdiction of the senate extends, include t he manage- ment of the finances and property of the university (as distinguished from that belonging to the individ- ual colleges), the general conduct of the studies and examinations, and the regulations affecting morals and discipline. It is, however, to lie noted that noth- ing whatever can be proposed for enactment or con- firmation by the senate except with the sanction of the council, a body established by tin' authority of Parliament about 1S57. The council is really a com- mittee of the whole senate, consisting of the chancel- lor, vice-chancellor, four heads of colleges, four uni- versity professors, and eight other members of the senate elected by the whole body. Meetings of the senate, styled congregations, and presided over by the vice-chancellor or his deputy, are held about once
