families living in Cambridge to board at home. By degrees the rule of compulsory attendance was further relaxed until many other students boarded as well as lodged out of the Yard. The Overseers, realizing that this meant the disintegration of the system so laboriously built up, made great efforts to “put them in Commons again.” In 1747 they voted that it would be “beneficial for the College that the members thereof be in Commons”; and ten years later they passed a resolution “to restrain them from dieting in private families.” In 1760, students were specifically prohibited “from dining or supping in any house in town, except on an invitation to dine or sup gratis,” and in 1764 the prohibition was extended to breakfast, this being the date when that meal began to be served in hall.
All these fulminations were about as effectual as the rest of the mass of puerile legislation which then hung heavy (?) over the undergraduate head. Judge Wingate declares that some of his classmates “paid for their Commons and never entered the Hall while they belonged to the College.”[1] In 1761 it was officially reported that over ninety scholars, or more than half the entire University, were boarding in private families.[2] The fine for eating out of Commons was a shilling (sixteen and two-thirds cents), increased in 1789 to twenty cents.
