University of Cambridge, England

A Quarrel at Oxford

The University of Cambridge owes its existence to a killing. In 1209, two scholars at the University of Oxford were convicted of the death of a local woman and hanged by the town's secular authorities — without consulting the ecclesiastical courts, which would customarily have claimed jurisdiction and shown leniency. Fearing further reprisals from the hostile townspeople, and with the town authorities already in conflict with King John, scholars began leaving Oxford for more hospitable places. Some went to Paris, some to Reading, but a significant number settled in Cambridge, where the area surrounding the bishopric church of Ely already possessed a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation. By 1226, the transplanted scholars were numerous enough to have organised themselves under an official called a Chancellor and to offer regular courses of study.

In 1231, King Henry III took the fledgling university under his protection, granting a royal charter that gave it formal recognition and shielded its members from exploitation by landlords. He decreed that only scholars studying under a recognised Master were permitted to remain in the town. In 1318, Pope John XXII confirmed Cambridge's status as a studium generale — a medieval institution entitled to award degrees recognised throughout Christendom — securing its place alongside the great universities of Europe.

The First Colleges

For its first seventy-five years, Cambridge had no colleges at all. Scholars lived in rented hostels and attended lectures given by Masters in churches or hired rooms. It was partly to impose order on this arrangement that the first college, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, to accommodate a Master and fourteen impoverished Fellows on a site beside the Trumpington Gate. Peterhouse established a model — a self-governing community of scholars with its own endowment, hall, and chapel — that every subsequent college would follow.

Over the next three centuries, another fifteen colleges were established. Clare College was founded in 1326 by Lady Elizabeth de Clare; Pembroke College in 1347 by Marie de St Pol, Countess of Pembroke; Corpus Christi in 1352 by the town guilds — the only Cambridge college founded by townspeople rather than royalty, clergy, or nobility. King's Hall, established by Edward II in 1317 to supply recruits for the higher civil service, would later be absorbed into Trinity. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, founded Christ's College in 1505 and St John's College in 1511, endowing both with generous bequests that made them among the wealthiest foundations in the university.

Henry VI and the Chapel

The most ambitious act of royal patronage in the university's history came from Henry VI, who in 1441 founded King's College as the university counterpart to Eton College, which he had established the previous year. Henry was nineteen years old. To clear the site for his college, he exercised a form of compulsory purchase across the centre of medieval Cambridge, demolishing houses, shops, lanes, wharves, and a parish church between the river and the high street. His original plan envisaged a Provost and twelve scholars — the number of the apostles — but he soon revised his ambitions upward. His foundation charter provided for seventy scholars, to be drawn exclusively from Eton.

The foundation stone of the chapel was laid by the king himself on the Feast of Saint James, 25 July 1446, to a design by the master mason Reginald Ely. Henry intended a building on the scale of a cathedral choir, without equal in beauty anywhere in the kingdom. The Wars of the Roses interrupted construction when Henry was deposed in 1461; the masons set down their tools and went home. Building resumed fitfully under Richard III, and the first five bays were roofed in timber and put into daily use. It was Henry VII who visited in 1506 and paid for work to restart on a grand scale, and his executors who contributed a further five thousand pounds for the vaulting. The master mason John Wastell designed and completed the fan vault — the largest in the world — in just three years, between 1512 and 1515. Henry VIII added the Renaissance rood screen in 1532 to celebrate his marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the great Flemish stained-glass windows were completed by 1531. A century after its foundation stone, King's College Chapel was recognised as one of the finest late medieval buildings in Europe.

The Reformation, Trinity, and Newton

In 1536, Henry VIII issued injunctions that transformed the university: the Faculty of Canon Law was dissolved, the study of scholastic philosophy was forbidden, and the colleges redirected their curricula toward mathematics, the classics, and scripture. A decade later, in 1546, Henry founded Trinity College by merging the older King's Hall and Michaelhouse with several smaller hostels, creating what would become the largest and wealthiest college in Cambridge. Trinity alone has produced thirty-four Nobel laureates — more than most countries.

It was at Trinity, in private rooms overlooking the Great Court, that Isaac Newton conducted much of the experimental work that would lay the foundations of modern physics and mathematics. Newton arrived as an undergraduate in 1661, was elected a Fellow in 1667, and held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics from 1669 to 1702. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, was among the most consequential works of science ever written.

The English Civil War brought disruption to the university. Oliver Cromwell, himself a graduate of Sidney Sussex College, used King's College Chapel as a drill hall for his troops, though he is said to have given orders that the building be spared destruction. Several colleges were garrisoned, and the university's loyalties were divided. The Restoration brought renewed stability and royal patronage, and Cambridge reaffirmed its position at the centre of English intellectual life.

The Cavendish and the Age of Science

Physics was not taught as a full university subject at Cambridge until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1871, the university established the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics, and James Clerk Maxwell — already distinguished for his work on the nature of light and the kinetic theory of gases — was elected the first professor. The Cavendish Laboratory, funded by William Cavendish, seventh Duke of Devonshire, who served as Chancellor of the university, opened on the New Museums Site in 1874. It was named not for the Duke but for his kinsman Henry Cavendish, the eighteenth-century chemist and physicist.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary concentrations of scientific achievement in history. J.J. Thomson discovered the electron at the Cavendish in 1897. Ernest Rutherford, who succeeded Thomson as Cavendish Professor, split the atom and laid the groundwork for nuclear physics. In February 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson, working in the Medical Research Council Unit housed within the Cavendish, determined the double-helix structure of DNA — a discovery that founded the modern science of molecular biology. As of 2019, thirty Cavendish researchers have been awarded Nobel Prizes, and the laboratory's discoveries include the electron, the neutron, and the structure of DNA.

The university's scientific tradition extends far beyond the Cavendish. Charles Darwin, who read for an ordinary degree at Christ's College in the 1820s, produced work that transformed biology. Charles Babbage, a Peterhouse and Trinity man, developed the concept of the digital computer. John Maynard Keynes, educated at King's, revolutionised economics. Frederick Sanger, a graduate of St John's and Fellow of King's, remains one of only four individuals to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes. In total, 126 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to members of the University of Cambridge — more than any other university in the world.

Women and the Modern University

For more than six centuries, Cambridge was an institution for men alone. The first step toward change came in 1869, when Emily Davies founded Girton College — initially at Hitchin, moving to its present site in 1873 — as a residential college for women. Newnham College followed in 1872. Women were permitted to attend lectures and sit examinations, but they were not awarded full degrees; instead, they received only titular certificates. It was not until 1948 that Cambridge finally agreed to confer degrees upon women, making it one of the last universities in Britain to do so. In 1972, the men's colleges began to admit women, and by the 1980s the transition was effectively complete. Today there are no single-sex colleges at Cambridge, and the university enrols more than twenty-four thousand students across thirty-one colleges.

The collegiate system remains the distinguishing feature of a Cambridge education. Each college is a self-governing institution with its own endowment, admissions, and domestic arrangements, providing not only accommodation but the small-group supervisions that are the heart of the teaching method. The most recently founded college is Robinson, established in 1979; the most recent to achieve full college status is Homerton, in 2010. Between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and that of Downing in 1800, no new college was established — a gap of two hundred and four years.

Cambridge and the Wider World

The influence of the University of Cambridge extends across every field of human endeavour. Fourteen British prime ministers were educated here, as were the Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru and the Singaporean founding father Lee Kuan Yew. John Milton and William Wordsworth were Cambridge men; so were E.M. Forster, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. The annual Boat Race against Oxford, first contested in 1829 and held annually since 1856, remains one of the most watched sporting events in Britain. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast live from King's College Chapel on Christmas Eve, has been heard by millions of listeners worldwide since the BBC first transmitted it in 1928.

Among the university's graduates are men and women who went on to shape the legal, scientific, and commercial life of the colonies. Thomas Hawkins, who read law at Cambridge before emigrating to Van Diemen's Land in 1810, served as legal adviser to the Lieutenant-Governor and as a magistrate of the Supreme Court, helping to shape the legal framework of the young colony. William Edward Jeffries Jr., who commenced his law studies at Cambridge in February 1838 and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in June 1841, returned to Tasmania to expand the family estate and business empire established by his father. Horatio Blythe, who served as Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1838 to 1848, was among the scholars who shaped the curriculum under which both Jeffries and his contemporary Frederick Hayward — later Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales — received their legal training. The university's reach, from the Fens of Cambridgeshire to the settlements of the southern hemisphere, is a measure of the institution's enduring capacity to form minds and direct careers across the world.