It has been said that the University of Cambridge may actually trace its beginnings to a crime committed in 1209.
It was said that two Oxford scholars had been convicted of the murder of a woman and were hanged by the town authorities with the assent of the King.
In protest at the hanging, the University of Oxford went into voluntary suspension.
Scholars then migrated to a number of other locations, including the pre-existing school at Cambridge.
By 1226 theese scholars had started offering courses of study, and named a Chancellor to lead them.
In 1231, Cambridge’s status was enhanced by a charter from King Henry II of England which awarded the ius non trahi extra (a right to discipline its own members) plus some exemption from taxes.
In 1534, a royal charter gave the university the right to print books.
Cambridge’s colleges were originally an incidental feature of the system.
No college is as old as the university itself.
The colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars.
There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels.
The hostels were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some indicators of their time.
Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse in 1284, Cambridge’s first college.
Many colleges were founded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but colleges continued to be established throughout the centuries to modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and Downing in 1800.
In medieval times, colleges were founded so that their students would pray for the souls of the founders.
For that reason they were often associated with chapels or abbeys.
A change in the colleges’ focus occurred in 1536 with the dissolution of the monasteries.
King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law and to stop teaching scholastic philosophy.
In response, colleges changed their curricula away from canon law and towards the classics, the Bible, and mathematics.
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