At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their
favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming
that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It
is almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was
adopted very gradually.
Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older
universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are
themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly
be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding
of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an
attempt to supersede them.
More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first
necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this
being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in
Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was
consecrated in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess
of Pembroke in 1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the
precincts of her new college; and, so far from these convenient
adjuncts to a collegiate establishment having been considered an
essential in early times, no less than eight of the college chapels
at Cambridge and four at Oxford date from a time after the
Reformation. In the fourteenth century and later the young scholars,
as a rule, attended their parish church.
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