These
towels were for use _before_ dinner; _at_ dinner the fellows of
Christ's in 1575 were provided with table-napkins. If they wiped
their fingers on the table-cloth they were fined a penny. The temptation
must have been strong at times, for _no forks were in use_--not even
the iron-pronged forks which some of us remember in hall in our
young days. The oldest piece of furniture in the college halls were
the stocks, set up for the correction of refractory undergraduates
who should have been guilty of the enormity of bathing in the Cam
or other grave offence and scandal.
Of the amusements indulged in by the undergraduates at Cambridge in
the early times we hear but little. The probability seems to be that
they had to manage for themselves as best they could. Gradually the
bowling-green, the butts for archery, and the tennis-courts were
provided by several colleges. Tennis seems to have been the rage at
Cambridge during the sixteenth century, and the tennis-courts became
sources of revenue in the Elizabethan time, It is clear that by this
time the old severity and rigour had become relaxed, the colleges had
become richer, and in another hundred years the combination-rooms had
become comfortable and almost luxurious before the seventeenth
century closed. In Queens' College in 1693 there were actually
_flowers_ in the combination-room, and at Christ's College in
1716 a card-table was provided "in the fellows' parlour.
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