Jesus and St John's Colleges

The next 2 colleges were both built on top of religious houses that had been shut down to make room for them - and both of them decades before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

Jesus College was founded in 1496 by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, on the site of the nunnery of St Radegund.

Alcock had prepared the ground carefully : in 1487 he declared the 11 nuns unfit to elect their own prioress and installed his own nominee, and 9 years later the community was down to 2.

Rather than knock the nunnery down, he converted it - which is why Jesus keeps more medieval fabric than any other college in Cambridge.

Its chapel is the nunnery church, parts of which go back to the 12th century, and it is the oldest university building still in use.

Famous alumni include Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the Book of Common Prayer, and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

St John's followed in 1511, on the site of the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist, which was dissolved for the purpose - its last inhabitants leaving Cambridge for Ely in March of that year.

It was founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII's grandmother, who had already founded Christ's College in 1505 and whose portcullis badge is carved throughout King's College Chapel.

She died before either college was finished, and it took her confessor John Fisher 2 years of negotiation with Henry VIII to unlock the money for this.

Some of its most famous alumni include Lord Burghley (chief minister to Elizabeth I), abolitionist William Wilberforce, poet William Wordsworth, astronomer John Herschel, physicist Paul Dirac, mathematician Roger Penrose, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and Douglas Adams (who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)!

Fun fact : the rivalry between Trinity and St John's is one of the most famous in Cambridge.

The Boat Race is said to come out of this rivalry : when students of St John's put their first 8-oared boat on the Cam in 1825 (the Lady Margaret, after their founder Margaret Beaufort), Trinity bought one of their own (the King Edward) to race them.