The University Arrives

The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 by academics fleeing Oxford.

Indeed, a woman was murdered in Oxford that year, and the town authorities seized 2 scholars and hanged them - without consulting the Church.

Scholars answered to the law of the Church while townspeople answered to the law of the land, and cases like this one exposed how uneasily the two sat together - a friction that came to be known as "town vs gown".

The town was also in conflict with King John - so fearing for their lives, many Oxford scholars fled.

A few came to Cambridge, attracted by the scholarly reputation of Ely Cathedral, and founded Cambridge University.

Cambridge thus became the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world (after Oxford, which began teaching in 1096), and the third-oldest in continuous operation in the world, after Bologna and Oxford.

A chancellor was appointed 15 years later, and a few years later King Henry III established that the university had standing over the town it had settled in.

There were no colleges yet, so teaching happened wherever it could - hired halls, rented rooms, hostels and churches around the town.

The curriculum consisted of the 7 liberal arts : first the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, then the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, and after those the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine.

Everything was in Latin, and theology sat at the top of the hierarchy, where it stayed for centuries.

Fun fact : the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge is thus not a later invention but the actual founding condition of the younger university.