Medieval Michaelhouse

I want to concentrate for a few minutes on two events in the history of this church: on its original foundation, whose date is totally unknown; and on its rebuilding by Hervey de Stanton, which is precisely dated to the mid- and late-1320s. The first illustrates a very common piece of history among the urban parish churches of medieval England - which we haven't any precise evidence when they were founded. The second commemorates what is most unusual about the history of this church: that it was rebuilt - not in campaign after campaign over many centuries, but all in one, and by a single benefactor, for a special purpose. He was a rich man, with access to large resources - he was chancellor of the exchequer, which in those days meant he was at the peak of the civil service, not a minister in the modem sense; and a judge and chief justice. He was one of an intimate group of royal servants who worked together in the Exchequer and the royal administration and inspired one another (we may suppose) to found colleges: John Hotham, bishop of Ely, plausibly identified by Alan Cobban as the man who guided Edward II in founding the King's Hall (not to be confused with King's College), which was expanded into Trinity College in the sixteenth century - and later presided over the great building works of the 1320s and 30s in Ely Cathedral; Walter of Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, founder of what later became Exeter College in Oxford; and Harvey de Stanton. It was a miracle that the foundations of these loyal servants of King Edward II survived the king's fall and deposition at the turn of 1326-7 - when this church was being built: Stapeldon was lynched by the London mob; Stanton fled to the safe distance of a benefice in Yorkshire, where he died in November 1327 - and only Hotham survived to make his peace with the new regime, and perhaps to help Stanton's very determined executors to complete the difficult task of building this church.

The earliest documentary evidence for St Michael's is of 1231; it describes a legal case 'which carries our knowledge back into, the twelfth century.-But its-first foundation, was probably a while before that - perhaps in the eleventh century or even in the tenth. We can tell something from analogy and context. First, the setting. Cambridge had some sort of Roman origin north of the river, and it lies, of course, where the Roman road (now running from Hills Rd and Regent Street through to the Huntingdon Road) crossed the river. But as a city it is of the mid-Saxon period; perhaps in origin a Mercian town of the eighth century; not earlier. At that time it began to grow round the market place, between the straight Roman road and the meandering High Street (as it was still called in the nineteenth century, in Trollope's novel Dr Thorne) - which we call .Trumpington St, King's Parade, Trinity St and St John's St. It was Christian from the start, and the likeliest guess for the mother church of Cambridge is ~3reat St Mary's, which sits by the market place much as Mainz Cathedral sits by the old market of that city.

Cambridge came to maturity between the tenth and the twelfth centuries; and that is revealed to us above all - as in so many English and north French towns - by the development of a great number of parish churches, originally tiny churches with tiny parishes. The most spectacular was London, with 99 parishes within the city walls - and well over 100 in London as a whole. But Cambridge, in its way, is equally remarkable; for it was still a very modest place of not much more than say 2000 inhabitants; and it boasted 15 parish churches. If you walk along the old High Street from Little St Mary's, through the Trumpington Gate (long since demolished) past Great St Mary's and St Michael's and over Magdalene Bridge up Castle Hill you will pass ten of these (by or near the Street) and the sites of two no longer visible above ground.

To cut a long story short it is evident that these tiny parish churches were the worshipping centres of small communities of neighbours, who banded together to build the first tiny churches; they were community centres, in all probability, for parties as well as services - for priest and people were very close together in such tight communities and tiny churches. The leper chapel over the railway bridge on Newmarket Rd still preserves the physiognomy of a twelfth century parish church - though it was originally a hospital: a small nave and a tiny chancel with a round-headed Norman chancel arch between.. Some were evidently grander than others: the tower of St Benet's is a spectacular survival of Anglo-Saxon Cambridge. Otherwise the most visible early remains are in two churches originally conventual - for small communities of canons regular (almost monks): St Giles of the 1090s, whose chancel arch survives in the south aisle of the massive Victorian church, a fine example of an eleventh-century arch; and the Round Church built for the canons of the Holy Sepulchre in imitation of the mother church in Jerusalem. The canons of St Giles moved to Barnwell in the 1l20s to escape the brutal soldiery of the castle; and the canons of the Sepulchre faded away, leaving their church as a parish church. St Giles and the Round Church, of the l090s and the lll0s or 20s, represent the later stages in the development of the original parish churches of Cambridge; and we may reasonably suppose that those in the centre were founded in the tenth or eleventh centuries.

We can sometimes base a reasonable guess - it can be no more - on the dedications of these parish churches. This can be hazardous, for some, like Little St Mary's - which was St Peter's till Peterhouse usurped the dedication to St Peter - have changed their dedications. But it can yield interesting results. Not far from the wharves on the Cam is the church dedicated to St Clement, a saint who (though himself a Roman) was a favourite with the Vikings, St Clement. The cult of St Edward King and Martyr was relatively short-lived: he was a boy-king murdered in 978, the cult flourished in the early and mid-eleventh century, and faded away thereafter. St Botolph's was a favourite dedication of the late eleventh century - four were built then by the gates of the City of London, one by Trumpington Gate in Cambridge. St Giles was one of the patron saints of the French, brought here by the first generation of Norman conquerors.

What of St Michael? The cult of the militant archangel flourished exceedingly between the ninth century, when Mont Saint-Michel was founded - the church and abbey of St Michael in peril of the sea on a tiny pinnacle of rock on the borders of Normandy and Brittany - and the twelfth, when the lofty abbey of the Sacra di San Michele (St Michael's Shrine) or Chiusa above Turin in Italy was at the height of its fame. Both these examples, and the pilgrimage centre at Monte Gargano in central Italy, reveal St Michael as a patron of lofty places. This hardly fits Cambridge, which has had to invent its hills (Market and Pease Hill especially) to hide its flatness. However that may be, Michael's is a common dedication in English towns of the early and mid-middle ages; many of you will know the Saxon tower of Oxford's St Michael's. To that era, perhaps to the eleventh century, perhaps to the tenth, we may conjecturally ascribe the origin of the church and parish of St Michael.

In the two or three centuries which separate the foundation from the rebuilding in the 1320s, Cambridge had been transformed into a university town. The first students -coming from a young university in Oxford whose centre lay in the church of St Mary the Virgin - made Great St Mary's the centre of their life in Cambridge. That was in or about 1209. In 1284 came the first of the colleges, Peterhouse. Already the mother and pattern of the Oxbridge colleges had been formed by a great financier and royal official, and ultimately a bishop, Walter de Merton, in Oxford. Walter de Merton united in a single institution, Merton College, three rather different ideas. He provided funds for the support of students, as others had done before him. He imitated the colleges beginning to form in the University of Paris, which were small communities of worshipping scholars. And he formed a pastoral unit. For the early colleges were both places in which students could live while studying in the university and communities of clergy living together and singing masses and saying prayers for their founders and benefactors. In this last sense there were many colleges scattered about the land unconnected with study or universities, in which just such communities of clergy were gathered for the purpose of common worship and prayers for their founders. The Oxbridge colleges, from Merton on, combined the pattern of the college which was a chantry of priests with the pattern of the college which was a community of students and scholars. Merton actually took over an existing parish church, and down to the nineteenth century Merton chapel was also the parish church of St John the Baptist - though he greatly enlarged the chancel which became the college chapel and failed to provide more than a token nave for the parishioners. This was the model all too precisely followed by the fellows of Peterhouse when they rebuilt St Peter's Church as Little St Mary's, in the 1350s.

Meanwhile, Hervey de Stanton sought to make just such a union of parish and college chapel in St Michael's, and to make it effective by himself supervising the complete rebuilding of the church. His new college was called Michaelhouse; and the domestic buildings lay along Trinity Lane, now absorbed into the southwest corner of Trinity Great Court. His college was a relatively small community all of priests; and the document appropriating St Michael's to the college makes it clear that it was the duty of the fellows of Michaelhouse to provide for the services and pastoral care of the parish and its people. It was a remarkable concept, designed to unite town and gown in a single enterprise. It also explains the unique shape of the church: almost square, no doubt, because of the shape of the site; and divided in a very unequal way, so that the college's chancel is twice the size of the parishioners' nave. The chancel aisles provided additional space for altars for the community of priests to say individual masses each day - and, according to tradition, the fellows of Gonville Hall (now Gonville and Caius College) over the road used the north aisle as their chapel till their own chapel was built and licensed in the 1390s.

We have no means of knowing how effective the union of parish and college was; but analogies suggest it may only have been a moderate success.

However, the union was in full swing in the 1490s, when the most famous of the fellows of Michaelhouse, St John Fisher, entered the college as a young man in his early twenties. When Fisher, bishop of Rochester and chancellor of the university, was executed in the first round of the Reformation in 1535, Thomas Cromwell was beginning to devise his schemes for dissolving the monasteries; by the end of 1540 the monasteries had disappeared, Cromwell himself had followed Fisher to the block; and rapacious courtiers were beginning to hint to King Henry VIII that there were still religious institutions - namely colleges - to be plucked.

The Oxbridge colleges were saved by an obscure intrigue in the royal court, one of whose central figures was the warden of the largest of the existing colleges, the King's Hall (not to be confused with King's College), John Redman. Redman combined the roles of eminent academic and academic politician with that of a courtier and canon of the newly formed chapter of Westminster Abbey. The outcome of the intrigues was that the colleges were saved. Henry VIII was greatly impressed by the creative accounting presented to him which seemed to prove that all the colleges were run on a shoestring; and his mega-ego was flattered into founding Christ Church in Oxford and converting the King's Hall (already dedicated to the Trinity) into Trinity College. In the process, it was arranged to enlarge Trinity by taking in Michaelhouse and Physwick Hostel, a large part of Gonville Hall unluckily sited in an angle of the King's Hall. Gonville Hall would have foundered but for the generosity of Dr Caius who came in the nick of time in the 1550s to refound it as Gonville and Caius College.

Meanwhile, Michaelhouse had been absorbed into Trinity, and the college of priests had disappeared. When Trinity acquired a new chapel in Mary's reign the old stalls from the King's Hall chapel were removed - and they are probably the medieval stalls which fit rather awkwardly into the chancel of St Michael's today. The intimacy with Trinity survived in some measure, though with the dissolution of Michaelhouse the inspired idea of Hervey de Stanton came to an end. But the strange shape of the church, and the beauty of his decorated architecture - well preserved, and now beautifully restored - are a monument to a noble ideal. Hervey de Stanton was one of a group of civil servants who were responsible for several of the earliest colleges in Oxford and Cambridge; and he deserves to be gratefully remembered as a man who strove to provide in a single foundation for the pastoral care of the citizens of Cambridge in the parish and