The earliest studies of the university followed the usual pattern for medieval universities, with a particular emphasis on canon law, a trend encouraged by the foundation in Cambridge of large Franciscan and Dominican houses, to be followed by several other orders.
In 1381, in a manifestation of the Peasants’ Revolt, the townspeople of Cambridge made assaults on both the university and the colleges, notably on Corpus Christi College which, uniquely, had been founded by the amalgamated town gilds of St. Mary and of Corpus Christi (in 1352). This resulted, ironically, in royal charters greatly increasing the university’s dominance of the town, including the oversight of weights and measures and other day-to-day business.
Although royal and papal recognition came earlier to Cambridge than it did to Oxford, Cambridge was certainly the lesser of the two universities until the English Reformation in the sixteenth century. Cambridge men were dominant in both church and state under Henry VIII (e.g., Thomas Cranmer) and Elizabeth I (e.g., William Cecil and John Whitgift), but during the English Civil War (1642–1649), when the royal court removed to Oxford, the balance was reversed.
Academically, Cambridge’s eminence was enhanced in the early eighteenth century by the pupils of Isaac Newton, and for more than a century thereafter mathematics was the prime field of study and the only subject in which examinations for degrees were conducted. In the nineteenth century degrees became available in law (1816) and classics (1824), and later in the century other honors courses were introduced, natural sciences first, then moral sciences (philosophy) and gradually others. Although students of the natural sciences were at first few, it was this school that from the 1870s raised Cambridge to the status of a world-class university, with researchers coming from far and wide to work with the physicists James Clerk Maxwell (Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, 1871–1879) and his successors J. W. Strutt, Baron Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, and Ernest Rutherford. Since Thomson (1906), Cambridge has been home to some thirty Nobel laureates, including Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of DNA, and since Rayleigh and Kelvin (1902) some forty holders of the British Order of Merit. A roll call of the many earlier luminaries connected with Cambridge must include the teachers Erasmus of Rotterdam, St. John Fisher, Roger Ascham, Sir John Cheke, Richard Bentley, William Whewell, Lord Acton, Sir James Frazer, G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, F. R. Leavis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and the alumni Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, and the poets, to name but a few, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Coleridge, and William Wordsworth.
Barring several false starts in the medieval period and one (Durham) in the seventeenth century, Cambridge and Oxford were the only English (as opposed to British) universities until the 1840s. Given that, they have naturally been the universities of choice for long-established families and schools, and although there was always a variable amount of scope for the admission of the less affluent, in recent years the catchment of both universities has expanded vastly. Except in the sixteenth century, Oxford historically maintained closer relations with church and state (thus sending out more future prime ministers and archbishops), but Cambridge was never very far behind, sending out mathematicians and poets, as well as competing with Oxford for places in the civil service, seats in Parliament, and other influential positions. Some of this perception of prestige continues today, but it has been amply supported by recent national and international rankings that attract students, especially graduate students, from all over the world.
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