Look at Corpus Christi, and you’re looking at something rare in Cambridge: a college the town built for itself. Not a king’s project, not a bishop’s vanity. In thirteen forty-nine, as the Black Death tore through Cambridge, three guildsmen - William Horwode, Henry de Tangmere, and John Hardy - founded the Guild of Corpus Christi. Later that same year, they joined it to the older Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which the plague had devastated. Their patron, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, asked King Edward the Third for a licence to found a college, and in thirteen fifty-two the crown agreed.
What rose here was modest, almost stubbornly so. Old Court began at once, and by thirteen fifty-six it could house the Master and two fellows. It claims to be the oldest continually inhabited courtyard in the country... a claim Merton College in Oxford disputes, because of course it does. But Corpus kept Old Court for a very practical reason: it stayed poor. The college could not afford grand replacement buildings, so these medieval rooms survived. Some still keep their original stone sills and jambs, grooves that once held oil-soaked linen in place of glass. Medieval glazing, Cambridge style: functional, smoky, and probably not draft-proof.
For more than two hundred years, Corpus had no chapel at all, so students worshipped next door at St Bene’t’s. College life here also rested on people who rarely make the postcards. In the Chapter Book of sixteen forty-five, the college ordered, “Bedmakers to be instructed that on Sundays they should make haste so that they can attend services at their churches.” Make haste, then haul coal, carry water, light fires, wake students, bring breakfast. Even the waiters in Hall were bedmakers, in bonnets and little shawls. Much later, Phyliss Creek kept Number Seven for twenty-one years, conscientious and house-proud.
And then the sting in the tale: in thirteen eighty-one, Corpus itself was caught up in the town revolt, and its plate and founding charter went into the flames too. A generation after local craftsmen created this college, the town already saw it as part of the university establishment. That, in one brutal bonfire, is gown and town parting company.
Walk back out onto Trumpington Street and turn left, heading south. After about seventy metres the open court on your right, with the iron railings and the lawn behind, is St Catharine’s main entrance - the next stop.
