Cambridge loved grandeur, but it also loved a paper trail. The Senate House began in seventeen twenty-two to James Gibbs’s design, and the records still name the crew. Building stone came from Christopher Cass, a mason in London. The Senate approved the roof contract for Thomas Phillips and Benjamin Timbrell in January of seventeen twenty-three to twenty-four. James Essex senior made the sash windows, then the wainscoting, those wooden wall panels, while Cass laid the marble floor. In October of seventeen twenty-five, the university ordered Isaac Mansfield to do the plain plastering, and G Artari with J Bagutti to add the ceiling ornaments. The whole thing cost thirteen thousand pounds, with thousands more for the site and extras... something like a few million pounds in modern terms. Gibbs, the architect, received one hundred and fifty-one pounds, roughly tens of thousands today. Designers have been underpaid for quite a while.
Behind it, the Old Schools handled the university’s real obsession: administration. The bedells were ceremonial officers, but not just decorative ones. Cambridge elected two, one for theology and canon law, meaning church law, and one for arts. They attended disputations, formal academic debates, and university ceremonies. The proctors did the harder policing: they controlled lectures, disputations, and inceptions, formal degree acts, punished rule-breakers, and even kept the university chest and the cautions, which were financial deposits.
Their silver maces, those heavy staffs of office, appear in university use as early as twelve seventy-six. The three still carried today came from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, chancellor from sixteen twenty-six to sixteen twenty-eight.
And then the town snapped. During the Cambridge Peasants’ Revolt, the fifteenth to sixteenth of June, thirteen eighty-one, townspeople stormed Great Saint Mary’s up the passage, seized the university’s bulls and charters, and burned them in the market. They also took Corpus Christi’s plate and founding charter from the porters’ lodge and threw those on too. Margery Starre scattered the ashes “to the four winds,” crying, “away with the learning of clerks, away with it!”
On the south side here, Caius set out his gates of Humility, Virtue, and Honour. Graduates still pass through the Gate of Honour for their degrees... proof that Cambridge never really stopped turning paperwork into theater.
Step out from the east end of the passage onto Senate House Hill. The wide open ground just ahead of you, beyond Great Saint Mary’s Church, is Cambridge Market Square - the next stop.
