Clare College is the second oldest of Cambridge’s thirty-one colleges (its foundation having been anticipated, among surviving institutions, only by Peterhouse). It was founded in 1326, and generously endowed a few years later by Lady Elizabeth de Clare (Lady de Burgh), a granddaughter of King Edward I (1272-1307). In 1336 King Edward III (1327-77) granted licence ‘to his cousin Elizabeth de Burgo’ to establish a collegium (the word originally meant ‘a corporation of scholars’, not, as in modern English ‘college’, the buildings in which the scholars were housed); although it was in the first instance referred to unspecifically as ‘the House of the University of Cambridge’, it became known as Clare Hall as early as 1339 (the present simplified title, ‘Clare’, dates from 1856). The original endowment consisted of estates at Great Gransden and Duxford, and provided for the maintenance of a maximum of fifteen ‘Scholars’ (subsequently to be called ‘Fellows’), of whom no more than six were bound strictly by priestly orders.

Provision was also made for ten ‘poor scholars’ (pauperes or ‘students’), who were to be maintained by the college up to the age of twenty. In 1359, a year before her death, Lady Elizabeth de Clare promulgated a set of statutes by which the new college was to be governed. The remarkably enlightened attitude to learning and university education in these statutes has guided the college for nearly seven centuries: ‘the knowledge of letters ... when it hath been found, it sendeth forth its students, who have tasted of its sweetness, fit and proper members in God’s Church and the State, to rise to diverse heights, according to the claim of their deserts.’

The history of Clare in its earliest days in the later fourteenth century is not well recorded (a fire in 1521 destroyed most of the college’s early muniments), and we have little more than a list of names of those who were the college’s Masters, of whom the first was one Walter de Thaxted. During the fifteenth century, however, we know that the college fought successfully to remain independent of the jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop of Ely (the independence being eventually settled in 1430 by the so-called ‘Barnwell Process’). In 1439, a generous bequest by William Bingham provided for the maintenance of a chaplain and twenty-four scholars housed in what was called ‘God’s House’ (the location of which lies beneath the present Old Schools); so, within a century or so of its foundation, Clare Hall had begun to grow modestly in size.

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