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Early History

Before the University existed Cambridge was the lowest reliable fording (crossing) place of the River Cam, or Granta. In the 1st century BC an Iron Age Belgic tribe built a settlement on what is now Castle Hill. Around AD40 the Romans took over the site and it became the crossing point for the Via Devana which linked Colchester with Lincoln and beyond. After the Romans' departure the Saxons inhabited the town. In the 11th century, the Normans under William the Conqueror built a castle here to help in the fight against the Saxon rebel, Hereward the Wake who was based in the Fens at Ely.

The University Begins

The city gained in importance due to the arrival of scholars from Oxford in 1209. Peterhouse, the first of the University colleges, was founded in 1284 soon to be followed by Clare (1326), Pembroke (1347), Gonville and Caius (1348), Trinity Hall (1350) and Corpus Christi (1352). Ten more colleges were founded during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Christ's (1505), King's (1441), Queens' (1448), Jesus (1496), St. John's (1511), Trinity (1546), and Emmanuel (1584). There are now 31 colleges in the town with King's boasting the town's most fabulous building, King's College Chapel, completed in the 15th century.

Maturity

In the 16th century, some of the most famous Protestant preachers were educated here, including Cranmer and Latimer, leading the reformation of the Church. By the 18th century the University was better associated with drunkenness than its now famous academic record. In the 19th century the population of the town quadrupled due to the arival of the railways and the University prospered once more. Some of the colleges became fabulously wealthy by the acqusition of land and to this day some rank among the richest non-commercial institutions in Britain.

The Present Day

By the 20th century, the equality of the sexes was having a profound effect on the thinking of the University and it, along with the city, has now become a high-tech centre for computer and bioscience innovation. To continue the advances of Crick and Watson who discovered DNA at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1962, much of the human genome has been mapped by scientists from the town. The splitting of the atom by Rutherford was conducted here, too. Numerous notable scholars have been educated in the town including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Salman Rushdie, EM Forster, JM Keynes, Frank Whittle, William Wordsworth, Oliver Cromwell, Stephen Hawking....Ninety Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scholars of the University, more than for any other University in the world.