Besides the Carmelites and Austinfriars there were the Bethlemite friars in Trumpington street and Our-Lady friars by the Castle; the former could be distinguished at a distance by the red star of five rays on their cloaks with a sky blue circle in its centre--the star of Bethlehem; but both these communities wore the habit--black over white--of the Dominicans. Scholars poor and rich jostled each other in the schools and in the public ways, wearing the long and short gowns of the day, the _cote_ which had just come into fashion, or the habit of their order. There were doctors in the three faculties wearing scarlet gowns and the doctor's bonnet or _camaurum_, and there was a sprinkling of doctors and of students from Orléans, Padua, Pavia, and Paris.
A large number of the inmates of the colleges round, and of the scholars walking the streets, wear the clerical tonsure, many scores have the coronal tonsure of the friar--yet the feeling in the air is secular. Cambridge has always suggested a certain detachment; neither zeal--perfervid or sour--nor the pressure of tradition upon living thought has had its proper home there. It has not represented monastic seclusion nor hieratic exclusion, and it did so at this moment of its history less than ever. The dawn of the coming renascence shone upon the walls at which we have been looking. The modern world has been born of the birth-pangs which have since convulsed Europe, and the walls which were then big with the future are now big with the past. But it is the greatness of Cambridge that amidst the multiple suggestiveness of its ancient halls of learning, tyranny of the past has no place. About it the dawn of the renascence still lingers; and the early morning light which presided at its birth still defines the shadows and seems to temper the noon-day heat, as light and shade alternate in its history.
We have taken it for granted that Chaucer was walking the streets of Cambridge with us. We have no direct evidence as to where Chaucer studied; but our indirect evidence is sufficient. In the "Canterbury Tales" Chaucer introduces us to two Cambridge scholars and to a clerk of Oxenforde; and if one considers what would nowadays be called the internal evidence of the _Reeve's Tale_ it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Chaucer was at Cambridge. How else should he know Trumpington so well? Its brook, its bridge, its mill, its fen? He knows about the "gret colledge" which had risen a few years previously; he knows that its Master is called "the warden," that its scholars are also its "fellaws." He has learnt there the dialect of Yorkshiremen, and reproduces not only their turns of speech but characteristic terms--as _bete_, _kime_, _jossa_--in the East Anglian dialect. If we turn to the _Miller's Tale_ all this local colouring is to seek. A "clerke of Oxenforde," indeed, was no unfamiliar figure in the xiv century, especially to a Londoner. Familiarity with the aspect of Cambridge and its neighbourhood was a very different matter.