Death of a Scholar (56 page)

John Meryfeld was a famous physician at about this time, while William Holm held a royal appointment as surgeon. So did Master Lawrence, one of the medics who tended Queen Isabella on her deathbed in August 1358. She died shortly after swallowing a purge made up by Thomas Eyer the apothecary, although there is nothing to suggest that this was anything more than coincidence.

Colleges were different from hostels, because they were endowed – they had a pot of money at their fingertips that made them more stable than those that relied solely on fluctuating student fees. As such they tended to have a greater say in University affairs, although some hostels were exceptions to the rule. There was a little flurry of new Colleges in Cambridge in the mid-fourteenth century, with Pembroke (Valence Marie), Gonville Hall, Trinity Hall and Corpus Christi (Bene’t) founded between 1347 and 1352. Then there was a significant hiatus, and no more appeared until Magdalene in 1428.

There was never a Winwick Hall in Cambridge, although there was an influential clerk named John Winwick who founded a College, named after himself, in Oxford. It was one of two pre-1400 Colleges in that University which failed to survive, although it might have done had John Winwick not died before matters were fully settled.

John Winwick was an extremely able public servant and a noted pluralist, both of which served to make him very rich. He began as a lowly clerk from Huyten (Uyten), now in Merseyside, but quickly climbed the slippery pole until he became one of Edward III’s most trusted administrators. He was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1355, a post he held until his death in 1360. He was a canon in nine different cathedrals, not to mention accruing lucrative posts in York, Clitheroe, Shrewsbury and Ripon.

Winwick College was for lawyers, and the founder’s will stipulated that the funding was to come from the church at Ratcliffe on Soar, the title of which the College was to hold. The Pope failed to ratify the arrangement, and Winwick’s executors did not press the matter, perhaps because they wanted the tithes for themselves. Had it survived, Winwick College might have been as much a household name as any of the medieval foundations in Oxford and Cambridge, but it faded into oblivion from lack of funds, and is now no more than a footnote in the history books.