Fit for a King

At long last, I have here Part III of the Cambridge trip, the longest and final section: Kings' College.


Front of Kings' College, or at least part of the front. It's huge!


Here is the main entrance. The college was founded by Henry VI and finished by Richard II and Henry VIII. It was built between 1441 and 1544, during the height of Gothic architecture. It took so long because the War of the Roses was going on at the time, and the builders had to keep stopping and starting.


It's a bit difficult to see, but if you look at the farthest section of the base of the building, you will notice that the stone is much lighter than all of the other base sections. This is because work had to be stopped in 1461, after this first section was built, when Henry VI was taken prisoner by the future Edward IV. The builders, hearing that the man paying the bills was no longer in a position to do so, just packed up and went home. When building got underway again, they had to get the stone from a different quarry.


The entrance to Kings' College chapel. There are tall spires going up from where the photo cuts off, much like those that can be seen in the first two photos.

A detail of the entrance to the chapel. If you click on the photo, it will enlarge. The two circular crests above the door are just a little bit different from each other. All of the emblems found on the doorways and in the chapel are Tudor symbols.


A humble side entrance. As I said before, if you click on the photos, they will enlarge and you will be able to see more carving detail. The roses are Tudor roses--a two-toned rose that combined the red rose of the House of Lancaster and the white rose of the House of York, the two major parties in the War of the Roses. The crowns are imperial crowns--notice the cross-banded top. Imperial crowns have been in use in England since Edward the Confessor (1003-1066, before the Norman Conquest). Regular English crowns are just circular, with an open top.


The front half (antechapel) of the chapel. The other half (the choir) is past the wood structure (the screen) with the organ pipes. The chapel was only intended to serve 70 or so members, but it's enormous!


A detail of the ceiling. This style is called "fan vaulting," and it is absolutely magnificent. The ceiling is 12 meters across and built with 2,000 tons of French stone. It was completed in just three years, and is still the largest fan-vaulted ceiling in the world. If you were to clamber up into the ceiling, you would encounter a timber walkway above the stone, and a layer of lead structuring above that. The backside of the stone, the part that one can see when standing on the timber walkway, is covered in coded chisel marks from the 15th-16th centuries, telling the builders how to fit all of the pieces together, much like the "assembled, then re-assembled" log homes you see today.


The Tudor crest and emblems. There is one of these under each of the stained glass windows, and there are a lot of stained glass windows. In each one, the dragon and the greyhound are just a little bit different--different stances, different facial expressions, etc. The dragon and greyhound were the animals of the Tudors until 1528, when Henry VIII changed the greyhound to a lion (because, let's face it, lions are way cooler than greyhounds). As the college wasn't finished until 1544, and the crests feature the greyhound, he must have already commissioned the carvings before he switched to using lions and didn't want to pay for new ones to be made.


As I said before, there are a lot of stained glass windows and Tudor carvings--twelve bays, to be exact. They wrap all the way around the chapel.


This is the stained glass window in the back of the chapel. Each of the windows tells a story from the bible, and each of the panels tells a different part of the story. Each window has two rows of panels. The upper row tells stories from the Old Testament, and the bottom row tells stories from the New Testament.



Here is another window. The level of detail is incredible.


A row of one of the windows on the side walls.

A close-up. The windows were commissioned and put in last, so they reflect the highest stained-glass technology of the time. Even more than that, Henry VIII commissioned glassworkers in Flanders to make the windows, as Flanders had the best glassworking in all of Europe. That's why, even though they were installed in the 1540s, the same time as the chapel was built, it's Renaissance art in a Gothic building.


Here we have a physician circumcising Jesus. Notice he is wearing spectacles. Up until this point, any visual aid came in the form of a monocle or carved stone/glass held up to the eye. Spectacles were...a spectacle. Henry VIII wanted the physician to be wearing them to show that these stained glass windows were the most modern and advanced as could be had.


A picture of the organ pipes, built between 1666 and 1668.

The back side of the organ, as viewed from the choir. Henry VIII commissioned the screen and all of the interior woodwork.


A close-up of a part of the screen. We weren't allowed to use flash photography in the chapel, so I'm afraid it turned out a bit dark, but you can still see a great deal of the level of detail put into carving the screen. Inside the arcs are carved the initials "R. A." standing for Regina Anna--Anne Boleyn. So this entire screen was built between 1533 and 1536, which, given the size of the thing and the amount of detail, is incredible.


The choir benches. Each panel has a different carving. The center panel on the right side has the emblem of Cambridge, and on the left, of Oxford--or as it is referred to in Cambridge, "the Other Place."


Behind the altar is the painting "The Adoration of the Magi" by Rubens, c. 1634. It was originally painted for a convent in Flanders. The nuns couldn't really afford the painting, so Rubens dashed the whole thing off in three weeks. The convent closed in the French Revolution, and the painting was sold to a private owner for 1/4 million pounds (about $390,000), making it the most expensive painting up until that time. The owner wanted to donate it to the Kings' College chapel, but there was a huge debate by the heads of the college as the whether the painting would dominate the space too much. Finally they agreed to accept the gift (agreed to accept it! The most expensive painting of the era!) and it has been hanging here for 40 years.



Dorm buildings and the grassy area in back of the college. The peasants were angered at having their homes and fields destroyed for the purpose of building a college, so Henry (I'm not sure which one) tried to pacify them by promising that they could let their cattle graze on the back lawn. To this day, people still let their cattle loose, just to remind everyone that they can.

One of the side-courtyards. At the end of the term, the professors post everyone's grades up on the fence. Apparently a few years ago some student, displeased with his grades and with this practice of posting them publicly, disassembled his car, reassembled it on the roof of one of those buildings, and drove around on the top of the college to show his displeasure. Another student, whose identity remains unknown to police record, scaled the front of the college one night and placed an orange traffic cone on top of one of the spires. Just about the time that the college had finally built up enough scaffolding to reach the cone, the midnight climber scaled up again, took the traffic cone, and moved it to a spire a few meters over. They had to entirely rebuild the scaffolding.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Here's Part II of the Cambridge trip: Emmanuel College. It was founded as a training college for Protestant preachers in 1584, and was all-male until 1979. It is comprised of several attached courtyards. Below is a photo of the front courtyard. Only professors, or "fellows" as they are called at Cambridge, are allowed to walk on the lawn. Everyone else has to walk around the outer walkways.

Here is one of the adjoining courtyards. The building on the left is dorm rooms, and the one on the right, that you can just see the corner of, is the library. Excepting the front courtyard, the courtyards at Emmanuel are all filled with hedge mazes and such, all organized and trimmed in traditional Tudor fashion, complete with herb gardens between the rows.

The dining hall. And to think I put up with Prentiss for two years. Not fair.

The hall is actually much longer than the picture shows, but I was forced to crop a lot of it in an effort to make my very cock-eyed photo somewhat straighter. The profs sit at the top table and get waited on.


The college chapel. The pews are built facing inward rather than forward to signify that this is an academic setting, not just a religious one.


Close-up of one of the stained glass windows in the chapel. Each of the windows depicts two people of great import who either attended or taught at Emmanuel College. Here we have Lawrence Chaderton, right, who was the first headmaster of Emmanuel. The current headmaster is Lord Wilson, Baron of Dinton. To the left is John Harvard (as in Harvard University, the U.S.'s oldest university), who was a student here. In the top right-hand corner of his picture is a ship, to signify his crossing the Atlantic to the New World and setting up Harvard University.


This is John Harvard's dorm building. As in the one he lived in, not one that's named after him. Yeah.


Part of the grounds in back of the college. The pond used to be stocked with fish, and the priests- and monks-in-training would catch fish as part of their dinners.

On the far left-hand side of the photo is the requisite Ugly Modern Sculpture that it seems no beautiful college can be without. And I thought it was just Whitman that had a hideous artwork problem.


All in all, though, a lovely Cambridge college--and one of many!

DNA, Gravity, and Other Trivialities

Here is Part I of the Cambridge trip, which covers everything except Emmanuel College and Kings' College.

The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 when riots at Oxford caused some refugee students to flee to Cambridge, then a major river port and trading town. They set up shop there, and the rest is 800-year-old-history. There are now 31 colleges in Cambridge, all under the umbrella of University of Cambridge. As we only had one day there, our tour guide was only able to take us to a few.

I'll open up with a few street scenes of Cambridge, to give you all a feel for the place:



And, of course, the other main road, the River Cam (hence Cam-bridge), where punting is a popular hobby:



Here is a photo of Mathematical Bridge and one of the buildings of Queens' College. Queens' College was commissioned by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI--the one who originally commissioned Kings' College down the road. This particular building was built in the mid-15th century.



Corpus Christi College boasts the oldest college building in Cambridge, built in the mid-1300s. The dorms originally slept eight to a room. Now they sleep one to a room. Mmm...cozy.



This, ladies and gentlemen, is a descendant of the apple tree that clonked Sir Isaac Newton on the head, leading to the discovery of gravity.



And here is the Eagle, the most famous pub in Cambridge. It is here that Watson and Crick, having just discovered DNA at Cavendish Laboratory down the road, came to celebrate. They walked in, ordered drinks, and loudly whispered, "We have discovered the secret of life!" So the patrons at the Eagle knew about DNA before the article was published in any science journal; they knew about it before most of the world's leading scientists did. Their response? Everyone just rolled their eyes and kept on drinking. Nerds.