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8 January 2025

I is for … Inscriptions

Inscribed stones and plaques can be seen all around the college, celebrating such things as Emmanuel worthies and benefactors, the planting of notable trees, and the completion of new college buildings. An example of the latter is the Latin datestone set into the library façade (pictured). This records, a touch cryptically, the building’s completion in the 325th year of the college’s foundation (i.e.1909). Prior to the twentieth century, nearly all the college’s inscriptions consisted of memorial tablets or gravestones, and were confined to the chapel and its cloister. There was one exception, however: the Latin epigraph displayed on the imposing stone archway housing the main college entrance gates, in Emmanuel Street. Shortly before the college’s 1587 dedication feast, at which the Founder, Sir Walter Mildmay, was to be present, workmen were paid to take ‘downe the great gates and sett them up agayne’. There is no mention of the inscription, though, so it is not certain whether it was installed then, or subsequently. According to Francis Blomefield’s 1751 work, Collectanea Cantabrigiensa, the wording of the inscription was: Sacrae Theologiae Studiosis, posuit Gualterus Mildmaius Ao. Dne. 1584 (‘Founded by Walter Mildmay for the study of sacred theology in the year of our Lord 1584’). When the main college entrance was translocated to St Andrew’s Street in the 1770s, the original gateway presumably became largely redundant, but is thought to have survived until 1824, when New Court was constructed. The inscription appears to have then perished with the rest of the archway. One day, if the opportunity arises, it could perhaps be carved anew somewhere in college.

I is for … Inventories

Any large institution needs to know what it owns. Four years after Emmanuel’s foundation, the following payment appears in the college accounts: ‘For two paper… inventorie books for the College - vs iiid’. The earliest inventory was made in 1589, immediately after these books had been purchased. It comprised a list of moveable goods kept in the chapel, hall, parlour and kitchen complex. Similar room-by-room inventories continued to be made for some years, but as the college grew, so did its collection of valuables, and before long it became necessary to have separate listings of things like library books and silverware. These early college inventories are both fascinating and frustrating. They record many objects that have since been lost, sold, or melted down and re-fashioned. We read, for instance, of the ‘doble gylt’ cup used at high table by the first Master, the dozen ‘knopt spoones with Lions head att the end’, the stained-glass panels in the chapel windows showing ‘the Queenes armes’, the ‘movable hearth of Ironn’ in the dining hall, and the ‘Celestiall maps in frames’ hung in the library. Conversely, the inventories omit many things that were certainly here.  The celebrated Founder’s Cup, for instance, is not mentioned until 1622, but only because the treasury, where it was kept, was not included in the room listings before that date. Similarly, a good many college paintings are not recorded until the first comprehensive picture inventory was compiled in the late eighteenth century, even though some of them had certainly been in college ownership for many years. Emmanuel has a particularly fine series of early library book inventories (a detail from one is pictured), which record an impressive range and quantity of scholarly works. What the inventories don’t show, of course, is how many students actually read any of the books!

Amanda Goode, College Archivist

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