England

Matriculation

It was on a re­ally cold Sun­day, and rain­ing pretty hard. When we ar­rived, I signed a bunch of pa­pers for porters and ad­min­is­tra­tion, re­ceived a bunch of pa­pers, and bought a col­lege gown. The Cor­pus Christi gowns are, as An­drew said, more like a cape with arm­holes. The gown goes to about my knees, but are one‐size‐fits‐all, so it was much stranger look­ing at the new Or­gan Scholar who was at least a foot taller than me and 40 pounds lighter. They are black with vents on the sleeves, with one strip of vel­vety col­lar.

Af­ter the com­ple­tion of pa­per­work, there was tea in the Old Com­mon Room, which is the com­mon room for Fel­lows. Af­ter that, they took a pic­ture of all of the fresh­ers out­side be­cause it had stopped rain­ing; how­ever, it was still quite cold. Sev­eral fresh­ers at­trib­uted colds to the event af­ter the fact due to the long pe­riod of time spent wait­ing while names were called out so that we could be arranged in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der, for easy cap­tion­ing. Af­ter the pic­ture, all guests were asked to leave, and we went into the hall to sign “the big book”. Af­ter a short break most of the fresh­ers at­tended a lovely, op­tional, Even­song ser­vice where they sang Pur­cell and Mon­teverdi and read the liturgy. The Chapel was so full that they had to bring in ex­tra benches and they ran out of ser­vice pam­phlets. At the end, the ju­nior or­gan scholar, a fresher read­ing his­tory, played a lengthy and dif­fi­cult pre­lude for the re­ces­sion. The most amaz­ing part was that he has only been play­ing the or­gan for three years. Af­ter Even­song, we went to the s Lodge, which is lo­cated in the Col­lege, for drinks. Thence we pro­ceeded to For­mal Hall, where I was seated with the other the­olo­gians be­tween the ar­chae­ol­o­gists and the Ori­en­tal stud­ies stu­dents.

Mas­ter

For­mal Hall is a sil­ver and china ser­vice meal where gowns are re­quired and the ta­bles are waited upon, in­stead of the more com­mon every­day cafe­te­ria style of the Hall. That night we were served tomato tart­let salad and duck in an or­ange and wine sauce served with some sort of French prepa­ra­tion of pota­toes; it was de­li­cious. For desert we had a slice of choco­late mousse cake with a can­died plum. I sat next to the Mas­ter’s wife and was very cor­dially in­vited to tea at the Lodge, and across from me sat An­gus, a fel­low the­olo­gian. We dis­cussed An­gus’ prospects of faith as he stud­ied re­li­gion, the en­gag­ing na­ture of this di­a­logue the only pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion for leav­ing part of my duck un­eaten!

The col­lege con­tains a lovely sil­ver col­lec­tion and a very ugly clock; along with a large wine col­lec­tion these as­sets help con­tribute to Cor­pus’ sta­tus among the top three rich­est col­leges in Cam­bridge. All other as­sets are over­whelmed, how­ever, by the mag­nif­i­cent Parker Man­u­script Li­brary where I saw the orig­i­nal draft of the 39 Ar­ti­cles, the found­ing doc­u­ment for the Church of Eng­land. A 6th Cen­tury gospel kept by the li­brary is still used at the en­throne­ment of each new Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury. I also saw a jour­nal where there were draw­ings of the first ele­phant ever to come to Eng­land (They fed the ele­phant meat, so in­stead of liv­ing the es­ti­mated hun­dred years, it died af­ter two.), sev­eral Anglo‐Saxon books, and many beau­ti­ful il­lu­mi­nated pages from the gospels. While most un­der­grad­u­ates have no need of the li­braries re­sources they are al­lowed to visit and bring guests to the li­brary at any time dur­ing of­fice hours and even to han­dle many of the books. The li­brar­ian had many in­ter­est­ing sto­ries to tell and when I asked if there was a good bi­og­ra­phy of Matthew Parker (who was the arch­bishop that gave Cor­pus all the man­u­scripts and was ap­pointed by Eliz­a­beth I to “make sure it [Protes­tantism] sticks”) that cov­ered his later life, in­cor­po­rat­ing the masses of mar­gin­a­lia in the books, he said “No, will you write one?” And turned his eye strongly on me. I thought, how­ever, that this sounded much more like an in­vi­ta­tion to be­come a Caus­abon than to be the glo­ri­ously rev­e­la­tory bi­og­ra­phy for which he hopes. How­ever, of the man­u­scripts, printed works, and many let­ters etc. kept at the li­brary, all the man­u­scripts are be­ing put on­line and can be viewed any­where in the world.

Pretty nifty. I asked if they used un­der­grad vol­un­teers. They said, …not much.

8 November 2008

Jon Kara Shields