We are clearly both federal universities, with great power and individuality residing in the colleges. I do not think such a degree of decentralization exists in any other geographically concentrated university in the world. California, yes, even London, but they are not concentrated geographically, and certainly not Harvard or Yale, which are. Harvard houses are merely dormitories with resonant names. Yale has colleges, but they are concerned only with living and not with teaching. Oxford and Cambridge are both highly collegiate universities, some would say Oxford marginally more so than Cambridge, in spite of the longer-term and more full-time nature of the Oxford Vice-Chancellorship (until 1991 when Cambridge accomplished a leap-frog in this respect), because the colleges in Oxford appoint many of those who are subsequently paid by the university. This being so, however, it is surprising that the history of both of them contradicts the normal pattern of federations, where, as in America, Switzerland, Australia, the component states came first and the federal authority was very much an afterthought. In Cambridge as in Oxford, on the other hand, the university was there nearly a century before the first colleges and it was not indeed until a good three hundred years after the beginning of the universities that the colleges came into their full insolent authority.
This was for the very good reason that the most lordly of them did not exist. Cambridge towards the end of the fifteenth century was a university almost as old as Harvard is today, was rapidly catching up on Oxford both in numbers and fame, but was still without Trinity (except in vestigial form) or St John’s, as well of course as the late sixteenth-century trio of Caius, Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex, and with King’s looking no more than a muddy building site alongside a gaunt and roofless shell which was to become the chapel. Yet it was undoubtedly a much better period for Cambridge than for Oxford, where the mid-fifteenth-century foundation of Magdalen and All Souls did nothing to arrest a half-century of decline. Erasmus was at Queens’ (Cambridge) for some time around 1510, and much though he complained about his living conditions and the climate, although I cannot think that he had been used to much better in his Low Countries, his presence was both an indication of Cambridge’s rising prestige and a formative influence on teaching developments. Just as the college as a community for living was an Oxford idea, stemming essentially from Merton, which spread to Cambridge at the beginning of the fourteenth century, so the college as an institution for teaching was a Cambridge idea which spread to Oxford at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Then in the second quarter of that century there came the outbreak of grandeur in both universities in the form of Trinity here and Christ Church at Oxford. Christ Church was born only after two false attempts, which made it first Cardinal College, then King Henry VIII College and only finally Christ Church, all within thirty years. It is to the best of my belief the only college in the world that has a cathedral tucked away in its purlieus. But however firmly it may have the diocesan church in its embrace it has not got the university in this position. The original intention was perhaps precisely this - ‘a college which when finished will equal the rest of Oxford’ was an early statement of aim. It has never quite achieved that, although it has achieved the worldly feat of producing more Prime Ministers than the rest of the university put together. So has Trinity. Christ Church indeed in some ways resembles a bit of Cambridge in Oxford. It was wholly appropriate that its first dean - Cox - should have been imported from Cambridge. Perhaps for this reason it is more detached than is Trinity. Trinity may be uncomfortably large and rich for the rest of the university - like a province of an African state with an unbalancing amount of the minerals and therefore the wealth, a Katanga or a Biafra, although not I hope a candidate for secession, but it is also part of the core of the university and therefore its middle kingdom. Christ Church, both geographically and psychologically, is much more like a ship - some would say a luxury liner - moored off shore. However, they have both exhibited a worldly exuberance and physical splendour which make them suitable monuments to their royal founder as well as major moulders of the shapes of their universities.
In spite of these great developments the sixteenth century was a pretty rough time in Cambridge. Five of its nine Chancellors were executed, including the great Fisher in 1535. This was a degree of hazard to which my predecessors have never been exposed, which is surprising for, more recently, the Oxford tradition has favoured the choice, after contest, of more controversial Chancellors than has been the Cambridge habit.