Circulation

WILLIAM HARVEY STOOD in front of the entrance to Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge High Street, towards the end of May 1593. It was a simple arch, adorned with Corinthian capitals, called Porta Humilitatis, the Gate of Humility. Walking beneath it, the new arrival was confronted by a far more imposing gate, the Gate of Virtue (Porta Virtutis), the entrance to the college courts and chambers. Harvey reached it via Tree Court, an avenue of young trees planted three decades previously.

Caius College, Cambridge (c. 1690). Tree Court can be seen on the right; the Gate of Virtue stands under the tall, central tower and offers access to the spacious quadrangle, Caius Court.

The Gate of Virtue’s facade, on its eastern side, is embellished with a series of Ionic, Corinthian and composite pilasters.

The Gate of Virtue, with its two sculptures of the Goddess Fortune: to the left of the arch she holds a palm and a laurel wreath, denoting glory, to the right a cornucopia and a bag of gold, symbolizing worldly success.

Passing under the gate, and so through into Caius Court, Harvey could look back at the gate’s less elaborate western face, which is adorned with a Latin inscription to wisdom.

In the centre of Caius Court there was a stone column, which supported a weathercock in the shape of Pegasus, the winged horse that leaped out of the spurting blood of the decapitated Medusa. The column boasted sixty sundials. There were six more sundials on the hexagonal turret of the most ornate of all the college gates – the Gate of Honour (Porta Honoris), located on the south side of the court (visible in the foreground of the engraving on the previous page). Designed in the style of a High Renaissance triumphal arch, the gate has pilasters and a pediment; it is embellished with intricate circular symbols.

The Gate of Honour marked the last stage of the intellectual journey that each Caius student was encouraged to complete. Having adopted a humble attitude to their studies on arrival at the college, and having lived virtuous and wise lives during their time there, they would be ready to receive the honour of a degree. That degree would be conferred upon them during an elaborate ceremony in the Old (examination) Schools, which lay just beyond the Gate of Honour. No student was permitted to pass under the gate before the day of his graduation.¹

The layout of the college is a symbolic fantasy designed by its second founder, the physician, anatomist and humanist John Caius (1510– 1573). Originally established in 1348 as Gonville Hall by the rector Edmund Gonville, Cambridge’s fourth oldest college was re-founded by Caius, under the name of Gonville and Caius, in 1557. On becoming master of the comparatively small Cambridge institution in 1559, Caius set about raising its status, bestowing on it twenty scholarships during his reign. Along with the famous gates, Caius also built the Court, which was named after him, and in which Harvey stood on his first day.

Apart from the Gate of Honour, the south side of Caius Court had been left entirely free from architectural features. The chapel is on the north side, rooms on the east and west, but in the south it was decreed by the college that no building block out the sun, or prevent the ‘circulation of air, which might damage the health of those dwelling [there] and speed the coming of illness and death’. The circulating air and the sunshine were especially refreshing in May, the month being renowned for the sweetness of its air, which was believed to make men merry.

On that May day in 1593, whatever merriness Harvey may have felt would have been mingled with exhaustion and hunger. After an arduous journey up from Kent, he must have been as famished as the playwright Christopher Marlowe (another Kentish-born Cantabrian, and former King’s School, Canterbury student) who had completed the same trip thirteen years previously. On arrival at his college Marlowe wolfed down a penny meal in hall consisting of beef, oatmeal porridge and a few ‘cues’ (tiny portions) of beer.

In the days following his arrival William Harvey swore the Latin Oath of Matriculation at the Old Schools: ‘The Advancement of Piety and good Learning, I will support’, he vowed, ‘So help me God, and the Holy Gospels of God.’ He then entered his name in the Lists of Matriculation as ‘Will. Harvie’ and it was also inscribed in the Caius College Book, a weighty volume, bound in leather.² ‘Wil. Harvey’, the Latin entry reads, ‘son of Thomas Harvey yeoman, from the town of Folkestone in the county of Kent, educated at Canterbury School, in his sixteenth year, has been admitted as pensionarius minor to the Scholars’ mess on the last day of May 1593 … He pays for his entrance into the college three shillings and fourpence.’

Pensionarii minores were typically the sons of clergymen, professionals, merchants, yeomen or husbandmen; they could be either Bachelors of the Arts, bursaried scholars or commoners without financial support. Harvey entered as a commoner, but was elevated to the rank of scholar in the autumn of 1593, being awarded the Matthew Parker Scholarship, which carried a considerable stipend of £3 8d per annum. The scholarship was a medical one, the very first of its kind in England, so Harvey must already have shown some promise in the field. It was awarded only to former pupils of the King’s School, Canterbury, and to natives of Kent. The successful candidate had to prove themselves to be ‘able, learned, and worthy’; he also had to meet the bizarre criteria the college demanded of all its scholars – ‘that he be neither deformed, dumb, lame, maimed, mutilated, sick, invalid or Welsh’. Thomas Harvey may have known about the Matthew Parker Scholarship, and sent his eldest son to Caius with the command to secure it.

The scholarship placed Harvey in a more comfortable position, in financial terms, as well as for the additional social distance it placed between him and the ‘sizars’, classed below the minores. Sizars were officially poor young men who boarded, lodged and learned for free, paying their way through the menial tasks they performed for the fellows and the aristocratic students. The scholarship also placed Harvey a little closer to the gentlemen of the college, classified as pensionarii majores. Yet he was still separated, by some way, from that group which included the sons of noblemen (earls, lords and barons) and knights.

Gentlemen entered the university in ever increasing numbers as the sixteenth century progressed, largely because of Elizabeth’s patronage of university men. Important positions in the church, state, professions, and even at court, were offered by the queen to graduates; by the end of her reign over half the Members of Parliament had been to Oxford or Cambridge. Many pensionarii minores were outraged by the pervasive presence of gentlemen in universities that had originally been ‘erected by their founders for poor men’s sons, whose parents were not able to bring them up unto learning … Now they have least benefit of them, by reason the rich do encroach upon them.’

Student daily life was unvarying. Having risen sometime after four in the morning to the sound of the college bell, Harvey, along with all ‘of the fellows, scholars and students, who [had] not reached their fortieth year’ prepared himself for chapel, where morning prayers and divine service commenced at five. Failure to appear was punished by a fine of at least twopence. Harvey’s clerical gown had, according to the university statutes, to be ‘decently’ and ‘respectably’ presented; over it he put a surplice. On his broad head Harvey fixed his ‘scholastic and square’ cap.

Inside the fourteenth-century college chapel every individual had a place assigned to him according to his scholarly status – the fellows in the higher stalls, the students in the lower. Within the student ranks, social status determined position. Any one refusing to ‘give place’ (while doffing their cap) to a superior, was punished with a beating; the statutes decreed that ‘modesty suited to their rank shall be cultivated everywhere. Inferior ranks shall give way to superior, and treat them with proper respect’.

Morning service was in strict accordance with the liturgy of the Protestant English Church, established by Elizabeth. In 1558, the first year of her reign, she had ‘inspected and purged our Universities, the chief fountains of learning’ so that ‘superstition [i.e. Catholicism] the ruin of all true religion, may be put to flight, and ignorance, entirely banished’. From that date too, anyone wishing to graduate from Oxford or Cambridge had to acknowledge Elizabeth as the head of the church. Religious conformity was especially important now that so many scions of the most powerful English families attended university.

After chapel, at precisely 6.10 a.m., Harvey’s studies began, continuing until ten, with only a short break for bread and beer. At ten a bell summoned Harvey to dinner in hall, in Gonville Court, a wooden-beamed building fairly small by Cambridge standards. The students sat according to rank, the superior young men on tables nearer to the fire. Gentlemen had a separate table where they were waited on by their sizars. The more generous aristocrats gave their servants ‘leave to eat’ at their expense when they found themselves in ‘distress’ – a permanent state for many sizars, who often had to pawn their books, and even beg on the public highways. Gratefully receiving a few coins from his master the sizar would bow and bound across the hall to make a ‘lamentable cry at the buttery-hatch, “Ho, Lancelot, a cue of bread and a cue of beer.”’

While gentlemen ordered lavish meals, pensionarii minores such as Harvey shared a penny piece of beef between four, some ‘porage’ made of the broth of the beef, a little oatmeal and a small glass of beer. Harvey’s scholarship covered the costs of tuition, lodging and board, but permitted him to purchase food only of the most basic kind. After lunch, students might take a brisk postprandial walk in the city or the surrounding countryside. A restless country boy, Harvey must have loved to tramp the marshlands around Cambridge, following the silver Cam and its tributaries, abundant in perch and pike, over bridges, into orchards, through the grazing grounds of horses, cows, pigs and boars, past fields full of sheep and goats.

Richard Lynne’s 1574 bird’s-eye view of Cambridge. The city’s historical centre resembles a heart, bordered by the River Cam and the Kinge’s Ditch stream. The vein-like Cam, arriving from the south, passes King’s and Clare, next to which we see ‘Gunwell and Caius’.

In the afternoons, students studied until five, when they sat down to a scant dinner. Further reading took the young men up to compulsory evening service in chapel at seven, after which study continued until nine or ten. Students were then, according to one contemporary, ‘fain to walk or run up and down half an hour, to get a heat in their feet’ before going to bed.

For those who wearied of scholarly labour, there were temptations in town – ‘taverns, dicing, sword-playing, gaming, boxing-matches, skittle-playing, dancings, bear-fights, cock-fights and the like’; ‘the like’ including theatrical performances, and a plentiful supply of whores. The punishments for indulging in such recreations were so severe, however, that they would probably have deterred Harvey, who was, in any case, of a bookish and conformist temperament.

Yet nefarious activities went on, especially among gentlemen, who were allowed to purchase the privilege of transgressing many university decrees. A scholar such as Harvey always wore in public his clerical cloth gown, a cloak ‘of black or sad [i.e dark] colour’ and a cap of rough cloth (caps made of silk ‘for the sake of softness or elegance’ being forbidden); in private, a plain shirt and a hose made of simple material was compulsory. In contrast, gentlemen could parade the quads in velvet doublets and wear their hair long. They entertained each other in their rooms, too, and obtained permission to leave college for hours or even days at a time. ‘Huntinge from morninge till nighte,’ as one sizar described his masters’ habits, ‘they never studied nor gave themselves to their bookes, but [went] to schools of defence [i.e. fencing], to ye dauncieing scolles, to stealle deer and connyes [rabbits] … to woinge of wenches.’

Such accomplishments were the traditional attributes of gentlemen, the ornaments of a courtier. University served as a finishing school, where they learned to ride, play tennis, master falconry. The well-born student who rarely looked into his books was a stock figure of fun in popular literature, even though the caricature was growing somewhat musty by the 1590s. ‘Of all things’, it was said, ‘the young gentleman at University endures not to be mistaken for a scholar.’ Gentlemen dismissed scholars as melancholy, pedantic and of low birth, utterly bereft of manners and civility; ‘honest’ they may have been, but they knew nothing of honour or decorum – true virtues because they were social rather than solitary.

Exposed to such attitudes, Harvey must have realized, during his first months at college, the acute difficulty of the mission his father had given him – the achievement of wealth and status in a world ruled by gentlemen. Three conventional strategies were now open to him in his bid to climb the social ladder.

He could study hard and attempt to stay on at Caius as a fellow, yet that would only constitute a partial social victory, as fellows were not gentlemen. Alternatively, Harvey could watch the aristocrats closely, and learn to imitate their ways. This had been the tactic of Christopher Marlowe, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, who had excited comment in the quads by dressing in a flamboyant style. In one of his plays, Marlowe outlines the strategy, when a character advises his friend to:

Unlike his fellow Kentishman, however, Harvey lacked the requisite social graces, as well as the looks and the audacity, to carry off the scheme.

There was a third path, however, opened by Elizabeth’s patronage of university men. A degree could be used as a passport to one of the professions and, thereafter, might facilitate access to the court. Nicholas Bacon, the son of a yeoman, and father of the philosopher Francis Bacon, considered himself to be ‘half a gentleman’ simply by virtue of his admission to Cambridge. On ‘going down’ from the university, he studied law at Gray’s Inn, then became a barrister and eventually entered Parliament. He officially secured genteel status in 1558, the year in which Elizabeth appointed him Lord Keeper of the Seal. Soon afterwards she knighted him.

In electing to send his son to Cambridge, and in encouraging him to apply for the Parker Scholarship in medicine, Thomas Harvey probably hoped that William would tread a similar path. The choice of subject was a typically canny one: like the law, medicine offered the yeoman a clearly defined, albeit arduous, route to the professions and so (in many cases) on to gentlemanly status; respected medical men also tended on the nobility and their services were required at court. William had obediently concurred with his father’s choice of subject and career; he may even have had some influence in the decision himself. A friend recalled that ‘he thought again and again how he could raise himself effectively from the ground and place his head among the stars, and, at last, there settled in his mind the wish to embrace medicine’.

1 Many modern-day Caius students still refuse to pass through the Gate of Honour until they have completed their degrees. In the twentieth century students contributed to the venerable tradition of giving the college gates abstract names, by adding a ‘fourth gate’ to the scheme, between Tree Court and Gonville Court. Allowing immediate access to the lavatories, it was christened the ‘Gate of Necessity’.

2 He was one of ten Caius students with the extremely common name ‘Harvey’ (variously spelt ‘Harvie’, ‘Harvy’, ‘Harvye’ or ‘Hervey’) to appear in that book over the period spanned by his lifetime; two of these students were also called ‘William’.