Note

In accounts of the medieval constitution of the University of Cambridge insufficient attention is paid to the gradual decrease of the Chancellor's authority and the concomitant increase of powers of the regent masters. This development very clearly reflects the growing awareness of the University of itself as an autonomous institution, that is, a body with its own inherent rights and within which the supreme jurisdictional power resided. Although the premisses and presuppositions are different, this development might well show some kinship with contemporary developments elsewhere, namely in the institutional growth of Parliament and in the conciliarist form of church government. This rather important evolution of the University constitution has not yet been properly appreciated, mainly because the individual statutory enactments by which the gradual transfer of authority from the (ecclesiastical) Chancellor to the whole University took place had not been known. What was known was one Statute, through which alone the stages of the development could not, of course, be recognized. Moreover, when touching upon this point, G. Peacock and C. H. Cooper relied on a Statute which substantially differs in its wording and in its subject-matter from that printed by the Commissioners in 1852, on which J. B. Mullinger, Sir Stanley Leathes and Dean Rashdall drew. Fortunately, the Statute in its original form has been preserved as an original document in the Archives of the University of Cambridge, and it enables us to trace, at least in rough outline, this process of displacement of authority which ended in the control by the regent masters (through their proctors) over the chancellor and vice-chancellor. As far as can be established, there was no corresponding development at the University of Oxford

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