Jesus College] Chapel Romanesque Gallery North Transept

• Contributor: John Henwood / Alamy Stock Photo
• Image ID: BP3J9F
• File size: 28.5 MB (680.3 KB Compressed download)
• Releases: Model - no | Property - yes
• Dimensions: 3873 x 2576 px | 32.8 x 21.8 cm | 12.9 x 8.6 inches | 300dpi
• Date taken: 18 May 2006
• Location: Jesus College, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

More information

Jesus College Chapel is the oldest college chapel in Cambridge and it is unique in that it was not originally designed as a college chapel, since it precedes the foundation of the college by three and a half centuries, and the university by more than half a century. It was originally a large Norman church dedicated to St Mary which served the twelfth-century Benedictine convent of St Radegund, which is why the plan of the present chapel, like that of the cloisters that surround it, has a conventual rather than a collegiate character (1). It also served as the church of the parish of St Radegund which grew up around the convent, which was at that time a semi-rural area located just outside the city of Cambridge: a charter of 113 from Nigellus, the second Bishop of Ely, refers to ‘the nuns of the little cell lately instituted without the town of Cantebruge’. The church took about a century to build, being begun about 1157 and completed about 1245, and it was at that time the largest church in Cambridge. When the convent of St Radegund was dissolved in 1496 by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, and a new college was founded in its place, the conventual church of St Mary was rededicated to the name of Jesus and part of the church was demolished and the remaining portion was drastically modified. Alcock, who was an architect as well as a bishop, having been Comptroller of the Royal Works and Buildings under Henry VII and having designed parts of Ely Cathedral and Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge, himself designed many of these alterations, which were intended to create a chapel that was more suitable in scale for a small community of scholars than the existing church. The beginning of this work on the new chapel was superintended by one of Alcock’s friends, William Plombe, who was one of the original fellows of the college, in 1497-98. After Alcock’s death in 1500, the work was continued by some other friends of Alcock, Dr William Chubbes, the first master

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