Christ's College, Cambridge
college of the University of Cambridge
Christ's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college includes the master, the fellows of the college, and about 450 undergraduate and 250 graduate students. The college was founded by William Byngham in 1437 as God's House. In 1505, the college was granted a new royal charter, was given a substantial endowment by Lady Margaret Beaufort, and changed its name to Christ's College, becoming the twelfth of the Cambridge colleges to be founded in its modern form.
Alumni of the college include the poet John Milton, the naturalist Charles Darwin, as well as the Nobel Laureates Martin Evans, James Meade, Alexander Todd, Duncan Haldane, and John Clarke. The Master is Lord McDonald of Salford.
History
Christ's College was founded by William Byngham in 1437 as God's House, on land which was soon after sold to enable the enlargement of King's College. Byngham obtained the first royal licence for God's House in July 1439. The college was founded to provide for the lack of grammar-school masters in England at the time, and the college has been described as "the first secondary-school training college on record". The original site of God’s House was surrendered in 1443 to King's College.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Christ's College, Cambridge” as college of the University of Cambridge. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as college of the University of Cambridge. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q714717. VIAF identifies the subject as 139541917. The Library of Congress control number is n79058865. Authority coordinates are 52.205, 0.122. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1437, 1505, 1439 and 1443.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christ's College, Cambridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.