English autonomous institution of higher learning at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng., on the River Cam 50 miles (80 km) north of London.

The start of the university is generally taken as 1209, when scholars from Oxford migrated to Cambridge to escape Oxford's riots of “town and gown” (townspeople versus scholars). To avert possible troubles, the authorities in Cambridge allowed only scholars under the supervision of a master to remain in the town. It was partly to provide an orderly place of residence that (in emulation of Oxford) the first college, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284 by Hugo de Balsham, bishop of Ely. Over the next three centuries another 15 colleges were founded, and in 1318 Cambridge received formal recognition as a studium generale from Pope John XXII.

Cambridge remained fairly insignificant until about 1502, when a professorship of divinity was founded—the oldest in the university. In 1511 Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus, Desiderius) went to Cambridge and did much to inculcate the new learning of the Renaissance there. In 1546 Henry VIII founded Trinity College (which was and still remains the largest of the Cambridge colleges). In 1570 Elizabeth I gave the university a revised body of statutes, and in 1571 the university was formally incorporated by act of Parliament. The new statutes, which remained in force for nearly three centuries, vested the effective government of the university in the heads of colleges. Membership of the university was no longer envisaged without membership of a college.

In 1663 the Lucasian professorship of mathematics was founded under the will of a former member of the university, and six years later the first holder resigned in favour of Isaac Newton (Newton, Sir Isaac), then a young fellow of Trinity. Newton held the chair for over 30 years and gave the study of mathematics a unique position in the university. When the honours examination came into being in the 18th century, it was primarily mathematical. (It was called the tripos, after the three-legged stool used formerly at disputations; and candidates placed in the first class were known as wranglers from the style of argument at a disputation.) A classical tripos was instituted in 1824, and tripos in natural sciences and moral sciences were added in 1851.

In 1871 the university established the Cavendish professorship of experimental physics and began the building of the Cavendish Laboratory. James Clerk Maxwell (second wrangler in 1854) was the first professor, beginning a leadership in physics at the university that would be continued by J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. Here, too, the team of Max Ferdinand Perutz and John Cowdery Kendrew and the team of Francis Crick and James Watson elucidated the structures of proteins and of the double-helix DNA, to found the modern science of molecular biology. Earlier came the work of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who, more than perhaps any other man, can be hailed as the founder of biochemistry. Noted Cambridge scholars in other fields have been the naturalist Charles Darwin, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the historian G.M. Trevelyan.

The university library with well over 3,000,000 volumes is one of a handful in the country that is entitled to a copy of every book published in Great Britain. Noteworthy collections include the Acton Library of medieval, ecclesiastical, and modern history, the W.G. Aston Japanese library, the papers of Charles Darwin, and the Wade Chinese collection.

The Fitzwilliam Museum contains, among other things, important collections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities; medieval and modern manuscripts; and paintings of European masters.