Subseries XIII - Mortimers, Newnham

Lady Anne Scroop devised this Manor to the College in 1498. In 1501-2 the Mayor, Bailiffs and Burgesses of Cambridge gave their licence to her trustees to assign the Manor to the College. The demesne of the Manor was therein said to consist of: the Newnham Mill, with one close adjoining; one close, called Newnham Close; and 99 acres in the town and fields of Cambridge.

From Christopher Brooke 'A History of Gonville and Caius College':

'From 1478 to 1500 came a series of modest additions to the endowments.. The Executors of the Lady Anne Scroop handed over a property in the manor of Mortimers mainly in the west and east fields of Cambridge to support "one well disposed priest or.. one good young man disposed to learn, born in the diocese of Norwich" to be nominated by the executors while they lived and elected by the College, "which young man shall within the space of one year be priest and be called Dame Anne's priest". Anne Scroop was the last surviving descendant of Edmund Gonville's brother, and she showed an interest in both Rushford and Gonville Hall. She was married three times, but had no children: her considerable wealth passed mainly to a nephew, but she managed to distribute gifts in her lifetime and after her death to a number of institutions and to almost everyone of note in Norfolk. In 1490 she had made elaborate provision for enlarging Rushford to provide additional fellows and a school there, as well as a chantry for her first and second husbands and herself. Her provision for Gonville Hall was more modest and more laconically expressed. But it meant much to a small college, for it included pasture land in Newnham and arable in Newnham and Barnwell; and in due course this became some of the college's most valuable land. Mortimer Road commemorates her manor and Scroope Terrace her name - and a stretch of Cambridge was developed in the 19th century scoring the map with College names, Gonville, Harvey, 'Lyndewode' among them. The pasture closes in Newnham run from West Road to the south end of the Backs, and supply the lung for a college whose island site in central Cambridge has always been circumscribed; on Dame Anne's pastures now lie a line of gardens and buildings from Harvey Court to the Fellows' garden.'