The Guild Chapels

The guild chapels stand beside the Assay Halls in Cambridge, and they belong to the trades rather than to any parish. The river wards go to Vicar Henry Keable at Saint Wendreda's in Bridge Street for their christenings, marriages and burials; the guild chapels are where the trades pray as trades, within sight of the halls that examine them. Like every chapel of the Cambridge yards they sit alongside the work rather than over it, and their clergy, licensed by Oxford and mostly trained in the town, live among men whose craft they only half understand.

Most of the year they are quiet. On examination days they are full. Apprentices come in from every yard with their papers buttoned inside their coats, kneel for a few minutes and go out to face the examiners, while masters who sat the same trials thirty years before stand at the back and pretend to have come for something else. Assay Day in June, the town's feast of making, brings the greatest crowds of all, when the Halls open their doors to visitors for a single day.

At the chapel doors stand the candle-sellers, whose whole trade is examination days. Their best week of the year is the one after Michaelmas. A candle bought there is said to burn steadiest for a hand that must be steady the next morning, and few apprentices risk going without one. The cook-shops of Bell Row are a step away, and many a young man eats his first dinner as a passed hand within sight of the door where he prayed not to fail.