ABSTRACT
Compulsory attendance at Chapel was for long the rule, relaxed generally only after the First World War, although it was discontinued at Pembroke as early as 1898 and in some Colleges was less rigorously enforced before 1914. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lax attendance on the part of both undergraduates and Fellows1 caused some anxiety to Heads of Houses. The world-wide known Service of Carols and the Nine Lessons has been held over the past forty-five years in the afternoon of Christmas Eve in King’s College Chapel. College Chapels are the final resting-places of many famous men who, in their lifetime, served as Masters or brought glory to their Colleges by their lives, their deeds or their benefactions. The early University having, in its beginning, no Colleges, found accommodation in houses in the centre of Cambridge. The church was used, too, for the transaction of University business, for the storage of charters and doctors and for teaching and examining.
