The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site had been occupied by a Dominican friary until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, some 45 years earlier. Mildmay's foundation made use of the existing buildings. Mildmay, a Puritan, intended Emmanuel to be a college of training for Protestant preachers. Like all of the older Cambridge Colleges, Emmanuel originally took only male students. It first admitted female students in 1979. In every year from 1998 until 2016 Emmanuel was among the top five colleges in the Tompkins Table, which ranks colleges according to end-of-year examination results. Emmanuel topped the table five times and placed second six times. Its mean score for 1997–2018 inclusive places it as the second highest ranking college after Trinity.
Buildings and grounds
Under Mildmay's instruction, the chapel of the original Dominican Friary had been converted to be the College's dining hall, with the friars' dining hall becoming a puritan chapel. In the late 17th century, the College commissioned a new chapel, one of three buildings in Cambridge to be designed by Christopher Wren. After Wren's construction, the puritan chapel became the College library until it outgrew the space and a purpose-built library was constructed in 1930. There is a large fish pond in the grounds, part of the legacy of the friary. The pond is home of a colony of ducks. The Fellows' Garden contains a swimming pool, which was originally the friars' bathing pool, making it one of the oldest bathing pools in Europe and allegedly the oldest outdoor pool in continuous use in the UK. It includes an Oriental plane tree, also in the Fellows' Garden, which is reputed to have lived far longer than is typical of the species. The college is said to own the only privately owned subway in the UK, connecting the main site to North Court. This claim is demonstrably false as Oriel College, Oxford has its own tunnel beneath Oriel Street linking the Island Site with the main college buildings. Similarly the Bodleian Library in Oxford has its own tunnel beneath Broad Street, Oxford.
Student life
The Emmanuel College Students' Union is the society of all undergraduate students at Emmanuel College. It provides a shop, a bar, a common room, and funding for sports and other societies. ECSU's Executive Committee is elected on a yearly basis at the end of Michaelmas Term. The Emmanuel College Middle Combination Room is the society of all post-graduate students at Emmanuel College. The Room itself is a comfortable and well equipped space in the Queen's Building. The MCR committee organises regular social events for graduate students, including well-attended formal dinners in hall every few weeks.
Sports and societies
A large number of student societies and sports clubs exist at Emmanuel College. Sports clubs include Tennis, badminton, cricket, squash, rugby, football, hockey and netball. Societies include the Emmanuel College Music Society, the Christian Union, the Mountaineering Club, the recently relaunched Emmanuel College Art and Photography Society, the Emmanuel Real Ice Cream Society and the Politics and Economics Society. The students' favourite society is Emma Circus Society. Funding for societies, old and new, come from applications to the Emmanuel College Student union.
People associated with Emmanuel
Former students
Emmanuel graduates had a large involvement in the settling of North America. Of the first 100 university graduates in New England, one-third were graduates of Emmanuel College. Harvard University, the first college in the United States, was organised on the model of Emmanuel, as it was then run. Harvard is named for John Harvard, an Emmanuel graduate. Emmanuel and Harvard maintain relations via student exchanges such as the Herchel Smith scholarships, the Harvard Scholarship, the Paul Williams Scholarship, and the annual Gomes lecture and dinner held each February at Emmanuel in honour of the late Peter Gomes, erstwhile minister at Harvard's Memorial Church. Early Emmanuel men included several translators of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible, for example Laurence Chaderton and William Branthwaite. Fictional characters who have been said to have gone to Emmanuel include Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver. It is implied that Sebastian Faulks' eponymous Engleby and Thomas Richardson also matriculated at Emmanuel. The protagonist in Samuel Butler's masterpiece The Way of All Flesh also went to Emmanuel. The uncompleted Doctor Who serial Shada was also partly filmed in the college with the character Professor Chronotis having rooms in New Court.
