Engraving of Christ’s College, c. 1690. from David Loggan (bap. 1634, d. 1692), Cantabrigia illustrata ... (Cambridge, 1690).
Loggan’s aerial view of Christ’s College, dating from 1690, displays the college approximately as it would have looked during Milton’s time here. The main buildings (grouped in the vicinity of the modern First Court) had remained virtually unchanged since the college’s foundation in 1505. Still visible in Loggan’s print, in the area now known as Second Court, is the inauspiciously named ‘Rat’s Hall’: a temporary wooden building of three-storeys, put up in 1613 to ease the college’s overcrowding. It was common for two, three or even four undergraduates to share a room at the university during the early seventeenth century. The Fellows’ Building (the grand edifice visible behind it) did not exist in Milton’s time, since it was built from 1640-42.