The Benedictines were attracted to having their "Monks' Hostel" north of the river, aiming to distance themselves from the temptations of the town.

The monks chose a location which had been inhabited in prehistoric times, an Iron Age settlement of circular houses has been located close by and parts of a paved Roman road, rubbish pits and coins have been found. A spectacular collection of medieval coins, ‘The Magdalene hoard' was found on the edge of the College site and is now displayed in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

The Benedictine monks began building in the 1470s. John de Wisbech, Abbot of Crowland, planned First Court and completed the Chapel. The Benedictines were only responsible for the communal buildings of their monastic colleges, individual abbeys were invited to provide their own student chambers.

Four local Benedictine abbeys - Crowland, Ely, Ramsey and Walden - each built a staircase (of two storeys), three of them in the south range. As a result of patronage by the family of Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, the name of the institution was changed from Monks' Hostel to Buckingham College sometime after 1472. The College suffered an early misfortune when the Duke of Buckingham was executed for treason in 1483.

It was not long before students who were not monks were admitted. Such lay students would have paid rent to the host abbey whose rooms they occupied. Thomas Cranmer, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was appointed a lecturer at Magdalene in 1515.

The College had to wait another twenty years to find someone willing to play the part of great patron. Meanwhile, Henry VIII's campaign of the Dissolution of the Monasteries closed Crowland Abbey in December 1539. Fortunately, this adversity for the parent abbey did not have a particularly disruptive effect on Magdalene: the College, it seems, never closed.

One of the Benedictine abbeys involved in the College, Walden, came into the possession of Thomas, Lord Audley. A former Speaker of the House of Commons, Audley as Lord Chancellor had presided over the trials of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, and helped rid Henry VIII of more than one wife, as well as of Thomas Cromwell.

Having acquired a splendid house at Audley End, the Order of the Garter, and a peerage, he then re-founded Buckingham College as the College of St Mary Magdalene in 1542. The arms of Magdalene, with the motto Garde ta foy ('Keep faith'), and the crest showing the mythic wyvern, are derived from Audley.

Once again the College was unlucky in the fate of its patron, and Audley soon died, aged 56, in 1544. Audley left behind him a College struggling financially. The street front was completed by the generosity of Sir Christopher Wray, Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, in the 1580s.

Spinola succeeded in seducing the Master and Fellows with the short-sighted prospect of increasing the annual rental from £9 to £15 a year.

The transaction was thought by many to be illegal, and it was contested unsuccessfully on more than one occasion. The first such lawsuit, energetically pursued by Barnaby Goche (Master 1604-26), landed him and the Senior Fellow in prison for two years; and when Goche was subsequently offered £10,000 to compromise he refused.

By 1880, what was in effect 'compulsory purchase' for railways and sewers had reduced even that meagre rent still further, and the College drew only a nominal £2 per annum from what should have become its principal endowment.

When the splendid Quayside development was completed in 1989, Magdalene commissioned Fluck and Law, the creators of Spitting Image, to produce an unflattering gargoyle of Spinola, who now spouts river water into the Cam.

Revenge at last!

As his famous diaries attest, Pepys' behaviour in that regard improved little throughout his life, but that didn't prevent a glittering career in Restoration London. He became a Member of Parliament, a Baron of the Cinque Ports, an influential Secretary to the Admiralty (in which capacity he greatly contributed to the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy), and was elected President of the Royal Society in 1684.

Pepys' diary, which he kept between 1660 and 1669, offers invaluable insights into life in England in the decade after Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, and important first-hand accounts of major historical events, such as the Restoration of Charles II and the Great Fire of London.

Pepys was a generous benefactor to his College, and made three subscriptions to the new College building that eventually came to bear his name. Begun in 1670, the fundraising for the elegant addition to the College in Second Court was initially slow, but the building was largely completed by the time of Pepys death in 1703. It soon provided a perfect home for his final bequest: his invaluable collection of books and papers which now constitute the Pepys Library.

He also succeeded in attracting benefactions, including money for the Millington scholarships on the strength of which the best Cambridge mathematician of the century, Edward Waring, joined the College. Waring was famous throughout Europe in his day and a predecessor of Stephen Hawking as Lucasian Professor.

Despite the hopeful foundations laid by Waterland, the College's fortunes declined after his death. During the fifty middle years of the eighteenth century the total number of undergraduates in residence sometimes fell into single figures. It was not until the liberal churchman, Dr Peter Peckard, became Master in 1781 that Magdalene began to set its sights on achieving a wider reputation for scholarship and sound thinking. Peckard was a leading campaigner against prejudice and oppression as can be seen from his courageous and galvanic sermons against the slave trade:

"What a contradiction to these gracious intentions is the whole of our conduct respecting the innocent and unoffending nations of Africa! if we consider the treatment they receive from us; first by being torn from their country and their friends by the violence of hardhearted ruffians, then doomed to chains and excruciating misery, and if they survive these calamities, in being sold for Slaves to merciless masters, not less cruel than the ruffians who forced them from their native land. Is this our Gospel of Peace and Liberty?" (Peter Peckard, Sermon against Slavery, preached before the University in 1790.)

The College from the 1790s produced a number of men prominent not only in the anti-slavery movement and the early human rights movement, but also in the inauguration of the protestant missionary movement. Sir George Stephen masterminded the campaign for the abolition of slavery in 1833. Samuel Marsden carried the gospel to New Zealand in 1814.

Daniel Waterland's role in curriculum reform was echoed in the early nineteenth century by William Farish, who instigated the first written university examination. Farish was formally a chemist, and held the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Philosophy in the university, but is reckoned by many to be the first de facto university lecturer in Engineering: a subject in which Magdalene maintains a leading reputation to this day.

Yet, on the positive side, during this time the College was more liberal in its access policies than most. It admitted Catholics such as Charles Acton (later Cardinal); Arthur Cohen, the first practising Jewish Cambridge graduate, who became a prominent barrister and a number of Asian students who were excluded from many other Colleges until after the First World War.

Another product of Victorian Magdalene was the clergyman and social reformer Charles Kingsley, who joined the College in 1838. By 1860, he was Regius Professor of Modern History in the University and an early supporter of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He is best remembered today as a novelist.

Another early advocate of Darwinian theory was Kingsley's younger contemporary Alfred Newton, who entered the College in 1848 and spent most of the rest of his life here. He became the University's first Professor of Zoology in 1866, and died in Old Lodge in 1907.

The most significant person to attend Magdalene in the second half of the nineteenth century was probably Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist leader, who studied here from 1865 to 1869. The College now maintains a prestigious Parnell Fellowship in Irish Studies.

Benson's facile pen, microscopic curiosity about detail, and indefatigable enthusiasm led to an outpouring of belle lettres, literary criticism (which he would engagingly dismiss as his 'usual twaddle'), the words of 'Land of Hope and Glory', and a fascinating diary. His financial generosity, left its mark in almost every corner of the College and his influence on College buildings may be judged by the fact that his arms or initials appear no fewer than 20 times.

During the twentieth century, Magdalene graduates reached the top of the ladder in almost all professions and fields of endeavour. Patrick Blackett arrived in Magdalene following war service in 1919, and on his first night in the College met Geoffrey Webb and Kingsley Martin. He later recalled that it was his first taste of intellectual conversation. Webb subsequently became Slade Professor of Fine Art and was head of the Monuments and Fine Arts section of the Allied Control Commission during World War II (inspiration for the 2014 film The Monuments Men); Martin became a journalist and edited the New Statesman between 1930 and 1960. Blackett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948, and became President of the Royal Society in 1965.

Magdalene was also a centre for the emerging discipline of English Studies. I. A. Richards, sometimes credited as the 'founding father' of modern literary criticism, began as an undergraduate at Magdalene in 1911. After 35 years teaching at Harvard, he returned to the College and lived here until his death in 1979. Much of his early work was done in collaboration with the polymath C. K. Ogden, who had matriculated in 1908 and went on to invent 'Basic English', which still forms the standard vocabulary for much English language teaching across the world.

One of Richards' early students at Magdalene was the poet and critic William Empson. Empson, alas, was sent down in disgrace and banished from the city when 'engines of love' (condoms) were found in his room; some fifty years later, in 1979, the College made amends by electing him (by then, Sir William) to an honorary fellowship.

Other literary greats who became Honorary Fellows of Magdalene have included Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney. C. S. Lewis was a Professorial Fellow of Magdalene between 1954 and 1963, and occupied the rooms above the Parlour and Old Library in First Court.

Antony Grey, the LGBT rights activist, read History at Magdalene 1945-48. Grey was credited by Lord Arran (who introduced the Sexual Offences Act to parliament) as having 'done more than any single man' to bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

In 1987, the College became co-educational, with the first women undergraduates arriving the following year. That first cohort included, amongst many others, the broadcaster (and Strictly Come Dancing alumna), Katie Derham.

Towards the end of the century, Sir John Gurdon became Master of the College. He retired in 2002, and won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2012.

A highlight of the opening of the new millennium was the admission of Nelson Mandela as an Honorary Fellow. President Mandela visited Magdalene in 2001, where he met some of the holders of the College's Mandela-Magdalene scholarships. His legacy at Magdalene continues to grow, with the establishment in 2017 of the Magdalene Mandela Memorial Fellowship alongside the first Professorship of the Deep History and Archaeology of Africa, generously endowed by the Jonathan and Jennifer Oppenheimer Foundation.

2005 saw the completion of the magnificent Cripps Court development on Chesterton Road, providing a lecture theatre, seminar rooms, and state of the art conference facilities, alongside high-quality student accommodation. This and other building and land-purchasing projects allow Magdalene to continue to accommodate all its undergraduates and nearly all graduates in rooms within two or three minutes' walk of the centre of College.

2021 saw the completion of the New Library. Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the New Library is a purpose-built space for Magdalene students to meet, work, relax and find inspiration. The New Library building houses the Colleges working library, the College Archives and Ronald Hyam Archive Work Room, and The Robert Cripps Art Gallery.

In 2022 the New Library won the prestigious The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize for best new building in the UK.