The name of Clare figures on every page of the history of the Plantagenets. The first Gilbert de Clare had been employed to terrorise the East Anglians who held out against William; another Gilbert is at the head of the barons, his son is the guardian of Magna Charta, and _his_ granddaughter founded Clare College. She also built the Greyfriars house at Walsingham in 1346, was, with her kinsmen the Monthermers a great benefactor to the first Augustinian priory founded a hundred years earlier at Stoke Clare[422] and found time
to send timber from her estates towards the building of the king's Hall, as Queen Elizabeth sent a similar gift just two hundred years afterwards to the king's college of Trinity. The Clares had received 95 lordships in Suffolk, which formed "the honour of Clare," and they gave their name to the county in Ireland. Through Ralph de Monthermer the founders of Clare and Pembroke were allied, for he was Elizabeth de Clare's stepfather, and afterwards brother-in-law to Aymer de Valence (see Tables I, II).
We first hear of the de Burghs in 1198 when Thomas, brother to Hubert the king's chamberlain,
became guardian to a Bury ward. In 1225 a de Burgh was bishop of Ely, and a hundred years later John de Burgh the 4th earl of Connaught and 2nd earl of Ulster married with Elizabeth de Clare. Towards
the end of the xiv century another de Burgh, author of the "_Pupilla oculi_" was chancellor of the university, and it is he who purchased the land of S. Margaret's hostel in 1368.
The connexion of the Mortimers with Cambridge also dates from the xiii century: Guy de Mortimer figures in the Cambridge Hundred Rolls as the benefactor of the Carmelite friars, and sixty years later Thomas, son of Sir Constantine de Mortimer, ceded land for King's Hall.
The name of Walsingham occurs as that of a prior of Ely in 1353. The Walsinghams held two manors
in Suffolk, besides land in Cambridge part of which was sold to the king for the site of King's Hall.
There was a Ralph Walpole bishop of Ely, and subsequently of Norwich in the time of Edward I., who gave a messuage to Peterhouse as early as 1290. The Walpoles continued to figure on the roll of this college till in the xvi century the Walpole of that day fled with the Jesuit Parsons to Spain after the trial of Campian; he became vice-rector at Valladolid but was eventually martyred at York five years before the close of the century. Robert and Horace Walpole continued the Cambridge traditions of their family.