The ‘uniform’ of members of the University, varies according to the degree of the wearer and, among undergraduates, according to their College. For those of the degree of doctor it also varies according to their subject (for higher doctorates) and according to the day. Persons in statu pupillari were traditionally required to wear academical dress in Cambridge after dusk, a requirement that was abolished for BAs in 1961 and for undergraduates in May 1965. Festal gowns are worn on Scarlet Days, when members of the University may now wear the appropriate academical dress of their previous universities.
For further information see: J. R. Tanner (ed.), The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge to the year 1910 (Cambridge, 1917), 189-98; E. C. Clark, in Archaeological Journal, 1893 and 1904 (vols 50 and 61); A. G. Almond, Cambridge robes for doctors and graduates, (Cambridge, 1909, 1934, 1959); George W. Shaw, Cambridge University academical dress: with notes on Oxford academical dress, [Cambridge]: Cambridge University press, [1992]; idem, Academical dress of British and Irish universities (Chichester: Phillimore, 1995); Charles Aubrey Hamilton Franklyn, Academical dress from the Middle Ages to the present day: including Lambeth degrees (Lewes, 1970); William Norman Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A history of academical dress in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); J. H. Baker, ‘“Doctors wear scarlet”: the festal gowns of the University of Cambridge’, Costume, no. 20 (1986) 34–43; idem, ‘The dress of the Cambridge proctors’, ibid ., no. 18 (1984) 86–97. There are useful depictions of 15th and early 16th century academical dress in P. J. Heseltine, The figure brasses of Cambridgeshire (St Neot’s, c.1981).
