I have been invited to write something about three friends of mine who, each in his own way, helped to maintain and advance medieval studies in Cambridge during the last generation. Two of them, Charles William Previté-Orton and Zachary Nugent Brooke were bulwarks of the history school as teachers and lecturers, the one for twenty-six, the other for thirty-four years. Both were scholars of St John's College and, although Brooke was six years younger than his friend, were contemporaries as undergraduates; both were editors of the Cambridge Medieval History; each in succession was Professor of Medieval History. It was not easy to think of one without passing on in thought to the other, as a man might take the short walk from St John's to Caius. The third scholar, who survived both the others, was George Gordon Coulton. Born in October 1858, a fortnight before Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1 November announced to the people of India that the territories, possessions and executive powers of the East India Company had been transferred to the Crown, he lived to know that the end of British rule in India would come within a year or two. He was the last survivor of a noble company of medievalists, to whose society, it must be confessed, he owed but a casual, though in general a respectful, allegiance. He was four and a half years younger than John Horace Round, three years younger than Thomas Frederick Tout, eighteen months younger than Reginald Lane Poole, four months younger than Hastings Rashdall, the scholar and friend whom he especially revered.