On 8 April 1511, John Fotehede, Master of Michaelhouse, wrote from Cambridge to John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, formerly spiritual advisor to Lady Margaret Beaufort and now one of her executors, urging faster progress on the buildings of her foundation of St John's College. Fotehede himself had served as her controller of finances in 1504–6, and had presented her statutes to the fellows of Christ's College, her earlier foundation, in the latter year. Both colleges were endowed and built with the resources of the countess's household and estates, and both had transfigured and replaced previous smaller foundations on the same sites. The later educational prestige of the colleges has dwarfed the institutions which preceded them; but for contemporaries there were priorities other than education which weighed equally or even more strongly.

Fotehede's letter mentioned the importance of local opinion in the furtherance of the project; but it was not, according to the writer, an opinion concerned with education. It focussed rather on elements in the old foundation, the thirteenth-century hospital of St John the Evangelist under the patronage of the bishops of Ely, which remained precious to local people. Some headway had been made in negotiations with adjoining King's Hall to secure the southern boundary of the new college, but progress was now held up by the reluctance of the last members of the hospital to surrender a bond in their possession, and the intervention of Dr William Robinson, the bishop of Ely's commissary, was called for.