The Eagle

Origins: a medieval site and a Tudor inn

The Eagle stands on land that Corpus Christi College has owned since the early 16th century; 2025 marked the 500th anniversary of the College's ownership. The earliest firm evidence that the site was an inn is a lease in the College archives, dated 1566, to Andrew Pylkynton, "innkeeper", and his wife. It describes "their two tenements, a greater and a lesser nowe made an Inne called the Eagle and Child sett and built together in the parishe of St Benett in Cambridge." The name Eagle and Child — a heraldic device associated with the Stanley family — was common to a number of English inns; the Cambridge house was only later shortened to the Eagle.

Excavation has shown the site was in use long before it became a tavern. In 1996, archaeological work in Eagle Yard uncovered a 13th-century well; its upper shaft held a large deposit of cat carcasses, interpreted by the excavators as the by-product of skinning or butchering, deposited in what appears to have been a single episode. The find is a reminder that the courtyard now used for drinks was a working medieval plot centuries before the inn.

Rebuilding and the coaching inn, 17th–19th centuries

The Tudor tenements were substantially rebuilt in the 17th century, and the front range facing Bene't Street dates from around 1600. A lease of 1637 to a Mark Sherman set the rent partly in kind — "a good fat gammon of bacon at audit time and a load of hay" — a normal arrangement for the period, when a college's income came as much in produce as in cash.

The date usually given for the Eagle as a public house is 1667. In that year, on the election of John Spencer as Master of Corpus Christi, the College agreed that the rent owed by the tenant of the Eagle and Child, previously paid in hay, could instead fund wainscotting for the Old Combination Room. From this point the Eagle operated as a coaching house. David Loggan's celebrated map of Cambridge, printed in 1688, marks the building as "The Post House", showing that the innkeeper had secured the contract to supply post horses — a lucrative role on the road between London and the eastern counties.

For the next century and a half the Eagle was one of the busiest hostelries in Cambridge. By 1834 a passenger could board a fast coach to London from the courtyard for four shillings. The inn doubled as a place of public business: it hosted auctions, meetings of University and town societies, and lodgings for commercial travellers, all recorded in the College lease books and the local press. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was also a centre of political intrigue. From 1782 the banker John Mortlock — Member of Parliament and thirteen times Mayor of Cambridge — made the Eagle his base; the dinners he held there were known as the Rutland Club, and from them he ran a system of patronage that dominated the town's politics for nearly half a century. Mortlock is remembered for the line, "That which you call corruption I call influence." The Eagle remained the headquarters of the Cambridge Tories, and was pressed into service at elections, well past the middle of the 19th century.

Decline of the coaching trade and division of the building

The opening of the railway to Cambridge in 1845, and the growth of the network in the following years, ended the coaching business that had sustained the Eagle. By about 1850 the inn had lost its coaching status, and the building was divided: the rear became a tavern and the front a hotel. The hotel lasted only about a decade before the frontage was converted into offices, let for a time to a firm of solicitors and estate agents. The pub trade continued at the back, in the rooms that visitors drink in today, and the galleried courtyard survived the changes.

The RAF Bar and its ceiling, 1939–1945

During the Second World War the Eagle was a favourite of aircrew from the many Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces bases across Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. In what is now called the RAF Bar — the back room on the right — men on leave began marking the ceiling: squadron numbers, names, the names of sweethearts and the occasional drawing, applied with cigarette lighters, candle smoke, lipstick and, reputedly, a can of burning fuel held up on a billiard cue. The graffiti was left in place after the war and is now preserved. It is a rare survival of ordinary wartime feeling, made by men many of whom did not return, and the room is treated with a degree of respect unusual for a pub back bar.

"The secret of life", 28 February 1953

The Eagle was the local of scientists working at the Cavendish Laboratory, whose old buildings stand a short walk away on Free School Lane. On 28 February 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson came into the Eagle at lunchtime and, in Watson's later account, Crick announced to the room that the pair had "found the secret of life" — they had worked out the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. It was one of the defining moments of 20th-century biology. The pub marks it with a blue plaque on the Bene't Street frontage and with a beer, brewed for the purpose, sold behind the bar. As with all such stories the exact words are debated, but the announcement itself is well documented and the association is genuine, not invented for tourism.

Ownership and the building today

The Eagle remains owned by Corpus Christi College and operated by Greene King. It is listed at Grade II by Historic England (list entry 1126250). The fabric is a mixture of periods — a front of about 1600, much 17th-century rebuilding, and a galleried range around the courtyard behind — and the pub continues to trade as a food-led house while carrying its history openly. It is generally described as Cambridge's second-oldest pub, after the Pickerel Inn on Magdalene Street, a ranking that turns on how one counts the age of a licensed house against the age of a building; the two pubs are close in date and the distinction is a matter of definition rather than a settled fact.