Examiner Ursula Kell

Examiner of the Cambridge Collegium and its most quoted authority on examination and assay, whose Notes for Entrants insist that only what the material does is written down, and that the body which teaches must never be the body which judges.

Ursula Kell is an Examiner of the Collegium at Cambridge, one of the officers by whom material is examined and certified. Her Notes for Entrants, written for those who come to the bench, have made her the most familiar explanatory voice of a process most people see only from outside. Examination, as she describes it, records what material does and not what an applicant says: the bench is cold, the light is northern, two men watch, and nothing spoken is written down.

She is also the author of the plainest defence of Cambridge’s division between Schola and Collegium. One body teaches and one body judges, she argues, because the day they are the same body is the day a man may be examined by his own master. And hers is the only explanation anybody has offered of why the annual admission sitting, held over three days in the week after Michaelmas, takes thirty of some four hundred candidates: the figure is set by the copying capacity of the formularies press, not by any judgement of how many the realm needs. Nobody has ever proposed building a second press.

Her tone is dry, exact and unsentimental, and she does not flatter her own institution; she has reckoned that one examiner, three artificers, ten hands and forty carters on the road with their dinner make the Collegium the smallest part of its own town. Entrants remember her as severe and scrupulously fair, and more than one has remarked that she seemed more interested in the sample than in the candidate.

Companies meet her when something they have carried, recovered or been paid in must be certified before anyone will trust it. She will not hurry, will not accept a story in place of a result, and will record exactly what the material does in front of her, which is not always what its owner hoped.

In person

Very lean, upright and controlled, the Examiner has iron-grey hair pinned up and a long, severe face with high cheekbones, a hooked nose, pale skin and hazel-brown eyes. She wears high-collared charcoal examination dress with white linen and a small Collegium badge, with spectacles for the bench. Her hands are precise and marked with stains and old burns, a faint scar shows below one ear, and among her gauges, assay tags and numbered samples she gives the impression of one who measures rather than casts.