This record of the Statutes of Cambridge University, compiled by the then University Registrary, John Neville Keynes (father of the economist John Maynard Keynes), and published in 1914, was intended as a statement of the legal instruments which controlled the organisation and day-to-day running of the university. Following the Royal Commission of inquiry into the universities of Oxford and Cambridge begun in 1850, a succession of Acts and Orders in Council, beginning with the Cambridge University Act of 1856, began to modernise the ancient rules by which the university and colleges had previously governed themselves, and to introduce new subjects, such as law, history, oriental languages and engineering, into the curriculum. Although the statutes have been much altered since then, the form of government of the university which they embodied still exists as a framework today.
