The world-famous University of Cambridge in England is a large school that is divided up into 31 different colleges. While their degree is ultimately from Cambridge itself, students also apply to a college they think will fit their lifestyle, since that is where they will sleep, eat, and make friends.
All this leads up to the fact that lots of important and wealthy people over the centuries would give money to the University of Cambridge to "endow" a new college – usually named after them. Gonville & Caius College, for example, was founded by two guys named Edmund Gonville and John Caius. When Sir George Downing died in 1717, he left a will instructing that if his family died off for lack of heirs, his fortune should go to founding a college, as the Downing College website explains. Since said college clearly exists, everything must have gone smoothly, right?
Wrong. The last living heir of Sir George was Sir Jacob Downing, who had no children. He had inherited a mess and, through a lot of hard work, turned it into something worth a lot more money. He didn't plan on giving it away to some school, so he left it all to his wife. When Sir Jacob died in 1764, Cambridge went to court to challenge the will ... for the next 36 years. Once the school finally won the case in 1800, they realized a lot of the bequest had been spent on lawyers and there wasn't really enough to build a new college anymore. But the university pressed on, slowly, and finally, in 1820, the first students arrived at Downing College.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunB9kGxranBgZMGpsYywoKWclajBbrXNoZyroaSWu6SxjJ2grKilqbK0ecSvnKtn