James Halman

Unusually for a Cambridge don of the period, he seems never to have taken holy orders, and in 1669 he failed to respond in Theology, pleading an attack of smallpox.

Despite this, on 9 March 1671 he was elected as a senior fellow of the college, in which he lived continuously for some forty years, becoming Lecturer, Dean, Bursar, and finally Master.

[3] Finally elected as Master of Caius on 24 October 1700, Halman was the twenty-third to hold the office, but presided over his college for barely two years.

[2] In 1696 Richard Bentley was given the power to establish a "new-style" Cambridge University Press, and in July 1697 Halman made a loan of one hundred pounds to "the Chancellor Masters and Schollars of the University... towards the printing house and presse", subsequently receiving six per cent interest on it until the loan was repaid in full on 24 October 1702.

[5] Halman was a friend of another fellow of Caius, Henry Jenkes, who died in 1697, and by a Will made in 1684 Jenkes left his library and all his other worldly goods to "my worthy friend, Mr James Halman",[6] appointing him his sole executor and instructing him "to burn my papers, or else to publish them cum judicio et dilectu".