He entered as "a lesser pensioner" at Christ's College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625; the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson.

Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.
The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose Liberalism had got him into trouble at that University.

He may also have been unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his estranged relatives.

Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had married Mr.Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown, now abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and judicial writs.

From this marriage were to spring the young men who were to find an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.
The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum.