High Table

"I watched the service from the organ loft and then he invited me, a mere wife dressed in my housecleaning clothes, to dine at High Table. This
was an unprecedented break with the past, as it was a long established rule in Cambridge colleges that wives – especially wives – were banned from High Table. High Table was the preserve of the Fellows who cultivated self-importance with the same exquisite care that lesser mortals might be expected to lavish on a prized stamp collection or a breed of racing pigeons.......Indeed a
Fellow might invite any woman to dine provided she was not his wife. It went without saying, of course, that, together with wives, undergraduates were also banned from High Table. "