Cambridgeshire

“ The modern architectural efforts may well compete with those of any former age.
Though Cambridge is the county town, Ely is the one city of Cambridgeshire. It derived its name from the abund ance of the eels which were found there. It was situated on the largest of the islands that rose above the level of the Fens, which in winter were surrounded by water, and were only accessible by certain passes or gates. (See Ely.) The other Cambridgeshire towns are soon enumerated. Wisbeach (beach of the Ouse) is a large and prosperous town, next in size and population to Cambridge. ”

“ And with this stirring story we take our leave of the Highways and Byways of Cambridgeshire, the stage of so many a story, the home of so many a memory; the scene—to those who have eyes to see—of so much quiet loveliness; where the Present is ever brooded over by the Past, and where on the anvils of Thought and Science the Future is ever being shaped. We have explored the County from end to end, we have mounted her uplands, we have traversed her fens, we have clambered her earthworks, we have entered her churches. ”

“ Cambridgeshire has always been mainly an agricultural county. The Domesday Survey mentions over ninety mills and numerous valuable fisheries, especially eel-fisheries, and contains frequent references to wheat, malt and honey. The county had a flourishing wool-industry in the 14th century, and became noted for its worsted cloths. The Black Death of 1349 and the ravages committed during the Wars of the Roses were followed by periods of severe depression, and in 1439 several Cambridgeshire towns obtained a remission of taxation on the plea of poverty. ”

“ All she did in Cambridge was to foster and stimulate the life of the already existing branch of the S.P.P.P., and to make it her centre for propaganda in Cambridgeshire.
Nicholas and Alix, having been brought up in Cambridge, did not know Cambridgeshire much. Alix discovered Cambridgeshire, through this quiet, pale December. There are moments in some lives when it is the only shire that will do. Many feel the same about Oxfordshire ”

“ For there are really two, the physical and the political. The last-named comprises the whole of the northern part of Cambridgeshire, from this point along the Ouse to Upware, and thence, following the Cambridgeshire border, round to Littleport and Tydd St. Giles in the north, by the neighbourhood of Crowland and Peterborough, and so down to the Ouse again at Earith, Aldreth, and Stretham Bridge. It is still a political division, and has its own government, under the style of the County Council of the Isle of Ely. The real geographical Isle—the one sketched in the map—is much smaller ”

“ Thus we should say that men were sparse in Cambridgeshire, did we not remember that a large part of our modern Cambridgeshire was then a sheet of water. Permanent physical causes interfere with the operation of the general rule. ”

“ In April 1588 North was summoned in haste from the wars to look to the military condition of Cambridgeshire in preparation for the Spanish invasion. In May 1588 he reported to the lords of the council that Cambridgeshire ‘is very badly furnished with armour and munition, and many of the trained bands dead or removed,’ but that he would see all defects supplied. North had much ado with the justices of the county, whose patriotism was not all that might have been desired. ”

“ From Melbourn station, then, thirty tons a day is an average consignment. Little wonder, then, that when one has come down from the bleak downs and heaths of Royston to these sheltered levels, the swelling contours of the windy pastures and breezy cornfields give place to long lines of orchards.
Cambridgeshire very soon develops its flat and fenny character along this route, and Melbourn left behind, the road on to Cambridge is a dead level. The low church-tower just visible to a keen eye, away to the left, among some clustered trees, is that of Shepreth. ”

“ Industries.—The climate is as a whole healthy, the fens being so carefully drained that diseases to which dwellers in marshy districts are commonly liable are practically eliminated. The land is very fertile, and although some decrease is generally apparent in the acreage under grain crops, Cambridgeshire is one of the principal grain-producing counties in England. ”

“ Large waste areas were brought under cultivation in the 17th century through the drainage of the fen-district, which was brought to completion about 1652 through the labours of Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutchman. The coprolite industry was very profitable for a short period from 1850 to 1880, and its decline was accompanied by a general industrial and agricultural depression. Cambridgeshire returned three members to parliament in 1290, and in 1295 the county returned two members, the borough of Cambridge two members, and the city of Ely two members, this being the sole return for Ely. ”

“ Theories like those of which we are speaking are born of facts and in their turn generate new facts. Our forefathers really lived in a simpler and a more chess-board-like England than that which we know. There must have been much equality among the hides and among the villages. When we see that a ‘hundred’ in Cambridgeshire has exactly 100 hides which are distributed between six vills of 10 hides apiece and eight vills of 5 hides apiece, this simple symmetry is in part the unreal outcome of a capricious method of taxation, but in part it is a real economic fact. ”

“ The borough of Cambridge has a separate court of quarter sessions, and this borough and Wisbech have separate commissions of the peace. The university of Cambridge exercises disciplinary jurisdiction over its members. There are 168 entire civil parishes in the two administrative counties. Cambridgeshire is almost wholly in the diocese of Ely and the archdeaconries of Ely and Sudbury, but small portions are within the dioceses of St Albans and Norwich. There are 194 ecclesiastical parishes or districts wholly or in part within the county. ”

“ Consequently the parties whose duty it was to make preparations had fled from that respectable county and gone away towards Six Mile Bottom, just in one of the corners of Cambridgeshire, as if the intention was that the dons of the University should have a look in. Constables slept more soundly in Cambridgeshire than in Essex. Moreover, the Essex magistrates would themselves have a moral right to witness the fight if it did not take place in their county. ”

“ The doings of one with the other afford amusing reading: how a separate workhouse was established and separate assessments made for each parish, and how at length, in 1781, an Act was passed for consolidating the two for local government purposes; all these inconvenient and absurdly conflicting jurisdictions of parishes and counties being eventually swept away in 1895, when the Cambridgeshire portion of Royston was transferred to Hertfordshire, the whole of the town now being in that county. ”

“ Most visitors find it difficult to escape speedily from the fascinations of Cambridge, and if some of our pilgrims be minded to make a short stay in these erudite surroundings, we will remind them that there are, not far away, three pleasing bits of glass, and [Pg 228] all of them Trees of Jesse—one of the Perpendicular period at Margaretting, about fifty miles south-east in Essex, another one of the same period at Levrington, thirty-three miles north in Cambridgeshire, and a Decorated example of the same subject at Lowick, thirty-six miles west in Cambridgeshire. ”

“ Each college is a corporation by itself, governed by statutes sanctioned by the crown, and capable of holding landed or other property.
Cambridgeshire (188) , an inland agricultural county, nine-tenths of its surface under cultivation; famed for its butter and cheese; very flat, marshy in the N., with a range of chalk-hills, the Gog-Magog in the S.; is rich in Roman remains.
Cambronne, French general, born at Nantes; served under the Republic and the Empire; accompanied Napoleon to Elba in 1814; commanded a division of the Old Guard at Waterloo; fought to the last ”

“ It is an undated writ of Henry I. (1100-1135) addressed to Henry, Bishop of Ely (1109-1131) , and attested by an unnamed Chancellor and by Miles of Gloucester and by Richard Basset. The main object of the King’s writ seems to be to make “his borough of Cambridge” the one “port” and emporium of the shire. “I forbid”—so runs the writ—“that any boat shall ply at any hithe in Cambridgeshire save at the hithe of my borough at Cambridge, nor shall barges be laden save in the borough of Cambridge, nor shall any take toll elsewhere, but only there.” ”

“ To reach it we have, indeed, to cross the border and go some half mile beyond; but though politically (p. 249) in Hertfordshire, Ashwell physically belongs to Cambridgeshire. For here is the source of the Cam, and such a source as few would dream of for the sluggish unclear stream that we see at Cambridge. In the midst of the village the ground sinks into a sort of amphitheatre, some 100 yards in length by thirty in breadth and ten in depth, with abrupt sides covered with brushwood and overshadowed by ancestral ash-trees. ”

“ Borough Green contains some fine twelfth century monuments, sadly knocked about. The Parson here was ejected by the Puritan Earl of Manchester, Governor of Cambridge, during the Civil War, for the heinous offence of saying "that he ought to shorten his sermons rather than neglect reading the Common Prayer, and that the Collects were to be preferred before preaching." Grounds no less frivolous were a sufficient excuse (p. 189) for a like ejection of half the parsons in Cambridgeshire at this period. ”

“ Three miles further the road brings us to the small but flourishing town of Royston, which, though now wholly in Hertfordshire, was till a few years ago partly in Cambridgeshire, with which it has a far closer physical connection than with its new county. ”

“ Conqueror to those of Henry the Eighth. The manor had once been the property of the ill-fated King Harold, and was given by the Conqueror to Judith, widow of the saintly hero Waltheof, after his judicial murder. The church contains many North monuments, and Kirtling also possesses a pretty little Roman Catholic church, being one of the five "Missions" in Cambridgeshire—along with Cambridge, Ely, Newmarket, and Wisbech. For the Norths still hold, not only their ancient seat, but their ancient Faith. ”

“ In two cases out of five we have already come upon sheer physical impossibility. But let us suppose some rearrangement of parish boundaries and look at the whole hundred. We are giving it 9900 acres of arable and leaving 1437 for other purposes. Then we are told of ‘meadow for’ 37 teams and this at the rate usual in Cambridgeshire [1475] , means 296 acres, so that we have only 1141 left. On this we must place the sites of five villages, houses, farmyards, fourteen water-mills, cottages, gardens. ”

“ Even as late as 1535 when Henry issued the royal injunctions to the university during the chancellorship of Cromwell, there were students from every diocese and district of England, and from Wales and Ireland, at Cambridge, but Scotland is not mentioned. [252] Of the 4 countesses who founded colleges, one was twice married to Irishmen, and two married Welshmen.{152}
Of the 14 (non-royal) men founders (including the third Duke of Buckingham and Fisher) 5 were East Anglian (3 Cambridgeshire) , 3 were East-Saxons, 3 Yorkshiremen, one a Northamptonshire man, and one came from Staffordshire. ”

“ The river Grant or Cam (call it what you will) , running by Cambridge, will have its stream dried up by the draining of the Fens. Now, as Cambridge is concerned in its river, so that whole County, yea, this whole Kingdom, is concerned in Cambridge. No reason, therefore, that private men's particular profit should be preferred before an universal good, or good of an University. ”

“ The county of Cambridge is rich in churches, especially in Ely and Cambridge and their neighbourhoods. We have abundant examples of Pre-Norman, Norman, Early English, Decorated, Perpen dicular. At Ely there are some valuable monastic remains. The famous Abbey of Thorncy is only represented by various foundations, and a fragment of the abbey church, which has been worked into the present parish church. Of domestic architecture there are very slight remains in one or two manor houses, and some remains of the Episcopal palace at Downham. ”

“ Thus the Forest and the Fen between them formed a material barrier separating the kingdom of East Anglia from the rest of Britain. At one point only could an entrance be gained. Between the forest and the fen there runs a long belt of land, at its narrowest point not more than five miles wide, consisting partly of open pasture, partly of chalk down. In the neck, so to say, of this natural pass into East Anglia lies the town of Cambridge. ”

“ At Cambridge we were within easy reach of the scenes of the Protector's early life. He was born in 1599 at Huntingdon, sixteen miles distant, and was twenty years a citizen of St. Ives, only a few miles away. He was a student at Cambridge and for several years was a farmer near Ely, being a tenant on the cathedral lands. As Ely is only fifteen miles north of Cambridge, it occurred to us to attend services at the cathedral there on Sunday morning.Pg 238 We followed a splendid road leading through a beautiful country, rich with fields of grain almost ready for harvest. ”

“ Twelve years later, the king gave a charter to the burgesses.
Cambridge was at no period of its history a great or even a prosperous commercial centre. East Anglia has always been a corner of England to itself, not on the direct line to anywhere, and offering very few points of vantage to the statesman or the merchant. The course of a river determines the history of a town, as it first determines its site. This is well exemplified in the histories of the Granta and the “Isis.” ”