Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

Villages continue to be found on both banks as we ascend the Granta. The main road, on the east of the stream, leads through Stapleford, a small place, to the large and important Sawston. Its size and importance are due to the existence of that all too rare development, a really thriving rural industry. For here is not only a flourishing paper-mill, turning out its twenty tons a week of superfine copper-glazed paper, but the much more uncommon manufacture of parchment, and of the "shammy" leather used for cleaning plate, etc. And this is produced in a delightfully rural and old-time fashion. There are no machines here automatically grinding out facsimile products; every process is confided to the skill and judgment of the individual in charge of it. There are fifteen or sixteen such processes involved, and a very little carelessness in any one of them would spoil the whole series. Thus every workman is an expert, and takes a pride in his work impossible to the mere driver of a machine. The great aim of each is to "keep his skin in condition" while under his hands, so as to have a right to glory in the finished article.

The very terms used in this manufacture have an ancient smack about them. The sheepskins used are called "pelts," and are supplied by the "fell-monger." They are first immersed for a while in a solution of lime, and then hung over nothing less primitive than the half of a tree, sawn lengthwise, while a "flesher" scrapes and "couches" them (i.e., removes all wrinkles). They are then "split," the inner skin, called the "mutton" or "lining," being adroitly separated from the outer "grain." This "lining" is next "frized" (i.e., rubbed), to remove all fat, then again "limed," and thoroughly washed. It is then "squeezed" and "punched" till "the water is killed," then soaked with cod-liver oil. This causes fermentation to set in, during which the skins have to be carefully watched by men whose duty it is to "turn the heats" before "burning" takes place. Alkaline treatment follows, and, finally, the skins are "ground," i.e., pared with a round knife and smoothed with a wooden "scurfer," being sprinkled the while with water from a bunch of butchers' broom, called by its old English name "knee-holm." They are then packed in "kips" of thirty apiece, and put on the market. Before "grounding," the taste of the ordinary customer, who likes a pretty white "shammy," is consulted by bleaching most of the skins with sulphur. Appearance, however, is thus dearly purchased, for sulphur blackens silver, besides shortening the life of the skin. The useful colour is dark brown.

"For parchment the 'linings' are tied in a frame by strings fastened round grooved pegs, on the same principle as a Spanish windlass.... After being scraped with a 'half-round' knife, dried, 'shaved,' dabbed with whitewash, and heated in a stove to remove the grease, they are then scalded and rubbed with pumice until they are fine and smooth.... The parchment workers wear clogs, sheepskin leggings, and 'basil' aprons. A basil is an unsplit tanned sheepskin. In this well-managed factory all the refuse goes to make soap, glue, dubbin, or manure, and not one scrap of material is wasted."[168]

Sawston, moreover, is not only full of present interest, but rich in associations with the past. The Village Cross stands on its ancient site, and the church, which retains some Norman features, has several mediæval brasses, though none of special merit. The Hall is yet more remarkable. It was built in the reign of Queen Mary with materials from the ruins of Cambridge Castle, granted by her in consideration of the earlier hall having been destroyed for sheltering her. At the death of her brother Edward the Sixth, the Protestant Lords of the Council sought to arrest her as she approached London. Hearing of their design she took refuge at Sawston Hall, then as now the seat of the Huddleston family, who then as now steadfastly adhered to the ancient faith. Her presence there being reported at Cambridge, a Protestant mob, under the direction of the authorities, pounced upon the hall so suddenly that she had barely time to escape on horseback behind one of the serving men, her course lighted by the flames of the burning building, which was utterly destroyed by the disappointed Protestants. A missal taken in the sack was, on the following Sunday, held up to public derision and formally torn to pieces in the University Church.

By the time the rebuilding of the hall was completed another, and more thoroughgoing, Protestant persecution had broken out. To hear Mass was made treason-felony, punished by forfeiture of goods and perpetual imprisonment, while to say it was an act of high treason, for which the offending priest suffered the lingering death assigned by the law to traitors, being first half-hanged, then disembowelled, and finally quartered. The Catholic chapels of the day were accordingly placed in the garrets, as in that still existing at Sawston Hall, where the worshippers had most warning in case of a domiciliary visit by the authorities. Secret cupboards were contrived for hiding the sacred vessels, books, and vestments, and secret exits by which the priest might, if possible, be smuggled out of the house, and, in case these proved unavailable, "Hiding Holes" in which he might take refuge. That at Sawston Hall is in the staircase, and is described by Mr. Allan Fea in his Secret Chambers and Hiding Places:

"The entrance is so cleverly arranged that it slants into the masonry of a circular tower, without showing the least perceptible sign, from the exterior, of a space capable of holding a baby, far less a man. A particular board in the landing is raised, and beneath it, in a corner of the cavity, is found a stone slab containing a circular aperture, something after the manner of our modern urban receptacles for coal. From this hole a tunnel slants downwards, at an angle, into the adjacent wall, where there is an apartment some twelve feet in depth, and wide enough to contain half a dozen people.... The opening is so massive and firm that, unless pointed out, the particular floor-board could never be detected, and when secured from the inside could defy a battering ram."

This is an unusually commodious Hiding Hole, large enough to hold not only the refugee priest but provisions to maintain him during the search, a very necessary item of the precautions. For when the pursuivants pounced upon a Catholic mansion they always began by locking up the inmates, that no succour might be given to the outlaw whose presence they suspected, and then proceeded to a most systematic and thoroughgoing search, in which chimneys, cellars, and roofs were exhaustively explored, panellings pulled down, and floors torn up, for days together. The ransacking and wrecking sometimes lasted a whole fortnight on end; but with such art were these retreats constructed that they constantly defied even so stringent a test, unless betrayed—sometimes by the unintentional emotion of those in the secret.

Like most others in England this Hiding Hole at Sawston Hall was due to the ingenuity of a Jesuit, one Nicolas Owen (nicknamed "Little John" from his diminutive stature), who, "with incomparable skill and inexhaustible industry," devoted his life to contriving these recesses. "And by this his skill," says a seventeenth century writer, "many priests were preserved from the prey of persecutors." Finally he was himself betrayed into the hands of the Protestant Government, who write exultingly of their "great joy" in his arrest; "knowing his skill in constructing hiding-places, and the innumerable number of these dark holes which he hath schemed for hiding priests throughout the kingdom." It was hoped that he might be induced to reveal these places, "to the taking of great booty of priests." But Owen remained staunch against all threats and blandishments, and finally allowed himself to be tortured to death without suffering the secret "to be wrung from him," as Cecil ordered that it should be. "The man is dead—he died in our hands," is the laconic report of the Governor of the Tower in answer to this order.

The knee-holm, or butchers' broom, used in the Sawston leather work, grows at Whittlesford, on the other side of the Granta, a pretty, shady village with an interesting church; the development of which, from a Saxon nucleus, is a nice (and not yet satisfactorily solved) problem for lovers of mediæval architecture. There is a wooden porch (oak) of the fourteenth century. At Whittlesford Bridge, where the Granta is crossed by the Icknield Street, close to the railway station, one sees, hard by the road, a decayed stone edifice, with a high pitched roof thatched with reeds, now used as a barn.

This is the chapel of the ancient Hospital of St. John, founded in the thirteenth century. There were several such institutions in Cambridgeshire, started, not specially for the care of the sick, but for "hospitality" in the widest sense of the word. Here travellers were entertained, the hungry were fed, the needy were ministered to, according to their several necessities. The Hospitals were rarely large institutions, and this one, as the size of its chapel shows, was quite a small affair, only endowed with some sixty acres of meadow land and a water-mill, equivalent, probably, to some £200 a year in all. But having been under the direction of a prior (appointed by the Bishop of Ely), it is sometimes known by the high-sounding title of Whittlesford Priory. The interior of the building still retains some beautiful early English work. A specially pleasant roadside hostelry next door (the Red Lion), with deliciously quaint carvings on mantel and ceiling, may be held, in some sense, its modern representative; and, indeed, is thought by many authorities to have actually formed part of it.

Though, for some reason, always associated with the name of Whittlesford, this Hospital is actually in the adjoining parish of Duxford, or rather in one of the two (now consolidated) parishes of St. John and St. Peter, between which this little village is divided. Both churches still exist (though St. John's is now only used for burials in its churchyard), and both are very much of the same build, mainly Early English, with a little Norman, of which St. John's steeple is the most noteworthy example. St. Peter's has a beautiful "low-side" window in the northern wall of the chancel.

To the west of Duxford the Icknield Street traverses a wide bleak expanse of treeless fields which, until the nineteenth century, were the unenclosed turf-land forming the famous Triplow Heath, the scene of the first breach between the Long Parliament and its army. In the view of the Parliament that force had now done its work. The Cavalier levies had been stamped out, the king had been "bought" from the Scots, and was in Parliamentary custody at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, the Scots themselves had withdrawn to their own country; why then should not this costly, and rather dangerous, army be disbanded?

But this was far from being the view of the soldiers themselves. A return to the monotonous routine of civil life, after the thrilling excitements of civil war, had no attractions for them; least of all, a return without their pay. That pay—one shilling a day—was more than double the current wages; and now it was many months behindhand—a whole year in some cases. The suggestions of disbandment were met, accordingly, by the concentration of the troops, including Cromwell's famous regiments, on Triplow Heath, in his own East Anglian district. This was on the 10th of June, 1647.

Commissioners from the Parliament were sent down from Westminster, with offers of two months' pay in cash and debentures for the remaining arrears, contingent on disbandment. But this was not nearly good enough; and the offers were met with cries of "Justice! Justice!" from the men, and with significant hints from the officers of a march on London if their claims were not speedily satisfied, "for a rich city may seem an enticing bait to poor beggarly soldiers to venture far to gain the wealth thereof."

And, while the baffled Commissioners returned, to call out the London train-bands to meet the threatened attack (finding them so reluctant to face this new and terrific foe that the death-penalty had to be denounced against all malingerers), the Army took more effective action by despatching Cornet Joyce, with a troop of horse, to seize the King at Holmby House and bring him along as a prisoner; or, as they put it, to rescue him from his Parliamentary jailers, and invite him to trust his person with his faithful soldiers. They might thus be able to sell him again to the Parliament, as the Scots had done, or they might really restore him, for a sufficient consideration, or make their own of him some way. And, while Charles was being thus carried off, as we have already seen, to Chippenham, they struck their camp and marched off along the Icknield Street to Royston, and thence to St. Albans, as a demonstration against London. When the unhappy monarch, a fortnight later, on Midsummer Day, was brought by the same route from Newmarket, crossing Whittlesford Bridge and passing through the midst of Triplow Heath, the scene had already returned to its habitual loneliness.

Triplow itself lies to the west of the Heath, and has a far-seen cruciform Church, sister to that in the adjoining village of Foulmire, or Fowlmere as it ought to be spelt. An actual mere, noted for its wealth of wild fowl, existed here till little more than half a century ago. It is now a worthless patch of land, full of springs and runlets. There is also a small prehistoric earthwork, known as "The Round Moats."

From Duxford, a pretty byway—far prettier till, a year or two ago, the picturesque wooden foot-bridge across the Granta was replaced by an iron modernity—leads to Hinxton, where the church has some interesting architectural developments, and a good brass to Sir Thomas de Skelton, steward to "old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster." He is shown in full plate-armour, and his two wives lie beside him. The Parochial Register here dates back to the very first institution of such documents, in 1538, by Thomas Cromwell. This is quite rare; for the idea was, in its first inception, to the last degree unpopular both with clergy and people, who suspected, from their experience of Henry's illimitable greed, that a tax would be exacted upon each of the ecclesiastical functions thus registered.

On the outside of the spire, which is of wood covered with lead, hangs a "Sanctus" (or "Sacring") Bell, which of old was rung at those places in the High Mass where a small bell is sounded by the Server at the Altar; that is to say, at the Ter Sanctus and the Consecration of the Host. Thus those of the faithful who were unable to attend church were invited to unite themselves in spirit with the worshippers there at the most solemn moments of the Service. Few of these bells remain, as their associations were, of course, specially distasteful to Protestant feeling, so that they were mostly destroyed at the Reformation.

At Hinxton we are on the borders of Essex, and a shady westward-running lane takes us on, across the river and the railway, to the last Cambridgeshire village on this line, Ickleton, where the church is of quite unique interest. Here, too, there is a Sacring Bell, on the side of the steeple; surviving, doubtless, through the same unknown local influence which also saved that on the sister spire of Hinxton. But the real interest of the church is entirely hidden from passers by. Those even who look from the pretty little Village Green to the southward see nothing that calls for notice, except the Sacring Bell and a fairly good Geometrical window in the steeple. The rest of the exterior shows only poor fourteenth century work—and cruelly "restored" at that.

But, once inside, we discover that the unsightly exterior is but an outer shell, built round, and over, a smaller and far older church, still standing, and so entirely enclosed that its clerestory lights now open into the existing aisles. Above them are the lights of the later fourteenth century clerestory, which, no doubt, originally contained Geometrical, or more probably Flowing, tracery. Now, however, they are mere "churchwarden" apertures, of various indefinite shapes, with mean wooden sashes, having been remorselessly doctored in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

It is when we look closely at this interior church that we note its truly astonishing features. At the first glance it might be taken for an ordinary Norman structure, with its round pillars and round arches; and, in fact, it is usually so described by the few authorities who notice it at all. The rudeness of the capitals, however, and the general aspect of the arcade, does not somehow look like Norman work, but more suggests Saxon architecture. And the very small clerestory lights, mere loopholes, still more lead us to this conclusion. Some archæologists, therefore, consider this interior church at Ickleton to be a Saxon edifice; and, so far as the clerestory is concerned, it is exceedingly probable that they are right. The piers of the tower arches, however, are unmistakably Norman, as is also the west doorway.

But what is the arcade? When we examine the massive circular pillars which support it, we see to our amazement that, instead of being built up in the usual manner, every one of them is a monolith! We are now obliged to confess ourselves in the presence not of Norman or Saxon but of Roman work, for no example of such monolithic construction is known in any later architecture, and was, indeed, sparingly employed even by the Romans.

How did these pillars come to be here? They are of Barnack stone from Northamptonshire, and must have been brought at an expense well-nigh prohibitory to the finances of a small country parish. We may dismiss the idea that they were hewn out of the quarry in this specially costly form, and fetched all the way from Barnack by the builders of this little unpretending church.

Dismissing this, there remain two other alternatives. A mile distant from Ickleton to the southward stands Chesterford, the site of an important Roman station, commonly identified with the Icianos of the third century "Antonine" Itinerary. The place derived its name, and its importance, from its position at the point where the River Granta is crossed by the Icknield Way, the line of communication along the strip of greensward between the Cambridgeshire fens and the forest topping the East Anglian heights, which gave access to the territory of the Iceni in Norfolk and Suffolk. The Saxon builders of Ickleton Church may have found these pillars amid the ruins of Icianos, or of some villa in the neighbourhood, and have brought them that short distance for their edifice. As they were ready made this would be a cheap job.

Such is the one alternative. The other, to which I myself incline, is that they did not need to fetch the pillars at all, but utilised them on the very spot where they originally stood. According to this view we have here an example, unique in Britain, of Roman work in situ. The very arcading which we see I take to have stood north and south of the central hall of some large Roman mansion. Such a mansion usually contained an oblong central hall of this kind (often roofless), with a peristyle, or cloister, on either side opening into it, a portico at one end, and a smaller tablinum or guest-chamber at the other. Lanciani has pointed out how this structural arrangement suggested the nave, aisles, porch, and chancel of the earliest ecclesiastical edifices at Rome.[169] The same suggestion may have influenced the builders of Ickleton Church to utilise this old Roman arcading, roofing in the enclosed space, but with a clerestory to prevent too great loss of light. If this view is correct the narrow north aisle probably represents the width of the original peristyle.

The south aisle is far wider, as wide indeed as the nave and north aisle together; and one asks why the fourteenth century architect planned his work so very unsymmetrically. The answer, I think, is to be found in the remarkable architectural development of the steeple. The piers of the tower are, as I have said, unmistakably Norman, but upon them are set, quite unconformably, arches at least a century later in date. The tower is pierced by these arches on all four sides, and was evidently meant as the centre of a cruciform church with transepts. For some reason this Norman plan was never completed, but it is very probable that the south wall of the church marks the limit to which the transept (which may have been actually begun) was meant to extend.

The church has also later features of interest. There are some good mediæval seat finials, shaped with the axe and bearing grotesque figures, musical instruments, and symbols; the word ORATE being decipherable upon one of them. The rood-screen is fifteenth century, and is placed across the eastern arch of the tower, with no trace of there having ever been a rood-loft.

The land of Ickleton was almost wholly Terra Ecclesiæ. A priory of Benedictine nuns existed here, founded in the twelfth century by Aubrey de Vere, the first Earl of Oxford; while the Abbeys of East Dereham in Norfolk, Tyltey in Essex, and even Calder (a "cell" of Furness), in far-off Cumberland, each possessed a Manor in the Parish. All alike were given by Henry the Eighth to Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, in exchange for the far more valuable property of Hatfield House. Queen Elizabeth, however, afterwards demanded them all back again, with much other land, as a condition of appointing Bishop Heton, in 1600, to the See, which she had kept vacant to fill her coffers for no less than nineteen years. The Manors were sold by the Crown, and are now in private hands. The benefice is in the gift of the Lord Chancellor.

The name Ickleton, like those of Ickborough in Norfolk, Ickingham in Suffolk, and Ickleford in Hertfordshire, is derived from the position of the village on the line of the Icknield Way. It may indeed be the direct linguistic descendant of the Roman Icianos. We must bear in mind that a prehistoric track, such as the Icknield Way, was not one single-metalled thoroughfare like a Roman road or a modern highway, but a broad line of route along which each traveller made his own "trek," so that the "Way" was a series of roughly parallel ruttings over the breadth of a mile and more. Such, to this day, are the routes across the Siberian steppes, which are often four or five miles across. Thus we found the Icknield Way at Whittlesford, three miles north of Chesterford, and it is probable that all the various "fords" we have been meeting—Shelford, Stapleford, Whittlesford, Duxford—have to do with its various passages of the Granta.

Beyond Chesterford the Granta comes down in tiny streamlets from the Essex chalk near Saffron Walden, with its wide-naved church, which Cromwell's troops used for a drill-shed and council-chamber, and its historic mansion of Audley End, once Walden Abbey, and its memories of the days, scarcely a century by-gone, when great crops of saffron were grown in its fields, leaving their only existing trace in the name. And even that is dying out; few of the inhabitants call their home anything but Walden. But this town is beyond our Cambridgeshire border.

CHAPTER XI

London Road.—Hauxton Bridge, Indulgences, Church, Becket Fresco.—Burnt Mill.—Haslingfield.—White Hill, View, Clunch Pits, Chapel, Papal Bulla.—Barrington, Green, Church, Porch, Seats, Chest, Fountains, Finds, Coprolite Digging, Hall.—Foxton.—Shepreth.—Meldreth, Parish Stocks.—Melbourn, Shipmoney.—Royston, Origin, Cave, Heath.—Bassingbourn, Old Accounts, Villenage.—Black Death.—Ashwell, Source of Cam, Church, Graffiti.—Akeman Street.—Barton, Butts.—Comberton, Maze.—Harlton Church, Old Pit.—Orwell Maypole, Church, Epitaph.—Wimpole Hall, Queen Victoria.—Arrington.—Shingay, Hospitallers, Fairy Cart.—Wendy.—Artesian Wells.—Guilden Morden, Screen, St. Edmund, Confessionals.

The Cam Valley road from Trumpington leads us over a singularly bare mile, edged by sparse thorn-trees, to Hauxton Mill, where we cross the Granta. The repair of the bridge here was, in mediæval days, paid for by the grant to all who aided this good object of a forty days' Indulgence. This does not mean a licence to sin with impunity for that period, as perfervid Protestants imagine, but merely the abrogation of any ordinary ecclesiastical censure incurred. The little church of Hauxton, not far beyond, is one of the few Norman village churches existing in Cambridgeshire, for the county suffered so severely in the Norman Conquest that little church building could be afforded till a century later, when Norman had given place to Early English.

In this church, upon the east wall of the south aisle is a fine fresco of Thomas à Becket, dating from within a few decades of his own lifetime. Representations of this Saint are extremely rare, for, as an ecclesiastic who had braved his king—and that king a Henry,—he was specially detested by Henry the Eighth. His Festivals were all suppressed, his name was erased from every Service Book, and his effigies were destroyed with ruthless diligence, so that this is almost the only one known to exist in all England. It was only saved by the niche in which it is painted being hastily bricked up and plastered over; to be forgotten for upwards of three centuries, till accidentally discovered in 1860 during some restoration work.

Hauxton Church stands a little off the main road, on a by way running from Shelford on the Granta to Haslingfield on the Cam. West of Hauxton this route becomes a mere field track, but quite a pretty one, crossing the Cam at an idyllic nook called Burnt Mill Bridges, where the green banks and clear waters are closed in by ancient elms and thorn bushes. It brings to the mind Milton's lines in Il Penseroso:

There in close covert, by some brook,
Where no profaner eye may look,
Hide me from day's garish eye."

Haslingfield (which is more directly reached from Cambridge by the Barton Road) has a fine and spacious church of the fourteenth century, the steeple being of special merit. Above it rises steeply the eastern extremity of a chalk spur to the height of 220 feet. From the summit, though so low, we get one of the widest panoramic views in England, embracing the whole valley of the Cam. "Ashwell Bush,"[170] which marks the source of the river, is conspicuous on a hill some ten miles to the south-westward, and Ely Cathedral, just beyond its junction with the Ouse, may be seen, twice as far away to the north; Cambridge, with its spires and pinnacles, lying between, five or six miles distant. Our eastward limit of vision is the long line of the East Anglian Heights, from Swaffham steeple[171] on their northernmost visible swell, twenty miles away, to the far-off jut of Sharpinhoe, near Dunstable, more than thirty miles in the opposite direction. Beneath us, in the valley, steeple after steeple rises amid its village elms, dotting the landscape like knots in net-work. No fewer than eighty of these can be made out, the most conspicuous being the cruciform church of Triplow.[172]

This eminence was anciently known as White Hill, from the three great "clunch" quarries,[173] which still conspicuously scar its sides, and must have done so much more conspicuously of old, when this material was much more generally used for building than it is now. From these quarries came, for example, the stone used in the First Court of St. John's College, Cambridge. The "pits," as they are locally called, are rapidly greening over, for the clunch is now only dug for the mending of farm roads, and occasionally for marling the fields; as Pliny records that the ancient Britons marled them two thousand years ago.

At the summit of the ridge a small roadside cottage, known as "Chapel Bush," represents the once famous shrine of "Our Lady of White Hill"; in mediæval days a noted centre of local devotion, which drew pilgrims in large numbers from a wide area, so that their accommodation, as we read, was no small profit (and, often, difficulty) to the neighbouring villages. No ruins, even, of this ancient chapel remain; but, in 1885, there was discovered on its site a leaden bulla of Pope Martin the Fifth, the first Pope to be generally acknowledged after the Great Schism; when for forty years two (or three) claimants to the Holy See were reigning simultaneously, supported some by one part of Christendom, some by another. He reigned 1417 to 1431, and was the consecrator of Milan Cathedral. It was he who, at the "Assize of Barnwell" (1430), pronounced that all spiritual jurisdiction over the students of Cambridge was exclusively vested in the University authorities. His bulla bears the heads of SS. Peter and Paul, with the traditional features, which Lanciani has now established as historical; St. Peter having a broad face with curly hair and beard, while St. Paul is thin-faced and straight-haired.

On the southern side of the hill lies Barrington, perhaps the loveliest of all Cambridgeshire villages. It consists of two long lines of scattered cottages, straggling along either side of a Village Green nearly a mile in length. The Green is traversed from end to end by the "Church Path," a pebbled causeway of immemorial antiquity. The church, to which this leads, stands at the north-eastern extremity of the Green, and is a noble structure of the twelfth century, with later developments. The south doorway and door are thirteenth century, and are wonders of graceful work; while the fourteenth century seats are of special interest as having been constructed with book-boards, showing that reading was not the rare accomplishment in those days that it is commonly supposed to have been.[174] There is also an iron-bound chest dating from the tenth century, a splendid specimen of the smiths-work for which England was then so famous. The font, too, is equally old, showing on its margin the depressions (now filled in), often provided in fonts of the period when baptism by immersion was the rule, as outlets for accidental overflow.

Here and there along the Green gush out bright fountains of delicious water from artesian wells driven into the "greensand," some 200 feet below the surface. Throughout all its length the village is sheltered, on the north, by the ridge of White Hill, while, on the south, the orchards and closes with their "hedge-row elms," slope down to the Cam and its water-meadows. The stream here runs beneath a gravel-terrace of its own formation, which has proved exceptionally rich in the remains of pleistocene mammalia, mostly, as has been said,[175] connoting a semi-tropical climate. Specimens of elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, bison, urus, lion, bear, hyæna, derived from Barrington, are to be seen in the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge. Associated palæolithic flint implements, and red-deer antlers rudely cut, show that human intelligence existed here along with these monsters, at least 5000 years ago, at the lowest estimate, which some geologists multiply fifty fold; and excavation has shown that the site has been populated pretty well ever since. Neolithic, British, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Mediæval relics have here been unearthed in quite astonishing abundance; and, though no Roman villa has yet been located, Roman coins have been found literally by the hundred.

This wealth of finds has been largely due to the "coprolite" digging, as it was inaccurately called, which went on here (and throughout the neighbourhood) during the whole latter half of the nineteenth century. It had been discovered that the "upper greensand"[176] (here a narrow deposit immediately over the gault and usually some fifteen or twenty feet below the surface) was full of organic remains worth extracting for manure. These remains were never true coprolites, but mostly formless nodules rich in phosphate of lime, many being sponges, along with abundance of sea-urchins, mollusca, crabs, and innumerable sharks' teeth.

The industry brought a wave of prosperity to the district; for coprolites were worth some £3 per ton, and the average yield was some 300 tons per acre. The merchants were, therefore, willing to pay well for the privilege of digging them out, and usually offered the landowner £150 or more per acre for three years' occupation of the land (more than its capital value); being bound also to level and resoil it at the end of their tenancy. Wages, too, ran high; a good "fossil-digger" could earn his 40s. per week. This produced a corresponding rise in agricultural wages, which went up from 10s. or 12s. per week to double that amount. The fossil-digging was all piecework, the men being paid by the cubic yard of earth moved.

After being brought to the surface the fossil-bearing greensand was washed in a horse-mill on the spot, an artesian well being bored, if necessary, to supply the water. This separated out the nodules, while the greensand and water was run off as thick mud; used, when dry, for levelling the land, and sometimes for brick-making. The nodules were ground to powder in central works at Royston and elsewhere, and treated with sulphuric acid, thus producing super-phosphate of lime adapted for manure. At the height of the industry as many as 55,000 tons per year were extracted from the Cambridgeshire beds; but with their gradual exhaustion the trade dwindled away till it was finally destroyed by imports from Charleston, U.S.A., where the like "coprolites" are found as a superficial deposit, needing no digging. And with the trade has disappeared the artificial prosperity which it brought, to be succeeded by the full weight of the agricultural depression.

Barrington Hall is the seat of one of the oldest of English county families, the Bendyshes, who have held their estate here since the reign of John. Their residence at Barrington dates, however, only from that of Edward the Third, for whom, during his siege of Calais, they raised money by mortgaging their earlier abode at Radwinter, in Essex, to the monks of that place. Before the king by repaying their loan put them in case to redeem the mortgage, the monks had foreclosed; thus driving the family to reside on their Cambridgeshire property at Barrington. They are not, however, lords of the Manor there (though they are in the adjoining parish of Foxton). That position belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge, who are also rectors of the church, by the gift of their earliest founder, Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor to Edward the Second.

From either end of Barrington lanes lead southward across the Cam to Foxton and Shepreth respectively. Both these villages are hard by the main road which we are following. Foxton Church has a most beautiful Early English east window, and some very good Geometrical tracery. Here is found that rare form of rural industry, a book-printing establishment, which to some extent mitigates the depression mentioned above. At Shepreth this is done on a larger scale by the making of cement, for which the clay procurable here is, like that on the Medway, peculiarly adapted. This is a little gem of a village, with a clear and copious brook running across its maze of thick-shaded lanes. The source of these waters is in the ancient Fowl Mere already spoken of.[177]

Another such tributary rises in our next village, Melbourn, and runs, on its way to the Cam, through the adjoining Meldreth, an old-world place, where the parish stocks are still to be seen at the village cross-roads. Till the nineteenth century was well on its way, these instruments of punishment were in actual use for the correction of minor offences such as vagrancy. They consist of a low upright frame of rough wood, so contrived that the prisoner's feet, as he sat upon the ground beside it, were passed through holes in the structure and there secured. The parish constable was supposed to keep sentry over him, but actually seldom kept off either the friends, who might alleviate his captivity by beer and tobacco, or the more numerous enemies, who found it a good joke to tease and pelt his helplessness. The hands were sometimes also secured, sometimes not; but in any case the culprit's situation was exceedingly unpleasant, and the stocks proved a most wholesome deterrent.

Melbourn is a larger place, and boasts that rare possession, a village trysting-tree. This is a huge elm, standing by the roadside at the churchyard gate. It is now at the extremity of elm life, some three hundred years old, and only the stump (still clothed with leafage) remains. But the vast massiveness of the roots show its former grandeur. At this tree, in 1640, the villagers spontaneously gathered to resist the imposition of the "ship-money," whereby Charles the First was striving to recruit his exhausted exchequer. "And they fell upon the sheriff's men with stones and staves, and hedgestakes and forks, and beat them and wounded divers of them, and did drive them out of the highway into a woman's yard for their safety. And were forced for saving of their lives to get out of the town a back way; which, notwithstanding, some thirty or forty able men and boys pursued them above a quarter of a mile, stoning them, and driving the bailiffs into a ditch, where some of their horses stuck fast. And the multitude got some of the bailiffs' horses and carried them away, and would not redeem them without money."

This stirring episode shows that the men of Melbourn were already Puritan stalwarts, a character which the place has ever since maintained. Three years later the parson himself removed from the church "sixty superstitious pictures," and a cross from the steeple, and digged down the altar steps. And after the Restoration, when Nonconformity was put under the straitest ban of the law, its worship still continued here to be practised, so that the place became, as it still remains, the chief centre of the Free Church form of religion in this part of the county.

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. The place has an interesting history. Like Newmarket, at the other end of Cambridgeshire, it is not, as are the villages around, one of the original English settlements dating from the fifth or sixth centuries, but a burgh of mediæval growth, owing its existence (again like Newmarket) to its position on the line of the Icknield Way, here crossed by another presumably British and certainly Roman road, the Ermine Street, which joined, as it still joins, the two great nerve-centres of Roman Britain, York and London. It is still known as the Old North Road.

Such a junction was necessarily an important spot, and the wonder is that there was not always a town here. It was left however still occupied when, in the eleventh century, the Lady Roesia, wife of Eudo Dapifer, the Norman chieftain to whom the land hereabouts was assigned by William the Conqueror, set up here, at the meeting of the ways, one of those stone wayside crosses by which mediæval piety so often marked such junctions. A century later the new-born devotion to St. Thomas of Canterbury led the then lord of the manor, Eustace de Mark, to found and dedicate to him a Priory, called, from the neighbouring cross, "De Cruce Rosae." This, as so often happened, became the nucleus of a little town, which got to be called Roesia's Town, or Royston.

At the same period Royston was the scene of yet another ecclesiastical development, by the establishment of a famous hermitage in its still celebrated cave. This cave is a curious bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk below the Icknield Way, of prehistoric origin, having been apparently one of those "dene holes" from which the ancient inhabitants of Britain used to procure chalk for marling their fields. It is not so long since this method was discontinued, and numbers of these holes are still to be found in Kent and elsewhere. They were always made on the same plan. A shaft was sunk to the desired depth, and the chalk excavated all round the bottom as far as safety permitted. The hole was then abandoned, and usually filled in. This one at Royston, however, remained open, and in the twelfth century was taken as his abode by a hermit, who employed himself in carving devotional figures and emblems all round the walls.

He must have been a true Solitary, for his shrine was only accessible by a rope ladder twenty-five feet long let down through the narrow opening at the top. It remained, however, a place of devotion till the Reformation, when it not only became disused, but was so effectually filled up that its very existence was forgotten for some two hundred and fifty years. Then curiosity was aroused by a subsidence at the top (under the very centre of the town), and the hole once more cleared out, a more convenient approach being cut from adjacent premises, by which it may still be visited.

The Priory of Royston was, of course, suppressed under Henry the Eighth. But its church was suffered to be bought by the inhabitants of the town, who besought the king to spare it to them on the ground that, though Royston stood in five several parishes, there was "never a parish church within two miles." This was literally true, the parochial boundaries having been already long established before the town grew up. The five parishes were those of Melbourn, Barley, Bassingbourn, Reed, and Therfield. They had therefore attended the Priory church, and been ministered to by its monks. The place was, in answer to this petition, constituted a parish, and the church rededicated to St. John the Baptist instead of to Henry's bête noire, Thomas à Becket. But the old connection of Royston with this saint survives to this day in the annual Fair held in July (near the date of his "Translation"), which is still popularly called "Becket Fair."

At Royston the Icknield Way used to be the boundary of Cambridgeshire, as at Newmarket, so that it was convenient for the resident magistrates to be in the Commission for both counties. Thus, by merely crossing the road, they could exercise their authority in whichever might be desired. Beyond the town, the way continues to run south-westwards, along the foot of the East Anglian heights, which here form the watershed between the basin of the Ouse and that of the Thames. Their northern escarpment is, at this point, still in its primæval condition, a steep slope of virgin turf, known as Royston Heath, the common property of the township. The Heath has a far-reaching view and delicious air, and the Royston folk do well in jealously guarding against any usurpation of their rights in it. That golf links should not exist on such a magnificent stretch of turf would almost be unthinkable, but even over this development many shake their heads as an encroachment.

As we continue our way along the hedgeless road at the foot of this delightful common, the Great Northern Railway, from Cambridge to London, keeps us close company on our right. A mile or so beyond it rises a conspicuous line of poplar trees. These mark the village of Bassingbourn, one of the most interesting in the county to the historian. For here there is preserved in the church a whole library of antique books, and amongst these (in manuscript) the churchwardens' accounts from 1498 to 1534, kept with an accuracy which enables us to picture faithfully the village life of those days. We find that it was a period of high wages, for a labourer got threepence a day if boarded, and fivepence unboarded. His board then was worth a shilling per week. Nowadays it is reckoned at ten shillings at least, so that we must multiply all the items by ten to express them in current value. His wages were thus equivalent to twenty-five shillings per week, double the present rate, while artisans could command nearly twice as much. The times were thus abnormally prosperous, and the parishioners could afford to spend so lavishly in merrymaking at the "Church Ales" that an annual profit equivalent to nearly £50 was usually made on these entertainments, which corresponded to the Parochial Teas and concerts of the present day. These profits went towards the "reparacyon" of the church, and the current church expenses, including such heavy items as refounding the bells, at a cost equal to over £200, and renovating the clock and the organ. Further funds were raised by a great "Miracle Play" of St. George and the Dragon, to which the whole neighbourhood assembled.

All this prosperity (founded, as always, on the high rate of wages) was the result of that fearful catastrophe, the Black Death, which, a few generations back, had all but decimated the population, and shattered the old social system of England, wherein the labourers were "villains," tied to the manor on which they were born, and bound to do for their lord (in lieu of rent) so many "jobs"[178] a year. A "job" meant 100 minutes' work, a strange subdivision of time, implying some fairly accurate means of measuring its flight, though we know not what these may have been. A Cambridgeshire "inquisition" of 1313 values each job at a halfpenny, so that the day's work of a "villain" was worth about threepence.

But the demand for labour after the "Death" became so great, and so many of the estate owners had died, that villenage came to an end, and the labourers could, as now, go where they would and make the best wages they could get in open market.

The result, after a while, was, as we have seen, a great increase in prosperity, testified to by the abundant Perpendicular work in almost every parish church in England. But the immediate effect was fearful distress, and a chaotic dislocation of the old feudal relationships, giving birth to the socialistic dreams which for a moment so vainly tried to materialise themselves in the anarchical outbreak which we call Wat Tyler's Rebellion. An example of this dislocation of ordinary conditions is furnished by the Papal registers, which tell us that the rectory of this very Bassingbourn (estimated at the equivalent of no less than £1,200 per year) was made over, in 1410, to the Chapel Royal of St. Martin's-le-Grand, London, "considering that the said chapel hath been ruined by the Great Storm, and its lands lie waste for lack of labourers through the pestilence."

The "great storm" here referred to took place on St. Maur's Day (January 15th), 1361. Of both storm and pestilence we shall find a most interesting record in the church of Ashwell, the next and last place which we should see in this corner of the county. To reach it we have, indeed, to cross the border and go some half mile beyond; but though politically 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. All round the floor of this gush forth springs upon springs of the brightest, most sparkling water; so copious that when the infant stream escapes through a breach towards the north it is already nearly thirty feet broad. No prettier river-source is to be found throughout the length and breadth of England. The ash-trees, however, are not, as one is apt to think at first, the origin of the name, but its consequence. The first syllable really embodies that Celtic word for water which, as Axe, Exe, Esk, and Usk, meets us in so many places all over Great Britain; and this syllable, at some far-back date, suggested the planting of ashes around the well.