Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

Not far from these bounteous springs rises the splendid tower of the church, springing high into the air with the same undaunted Early English ambition which raised the spire of Salisbury. And on its wall (inside) is carved, in rude and deeply incised lettering of Old English style, varied by some curiously Greek characteristics, the record already spoken of, dealing with the Black Death and the storm. This consists of four lines, intended for Latin elegiacs, again with a Greek touch, and runs thus:

M . Ct . Xpenta . miseranda . ferox . violenta .
M.CCC.L.
Supest . plebs . pessima . testis . in . fineque . vents .
Validus . oc . anno . maurus . in . orbe . tonat.
M.CCC.LXI.

The opening words stand for the date:

Ct = Cter = CCC, and Xpenta = XXXXX = 50

The interpretation therefore is:

1350! Miserable, wild, distracted,
1350!
The dregs of the people alone survive to witness.
And in the end a wind
Full mighty. This year St Maur thunders in the world.
1361.

The year 1349 marked the most fatal stage of the Black Death in these parts. In that year, to judge by the Diocesan records, no less than eighty-five per cent. of the beneficed clergy were swept away, which implies a corresponding mortality amongst other classes. By 1350 the worst was over, but the full wretchedness of the situation was now developing itself. The plague lingered on, constantly growing milder, till 1361, when the great storm was supposed to have cleared the fair of the last remnants of infection. A like popular distich about this later visitation is quoted by Adam of Murimuth:

C ter erant mille decies sex unus, et ille,
Luce tua Maure, vehemens fuit impetus auræ.
Ecce flat hoc anno Maurus in orbe tonans.

That is, in English:

There were 300 + 1000 + 60 + 1 and that
Mighty blast of wind was on thy day, Maurus.
Lo! in this year bloweth Maurus thundering in the world.

St. Maur was a Gallican saint of the sixth century who was the first to introduce monasticism into France. There are several other interesting graffiti on the same wall as the above, one of them representing old St. Paul's with its lofty steeple, the highest in the world (510 feet), and the famous Rose Window of the transept which Chaucer mentions in his Canterbury Tales.

Another, and perhaps prettier, way of reaching Ashwell from Cambridge is by taking the road that runs along the Backs, and following it out of the town in its course to the south-west. Its local designation is the Barton Road, but to antiquarians it has been known, since the seventeenth century, as the Akeman Street. It was at that period that the accepted identification of our Roman roads came into being, mainly through the fearless erudition of Gale. Their names (except that of the Via Devana) are as old at least as the Norman Conquest; but, save only in the case of the Watling Street, the main line of which has never been disputed, the connection between any given name and any given road has been matter for the wildest conjecture. Thus, Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the eleventh century, makes the Ermine Street (which we now, with strong reason, identify with the Old North Road from London to York) run from St. David's to Southampton! Our Akeman Street is supposed to connect Wells on the Wash with Aust on the Severn, passing on its way through Bath (the Ake-man-chester of the Anglo-Saxons, i.e., "the stone stronghold of Aquæ," Aquæ being the Roman name for Bath). But a lot of this is mere conjecture. The "Barton Road," however, is undoubtedly on the line of a Roman road.

In spite of its name, it does not pass through the village of Barton. Indeed, like the other roads leading westwards from Cambridge, it curiously avoids the villages on its line, or rather (for the road is older than they) the villages have curiously avoided being directly upon it, though they lie thick on either side. Possibly the first Anglo-Saxon settlers may have had in this district some superstitious dread of a deserted Roman road, such as they certainly entertained at first for the deserted Roman towns, which they did not occupy for many a year (as at Cambridge), though they located their hamlets all round them.

But though the Akeman Street does not actually take us through Barton village, it does lead us past the rare object of interest to be found connected with the place, the ancient Archery Butts of the parish. These are to be seen just opposite the sign-post which points to Haslingfield, and are worth a pause to contemplate, for they give a most impressive idea of what archery meant to our forefathers. Every parish, it must be remembered, was bound by law in mediæval times to have such a stretch of ground, and every yeoman was bound to constant practice upon it. And what practice! These "butts" are a stretch of greensward, some hundred yards across, and in length no less than three furlongs (660 yards). It looks an almost incredible distance for a bowman, but it was the standard, so far as we can judge by the very few butts of which the memory still survives. The length of the short street in South London, still called Newington Butts, is nearly the same.

Here, then, we can picture the sturdy archers of Plantagenet days stretching themselves; their bows, not the toys of the modern toxophilite with their thirty or forty pounds of pull, but of twice the power (eighty lb. being a common pull in those times), and their "cloth-yard" arrows, over three feet long, whistling to a target not planted forty or fifty yards away, but twelve times the distance—the whole length of these butts. Indeed, for anything under two furlongs light arrows were not allowed, and the heavy regulation war arrow had to be used. Each man was taught, as Bishop Latimer tells us in recording his own youthful training, to draw his bow not by mere strength, but by sleight of hand, "to lay the weight of his body into the bow," and to draw the bowstring not to his breast, like other nations, but to his ear. Small wonder that with eye and sinews so trained our English archers became the wonder and the dread of Europe, or that their shafts decided so many a battlefield—Cressy, Poictiers, Agincourt, Flodden.

A mile further we cross the Bourn Brook, a tiny tributary which joins the Cam near Grantchester, hard by a small station on the Cambridge branch of the London and North Western Railway, called Lord's Bridge, from the Lord Hardwicke who, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, substituted a bridge for the earlier ford here. To our right we see, across the fields, the church tower of Comberton; where, on the little village green, can still be seen the worn remains of a turf-built "maze," first traced out no one knows when, but certainly not later than the sixteenth century. Various mystical reasons are conjectured for the origin of these mazes, of which a fair number still exist in England (especially in the Eastern counties), while many more are known to have been destroyed by the Puritans of the seventeenth century as relics of heathen superstition. Such, indeed, they probably are. Mr. Walter Johnson, in his "Folk Memory," considers them to be exceedingly primitive, begun in connection with "ceremonial dances of painted heathen round a prehistoric camp fire." This Comberton maze is fifty feet in diameter, while the tracks are two feet in width, divided by slight banks of turf, once, it would seem, about a foot in height, but now much worn down.

The next turn (to the left) leads to Harlton, a pretty, shady village, with a fine Perpendicular church, having a stone rood screen, which is rare, and, what is yet rarer, a still surviving stone reredos of the fifteenth century, with a central recess, once closed with a door, and evidently intended as a "Tabernacle" for the Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. The six niches on either side of this recess were as evidently meant for images of the twelve Apostles.

Harlton lies close under White Hill, that chalk spur which we have already met at Haslingfield.[179] Here, too, there is a "clunch-pit" in the hill-side, from which the material for the church was probably dug. It is now disused, except for occasional marling purposes, and some unknown benefactor has planted its slopes with larches and laburnums, forming a most fascinating little dell, the charms of which are free to all.

Our road now climbs the hill, which it crosses through a cutting, with a fine view from the summit in either direction. In the little clump of trees just to the west of the road there stood, till the 'seventies of the nineteenth century, Orwell Maypole, the last of its class to survive in these parts. In mediæval times every village had its maypole, round which the lasses and lads hied them to dance on May Day. But, like the mazes, they were called (and actually were) remnants of heathenism, and, as such, were destroyed wholesale in the years of Puritan ascendancy. So it befell with the great maypole which gave name to the church of St. Andrew Under-shaft in the City of London. It was hewn down, and, as it lay along the street, sawn in pieces, each householder taking for firewood the length that lay opposite his own door. The Restoration set a certain number up again, but the continuity of their use had been broken, and its revival (as May Day was connected with no special Festival of the Church, like Easter and Christmas, which were also originally heathen feasts) became a merely artificial reaction, bound to dwindle away. So it befell that Orwell Maypole, after being disused for generations, finally perished by natural decay. It stood almost exactly upon the meridian of Greenwich, so that it was a valuable and far-seen landmark.

Orwell itself lies, as usual, just off the road, on the southern slope of the hill. Half a century ago it was the prettiest of villages, with its eponymous "well," shaded by magnificent trees, gushing from the hill-side, in the midst of a prehistoric earthwork, just below the noble church. But, about 1870, the earthwork, unhappily, was found to contain "coprolites" (worth probably about £100 after the expenses of getting them had been paid). For this paltry sum the whole place was destroyed. Well, trees, earthwork, all are now gone; only the church is left, perched on its slope high above the village street. It has a grand decorated chancel, the roof of which is covered with heraldic devices, and contains an interesting epitaph in Latin verse to one of the seventeenth century rectors of the parish, beginning:

In the south aisle is preserved a small crucifix of stone, dating from the thirteenth century. It had been built into the wall to save it from destruction at the Reformation, and was not discovered for three hundred years.

About a mile further we find a village along the road itself, the village of Wimpole. But we notice that the houses are all modern, and that no church is to be seen amongst them. A church there is belonging to them, but it stands a mile to the west, where the village also stood till towards the close of the eighteenth century. At that time the mansion and park of Wimpole Hall were being enlarged to their present magnificence by Philip, the first Earl of Hardwicke (the builder of Lord's Bridge). Plebeian cottages were not to be tolerated "betwixt the wind and his nobility," so he pulled down the entire village and planted it, where it now is, along the Akeman Street. The church, which could not well be moved, he faced with red brick to match his new-built stables, close to which it is situated.

Wimpole Hall has passed through various hands. The central portion was built, in 1632, by Sir Thomas Chicheley, the wings were added a century later by the Earl of Oxford, from whom it came to the Hardwicke family. It is now the seat of Viscount Clifden. The house is on a splendid scale, and the grounds on a scale yet more splendid, with a double avenue of elms, three miles long, running to the south. Here Queen Victoria stayed when visiting Cambridgeshire shortly after her marriage, and won all hearts by her graciousness. It is still remembered how when, by some blunder, the attendant in charge of her jewels was not forthcoming, she came down to the ball-room with a simple wreath of roses in her hair, "and not all the jewels in the world could have made her look so queenly."

There is, of course, a public road leading from Wimpole village to the church, which is also accessible from the west, where the great iron gates of the park are usually unbarred at the request of respectable visitors. These gates open upon the Ermine Street, which the Akeman Street crosses a mile beyond New Wimpole, after also crossing the great avenue. Close by them is another transplanted village, Arrington, whose church stands on the hill half a mile westward. The traffic of the old North Road is responsible for this move, and also for the delightful old coaching inn here, the Hardwicke Arms, with its old-fashioned rooms and long range of stables.

At the junction our road ceases. To continue our westward course we must go along the Ermine Street for half a mile, either northward or southward, where we shall find lanes, either of which will carry us on. The northern lane here will take us along the line of the hill, to Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, Potton, and, finally, Bedford, and will enable us, if we will, to explore the three Hadleys (East Hadley, Hadley St. George, and Cockayne Hadley), of which the two last have fine halls and parks. The southern, however, is the preferable route. It follows the course of the infant Cam, crossed by a bridge on the Ermine Street, and brings us first to the wholly obliterated Shingay, which, though once the most important parish hereabouts, and still giving its name to the Rural Deanery, has absolutely ceased to exist, church and all; its parishioners being affiliated to the neighbouring village of Wendy.

The cause of this ruin was the suppression, at the Reformation, of the institution which was literally the life of Shingay, a House of the Crusading Order of St. John of Jerusalem, or, as they were commonly called, the Knights Hospitallers. This title was given them because, at their original foundation, they dwelt in a Hospital (or house for the hospitable entertainment of pilgrims) at Jerusalem. We now connect this name only with places where the sick are ministered to; but it originally connoted far wider ministrations, and, indeed, rather corresponded to the other form in which the word has survived into our present speech—hotel. We read it on a leaden seal found here at Wendy, in 1876, which bears on one side a conventional representation of the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by the legend Ihervsalem, Hospitalis. On the other is the name of Guarin de Montaigu, who, from 1232 to 1269, was Grand Master of the Order.

The Hospitallers, as readers of "Ivanhoe" know, were, like the Templars, a military Order, who, for over six centuries, fought unceasingly for Christendom. First at Jerusalem, then at Rhodes, then at Malta, they held out with never-failing devotion against the on-sweeping torrent of Mahommedan aggression; and it is scarcely too much to say that but for their eight-pointed cross Christianity might well have been crushed throughout Europe. Not till the nineteenth century was their last stronghold, Malta, reft from them by Napoleon, to pass finally under the flag of England. The Order still survives, but the modern sodality calling itself by the same name, connected with what we now call hospital work, was set up in quite recent days.

Preceptories of the Order, as their branch Houses were called, were found in every land, and not least in England, where they were so much beloved that, when the rival Order of the Temple was suppressed, in the fourteenth century, its property was made over to them. Here, at Shingay, their establishment was a small one consisting of the preceptor, two knights, and three priests, one of whom acted as Vicar of Wendy. The gross income of the House was, in 1332 (as we know from a Report still existing in the Record Office at Malta), £187 12s. 8d., equivalent to about £3,500 at the present value of money. Of this the land (about 1,000 acres) brought in £71; the mills, houses, etc., £4 13s. 4d.; the work of the villains £38 10s. 0d.; and the Rectories of Wendy and Sawston, which formed part of their endowment, £66 13s. 4d. The rest was derived from the fees paid by visitors; for, by the rule of the Order, the doors of the House were open to all comers. The expenses of the year amounted to less than half the income, for they lived frugally, their keep only coming to about £3 a week (in present value) for the six inmates, besides servants and guests. Men servants were paid at the rate of £12 a year (besides their keep), and each knight was allowed the equivalent of £25 a year for clothing and pocket-money. Thus a large sum was available for the war-chest of the Order, and was annually forwarded to the headquarters at Jerusalem or Rhodes.

One of their sources of income was a special privilege which is still remembered in local tradition. Their House (like those of the Templars) was exempt from every ban, even that of the Pope himself. Thus, in the dismal days of King John, when England was placed under an Interdict, when no rites of religion could be observed, and even burial of the dead was forbidden, so that "you might see human bodies lying everywhere about the fields unsepultured," Shingay shone out as the one spot in the whole district where the consolations of religion were still attainable. Here Mass continued to be said, here the departed could still be laid in hallowed earth. And hither they were brought from all sides. And thus it is that peasants may be found who still tell how, at some far off, unknown period, those who, for some forgotten, inexplicable reason, might not be buried like Christians in their own churchyard, were spirited away by night in a "fairy-cart" to Shingay, there to be committed in peace to the ground. This "fairy-cart" is an echo of the word feretorium (or bier on wheels), in which the conveyance was actually effected.

Not a building of any kind now exists at Shingay, and very few at the adjoining Wendy, where, at every turn, we are greeted by a wealth of fresh-springing waters, derived from the artesian wells of the old coprolite diggings. The height in which the water in these wells rises is strangely variable. They are always made on the same system; an ordinary well being dug through the upper strata till the impervious gault is reached, which may be any distance from six to sixty feet below the surface. A four-inch bore is then made through the gault by means of a sort of Brobdingnagian cheese-taster, four or five feet long, screwed to an iron handle three times that length. Again and again the taster is brought up, full of gault, and its contents or "core" thrown aside. As the bore gets deeper more irons are added, till the water-bearing greensand or "rock" is attained, usually in the second hundred feet of the bore. The taster is then removed and a "chisel" substituted for "striking the rock," i.e., punching a hole by lifting the entire length of irons a few feet and letting it fall. By and by up comes the water, quite suddenly for the most part, gushing from the bore and filling the well till it finds its level. This, as we have said, is curiously different in different spots; in some it does not reach the surface, and has to be pumped up; in others, as here at Wendy, it will supply a fountain eight or ten feet in height. One of these picturesquely gushes out from the top of an old wooden gate-post, up which some artistically-minded coprolite-digger has engineered its course. It is almost medicinal in the quantity of iron with which it is impregnated, but delicious to drink, and the softest possible.

This gate-post is beside the lane leading on Guilden Morden, the last village before we once more reach Ashwell, and itself standing on an outlying mound of the Ashwell chalk. Round this elevation the Cam takes a wide sweep. We may record that Wendy is the highest point along its course which navigation has ever attained. The breadth at Ashwell at once suggests to visitors that a canoe could reach the spot, and many an attempt has been made by ambitious undergraduates. But the upper reaches are so choked up with reeds and weeds and rushes and bushes that no one has ever penetrated further than this spot, some four miles, by water-way, below the source.

Guilden Morden has a far-seen church, a conspicuous object from White Hill, over Barrington, twelve miles away. It is a fine building, with an unusually spacious tower of Northamptonshire stone, and a Saxon font. But it is chiefly interesting for the remarkable development of the fourteenth century rood-screen, which on either side expands into a small "parclose" or pew, enclosed to the height of twelve feet by rich decorated tracery, ornately painted (the original pattern having survived sufficiently to be restored). On the west panel of the northern parclose may be discerned the figures of St. Erconwald and St. Edmund, both members of the royal line of East Anglia. The former was a brother of St. Etheldreda, the foundress of Ely, and became a much-beloved Bishop of London in the seventh century. The latter was the hero king martyred by the Danes a century later, the chosen friend of our great Alfred, of whom so lovely a picture has been left us by the old chroniclers:—

"From his earliest years the truest of Christians, he showed himself of such promise that, by the unanimous will of all his folk, he was not so much chosen as rushed into the kingship over them. For his very look was worthy of this high estate; so bright was it with the calm beauty of holiness and of a conscience like the sea at rest. Kind was he of speech and courteous to all; the grace of Humility came natural to him; and amongst his comrades he kept his place as their Lord with wondrous meekness and no touch of pride. For already the Saint bare in his face that which he was afterwards, by God's will, to show forth; seeing that as a boy he had pressed with all his might into the Way of Righteousness, which, as God's pity foreknew, would end for him in the Way of Martyrdom.... And walking in the King's Highway, he turned aside neither to the right hand, by being puffed up with his own merits, nor to the left, by yielding to the faults of human weakness. To the needy was he a cheerful giver, to the widows and orphans the kindest of Patrons; ever keeping before his eyes the saying of the Wise Man: "Behold they have made thee Prince; but be thou among them as one of themselves."[180]

These parcloses seem to have been made to serve as confessional boxes, devices which were very rare in England before the Reformation. "Shrift," of course, was universal; but neither priest nor penitent were shut from view. The former sat in a chair, usually at the altar rail, while the latter knelt beside and facing him. In these parcloses the priest's head as he sat on the seat would be visible to those in the church, but the kneeling penitent would be hidden. That such was the purpose here would appear from the lines in old English lettering painted upon their sides:—

From Guilden Morden a lane leads straight to Ashwell, leaving on the left Steeple Morden (which lost its steeple in the great storm of 1703), and Littlington, the cradle of Cambridgeshire Nonconformity, of which hereafter. Here the old parish Lock-up survives; a dismal den of red brick, some ten feet square, with iron-clenched door and closely-barred window.

CHAPTER XII

Oxford Road, Observatory, Neptune, Cambridge Discoveries.—Coton.—Madingley.—Hardwick.—Toft, St. Hubert.—Childerley, Charles I.—Knapwell.—Bourn.—Caxton—Eltisley, St. Pandiana, Storm.—St. Neot's, Neotus and Alfred.—Paxton Hill.—Godmanchester, Port Meadow.—Huntingdon, Cromwell's Penance.—The Hemingfords.—St. Ives.—Holywell.—Overcote.—Earith, the Bedford Rivers, "Parallax."

Due westwards from Cambridge, turning leftwards out of the Via Devana just beyond Magdalene College, runs what used to be the old coaching road to Oxford. Till quite recently the milestones along it gave the distance to that city, between which and Cambridge there was of old a good deal of traffic, for the Universities were more closely connected then than even now. Popularly this road was called the Ad eundem road, a nickname referring to the not so long by-gone privilege by which any graduate of either place might be admitted to the same degree (ad eundem gradum) in the sister University simply on payment of the fees and without any further examination. It is now spoken of as the Madingley Road, from the first village along its course, or the St. Neots Road, from the first town to which it leads. Thence it went on to Oxford by way of Bedford, Buckingham, and Bicester.

A short two miles along this road brings us to the porticoed front and white domes of the University Observatory, erected in 1822. More than a century earlier its embryo had been set up on the summit of the Great Gate Tower at Trinity College, for the benefit of Sir Isaac Newton; but this seems to have been little used after the death of that greatest of scientists. Even after the new Observatory was set up a certain lack of keenness pervaded its work. Thus it came about that Cambridge and England lost the glory of the discovery of Neptune, the most distant planet of our Solar System.

For more than a decade the irregularities in the motion of Uranus (itself not long discovered) had suggested to astronomers that there must be another planet exterior to it, when, in 1841, John Couch Adams, then only an undergraduate of St. John's College, set himself to grapple with the arduous task of finding by analytical computation the orbit and place of this supposititious body. So stupendous were the difficulties that when, after four years of concentrated effort, he submitted his results to the Astronomer Royal, begging that the planet might be looked for in a certain spot (where we now know that it actually was visible at the time), his suggestion received very incredulous acceptance. Was it likely that a mere youth should have solved this gigantic problem?

That very autumn of 1845 another young man, quite independently, devoted himself to the same quest, the brilliant French mathematician Leverrier. He, in the following summer, published the results he had so far attained. Adams had never published; but these new results so strikingly agreed with his that the Astronomer Royal's incredulity gave way, and he desired that search should be made with the great equatorial telescope, then newly erected at Cambridge through the generosity of the Duke of Northumberland.

His injunctions were carried out; but the lack of a trustworthy star map made the work long. And it was made longer by lack of promptitude. The minute celestial object (only equal to a star of the eighth magnitude) had been actually seen, but further observations were needed to establish the fact that it was indeed a planet moving amongst the stars around it. And these observations were delayed at the crucial point by the observers adjourning for a cup of tea! When they returned the sky had clouded over and no favourable night occurred for many evenings after. Meanwhile Leverrier had called in the aid of the Berlin Observatory; where there did exist a good star map, and also the eagerness so sadly lacking here at Cambridge. The very day his letter was received (23rd September, 1846), the great Berlin telescope was directed to the spot which he indicated,—and there was the planet.

The story goes that when the tidings of this overthrow of hope reached Cambridge, and were reported to the Fellows of Trinity as they sat at dinner in their Hall, it was as if a thunderbolt had fallen amongst them:

"And all talk died, as in a grove all song
Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;
Then a long silence came upon the Hall,"

broken at last by Adam Sedgwick, the venerable Professor of Geology, who solemnly raised his clenched fist and brought it down upon the High Table, not with violence but with a concentrated tension of indignation, saying slowly, with an equal solemnity: "Confound their lymphatic souls."[181] As for the Observatory, the blow thoroughly roused it up; and ever since it has remained, both in material and moral equipment, amongst the foremost of the great Observatories of the world, where solid and useful work is continuously being done, while up-to-date instruments, methods, and records are never to seek. On one evening of each week during term time any member of the University may see the practical working of the place, and bring friends with him.

A mile further we reach the foot of the chalk slope which bounds the Cam valley. At this point lanes diverge to the right and left. The latter almost immediately brings us to Coton, a tiny village with a tiny, but most picturesque, fourteenth century church, having a (restored) Norman chancel, a pretty spire, and a yet prettier south doorway. There is, too, a massive rood screen, and a curious "palimpsest" Table of Commandments, the original sixteenth century lettering showing beneath repainted characters of the seventeenth century. Altogether the place is well worth the slight divergence needed to visit it, more especially as the lane between it and our road gives a view of Cambridge almost comparable to the prospect of

"That sweet City, with her dreaming spires"

which the Cumnor slopes (as Matthew Arnold sings) provide for Oxonians. Coton can also be reached from Cambridge by a delightful field path beneath overhanging oaks, which runs straight from Garret Hostel Bridge. Coton spire (as has been already mentioned) is the "objective" of the Trinity avenue, though the view has long been closed out by the growth of the branches.

The other lane, to the right, which leads to Madingley, is also worth traversing. From its hedgeless "switch-back" terraces we look northwards across the valley, not of the Cam but of the Ouse, bounded by the uplands of the island of Ely, ten miles away at the nearest point, and nearly twice as far where the ridge is crowned by the dim and distant towers of the cathedral. Conspicuous in the nearer distance is the red-brick mass of the Ladies' College at Girton, some three miles away from us. Madingley, to which half a mile or so of this prospect leads us, is a little place of steep pitches and tree-shaded lanes, very different from the usual Cambridgeshire village, but with a special charm of its own. It has a pretty little church nestling beneath a fine Elizabethan hall of red-brick. Both church and hall contain portions of the spoil of the church of St. Etheldreda, which once stood at Histon and was pulled down by Mr. Justice Hinde, the first builder of Madingley Hall, to whom the sacred edifice was given by Henry the Eighth. Its Norman font is now in Madingley Church, while part of its roof is still to be seen in the Hall.

At Madingley Hall King Edward the Seventh was quartered while an undergraduate of Trinity College. Tradition asserts that it once sheltered another monarch, the ill-fated Charles the First, in a momentary attempt to escape from the clutches of the rebel army during his enforced residence at the neighbouring Hall of Childerley, as will be narrated in connection with that place. The Hall has, since that date, passed from one family to another, and is now the seat of Colonel Harding, D.C.L.

Madingley is a centre of pretty lanes. Besides that already spoken of, another, an avenue of greenery, leads northwards to the Via Devana, another westwards to the village of Dry Drayton, and another up the hill southwards, to rejoin our St. Neots road on the summit of the ridge. Here we are 220 feet above the sea, overlooking the valley of the Ouse to the north and to the south that of the Cam, or, rather, of its tributary the Bourn Brook. The road keeps the highest ground, almost on the level, while a succession of lanes to the right and left lead down to the villages on either slope.

First comes a southward turn to Hardwick, the church of which is so conspicuous an object in the view from the roof of King's College Chapel. Here, in 1644, "Mr. Mapletoft, parson thereof, with a wife and seven children, had these articles exhibited against him, viz., that he refused to read anything from the Parliament, but read many things from the King at Oxford with great boldness; that he prayeth not for the Parliament nor hath found them any arms at all; that he is a man devoted to many superstitious ceremonies, and commonly useth altar-worship, east-worship, and dropping-worship,[182] and after his sermon came out of the pulpit into the chancel and there made an end of his will-worship." Whereupon, by the Earl of Manchester's warrant, he was promptly ejected and sequestrated. The previous year the church had been purified by Dowsing, who notes with disgust that for dealing with "ten superstitious pictures and a cross" he was here paid only 3s. 2d. instead of the 6s. 8d., which was his regular fee.

The great iconoclast has the same grievance in the adjoining village of Toft, where he got "only 6s. 8d." for a specially heavy "purification" of the church, involving the destruction of "twenty-seven superstitious pictures in the windows, ten others in stone, three inscriptions, Pray for the souls, divers Orate pro animabuses [sic] in the windows, and a bell Ora pro anima Sancta Katharina." The "pictures in stone" were doubtless the alabaster images of the reredos, fragments of which are still preserved in the church, exquisite in modelling and colour. The most noticeable is a headless figure of St. Hubert, the mighty hunter of legend, who was converted by meeting a white hart with golden horns (supposed to be an emblem of Christ), and received from St. Peter a key wherewith to cure hydrophobia. The key is here in his hand, with a dog beneath it, and the golden-horned hart couched by his side.

Just before we reach the seventh milestone from Cambridge another south-running lane diverges to Caldecote, with its retired little fane on the hill-side over the Bourn, a very oasis of devotional peace and quietude. Confronting it across the stream is the steeple of Kingston, where there is a fine fourteenth century fresco in the north aisle, and a delicious little niche in the western wall of the tower, outside.

At the point where this lane leaves the road, another, looking like a mere farm road, turns off northwards. This leads to Childerley Hall, now a farm house, but in 1647 of sufficient consequence to serve as a sleeping place for Royalty. Hither King Charles the First was brought by his captors, when carried off by Cornet Joyce from Holmby House in Northamptonshire, as has been already narrated.[183] He was not altogether an unwilling captive, for both he and the Army hoped to arrive at some mutual accommodation which would make both independent of that Parliamentary control of which both were heartily wearied.

He was treated, accordingly, with the utmost respect; and during his stay at Childerley Hall[184] (from Saturday, June 5, to Tuesday, June 8), the students of Cambridge "flocked apace" to pay their homage to him. "He is exceedingly cheerful," writes a contemporary scribe,[185] "shows himself to all, and commands that no scholler be debarred from kissing his hand, for which honour they return humble thanks and Vivat Rex; and there the Sophs are in their gowns and caps as if no further than Barnwell." Nay, even the great chiefs of the army, the men who at Marston and Naseby had faced and conquered him, Fairfax, Ireton, and Whalley, and Cromwell himself, came hither to join in this hand-kissing, and, one after another, to be astonished at the ability and graciousness which their distressed Sovereign showed in the private interview granted to each in turn.

But, if local tradition is to be trusted, beneath all this gallant show of gracious acquiescence in the inevitable, there lurked in the King's heart a deep conviction that the hope on which it was founded was forlorn indeed. For this tradition tells of a truly desperate dash for freedom, the success of which was all but impossible. It has been constantly handed down at Madingley Hall that on one of these June midnights a white figure knocked at the door, and a subdued voice asked for "Jack" (Sir John Cotton, a noted loyalist, whose seat the Hall was at that time). He came, and found this mysterious visitor none other than the King himself, disguised in a peasant's smock, and imploring concealment till he could escape from the country. By a secret stair, traces of which still exist, he was conducted to a hiding place in the roof. But it was too late; his flight had been discovered, and the pursuing troopers were already out in search of him. Madingley Hall would, of course, be amongst the very first places to be suspected of harbouring him, and the wild venture ended in despair. All was hushed up; for both he and his captors wished to keep up the fiction that he was with them willingly.

But they kept a tight grip upon him, and, when he left Childerley that Tuesday morning, would not allow him to ride on to his state prison at Newmarket through Cambridge (where the streets were being decked in his honour with "whole rose-bushes and strewn with rushes and herbs"), lest these demonstrations should kindle too ardent a flame of loyalty. He was accordingly carried round by way of Grantchester and Trumpington. Since that time Childerley Hall has been rebuilt, but the room in which the King slept is still to be seen. And hard by the Hall there still stands the unpretentious little red-brick chapel (now a barn) in which he worshipped on that memorable Sunday.

A mile further along the road, lanes again branch off north and south. The northern leads to the secluded hamlet of Knapwell, where a spring of ferruginous waters, held of old to be wonder-working, still justifies its ancient name of the Red Well. The southern brings us to Bourn, where the Bourn brook rises. On the slope above the stream stands the beautiful cruciform church, of late Norman and Early English architecture; the arches which open from the tower into the nave and the aisles being particularly noticeable. Bourn Hall is a fine Elizabethan mansion, the seat of J. Briscoe, Esq., and is the modern representative of a castle (the moat of which still exists) erected here by Picot, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire under William the Conqueror, and the scene of hard fighting in the Barons' War, when it belonged to the Peverells.

Eleven miles from Cambridge we cross the Ermine Street, a junction sufficiently important to have been selected by the wisdom of our ancestors as the site of a gibbet; the object being that as many as possible should see the gruesome spectacle of malefactors hanging in chains, and thus, if evilly disposed, take warning, or, if well disposed, be encouraged by this visible vindication of the Law's majesty. The gibbet has been gone for a century and more; but till quite lately the sign-post here directed the traveller simply TO LONDON and TO YORK on either hand, reminding us that this was the old North Road.

A mile along it, towards London, stands the little town of Caxton, from which the gibbet derived its name. A prosperous place in the old coaching days (as the size of its inns still testifies), it is now a mere village with 450 inhabitants. But it continues to boast itself a town. As the nearest point on the North Road to Cambridge, it was an important junction. The historian, Carter, writing in 1753, mentions that a mail was carried twice a week (on horseback) between Caxton and Cambridge; the only mail connection our University town then had, except with London and Bury St. Edmunds! We read also that, in the Jacobite rising of 1745, when it was seriously expected that the Stuart forces, after their wonderful success in reaching Derby, would march on to London, many Cambridge students, who cared little about the issue, secured windows at Caxton "to see the Scots pass by."

Sixty years before this another gleam of interest lights up the name of Caxton. In 1686 the Bishop, Francis Turner (one of the famous Seven prosecuted by James the Second and afterwards deprived by William the Third as a non-juror), made a strenuous effort to get Mattins and Evensong said daily, according to the Rubric, throughout his Diocese. The following characteristic letter addressed by him to the Vicar of Caxton was discovered in 1908 amongst the church muniments:

After crossing the Ermine Street we come to Eltisley, where there is a pretty Village Green and a good village inn; and the church, though small, has some fine Early English work. It is dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. Pandiana (or Pandionia), an obscure personage, said by Leland to have been a Scottish[186] princess, who found in this remote spot a refuge from the importunities of her suitors, and was here buried by the side of a spring still known as St. Pandiana's Well. Her nunnery perished after the Conquest, and in the fourteenth century her body was translated into the church, along with that of the yet more obscure St. Wendreda,[187] a purely Cambridgeshire saint, whose name is also connected with the church of March, and with a "well" near Newmarket.

The village is the scene of a dramatic tale found in Roger of Wendover, under the date 1234. A famine was raging, and the hungry poor invaded the ripening harvest-fields and devoured the crops, "for which they may scarce be blamed. Of the farmers, however, (who ever from their avarice, look upon the poor with an evil eye,) many were highly wroth at this pious theft. And they of Alboldesley hied them all on the next Sunday (July 16th) to the church, and with tumult required the priest to excommunicate upon the spot all who had thus plucked their wheat-ears. But one pious man alone adjured him in God's name to pronounce no such sentence for his crops; adding that he was right well content that the poor should take from him in their need, and that he commended to the Lord's care whatsoever was left.

"Now scarcely had the priest perforce begun the curse, than there suddenly arose such a storm of thunder, lightning, whirlwind, rain and hail, that the corn in the fields was torn from the ground as by a blast from hell; and all that grew therein, and the cattle, and the very birds, were destroyed, as though trodden down by carts and horses. But that just man found his land without trace of harm. And thus it is clear that as the angels sing Glory to God in the Highest, so on earth is there Peace toward men of Good-will.

"This storm began on the borders of Bedfordshire (at Eltisley), and passed eastwards through the Isle of Ely. And here is a wondrous thing. Such crops as still stood when it was over were found so rotted that neither horse nor ass, steer nor pig, goose nor hen, would eat thereof." A cyclone of precisely the same character devastated Essex on June 24, 1897, and was as capricious in its visitations.

At Eltisley we reach the termination of the long ridge which has kept us at an upland level all the way from Madingley, and our road now runs rapidly down into the valley of the Ouse. We reach that noble stream at the old-world, but thriving, town of St. Neots, where there is a fine old bridge and a magnificent church. The name of this place is locally pronounced not Neats, but Notes. This last is the correct form, for the name is derived from Neotus, the eldest brother and friend of King Alfred, whom that greatest of our monarchs recognised as the good genius of his life.

The original name of this notable personality was Athelstane. He was the eldest grandson of Egbert, the first "King of the English," and held, accordingly, the under-kingship of Kent, at that time the usual appanage of the heir-apparent. This dignity he resigned to enter Religion, at the Abbey of Glastonbury, under the name of Neotus. A special bond of affection united him with his youngest brother, Alfred, who, as an enthusiastic boy of seventeen, took this dearest of brothers as his spiritual guide and counsellor. When, five years later, the successive deaths of the intervening brethren brought him to the throne, we read that the inconsiderate zeal with which he suppressed abuses drew anxious warnings from St. Neot, who foresaw that this overweening course would surely bring disastrous consequences.

"But Alfred heeded not the reproof of the man of God, nor listed what he foretold. Wherefore (seeing that a man's sins must needs be some way punished, either in this world or in that which is to come), the Righteous Judge and True willed that he should not be unpunished here, that so he might be spared hereafter."[188]

The punishment was that sudden and disastrous Danish inroad which overwhelmed the whole of the kingdom, and drove Alfred himself into hiding at Athelney. While he was there St. Neot died at the neighbouring Glastonbury. We read there, ere his departure, the saint had promised that as he had been Alfred's spiritual guide in life, so should that spiritual guidance and wardship still abide with him. "Thy guide have I been ever; thee and thine will I lead on." "I will be thy captain, I will be thy champion; thou shalt be glad and rejoice in me." "Lo, I will go before thy banner; thine enemies shall perish at my presence." And when, a few weeks later, the King led on his forces to the crowning victory over the Danes at Ethandune, he was persuaded that this promise was being fulfilled. With the eye of ardent faith he beheld the blessed spirit of his brother leading on the Christian banners to the onset. "See ye not?" he exclaimed to his men, "See ye not? That is indeed Neotus, Christ's glorious servant, Christ's unconquered soldier; and through him is the victory even now given to our hands."

Thus it came about that St. Neot remained the object of unforgotten reverence, not only to Alfred himself, but to his heroic son and daughter. The former christened after this sainted uncle his own eldest son Athelstane, afterwards "Athelstane the Magnificent," the mighty King of the English and Emperor of Britain; and when the latter delivered Mercia from the yoke of the Danes, she called by his name one of the fortress towns, which she founded on the Ouse to keep them in check, St. Neots.

It is appropriate that one of the earliest and most spirited of the Chronicles that record the great deeds of Alfred should have been preserved for five centuries in the Church of St. Neots, and should still be known as the "Chronicle of St. Neots."[189] The north aisle of this church is known as the "Jesus Chapel," having been built by a local mediæval fraternity called "The Guild of Jesus." The sacred monogram IHC, is to be seen on the beams of the roof inside and on the buttresses outside.

One of the most delightful routes of the district is that by which we make our way along the Ouse from St. Neots to Ely, by way of Godmanchester, Huntingdon, and St. Ives. On leaving St. Neots the road climbs Paxton Hill, where its shady course overhangs a beautiful sweep of the broad stream 120 feet below. Thence it drops to the river at Paxton itself, where the church has some good Saxon features, and thence continues along the water to the twin villages of Offord Darcy and Offord Cluny, close together on the right bank, and so over another little eminence to strike the river again at Godmanchester.

The etymology of this name shows it to have been a Roman station, and Roman remains have been found here. It is commonly identified with the Durolipons of the Antonine Itinerary. Here the Via Devana, running straight from Cambridge, strikes the Ermine Street, and the final syllable of the Latin name suggests that the united roads crossed the river by a bridge before separating on their respective lines towards Chester and York. If so the bridge must have stood somewhere near the present one, which, however, was not built till the thirteenth century. Godmanchester is now a reposeful little town, with a uniquely picturesque view across the verdant expanse of Port Holme, the largest meadow, as it boasts itself, in the world, a wide, wide flat of breezy grass, across which, more than a mile away, rise the buildings of Huntingdon. In flood time, when this flat becomes a shining lake, the scene is striking indeed.

From the northern end of the town a long causeway, pierced with many arches to carry off these floods, leads across the fields to the bridge, with its high pitch, its recessed and pointed buttresses, and its old bridge-chapel (now used for secular purposes) on the central span. Immediately behind lies the town of Huntingdon, larger and more stirring than its elder sister Godmanchester. It owes its existence to the same cause as St. Neots, being one of the fortresses erected by the "Children of Alfred," Edward the Elder and his sister Ethelfleda, "the lady of the Mercians," to ensure their pacification of these parts when reconquered from the Danes. It is famous as the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell, the entry of whose baptism, in 1599, is still to be seen in the register of All Saints' Church. The same book contains a record of his having been put to public penance, at the age of twenty, for scandalous living. The register of St. John's (now united to All Saints') tells us that the body of the unhappy Mary Stuart rested in that church during its removal by her son, James the First, from Peterborough Cathedral to Westminster Abbey.

From Huntingdon our road, keeping close in touch with the river, takes us through the pretty villages of Hartford, Wyton, and Houghton, to St. Ives. A yet prettier way is to recross the stream at Houghton Lock and take a field-road across the meadows to the two Hemingfords, Hemingford Abbots and Hemingford Grey. The latter is famous as the birthplace of the Misses Gunning, who were the leading beauties of the Court in the early days of the reign of George the Third, and married into the highest families of the Peerage. Both churches stand on the very brink of the Ouse, about a mile apart, their graceful steeples, with that of Houghton to the north-east and that of St. Ives to the north-west, watching as guardian sentinels over the rich Ouse meadows between. All have spires, but that of Hemingford Grey lost its upper part by an equinoctial gale in the middle of the eighteenth century, and only the base now remains.

St. Ives is yet another of Edward the Elder's fortresses, and is probably named from the Cornish town similarly designated. It is possible that it may be even a colony from that far-off strand, which had never swerved in its allegiance, planted here to leaven the turbulent Danish elements around. Certain it is that here Ednoth, Abbot of Ely, erected a church dedicated to St. Ivo. Who this saint may have been originally is not known; probably he (or she) was one of the many obscure Celtic saints whose names dot the map of Cornwall. But there grew up in the eleventh century a wild legend that Ivo, a Persian (!) bishop, had settled down in the neighbourhood. In the fifteenth century a stone sarcophagus, found by a peasant when ploughing, was declared to contain the body of this holy Oriental, and was translated with due pomp to the neighbouring Abbey of Ramsey. St. Ives was specially connected with this House, and it was an Abbot of Ramsey who built the beautiful bridge, the ditto of that at Huntingdon, by which we here recross to the left bank of the Ouse.

Our next point, on leaving St. Ives, is the tiny village of Holywell, which we may reach either by road, through the hamlet of Needingworth, or (preferably) by a field-path running westwards from near the railway station. The little church here stands on a slope above the river, and in the churchyard the holy well is still to be seen. But the delight of the place is its strand along the Ouse, a rarely picturesque medley of old houses on one side of the road and on the other the broad clear stream, here crossed by a ferry. This road continues (as a mere field-path) to another delicious ferry a mile lower, with a charming little inn beside it, in a grove of lofty trees. This lovely spot is named Overcote. Here travellers may cross into Cambridgeshire and make their way along the "Hundred Foot" embankment (so called because it is thirty yards in width) along the river to Earith. For motors the way lies through Needingworth, and past the pretty little Church of Bluntisham, with its three-sided apse and its churchyard yews.

Earith is a hamlet of Bluntisham, but a much larger place, owing its importance to its situation on the point where the great works connected with the drainage of the fens have their beginning by the diversion of the Ouse waters from their ancient bed into the two "Bedford Rivers," the Old and the New, which from this point run straight as a die (like the supposed "canals" in Mars) across the fen to Denvers Sluice, twenty-two miles away. The former was made in 1630, the latter in 1650, at the expense of what we should now call a company, promoted by the Earl of Bedford. No such cuts exist elsewhere in the world. Along them a clear horizon is to be obtained, and here, accordingly, was conducted, some forty years ago, a decisive experiment for proving the sphericity of the earth.

At that time a deluded gentleman, who called himself "Parallax," was obsessed with the notion that the globe was a flat disc, and used to go lecturing with great vigour on the subject. After these lectures he invited questions, none of which were able to shake his belief. When asked, for example, "Why does the hull of a ship disappear below the horizon while the masts remain visible?" he would answer, "Because the lowest stratum of air is the densest, and, therefore, soonest conceals objects seen through it." In view of the present Polar exploration, it may interest our readers to know that one of his points was the absolute non-existence of the South Pole. "Explorers say they cannot get near it, because of an icy barrier. Of course. That barrier is the raised rim of our world plate, and they can but sail round and round inside it." Finally he showed his wholehearted belief in his absurd views by laying a heavy wager that no one would disprove them. The stakes were deposited in the hands of judges, and the trial, under agreed conditions, took place upon the New River. Three boats were moored three miles apart, each provided with a cross-tree of equal height. If the earth was spherical the central cross would appear above the other to an observer looking through a telescope levelled from the cross-tree of the boat at either end; if it was flat he would see both the other cross-trees as one. "Parallax" declared that he did so (!), but the judges decided against him, and the poor man lost his money.