This eulogy of the Fenland, however, Drayton is careful to put into the mouth of a Fenland nymph, who is not allowed to pass without criticism by her sister who rules the uplands:—
But probably the most picturesque and truthful imaginative sketch of the old fenlands is that which was given in our own time by the graphic pen of Charles Kingsley in his fine novel of “Hereward the Wake,” somewhat amplified afterwards in the chapters of “The Hermits,” which he devoted to the history of St. Guthlac:—
“The fens in the seventh century,” he says, “were probably very like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now in summer one sea of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines of poplar trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black wandering streams, broad lagoons, morasses submerged every spring-tide, vast beds of reed and sedge and fern, vast copses of willow and alder and grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallowing up slowly, all devouring, yet preserving the forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us) beneath the sea from age to age. Trees torn down by flood and storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back on the land. Streams bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature left to herself ran into wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one ‘dismal swamp,’ in which at the time of the Norman Conquest, ‘the last of the English,’ like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale, took refuge from their tyrants and lived like him a free and joyous life awhile.”
Such was one aspect, then, in the early days of English history, of the great plain that stretches from Cambridge to the sea. But our map-palimpsest has further physical facts to reveal which had an important influence on the civic and economic development of Cambridge. To the south-east of this great plain of low-lying fenlands rises the upland country of boulder clay, stretching in a line almost directly west and east from the downs at Royston, thirteen miles below Cambridge, to Sudbury-on-the-Stour. The whole of this ridge of high ground, which roughly corresponds with the present boundaries between Cambridgeshire and Suffolk and Essex, was in the early days covered with dense forest. Thus the Forest and the Fen between them formed a material barrier separating the kingdom of East Anglia from the rest of Britain. At one point only could an entrance be gained. Between the forest and the fen there runs a long belt of land, at its narrowest point not more than five miles wide, consisting partly of open pasture, partly of chalk down. In the neck, so to say, of this natural pass into East Anglia lies the town of Cambridge. A careful scrutiny of our map will show, on the under-text of our palimpsest, a remarkable series of British earthworks, all crossing in parallel lines this narrow belt of open land between the fen and the forest, marked on the map as Black Ditches, Devil’s Dyke, the Fleam or Balsham Dyke, the Brent or Pampisford Ditch, and the Brand or Heydon Way. Of these the longest and most important is the well-known Devil’s Dyke, near Newmarket. It is some eight miles long in all, and consists of a lofty bank twelve feet wide at the top, eighteen feet above the level of the country, and thirty feet above the bottom of the Ditch, which is itself some twenty feet wide. The ditch is on the western side of the bank, thus showing that it was used as a defence by the people on the east against those on the west. It was near this ditch that the defeat of the ancient British tribe of the Iceni by the Romans, as described by Tacitus (“Annals,” xii. 31), took place in A.D. 50.[3]
At Cambridge itself the ancient earthwork known as Castle Hill may belong to this British period, and have formed a valuable auxiliary to the line of dykes in defending the ford of the river and the pass behind; but upon this point authorities are divided.[4] Indeed, there is good ground for the opinion that the Castle Hill is a construction of the later Saxon period, and may, in fact, be referred to the time of the Danish incursions in the ninth century, during which time Cambridge is known to have been sacked more than once.
However that may be, there is ample proof that the site of the Castle at any rate was occupied by the Romans, for the remains of a fosse and vallum, forming part of an oblong enclosure within which the Castle Hill, whether early British or later Saxon, is included, seem to indicate the position of a Roman station here. Moreover, to this place converge the two great Roman roads, of which the remains may still be traced: Akeman Street, leading from Cirencester (Corinium) in the south through Hertfordshire to Cambridge, and thence across the fen (by the Aldreth Causeway, the scene of William the Conqueror’s two years’ campaign with Hereward) to Ely, and so onwards to Brancaster in Norfolk; and the Via Devana, which, starting from Colchester (Colonia or Camelodunum), skirted the forest lands of Essex through Cambridge and Huntingdon (Durolifons) northwards to Chester (Deva). Whether the Roman station, however, at the junction of these two roads can be identified as the ancient Camboritum is still a little doubtful. Certainly the common identification of Cambridge with Camboritum, because of the resemblance between the two names, cannot be justified. That resemblance is a mere coincidence. The name Cambridge, in fact, is comparatively modern, being corrupted, by regular gradations, from the original Anglo-Saxon form which had the sense of Granta-bridge. The name of the town is thus not, as is generally supposed, derived from the name of the river (Cam being modern and artificial), but, conversely, the name of the river has, in the course of centuries, been evolved out of the name of the town.[5]
To return, however, to the Castle Hill. It may be doubtful, as we have said, whether the Roman station there was Camboritum or not, but there can be no doubt that the station, whatever it may have been called by the Romans, must have been a fairly important one, not only as commanding the open pass-way between the forest and the fen leading into East Anglia, but also as standing at the head of a waterway leading to the sea. It is difficult, of course, to estimate the extent of the commerce in these early days, or even perhaps to name the staple article of export that must have found its way by means of the fenland rivers to the Continent, but that it must have been at times considerable we may at least conjecture from the fact that in the records of the sacking of the Fenland abbeys—Ely, Peterborough, Ramsey, and Crowland—by the Danes in the seventh century there is evidence of a great store of wealth, costly embroideries, rich jewels, gold and silver, which can hardly have been the product of native industry alone, but seem to indicate a fair import trade from the Continent.
The geographical position, in fact, of Cambridge at the head of a waterway directly communicating with the sea is a factor in the history of the town the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. In direct communication with the Continent by means of the river, and on the only, or almost the only, line of traffic between East Anglia and the rest of England, it naturally became the chief distributing centre of the commerce and trade of eastern England, and the seat of a Fair which in a later age boasted itself the largest in Europe.
In his “History of the University,” Thomas Fuller gives an account of the origin of this Fair, which is perhaps more picturesque than accurate:—
“About this time,” he says—that is, about A.D. 1103, in the reign of the first Henry—“Barnwell,[6] that is, Children’s Well, a village within the precincts of Cambridge, got both the name thereof and a Fair therein on this occasion. Many little children on Midsummer (or St. John Baptist’s) Eve met there in mirth to play and sport together; their company caused the confluence of more and bigger boys to the place: then bigger than they: even their parents themselves came thither to be delighted with the activity of their children. Meat and drink must be had for their refection, which brought some victualling booths to be set up. Pedlers with toys and trifles cannot be supposed long absent, whose packs in short time swelled into tradesmen’s stalls of all commodities. Now it is become a great fair, and (as I may term it) one of the townsmen’s commencements, wherein they take their degrees of wealth, fraught with all store of wares and nothing (except buyers) wanting therein.”
This description of Fuller is obviously a rough translation of a passage from the Liber Memorandorum Ecclesia de Bernewelle, commonly called the “Barnewell Cartulary,” given at page xii. of Mr. J. W. Clark’s “Customs of Augustinian Canons,” and dated about 1296.
It is possible, of course, that the celebrated Stourbridge Fair, which in later centuries was held every autumn in the river Meadow, a mile or so below the town, adjoining Barnwell Priory, did date back to these early times, but its two earliest charters undoubtedly belong to the thirteenth century, one belonging to the reign of King John, granting the tolls of the Fair to the Friars of the Leper Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, the other to Henry III.’s time fixing the date of the Fair for the four days commencing October 17, being the Festival of St. Etheldreda, Virgin, Queen and Abbess of Ely. From this time onward at any rate the annual occurrence of this Fair furnishes incidents, not always commendable, in the annals of both town and University. It is said with probability that John Bunyan, who in his Bedfordshire youth may well have been drawn to its attractions, made the Fair at Stourbridge Common the prototype of his “Vanity Fair.” And certainly any one who will take the trouble to compare the description of the Fair given by the Cambridgeshire historian Carter with the well-known passage in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” cannot but feel that the details of Bunyan’s picture are touches painted from life:—
“Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the Wilderness, they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of that Town is Vanity; and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity Fair ... therefore at this Fair are all such Merchandise sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones and what not.
“And moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen Jugglings, Cheats, Games, Plays, Fools, Apes, Knaves, and Rogues, and that of all sorts.
“And as in other Fairs of less moment, there are the several Rows and Streets under their proper names, where such and such wares are vended; so here likewise you have the proper places, Rows, Streets ... where the wares of this Fair are soonest to be found. Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the German Row, where several sorts of vanities are to be sold.”
The historian, it is true, speaks of “the Sturbridge Fair as like to a well-governed city, with less disorder and confusion than in any other place where there is so great a concourse of people,” yet when one reads in Bunyan’s “Progress” of the Peremptory Court of Trial, “under the Great One of the Fair,” ever ready to take immediate cognisance of any “hubbub,” one cannot but remember that the judicial rights of the University in the regulation of the ale-tents and show-booths on Midsummer Common were at least a fertile theme for satire with the licensed wits of both Universities, whether of “Mr. Tripos” at Cambridge, or of the “Terræ Filius” at Oxford, and wonder what amount of truth there may have been in the rude statement of the latter that “the Cambridge proctors at Fair time were so strict in forbidding undergraduates to enter public-houses in the town because it would spoil their own trade in the Fair.”
But as Fuller would say, “Enough hereof. It tends to slanting and suppositive traducing of the records.” Let us proceed with our history. And that we may do so let us end this introductory chapter of Fable and Fact by enforcing the point, of which the incident of Stourbridge Fair was but an illustration, that Cambridge became the seat of an English University, because it had already become a chief centre of English trade and commerce, and had so become because in the early centuries it had stood as guardian of the only pass-way which crossed the frontier line of the kingdoms of Mercia and the West Saxons and the kingdom of the East Anglians, and at a later time had been the busy porter of the river gate, by which the merchandise of northern Europe, borne to the Norfolk Wash and the Port of Lynn by the ships of Flanders and the Hanse towns of the Baltic, found its way, by the sluggish waters of the Cam and the Ouse, to a place which was thus well fitted to become the great distributing centre of trade for southern England and the Midlands. Stourbridge Fair is a thing of the past. Cambridge as a distributing centre for the trade of northern Europe has ceased to be. The long line of river barges no longer float down the stream. The waters of the Wash are silting up. The fame of the town has been eclipsed by the fame of the University. But town and University alike may still gaze with emotion at the old timbered wharfs and clay hithes of the river, the green earthwork of the Castle Hill, the far-stretching roads once known as Akeman Street and the Icknield Way, the grass-grown slopes of the Devil’s Dyke, as the symbols of mighty forces which in their day brought men from all parts of Europe to this place, and have been potent to make it through many centuries a centre of light and learning to England and the world.
“At this time the fountain of learning in Cambridge was but little, and that very troubled.... Mars then frighted away the Muses, when the Mount of Parnassus was turned into a fort, and Helicon derived into a trench. And at this present, King William the Conqueror, going to subdue the monks of Ely that resisted him, made Cambridgeshire the seat of war.”—Fuller.
William I. at Cambridge Castle—Cambridge at the Domesday Survey—Roger Picot the Sheriff—Pythagoras School—Castle and Borough—S. Benet’s Church and its Parish—The King’s Ditch—The Great and the Small Bridges—The King’s and the Bishop’s Mills—The River Hithes—S. Peter by the Castle and S. Giles Church—The early Streets of the City—The Augustinian Priory of Barnwell—The Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre—The Cambridge Jewry—Debt of early Scholars to the Philosophers of the Synagogue—Benjamin’s House—Municipal Freedom of the Borough.
ON the site of the ancient Roman station of which we have spoken in the preceding chapter, as guarding the river ford and the pass between forest and fen into East Anglia, William the Conqueror, returning from the conquest of York in the year 1068, founded Cambridge Castle, that “it might be”—to quote Fuller’s words—“a check-bit to curb this country, which otherwise was so hard-mouthed to be ruled.” Here, in the following year, he took up his abode, making the castle the centre of his operations against the rebel English who had rallied to the leadership of Hereward the Wake, in his camp of refuge at Ely. But the castle at Cambridge never became a military centre of importance. No important deed of arms is recorded in connection with it. It was a mere outpost, useful only as a base of operations. It was so used by William the Conqueror. It was so used by Henry III. in his futile contest with the English baronage. It was so used by the Duke of Northumberland in his unsuccessful attempt to crush the loyalist rising of East Anglia against his plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. It was so used by Oliver Cromwell when he was organising the Eastern Counties Association, and forming “his lovely company” of Ironsides. But beyond these episodes Cambridge Castle has no history. In the early part of the fourteenth century it was used as a prison for common criminals. Edward III. built his College of King’s Hall with some of its materials, and from that time onwards it appears to have been used as a quarry by the royal founders of more than one college. Its last remaining outwork, the Gate House, was demolished in 1842. Now there is nothing left but the grass-grown mound, still known as Castle Hill, the resort of occasional American tourists who are wise enough to know how fine a view of the town may be obtained from that position, and, so it is said, a less frequent place of pilgrimage also to certain university freshmen who are foolish enough to accept the assurance of their fellows that “at the witching hour of night” they may best observe from Castle Hill those solemn portents which, on the doubtful authority of the University Calendar, are said to happen when “the Cambridge term divides at midnight.”
But if the Castle at Cambridge, as a “place of arms,” had practically no history, much less had the town over which nominally it stood guard. The old streets of Cambridge show no sign of ever having been packed closely within walls in the usual mediæval fashion. In the early days the town seems to have been limited to a little knot of houses round the castle and along the street leading down to the river ford at the foot of the Castle Hill. From the Domesday Survey we learn that in the time of Edward the Confessor the town had consisted of 400 dwelling-houses, and was divided into ten wards, each governed by its own lawman (“lageman”) or magistrate, a name which appears to suggest that the original organisation of the town was of Danish origin. By the year 1086 two of these wards had been thrown into one, owing to the destruction of twenty-seven houses—“pro castro”—on account of the building of the Castle, and in the remaining wards no fewer than fifty-three other dwellings are entered as “waste.” Altogether, in Norman times the population of Cambridge can hardly have exceeded at the most a couple of thousand. The customs of the town were assessed at £7, the land tax at £7. 2s. 2d. Both of these seem to have been new impositions, payable to the royal treasury. How this came about one cannot say, but from this time onward, all through the middle ages, the farm of Cambridge appears frequently to have been given as a dower to the Queen.
The earldom of Cambridge and Huntingdon has been almost invariably held by a member of the Royal Family. The first steps, indeed, towards municipal independence on the part of the borough were taken when the burgesses demanded the privilege of making their customary payments direct to the King, and ridding themselves of this part, at any rate, of the authority of the sheriff. Certainly, there was much complaint made to the Domesday Commissioners concerning the first Norman sheriff of Cambridgeshire, one Roger Picot, because of his hard treatment of the burgesses. Among other things, it was said that he had “required the loan of their ploughs nine times in the year, whereas in the reign of the Confessor they lent their ploughs only thrice in the year and found neither cattle nor carts,” and also that he had built himself three mills upon the river to the destruction of many dwelling-houses and the confiscation of much common pasture. Reading of these things one is almost tempted to wonder, whether the old stone Norman house still standing, styled, by a tradition now lost, “the School of Pythagoras,” in close proximity as it is to the river, the ford, and the castle, may not have been the residence of this sheriff or of one of his immediate successors. The house cannot, certainly, be of a later date than the latter part of the twelfth century. Originally, it appears to have consisted of a single range of building of two storeys, the lower one formerly vaulted, the upper one serving as a hall. How it came by its present name of “Pythagoras School” we do not know, and certainly there is no reason to suppose that it was at any time a school. The Norman occupier, however, of this stone house, with his servants and retainers, could hardly have been other than a leading personage in the community, and must have contributed in no slight degree to its importance. Possibly it may have been owing to the destruction of houses caused by the clearing of the sites for both this mansion and for the Castle, that the dispossessed population sought habitation for themselves on the low lying ground across the ford, on the east bank of the river. Whether this was the cause or not, certainly the town on the west bank—“the borough,” as the castle end of Cambridge was still called in the memory of persons still living[7]—overflowed at an early period to the other side of the river, and gradually extending itself along the line of the Via Devana, eventually coalesced with what had before been a distinct village clustering round the ancient pre-Norman church of S. Benedict. This church, or rather its tower, is the oldest building in Cambridge and one of the most interesting. It is thus described by Mr. Atkinson.[8]
“The tower presents those features which are usually taken to indicate a Saxon origin. It is divided into three well-marked stages, each one of which is rather narrower than the one below it. The quoins are of the well-known long-and-short work (a sign of late date), and the lowest quoin is let into a sinking prepared for it in the plinth. The belfry windows are of two sorts; the central window on each face is of two heights, divided by a mid-wall balister shaft, supporting a through-stone of the usual character. On each side of this window there is a plain lancet at a somewhat higher level, and with rubble jambs. Above these latter there are small round holes—they can hardly be called windows. Over each of the central windows there is a small pilaster, stopped by a corbel which rests on the window head; these pilasters are cut off abruptly at the top of the tower, which has probably been altered since it was first built; most likely it was originally terminated by a low spire or by gables. The rough edges of the quoins are worked with a rebate to receive the plaster which originally covered the tower. The arch between the tower and the nave springs from bold imposts, above which are rude pieces of sculpture, forming stops to the hood mould. The quoins remaining at each angle of the present nave show that it is of the same length and width as the nave of the original church, and they seem to show also that the original church had neither aisles nor transepts. The chancel is also the same size as that of the early church, for though the east and north walls have been rebuilt, they are in the positions of the Saxon walls. The south wall of the chancel has been altered at many different periods, but has probably never been rebuilt. The bases of the chancel arch remain below the floor. The early church was probably lighted by small lancets about three inches wide, placed high in the wall, and without glass.”
The present nave is of the thirteenth century. The chancel was built as late as 1872. The building which still abuts against the south chancel wall belongs, however, to the fifteenth century, and was a connecting hall or gallery with “the old court” of Corpus Christi College, which not only took its early name of S. Benet from the ancient church, but for some century and more possessed no other College chapel. The bells of S. Benet, we read in the old College records, were long used to call the students “to ye schooles, att such times as neede did require—as to acts, clearums, congregations, lecturs, disses, and such like.” But this belongs to its story in a later age. The Pre-Conquest Church of S. Benet, as we have said, probably served a township separate and distinct from the Castle-end “borough” on the west bank of the river. After the two villages became united, the Norman Grantebrigge, and indeed the mediæval Cambridge of later days, seemed to have formed a straggling and incompact town, stretching for the most part along the Roman road which crossed the river by the bridge at the foot of Castle hill, and so eastward past S. Benet’s, and onward to the open country, eventually reached Colchester across the forest uplands. This Roman Way, following the line of the modern Bridge Street, Sidney Street, S. Andrew Street, Regent Street, ran close to the eastern limit of the town, marked roughly at a later time by the King’s Ditch. This was an artificial stream constructed as a defence of the town by King John in the year 1215. It was strengthened later by King Henry III., who had also intended to protect the town on this side by a wall. The wall, however, was never built, and the Ditch itself could never have been much of a defence, except, perhaps, against casual marauders, though for centuries it was a cause of insanitary trouble to the town. Branching out of the river at the King’s and Bishop’s Mills, just above Queen’s College, it joined the river again, after encircling the town, just below the Great Bridge and above the Common now called Jesus Green. The Ditch was crossed by bridges on the lines of the principal roads. One of these, built of stone, still remains under the road now called Jesus Lane. There appears to have been a drawbridge also at the end of Sussex Street. The river itself, which formed the western boundary of the town, was spanned by two bridges, the Great Bridge at Castle End and the Small Bridge or Bridges at Newnham by the Mill pond. Between the two bridges were the principal wharfs or river hithes—corn hithe, flax hithe, garlic hithe, salt hithe, Dame Nichol’s hithe. These have all now given place to the sloping lawns and gardens of the colleges, the far-famed “Cambridge Backs.” The common hithe, however, below the Great Bridge still continues in use. It is with certain rights in regard to these hithes that the earliest Royal charter of which we have record deals. It is an undated writ of Henry I. (1100-1135) addressed to Henry, Bishop of Ely (1109-1131), and attested by an unnamed Chancellor and by Miles of Gloucester and by Richard Basset. The main object of the King’s writ seems to be to make “his borough of Cambridge” the one “port” and emporium of the shire. “I forbid”—so runs the writ—“that any boat shall ply at any hithe in Cambridgeshire save at the hithe of my borough at Cambridge, nor shall barges be laden save in the borough of Cambridge, nor shall any take toll elsewhere, but only there.”
Numerous narrow lanes, all now vanished, with the exception of John’s Lane, Gareth Hostel Lane, and Silver Street, led down from High Street to the quays. The town was intersected by three main streets. From the Great Bridge ran the streets already mentioned as following the line of the old Roman Way (the Via Devana). From this old roadway, at a point opposite the Round Church, there branched off the High Street—now Trinity Street and King’s Parade—leading to Trumpington Gate. Parallel to the High Street, and between it and the river, ran Milne Street, leading from the King’s Mill at the south end of the town, and continuing northwards to a point about the site of the existing sun-dial in Trinity Great Court, where it joined a cross-street leading into the High Street. Parts of Milne Street still exist in the lanes which run past the fronts of Queen’s College and Trinity Hall. In mediæval times the entrance gateways of six colleges opened into it—King’s Hall, Michael House, Trinity Hall, King’s College, S. Catharine’s Hall, and Queen’s College. Of the most ancient church of the town, that of S. Benedict, we have already spoken. Of the possibly contemporary church of S. Peter by the Castle, the only architectural remains of any importance now existing are a rich late Norman doorway and the bowl of an ancient font. The tower and spire belong to the fourteenth century. The rest of the building is entirely modern. Bricks, however, said to be Roman, appear to have been used in the new walls. Similarly of the other two ancient Castle-end churches, All Saints by the Castle, and S. Giles. Of the former nothing now remains and its actual site is doubtful, for the parish attached to it has been united with S. Giles ever since the time when in the fourteenth century the Black Death left it almost without inhabitants. Of the Church of S. Giles there remains the ancient chancel arch of late Saxon or early Norman character (the familiar long-and-short work seems to date it about the middle of the eleventh century), and the doorway of the nave, which have been rebuilt in the large new church opened in 1875.
It was, however, from this old church of S. Giles by the Castle that the first religious house in Cambridge of which we have any record, and quite possibly the most important factor in the early development of the University, the wealthy Augustinian Priory of Barnwell, took its origin. The story of that foundation is this.[9]
Roger Picot, Baron of Bourne and Norman Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, of whose hard treatment the Cambridge burgesses complained to the commissioners of the Domesday Survey, had married a noble and pious woman named Hugoline. Hugoline being taken very ill at Cambridge, and on the point, as she thought, of death, vowed a vow, that if she recovered she would build a church in honour of God and S. Giles. “Whereupon,” says the legend, “she recovered in three days.” And in gratitude to God she built close to the Castle the Church of S. Giles in the year 1092, together with appropriate buildings, and placed therein six canons regular of the order of S. Augustine, under the charge of Canon Geoffrey of Huntingdon, a man of great piety, and prevailed upon her husband to endow the Church and house with half the tithes of his manorial demesnes. Some vestiges of this small house (veteris cœnobioli vestigia) were still extant in Leland’s time. Before, however, this Augustinian house had been thoroughly established, Earl Pigot and his wife Hugoline died, committing the foundation to the care of their son Robert. Robert unfortunately became implicated in a conspiracy against Henry I., was charged with treason, and obliged to fly the country. The estates were confiscated, and the canons reduced to great want and misery. In this extremity a certain Pain Peverel, a valiant young Crusader, who had been standard-bearer to Robert Curthose in the Holy Land, and who had received the confiscated estates of Picot’s son, Robert, came to the rescue, declaring that as he had become Picot’s heir, so he would succeed him in the care of this foundation, and increase the number of canons to the number of the years of his own age, namely thirty. He determined also to move the house to a more convenient situation, and accordingly, in the year 1112, he transferred it to an excellent site in Barnwell, a mile and a half or so down the river, just off the high-road leading from Cambridge to Newmarket. This transaction is related as follows:—
“Perceiving that the site on which their house stood was not sufficiently large for all the buildings needful for his canons, and was devoid of any spring of fresh water, Pain Peverel besought King Henry to give him a certain site beyond the borough of Cambridge, extending from the highway to the river, and sufficiently agreeable from the pleasantness of its position. Besides, from the midst of that site there bubbled forth springs of clear fresh water, called at that time in English Barnewelle, the children’s springs, because once a year, on St. John Baptist’s Eve, boys and lads met there and amused themselves in the English fashion with wrestling matches and other games, and applauded each other in singing songs and playing on musical instruments. Hence by reason of the crowd of boys and girls who met and played there, a habit grew up that on the same day a crowd of buyers and sellers should meet in the same place to do business. There, too, a man of great sanctity, called Godesone, used to lead a solitary life in a small wooden oratory that he had built in honour of St. Andrew. He had died a short time before, leaving the place without any habitation upon it, and his oratory without a keeper.”[10]
In this pleasant place accordingly the house was rebuilt on a very large scale, and by the liberality of Peverel and his son William richly endowed. In the year 1112, we read in the Cartulary that Peverel at once set about building “a church of wonderful beauty and massive work in honour of S. Giles.” To this church he gave “vestment, ornaments, and relics of undoubted authenticity which he had brought back from Palestine”; but before he could carry out his intention of completing it, he died in London of a fever “barely ten years after the translation of the canons. His body was brought to Barnwell and buried in a becoming manner on the north side of the high altar.” By the munificence, however, of a later benefactor, the church was finished and consecrated in 1191, and before the end of the next century the conventual buildings, cloister, chapter house, frater, farmery, guest hall, gate house, were complete, and the Priory of Augustinian canons at Barnwell took its place in the monastic history of Cambridgeshire, a place only second probably to that of the great Benedictine House at Ely.[11] All that now remains of the Priory is a small church or chapel standing near the road, and the fragment of some other building. The whole site, however, was excavated for gravel in the beginning of the last century, so that it is impossible to speak with any certainty of the disposition of the buildings, although Mr. Willis Clark, in his “Customs of Augustinian Canons,” has from documentary sources made an ingenious attempt to reconstruct the whole plan of the Priory. The small chapel of S. Andrew the Less, although it has long been known as the Abbey Church, has, of course, strictly no right to that name. Obviously it cannot be the church of “wondrous dimensions” built by Pain Peverel. The chapel, although in all likelihood it did stand within the Priory precincts, was most probably built for the use of the inhabitants of the parish by the canons, in order that they themselves might be left undisturbed in the exclusive use of the Conventual Church. It is a building of the early English style, with long, narrow lancet windows, evidently belonging to the early part of the thirteenth century.
The material remains of the Priory are therefore very meagre, but a most interesting insight into the domestic economy of a monastic house is afforded by the “Consuetudinarium; or, Book of Observances of the Austin Canons,” which forms the Eighth Book of the Barnwell Cartulary, to which we have already alluded. A comparison of the domestic customs of a monastic house in the thirteenth century, as shown in this book, and of the functions of its various officers, with many of the corresponding customs and functions in the government of a Cambridge college, not only in mediæval but in modern times, throws much light on the origin of some of the most characteristic features of college life to-day.[12]
Let us retrace our steps, however, along the Barnwell Road from the suburban monastery to the ancient town. There are still some features, belonging to the Norman structure of Cambridge, which demand our notice before we pass on.
At a point where the High Street, now Trinity Street, branches off from Bridge Street stands the church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the four round churches of England.[13]
Presumably it must have been built by some confraternity connected with the newly established Military Order of the Templars, and, to judge by the style of its architecture—the only real evidence we have as to its date, for the conjecture that it owes its foundation to the young crusader, Pain Peverel, is purely fanciful, and of “the Ralph with a Beard,” of which we read in the Ramsey cartularies as receiving “a grant of land to build a Minster in honour of God and the Holy Sepulchre,” we know nothing—probably between 1120 and 1140. In its original shape, the church must have consisted of its present circular nave with the ambulatory aisle, and in all probability a semi-circular eastern apse. The ambulatory was vaulted, as in all probability was also the central area, while the apse would doubtless be covered with a semi-dome. The chancel and its north aisle, which had apparently been remodelled in early English times, was again reconstructed in the fifteenth century. At about the same time an important alteration was made in the circular nave by carrying up the walls to form a belfry. The additional stage was polygonal and terminated in a battlemented parapet. The Norman corbel table, under the original eaves of what was probably a dwarf spire, was not destroyed, and thus serves to mark the top of the Norman wall. Windows of three lights were not only inserted in the additional stage, but were also substituted for the circular-headed Norman windows of both ambulatory and clerestory.
“Such,” says Mr. Atkinson, “was the condition of the Church when, in 1841, the Cambridge Camden Society undertook its ‘restoration.’ The polygonal upper story of the circular nave, containing four bells, was destroyed; sham Norman windows, copied from one remaining old one, replaced those which had been inserted in the 15th century; and new stone vaults and high pitched roofs were constructed over the nave and ambulatory. The chancel, with the exception of one arch and the wall above it, were entirely rebuilt; the north aisle, with the exception of the entrance arch from the west, was rebuilt and extended eastwards to the same length as the chancel; a new south aisle of equal dimensions with the enlarged north aisle was added; and a small turret for two bells was built at the north-west corner of the north aisle; the lower stage of this turret was considered a sufficient substitute for the destroyed vestry. A new chancel arch of less width than the old one was built, and a pierced stone screen was formed above it. In addition to all this, those old parts which were not destroyed were ‘repaired and beautified,’ or ‘dressed and pointed,’ or ‘thoroughly restored.’ What these processes involved is clear from an inspection of the parts to which they were applied; in the west doorway, for instance, there is not one old stone left.”[14]
Across the road from the Round Church, in the angle of land caused by the branching apart of the High Street and the Bridge Street, was planted one of the earliest Jewries established in England. The coming of the Jews to England was one of the incidental effects of the Norman Conquest. They had followed in the wake of the invading army as in modern times they followed the German hosts into France, assisting the Normans to dispose of their spoil, finding at usurious interest ready-money for the impoverished English landowner, to meet his conqueror’s requisitions, and generally meeting the money-broking needs of both King and subject. In a curious diatribe by Richard of Devizes (1190), Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, Oxford, Exeter, Worcester, Chester, Hereford, York, Ely, Durham, Norwich, Lincoln, Bristol, Winchester, and of course London are all mentioned as harbouring Jewish settlements. The position of the Jew, however, in England was all along anomalous. As the member of an alien race, and still more of an alien religion, he could gain no kind of constitutional status in the kingdom. The common law ignored him. His Jewry, like the royal forest, was outside its domain. He came, indeed, as the King’s special man—nay, more, as the King’s special chattel. And in this character he lived for the most part secure. The romantic picture of the despised, trembling Jew—the Isaac of York, depicted for us in Scott’s “Ivanhoe”—cringing before every Christian that he meets, is, in any age of English history, simply a romantic picture. The attitude of the Jew almost to the last is one of proud and even insolent defiance. In the days of the Red King at any rate, he stood erect before the prince, and seemed to have enjoyed no small share of his favour and personal familiarity. The presence of the unbelieving Hebrew at his court supplied, it is said, William Rufus with many opportunities of mocking at the Christian Church and its bishops. In a well-known story of Eadmer, the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith. “It was a poor exchange,” he said, “which would rob me of a valuable property and give me only a subject.” The extortion of the Jew was therefore sheltered from the common law by the protection of the King. The bonds of the Jew were kept, in fact, under the royal seal in the royal archives, a fact of which the memory long remained in the name of “The Star” chamber; a name derived from the Hebrew word (ishtar) for a “bond.”
Oriel Windows from House in Petty-Cury now demolished To face p. 46
The late Mr. J. R. Green, in a delightful sketch on the early history of Oxford in his “Stray Studies,” afterwards incorporated into the pages of his “History of the English People,” seems inclined to give some support to the theory which would connect the origin of the University with the establishment of the Oxford Jewry. This theory, however, can hardly be accepted.[15] It is very probable indeed that the medical school, which we find established at Oxford and in high repute during the twelfth century, is traceable to Jewish origin; and the story is no doubt true also, which tells how Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research by means of the Hebrew instruction and the Hebrew books which he found among the Jewish rabbis of the Oxford Synagogue. It is reasonable also to suppose that the history of Christian Aristotelianism, and of the Scholastic Theology that was based upon it, may have been largely influenced by the philosophers of the Synagogue. It seems, indeed, to be a well-established conclusion, that the philosophy of Aristotle was first made known to the West through the Arabic versions brought from Spain by Jewish scholars and rabbis. But it is undoubtedly “in a more purely material way” that, as Mr. Green truly says, the Jewry most directly influenced academic history. At Oxford, as elsewhere, “the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we own the noblest of our Minsters in the loans of the Jew.”
Certainly at Cambridge, though perhaps hardly to the same extent as at Oxford, the material influence on the town of the Jewry is traceable. At Oxford, it is said that nearly all the larger dwelling-houses, which were subsequently converted into hostels, bore traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey’s Hall, Lombard’s Hall, Jacob’s Hall, and each of the successive Town Halls of the borough had previously been Jewish houses. We have some evidence of a similar conversion at Cambridge. In the first half of the thirteenth century, before we hear either of Tolbooth or of Guildhall, the enlarged judicial responsibilities of the town authorities made it necessary that they should be in possession of some strong building suitable for a prison. Accordingly, in 1224, we find King Henry III. granting to the burgesses the House of Benjamin, the Jew, for the purposes of a gaol. It is said that either the next house or a part of Benjamin’s House had been the Synagogue of the Jewry, and was granted in the first instance to the Franciscan Friars on their arrival in the city. Benjamin’s House, although it had been altered from time to time, appears never to have been entirely rebuilt, and some fragments of this, the earliest of Cambridge municipal buildings, are perhaps still to be found embedded in the walls of the old Town Arms public-house—a room in which, as late as the seventeenth century, was still known as “The Star Chamber”—at the western side of Butter Row, in the block of old buildings at the corner of Market Square, adjoining the new frontage of the Guildhall.
With this relic of the ancient Jewry we reach the last remaining building in Cambridge that had any existence in Norman times. And with the close of this age—the age of the Crusades—we already find the Cambridge burgess safely in possession, not only of that personal freedom which had descended to him by traditional usage from the communal customs of his early Teutonic forefathers, but also of many privileges which he had bought in hard cash from his Norman conqueror. Before the time of the first charter of King John (1201) Cambridge had passed through most of the earlier steps of emancipation which eventually led to complete self-government. The town-bell ringing out from the old tower of S. Benet’s already summoned the Cambridge freemen to a borough mote in which the principles of civic justice, of loyal association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid, were acknowledged by every member of a free, self-ruling assembly.