Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely Part 18

And as the river divides, so also does our London Road, one route following either valley. The Granta route goes via Bishop Stortford and Epping Forest, entering London by the Mile End Road, the other via Royston, Ware, and Tottenham, coming in by Bishopsgate Street. The division comes just as we leave Trumpington, at the lych-gate of the village cemetery, whence the left-hand branch brings us to the twin villages of Great and Little Shelford, with the Granta running between them. Both churches are good, the former with an octagonal steeple, and a churchyard kept like a garden, and the latter with a grand square-headed Decorated window in its transept, where are preserved some nice fragments of the ancient alabaster reredos. There are also various good fifteenth century monuments of the De Freville family, whose name still lives on as that of a suburban district in Cambridge.

Great Shelford Church is richly decorated, as it seems to have been of old, for here Dowsing destroyed no fewer than 128 "superst.i.tions." The bridge over the Granta between the two villages was in mediaeval times under the charge of a hermit, like Newnham Bridge at Cambridge.[167]

[Footnote 167: See p. 41.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Great Shelford Church._]

Villages continue to be found on both banks as we ascend the Granta.

The main road, on the east of the stream, leads through Stapleford, a small place, to the large and important Sawston. Its size and importance are due to the existence of that all too rare development, a really thriving rural industry. For here is not only a flourishing paper-mill, turning out its twenty tons a week of superfine copper-glazed paper, but the much more uncommon manufacture of parchment, and of the "shammy" leather used for cleaning plate, etc.

And this is produced in a delightfully rural and old-time fashion.

There are no machines here automatically grinding out facsimile products; every process is confided to the skill and judgment of the individual in charge of it. There are fifteen or sixteen such processes involved, and a very little carelessness in any one of them would spoil the whole series. Thus every workman is an expert, and takes a pride in his work impossible to the mere driver of a machine.

The great aim of each is to "keep his skin in condition" while under his hands, so as to have a right to glory in the finished article.

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

The useful colour is dark brown.

"For parchment the 'linings' are tied in a frame by strings fastened round grooved pegs, on the same principle as a Spanish windla.s.s....

After being sc.r.a.ped with a 'half-round' knife, dried, 'shaved,' dabbed with whitewash, and heated in a stove to remove the grease, they are then scalded and rubbed with pumice until they are fine and smooth.... The parchment workers wear clogs, sheepskin leggings, and 'basil' ap.r.o.ns. A basil is an unsplit tanned sheepskin. In this well-managed factory all the refuse goes to make soap, glue, dubbin, or manure, and not one sc.r.a.p of material is wasted."[168]

[Footnote 168: Prof. Hughes' _Geography of Cambridgeshire_, p. 106.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Whittlesford._]

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

Though, for some reason, always a.s.sociated with the name of Whittlesford, this Hospital is actually in the adjoining parish of Duxford, or rather in one of the two (now consolidated) parishes of St. John and St. Peter, between which this little village is divided.

Both churches still exist (though St. John's is now only used for burials in its churchyard), and both are very much of the same build, mainly Early English, with a little Norman, of which St. John's steeple is the most noteworthy example. St. Peter's has a beautiful "low-side" window in the northern wall of the chancel.

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

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

This was on the 10th of June, 1647.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _St. Peter's Church, Duxford._]

Commissioners from the Parliament were sent down from Westminster, with offers of two months' pay in cash and debentures for the remaining arrears, contingent on disbandment. But this was not nearly good enough; and the offers were met with cries of "Justice! Justice!"

from the men, and with significant hints from the officers of a march on London if their claims were not speedily satisfied, "for a rich city may seem an enticing bait to poor beggarly soldiers to venture far to gain the wealth thereof."

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

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

There is also a small prehistoric earthwork, known as "The Round Moats."

From Duxford, a pretty byway--far prettier till, a year or two ago, the picturesque wooden foot-bridge across the Granta was replaced by an iron modernity--leads to Hinxton, where the church has some interesting architectural developments, and a good bra.s.s to Sir Thomas de Skelton, steward to "old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster."

He is shown in full plate-armour, and his two wives lie beside him.

The Parochial Register here dates back to the very first inst.i.tution of such doc.u.ments, in 1538, by Thomas Cromwell. This is quite rare; for the idea was, in its first inception, to the last degree unpopular both with clergy and people, who suspected, from their experience of Henry's illimitable greed, that a tax would be exacted upon each of the ecclesiastical functions thus registered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such is the one alternative. The other, to which I myself incline, is that they did not need to fetch the pillars at all, but utilised them on the very spot where they originally stood. According to this view we have here an example, unique in Britain, of Roman work _in situ_.

The very arcading which we see I take to have stood north and south of the central hall of some large Roman mansion. Such a mansion usually contained an oblong central hall of this kind (often roofless), with a peristyle, or cloister, on either side opening into it, a portico at one end, and a smaller _tablinum_ or guest-chamber at the other.

Lanciani has pointed out how this structural arrangement suggested the nave, aisles, porch, and chancel of the earliest ecclesiastical edifices at Rome.[169] The same suggestion may have influenced the builders of Ickleton Church to utilise this old Roman arcading, roofing in the enclosed s.p.a.ce, but with a clerestory to prevent too great loss of light. If this view is correct the narrow north aisle probably represents the width of the original peristyle.

[Footnote 169: See my _Roman Britain_, p. 266.]

The south aisle is far wider, as wide indeed as the nave and north aisle together; and one asks why the fourteenth century architect planned his work so very unsymmetrically. The answer, I think, is to be found in the remarkable architectural development of the steeple.

The piers of the tower are, as I have said, unmistakably Norman, but upon them are set, quite unconformably, arches at least a century later in date. The tower is pierced by these arches on all four sides, and was evidently meant as the centre of a cruciform church with transepts. For some reason this Norman plan was never completed, but it is very probable that the south wall of the church marks the limit to which the transept (which may have been actually begun) was meant to extend.

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

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

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

we have been meeting--Shelford, Stapleford, Whittlesford, Duxford--have to do with its various pa.s.sages of the Granta.

Beyond Chesterford the Granta comes down in tiny streamlets from the Ess.e.x chalk near Saffron Walden, with its wide-naved church, which Cromwell's troops used for a drill-shed and council-chamber, and its historic mansion of Audley End, once Walden Abbey, and its memories of the days, scarcely a century by-gone, when great crops of saffron were grown in its fields, leaving their only existing trace in the name.

And even that is dying out; few of the inhabitants call their home anything but Walden. But this town is beyond our Cambridgeshire border.

CHAPTER XI

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