Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely Part 19

The Cam Valley road from Trumpington leads us over a singularly bare mile, edged by spa.r.s.e thorn-trees, to Hauxton Mill, where we cross the Granta. The repair of the bridge here was, in mediaeval days, paid for by the grant to all who aided this good object of a forty days'

Indulgence. This does not mean a licence to sin with impunity for that period, as perfervid Protestants imagine, but merely the abrogation of any ordinary ecclesiastical censure incurred. The little church of Hauxton, not far beyond, is one of the few Norman village churches existing in Cambridgeshire, for the county suffered so severely in the Norman Conquest that little church building could be afforded till a century later, when Norman had given place to Early English.

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

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

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

Haslingfield (which is more directly reached from Cambridge by the Barton Road) has a fine and s.p.a.cious church of the fourteenth century, the steeple being of special merit. Above it rises steeply the eastern extremity of a chalk spur to the height of 220 feet. From the summit, though so low, we get one of the widest panoramic views in England, embracing the whole valley of the Cam. "Ashwell Bush,"[170] which marks the source of the river, is conspicuous on a hill some ten miles to the south-westward, and Ely Cathedral, just beyond its junction with the Ouse, may be seen, twice as far away to the north; Cambridge, with its spires and pinnacles, lying between, five or six miles distant. Our eastward limit of vision is the long line of the East Anglian Heights, from Swaffham steeple[171] on their northernmost visible swell, twenty miles away, to the far-off jut of Sharpinhoe, near Dunstable, more than thirty miles in the opposite direction.

Beneath us, in the valley, steeple after steeple rises amid its village elms, dotting the landscape like knots in net-work. No fewer than eighty of these can be made out, the most conspicuous being the cruciform church of Triplow.[172]

[Footnote 170: This "bush" is actually a group of young elms.]

[Footnote 171: See p. 191.]

[Footnote 172: See p. 230.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Haslingfield Church._]

This eminence was anciently known as White Hill, from the three great "clunch" quarries,[173] which still conspicuously scar its sides, and must have done so much more conspicuously of old, when this material was much more generally used for building than it is now.

From these quarries came, for example, the stone used in the First Court of St. John's College, Cambridge. The "pits," as they are locally called, are rapidly greening over, for the clunch is now only dug for the mending of farm roads, and occasionally for marling the fields; as Pliny records that the ancient Britons marled them two thousand years ago.

[Footnote 173: See p. 198.]

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

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

[Footnote 174: The Chantry Priests, of whom there were two in Barrington, often acted as village schoolmasters, the Chantries themselves serving as cla.s.srooms.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Farmhouse at Haslingfield._]

Here and there along the Green gush out bright fountains of delicious water from artesian wells driven into the "greensand," some 200 feet below the surface. Throughout all its length the village is sheltered, on the north, by the ridge of White Hill, while, on the south, the orchards and closes with their "hedge-row elms," slope down to the Cam and its water-meadows. The stream here runs beneath a gravel-terrace of its own formation, which has proved exceptionally rich in the remains of pleistocene mammalia, mostly, as has been said,[175]

connoting a semi-tropical climate. Specimens of elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, bison, urus, lion, bear, hyaena, derived from Barrington, are to be seen in the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge.

a.s.sociated palaeolithic flint implements, and red-deer antlers rudely cut, show that human intelligence existed here along with these monsters, at least 5000 years ago, at the lowest estimate, which some geologists multiply fifty fold; and excavation has shown that the site has been populated pretty well ever since. Neolithic, British, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Mediaeval relics have here been unearthed in quite astonishing abundance; and, though no Roman villa has yet been located, Roman coins have been found literally by the hundred.

[Footnote 175: See p. 221. The gravel here is older than that at Grantchester.]

This wealth of finds has been largely due to the "coprolite" digging, as it was inaccurately called, which went on here (and throughout the neighbourhood) during the whole latter half of the nineteenth century.

It had been discovered that the "upper greensand"[176] (here a narrow deposit immediately over the gault and usually some fifteen or twenty feet below the surface) was full of organic remains worth extracting for manure. These remains were never true coprolites, but mostly formless nodules rich in phosphate of lime, many being sponges, along with abundance of sea-urchins, mollusca, crabs, and innumerable sharks' teeth.

[Footnote 176: So called because full of green grains of "glauconite,"

which appear to be the internal casts of the sh.e.l.ls of foraminifera.

This bed, however, is not the true Upper Greensand, but "riddlings"

from it.]

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: _South Porch, Barrington Church._]

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

And with the trade has disappeared the artificial prosperity which it brought, to be succeeded by the full weight of the agricultural depression.

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

From either end of Barrington lanes lead southward across the Cam to Foxton and Shepreth respectively. Both these villages are hard by the main road which we are following. Foxton Church has a most beautiful Early English east window, and some very good Geometrical tracery.

Here is found that rare form of rural industry, a book-printing establishment, which to some extent mitigates the depression mentioned above. At Shepreth this is done on a larger scale by the making of cement, for which the clay procurable here is, like that on the Medway, peculiarly adapted. This is a little gem of a village, with a clear and copious brook running across its maze of thick-shaded lanes.

The source of these waters is in the ancient Fowl Mere already spoken of.[177]

[Footnote 177: See p. 230.]

Another such tributary rises in our next village, Melbourn, and runs, on its way to the Cam, through the adjoining Meldreth, an old-world place, where the parish stocks are still to be seen at the village cross-roads. Till the nineteenth century was well on its way, these instruments of punishment were in actual use for the correction of minor offences such as vagrancy. They consist of a low upright frame of rough wood, so contrived that the prisoner's feet, as he sat upon the ground beside it, were pa.s.sed through holes in the structure and there secured. The parish constable was supposed to keep sentry over him, but actually seldom kept off either the friends, who might alleviate his captivity by beer and tobacco, or the more numerous enemies, who found it a good joke to tease and pelt his helplessness.

The hands were sometimes also secured, sometimes not; but in any case the culprit's situation was exceedingly unpleasant, and the stocks proved a most wholesome deterrent.

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

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

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

Three miles further the road brings us to the small but flourishing town of Royston, which, though now wholly in Hertfordshire, was till a few years ago partly in Cambridgeshire, with which it has a far closer physical connection than with its new county. The place has an interesting history. Like Newmarket, at the other end of Cambridgeshire, it is not, as are the villages around, one of the original English settlements dating from the fifth or sixth centuries, but a burgh of mediaeval growth, owing its existence (again like Newmarket) to its position on the line of the Icknield Way, here crossed by another presumably British and certainly Roman road, the Ermine Street, which joined, as it still joins, the two great nerve-centres of Roman Britain, York and London. It is still known as the Old North Road.

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

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

At the same period Royston was the scene of yet another ecclesiastical development, by the establishment of a famous hermitage in its still celebrated cave. This cave is a curious bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk below the Icknield Way, of prehistoric origin, having been apparently one of those "dene holes" from which the ancient inhabitants of Britain used to procure chalk for marling their fields.

It is not so long since this method was discontinued, and numbers of these holes are still to be found in Kent and elsewhere. They were always made on the same plan. A shaft was sunk to the desired depth, and the chalk excavated all round the bottom as far as safety permitted. The hole was then abandoned, and usually filled in. This one at Royston, however, remained open, and in the twelfth century was taken as his abode by a hermit, who employed himself in carving devotional figures and emblems all round the walls.

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

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

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

As we continue our way along the hedgeless road at the foot of this delightful common, the Great Northern Railway, from Cambridge to London, keeps us close company on our right. A mile or so beyond it rises a conspicuous line of poplar trees. These mark the village of Ba.s.singbourn, one of the most interesting in the county to the historian. For here there is preserved in the church a whole library of antique books, and amongst these (in ma.n.u.script) the churchwardens'

accounts from 1498 to 1534, kept with an accuracy which enables us to picture faithfully the village life of those days. We find that it was a period of high wages, for a labourer got threepence a day if boarded, and fivepence unboarded. His board then was worth a shilling per week. Nowadays it is reckoned at ten shillings at least, so that we must multiply all the items by ten to express them in current value. His wages were thus equivalent to twenty-five shillings per week, double the present rate, while artisans could command nearly twice as much. The times were thus abnormally prosperous, and the parishioners could afford to spend so lavishly in merrymaking at the "Church Ales" that an annual profit equivalent to nearly 50 was usually made on these entertainments, which corresponded to the Parochial Teas and concerts of the present day. These profits went towards the "reparacyon" of the church, and the current church expenses, including such heavy items as refounding the bells, at a cost equal to over 200, and renovating the clock and the organ.

Further funds were raised by a great "Miracle Play" of St. George and the Dragon, to which the whole neighbourhood a.s.sembled.

All this prosperity (founded, as always, on the high rate of wages) was the result of that fearful catastrophe, the Black Death, which, a few generations back, had all but decimated the population, and shattered the old social system of England, wherein the labourers were "villains," tied to the manor on which they were born, and bound to do for their lord (in lieu of rent) so many "jobs"[178] a year. A "job"

meant 100 minutes' work, a strange subdivision of time, implying some fairly accurate means of measuring its flight, though we know not what these may have been. A Cambridgeshire "inquisition" of 1313 values each job at a halfpenny, so that the day's work of a "villain" was worth about threepence.

[Footnote 178: This word is derived from the Latin _Opus_ ("work") which in the Manorial account books was usually written j.op. (_i.e._, one _Opus_).]

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

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

The "great storm" here referred to took place on St. Maur's Day (January 15th), 1361. Of both storm and pestilence we shall find a most interesting record in the church of Ashwell, the next and last place which we should see in this corner of the county. To reach it we have, indeed, to cross the border and go some half mile beyond; but though politically in Hertfordshire, Ashwell physically belongs to Cambridgeshire. For here is the source of the Cam, and such a source as few would dream of for the sluggish unclear stream that we see at Cambridge. In the midst of the village the ground sinks into a sort of amphitheatre, some 100 yards in length by thirty in breadth and ten in depth, with abrupt sides covered with brushwood and overshadowed by ancestral ash-trees. All round the floor of this gush forth springs upon springs of the brightest, most sparkling water; so copious that when the infant stream escapes through a breach towards the north it is already nearly thirty feet broad. No prettier river-source is to be found throughout the length and breadth of England. The ash-trees, however, are not, as one is apt to think at first, the origin of the name, but its consequence. The first syllable really embodies that Celtic word for water which, as Axe, Exe, Esk, and Usk, meets us in so many places all over Great Britain; and this syllable, at some far-back date, suggested the planting of ashes around the well.