EARLY CAMBRIDGE
Roman Cambridge was probably called Camboritum, but this, like the
majority of Roman place names in England, fell into disuse, and the
earliest definite reference to the town in post-Roman times gives the
name as Grantacaestir. This occurs in Bede's great _Ecclesiastical
History_, concluded in A.D. 731, and the incident alluded to in
connection with the Roman town throws a clear ray of light upon the
ancient site in those unsettled times. It tells how Sexburgh, the
abbess of Ely, needing a more permanent coffin for the remains of
AEtheldryth, her predecessor in office, sent some of the brothers from
the monastery to find such a coffin. Ely being without stone, and
surrounded by waterways and marshes, they took a vessel and came in
time to an abandoned city, "which, in the language of the English, is
called Grantacaestir; and presently, near the city walls, they found a
white marble coffin, most beautifully wrought, and neatly covered with
a lid of the same sort of stone." That this carved marble sarcophagus
was of Roman workmanship there seems no room to doubt, and Professor
Skeat regards it as clear that this ruined town, with its walls and
its Roman remains, was the same place as the Caer-grant mentioned by
the historian, Nennius.
In course of time the Anglo-Saxon people of the district must have
overcome their prejudices against living in what had been a Roman
city, and Grantacaestir arose out of the ruins of its former
greatness. In the ninth century a permanent bridge was built, and the
town began to be known as Grantabrycg, or, as the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle gives it, Grantebrycge. Domesday toned this down to
Grentebrige, and that was the name of Cambridge when a Norman castle
stood beside the grass-grown mound which is all that remains to-day of
the Saxon fortress. What caused the change from G to C is hard to
discover, but when King John was on the throne the name was written
Cantebrige, and the "m" put in its appearance in the earlier half of
the fifteenth century, the "t" being discarded at the same period. It
seems that the name of the river was arrived at by the same process.
Perhaps the oddest feature of the whole of these vicissitudes in
nomenclature is the similarity between the Roman Camboritum and
Cambridge, for the two names have, as has been shown, no connection
whatsoever.
A map of Cambridgeshire, compiled by the Rev. F.G. Walker, showing the
Roman and British roads reveals instantly that the university town has
a Roman origin, for it stands at the junction of four roads, or rather
where Akeman Street crossed Via Devana, the great Roman way connecting
Huntingdon and Colchester. Two or three miles to the south, however,
the eye falls on the name of a village called Grantchester, and if we
had no archaeology to help us, we would leap to the conclusion that
here, and not at Cambridge, was the ancient site mentioned by the
earlier chroniclers. And this is precisely what happened. Even recent
writers have fallen into the same old mistake in spite of the
discovery of Roman remains on the site of the real Roman town, and
notwithstanding the fact that the two roads mentioned intersect there.
The trouble arose through the alterations in spelling in the name of
the village of Granteceta, or, as it often appears in early writings,
Gransete, but now that Professor Skeat has given us the results of his
careful tracking of the name back to 1080, when it first appears in
any record, we see plainly that this village has never had a past of
any importance, and that the original name means nothing more than
"settlers by the Granta." There is a Roman camp near this village, and
a few other discoveries of that period have been made there, but such
finds have been made in dozens of places near Cambridge.
It is therefore an established fact that modern Cambridge has been
successively British, Roman, Saxon, and Norman, and the original town,
situated on the north-western side of the river, has extended across
the water and filled the space bounded on three sides by the Cam.
Being on the edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the
toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch
of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for
the erection of a castle, and from here he conducted his operations
against the English, who held out under Hereward the Wake on the Isle
of Ely. In the hurried operations preceding the taking of the "Camp of
Refuge" in 1071, there was probably only sufficient time to strengthen
the earthworks and to build stockades, but soon afterwards William
erected a permanent castle of stone on this marsh frontier--a building
Fuller describes as a "stately structure anciently the ornament of
Cambridge." In her scholarly work on the town, Miss Tuker tells us how
Edward III. quarried the castle to build King's Hall; how Henry VI.
allowed more stone to be taken for King's College Chapel; and how Mary
in 1557 completed the wiping out of the Norman fortress by granting to
Sir Robert Huddleston permission to carry away the remaining stone to
build himself a house at Sawston! Wherever building materials are
scarce such things have happened, even to the extent of utilizing the
stones of stately ruins for road-making purposes. It thus comes about
that the artificial mound and the earthworks on the north side of it
are as bare and grass-grown as any pre-historic fort which has not at
any period known a permanent edifice.
Owing to its fairs, and particularly to the famous Stourbridge Fair,
an annual mart of very great if uncertain antiquity, held near the
town during September, Cambridge at an early date became a centre of
commerce, and it had risen to be a fairly large town of some
importance before the Conquest. In the time of Ethelred a royal mint
had been established there, and it appears to have recovered rapidly
after its destruction by Robert Curthose in 1088, for it continued to
be a mint under the Plantagenets, and even as late as Henry VI. money
was coined in the town.
A bridge, as already stated, was built at Cambridge in the ninth
century, but in 870, and again in 1010, the Danes sacked the town, and
it would seem that the bridge was destroyed, for early in the twelfth
century we find a reference to the ferry being definitely fixed at
Cambridge, and that before that time it had been "a vagrant,"
passengers crossing anywhere that seemed most convenient. This fixing
of the ferry, and various favours bestowed by Henry I., resulted in an
immediate growth of prosperity, and the change was recognized by
certain Jews who took up their quarters in the town and were, it is
interesting to hear, of such "civil carriage" that they incurred
little of the spite and hatred so universally prevalent against them
in the Middle Ages. The trade guilds of Cambridge were founded before
the Conquest, and, becoming in course of time possessed of wealth and
influence, some of them were enabled to found a college.
As England settled down under the Norman Kings, the great Abbey of Ely
waxed stronger and wealthier, and in the wide Fen Country there also
grew up the abbeys of Peterborough, Crowland, Thorney, and Ramsey--all
under the Benedictine rules. To the proximity of these great
monasteries was due the beginning of the scholastic element in
Cambridge, and perhaps the immense popularity of Stourbridge Fair,
which Defoe thought the greatest in Europe, may have helped to locate
the University there. Exactly when or how the first little centre of
learning was established in the town is still a matter of uncertainty,
but there seems to have been some strong influence emanating from the
Continent in the twelfth century which encouraged the idea of
establishing monastic schools. Cambridge in quite early times began to
be sprinkled with small colonies of canons and friars, and in these
religious hostels the young monks from the surrounding abbeys were
educated. Mr. A.H. Thompson, in his _Cambridge and its Colleges_,
suggests that the unhealthy dampness of the fens would have made it
very desirable that the less robust of the youths who were training
for the cloistered life in the abbeys of East Anglia should be
transferred to the drier and healthier town, where the learning of
France was available among the many different religious Orders
represented there.
In 1284 the first college was founded on an academic basis. This was
Peterhouse. Its founder was Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who had
made the experiment of grafting secular scholars among the canons of
St. John's Hospital, afterwards the college. Finding it difficult to
reconcile the difficulties which arose between secular and religious,
he transferred his lay scholars, or Ely clerks, to two hostels at the
opposite end of the town, and at his death left 300 marks to build a
hall where they could meet and dine. After this beginning there were
no imitators until forty years had elapsed, but then colleges began to
spring up rapidly. In 1324 Michael House was founded, and following it
came six more in quick succession: Clare in 1326, King's Hall in 1337,
Pembroke in 1347, Gonville Hall in 1348, Trinity Hall in 1350, and
Corpus Christi in 1352. These constitute the first period of
college-founding, separated from the succeeding by nearly a century.
The second period began in 1441 with King's, and ended with St. John's
in 1509. After an interval of thirty-three years the third period
commenced with Magdalene, and concluded with Sidney Sussex in 1595. A
fourth group is composed of the half-dozen colleges belonging to last
century.