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.--Bassingbourn, Old
Accounts, Villenage.--Black Death.--Ashwell, Source of Cam,
Church, Graffiti.--Akeman Street.--Barton, Butts.--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.
The Cam Valley road from Trumpington leads us over a singularly bare
mile, edged by sparse 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 spacious 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.]
[Illustration: _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 "Assize of
Barnwell" (1430), pronounced 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 noble 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 classrooms.]
[Illustration: _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.
Associated 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 shells 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 L3 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 L150 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.
[Illustration: _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 Essex,
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 passed 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.
[Illustration: _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 leafage)
remains. But the vast massiveness 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 multitude
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 superstitious 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 assigned
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.
[Illustration: _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,
Bassingbourn, Reed, and Therfield. They had therefore attended the
Priory church, and been ministered to by its monks. The place was, in
answer to this petition, constituted 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
Bassingbourn, 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 manuscript) 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 L50 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 L200, 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 assembled.
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 Bassingbourn (estimated at the equivalent of no
less than L1,200 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.
[Illustration: _Ashwell._]
Not far from these bounteous springs rises the splendid tower of the
church, springing high into the air with the same undaunted Early
English ambition which raised the spire of Salisbury. And on its wall
(inside) is carved, in rude and deeply incised lettering of Old
English style, varied by some curiously Greek characteristics, the
record already spoken of, dealing with the Black Death and the storm.
This consists of four lines, intended for Latin elegiacs, again with a
Greek touch, and runs thus:
M . Ct . Xpenta . miseranda . ferox . violenta .
M.CCC.L.
Supest . plebs . pessima . testis . in . fineque . vents .
Validus . oc . anno . maurus . in . orbe . tonat.
M.CCC.LXI.
The opening words stand for the date:
Ct = Cter = CCC, and Xpenta = XXXXX = 50
The interpretation therefore is:
1350! Miserable, wild, distracted,
1350!
The dregs of the people alone survive to witness.
And in the end a wind
Full mighty. This year St Maur thunders in the world.
1361.
The year 1349 marked the most fatal stage of the Black Death in these
parts. In that year, to judge by the Diocesan records, no less than
eighty-five per cent. of the beneficed clergy were swept away, which
implies a corresponding mortality amongst other classes. By 1350 the
worst was over, but the full wretchedness of the situation was now
developing itself. The plague lingered on, constantly growing milder,
till 1361, when the great storm was supposed to have cleared the fair
of the last remnants of infection. A like popular distich about this
later visitation is quoted by Adam of Murimuth:
C ter erant mille decies sex unus, et ille,
Luce tua Maure, vehemens fuit impetus aurae.
Ecce flat hoc anno Maurus in orbe tonans.
That is, in English:
There were 300 + 1000 + 60 + 1 and that
Mighty blast of wind was on thy day, Maurus.
Lo! in this year bloweth Maurus thundering in the world.
[Illustration: _Ashwell Church from the N.W._]
St. Maur was a Gallican saint of the sixth century who was the first
to introduce monasticism into France. There are several other
interesting _graffiti_ on the same wall as the above, one of them
representing old St. Paul's with its lofty steeple, the highest in the
world (510 feet), and the famous Rose Window of the transept which
Chaucer mentions in his Canterbury Tales.
Another, and perhaps prettier, way of reaching Ashwell from Cambridge
is by taking the road that runs along the Backs, and following it out
of the town in its course to the south-west. Its local designation is
the Barton Road, but to antiquarians it has been known, since the
seventeenth century, as the Akeman Street. It was at that period that
the accepted identification of our Roman roads came into being, mainly
through the fearless erudition of Gale. Their names (except that of
the Via Devana) are as old at least as the Norman Conquest; but, save
only in the case of the Watling Street, the main line of which has
never been disputed, the connection between any given name and any
given road has been matter for the wildest conjecture. Thus, Geoffrey
of Monmouth, writing in the eleventh century, makes the Ermine Street
(which we now, with strong reason, identify with the Old North Road
from London to York) run from St. David's to Southampton! Our Akeman
Street is supposed to connect Wells on the Wash with Aust on the
Severn, passing on its way through Bath (the Ake-man-chester of the
Anglo-Saxons, _i.e._, "the stone stronghold of Aquae," Aquae being the
Roman name for Bath). But a lot of this is mere conjecture. The
"Barton Road," however, is undoubtedly on the line of a Roman road.
In spite of its name, it does not pass through the village of Barton.
Indeed, like the other roads leading westwards from Cambridge, it
curiously avoids the villages on its line, or rather (for the road is
older than they) the villages have curiously avoided being directly
upon it, though they lie thick on either side. Possibly the first
Anglo-Saxon settlers may have had in this district some superstitious
dread of a deserted Roman road, such as they certainly entertained at
first for the deserted Roman towns, which they did not occupy for many
a year (as at Cambridge), though they located their hamlets all round
them.
[Illustration: _Ashwell Church._]
But though the Akeman Street does not actually take us through
Barton village, it does lead us past the rare object of interest to be
found connected with the place, the ancient Archery Butts of the
parish. These are to be seen just opposite the sign-post which points
to Haslingfield, and are worth a pause to contemplate, for they give a
most impressive idea of what archery meant to our forefathers. Every
parish, it must be remembered, was bound by law in mediaeval times to
have such a stretch of ground, and every yeoman was bound to constant
practice upon it. And what practice! These "butts" are a stretch of
greensward, some hundred yards across, and in length no less than
three furlongs (660 yards). It looks an almost incredible distance for
a bowman, but it was the standard, so far as we can judge by the very
few butts of which the memory still survives. The length of the short
street in South London, still called Newington Butts, is nearly the
same.
Here, then, we can picture the sturdy archers of Plantagenet days
stretching themselves; their bows, not the toys of the modern
toxophilite with their thirty or forty pounds of pull, but of twice
the power (eighty lb. being a common pull in those times), and their
"cloth-yard" arrows, over three feet long, whistling to a target not
planted forty or fifty yards away, but twelve times the distance--the
whole length of these butts. Indeed, for anything under two furlongs
light arrows were not allowed, and the heavy regulation war arrow had
to be used. Each man was taught, as Bishop Latimer tells us in
recording his own youthful training, to draw his bow not by mere
strength, but by sleight of hand, "to lay the weight of his body into
the bow," and to draw the bowstring not to his breast, like other
nations, but to his ear. Small wonder that with eye and sinews so
trained our English archers became the wonder and the dread of Europe,
or that their shafts decided so many a battlefield--Cressy, Poictiers,
Agincourt, Flodden.
A mile further we cross the Bourn Brook, a tiny tributary which joins
the Cam near Grantchester, hard by a small station on the Cambridge
branch of the London and North Western Railway, called Lord's Bridge,
from the Lord Hardwicke who, in the beginning of the nineteenth
century, substituted a bridge for the earlier ford here. To our right
we see, across the fields, the church tower of Comberton; where, on
the little village green, can still be seen the worn remains of a
turf-built "maze," first traced out no one knows when, but certainly
not later than the sixteenth century. Various mystical reasons are
conjectured for the origin of these mazes, of which a fair number
still exist in England (especially in the Eastern counties), while
many more are known to have been destroyed by the Puritans of the
seventeenth century as relics of heathen superstition. Such, indeed,
they probably are. Mr. Walter Johnson, in his "Folk Memory," considers
them to be exceedingly primitive, begun in connection with "ceremonial
dances of painted heathen round a prehistoric camp fire." This
Comberton maze is fifty feet in diameter, while the tracks are two
feet in width, divided by slight banks of turf, once, it would seem,
about a foot in height, but now much worn down.
The next turn (to the left) leads to Harlton, a pretty, shady village,
with a fine Perpendicular church, having a stone rood screen, which is
rare, and, what is yet rarer, a still surviving stone reredos of the
fifteenth century, with a central recess, once closed with a door, and
evidently intended as a "Tabernacle" for the Reservation of the
Blessed Sacrament. The six niches on either side of this recess were
as evidently meant for images of the twelve Apostles.
Harlton lies close under White Hill, that chalk spur which we have
already met at Haslingfield.[179] Here, too, there is a "clunch-pit"
in the hill-side, from which the material for the church was probably
dug. It is now disused, except for occasional marling purposes, and
some unknown benefactor has planted its slopes with larches and
laburnums, forming a most fascinating little dell, the charms of which
are free to all.
[Footnote 179: See p. 236.]
Our road now climbs the hill, which it crosses through a cutting, with
a fine view from the summit in either direction. In the little clump
of trees just to the west of the road there stood, till the 'seventies
of the nineteenth century, Orwell Maypole, the last of its class to
survive in these parts. In mediaeval times every village had its
maypole, round which the lasses and lads hied them to dance on May
Day. But, like the mazes, they were called (and actually were)
remnants of heathenism, and, as such, were destroyed wholesale in the
years of Puritan ascendancy. So it befell with the great maypole which
gave name to the church of St. Andrew _Under-shaft_ in the City of
London. It was hewn down, and, as it lay along the street, sawn in
pieces, each householder taking for firewood the length that lay
opposite his own door. The Restoration set a certain number up again,
but the continuity of their use had been broken, and its revival (as
May Day was connected with no special Festival of the Church, like
Easter and Christmas, which were also originally heathen feasts)
became a merely artificial reaction, bound to dwindle away. So it
befell that Orwell Maypole, after being disused for generations,
finally perished by natural decay. It stood almost exactly upon the
meridian of Greenwich, so that it was a valuable and far-seen
landmark.
Orwell itself lies, as usual, just off the road, on the southern slope
of the hill. Half a century ago it was the prettiest of villages, with
its eponymous "well," shaded by magnificent trees, gushing from the
hill-side, in the midst of a prehistoric earthwork, just below the
noble church. But, about 1870, the earthwork, unhappily, was found to
contain "coprolites" (worth probably about L100 after the expenses of
getting them had been paid). For this paltry sum the whole place was
destroyed. Well, trees, earthwork, all are now gone; only the church
is left, perched on its slope high above the village street. It has a
grand decorated chancel, the roof of which is covered with heraldic
devices, and contains an interesting epitaph in Latin verse to one of
the seventeenth century rectors of the parish, beginning:
Pastor eram dum pastor eram tunc fistula dulcis
Tunc tuba qua torvum sprevit ovile lupum.
("I _was_ a Pastor, while a Pastor I;
Sweet then my pipe; loud then my trumpet-call,
Whereat my flock defied the wolf so grim.")
In the south aisle is preserved a small crucifix of stone, dating from
the thirteenth century. It had been built into the wall to save it
from destruction at the Reformation, and was not discovered for three
hundred years.
About a mile further we find a village along the road itself, the
village of Wimpole. But we notice that the houses are all modern, and
that no church is to be seen amongst them. A church there is belonging
to them, but it stands a mile to the west, where the village also
stood till towards the close of the eighteenth century. At that time
the mansion and park of Wimpole Hall were being enlarged to their
present magnificence by Philip, the first Earl of Hardwicke (the
builder of Lord's Bridge). Plebeian cottages were not to be tolerated
"betwixt the wind and his nobility," so he pulled down the entire
village and planted it, where it now is, along the Akeman Street. The
church, which could not well be moved, he faced with red brick to
match his new-built stables, close to which it is situated.
[Illustration: _Great Eversden._]
Wimpole Hall has passed through various hands. The central portion was
built, in 1632, by Sir Thomas Chicheley, the wings were added a
century later by the Earl of Oxford, from whom it came to the
Hardwicke family. It is now the seat of Viscount Clifden. The house is
on a splendid scale, and the grounds on a scale yet more splendid,
with a double avenue of elms, three miles long, running to the south.
Here Queen Victoria stayed when visiting Cambridgeshire shortly after
her marriage, and won all hearts by her graciousness. It is still
remembered how when, by some blunder, the attendant in charge of her
jewels was not forthcoming, she came down to the ball-room with a
simple wreath of roses in her hair, "and not all the jewels in the
world could have made her look so queenly."
There is, of course, a public road leading from Wimpole village to the
church, which is also accessible from the west, where the great iron
gates of the park are usually unbarred at the request of respectable
visitors. These gates open upon the Ermine Street, which the Akeman
Street crosses a mile beyond New Wimpole, after also crossing the
great avenue. Close by them is another transplanted village,
Arrington, whose church stands on the hill half a mile westward. The
traffic of the old North Road is responsible for this move, and also
for the delightful old coaching inn here, the Hardwicke Arms, with its
old-fashioned rooms and long range of stables.
At the junction our road ceases. To continue our westward course we
must go along the Ermine Street for half a mile, either northward or
southward, where we shall find lanes, either of which will carry us
on. The northern lane here will take us along the line of the hill, to
Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, Potton, and, finally, Bedford, and will enable
us, if we will, to explore the three Hadleys (East Hadley, Hadley St.
George, and Cockayne Hadley), of which the two last have fine halls
and parks. The southern, however, is the preferable route. It follows
the course of the infant Cam, crossed by a bridge on the Ermine
Street, and brings us first to the wholly obliterated Shingay, which,
though once the most important parish hereabouts, and still giving its
name to the Rural Deanery, has absolutely ceased to exist, church and
all; its parishioners being affiliated to the neighbouring village of
Wendy.
The cause of this ruin was the suppression, at the Reformation, of the
institution which was literally the life of Shingay, a House of the
Crusading Order of St. John of Jerusalem, or, as they were commonly
called, the Knights Hospitallers. This title was given them because,
at their original foundation, they dwelt in a Hospital (or house for
the hospitable entertainment of pilgrims) at Jerusalem. We now connect
this name only with places where the sick are ministered to; but it
originally connoted far wider ministrations, and, indeed, rather
corresponded to the other form in which the word has survived into our
present speech--hotel. We read it on a leaden seal found here at
Wendy, in 1876, which bears on one side a conventional representation
of the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by the legend
IHERVSALEM, HOSPITALIS. On the other is the name of Guarin de
Montaigu, who, from 1232 to 1269, was Grand Master of the Order.
The Hospitallers, as readers of "Ivanhoe" know, were, like the
Templars, a military Order, who, for over six centuries, fought
unceasingly for Christendom. First at Jerusalem, then at Rhodes, then
at Malta, they held out with never-failing devotion against the
on-sweeping torrent of Mahommedan aggression; and it is scarcely too
much to say that but for their eight-pointed cross Christianity might
well have been crushed throughout Europe. Not till the nineteenth
century was their last stronghold, Malta, reft from them by Napoleon,
to pass finally under the flag of England. The Order still survives,
but the modern sodality calling itself by the same name, connected
with what we now call hospital work, was set up in quite recent days.
Preceptories of the Order, as their branch Houses were called, were
found in every land, and not least in England, where they were so much
beloved that, when the rival Order of the Temple was suppressed, in
the fourteenth century, its property was made over to them. Here, at
Shingay, their establishment was a small one consisting of the
preceptor, two knights, and three priests, one of whom acted as Vicar
of Wendy. The gross income of the House was, in 1332 (as we know from
a Report still existing in the Record Office at Malta), L187 12s. 8d.,
equivalent to about L3,500 at the present value of money. Of this the
land (about 1,000 acres) brought in L71; the mills, houses, etc., L4
13s. 4d.; the work of the villains L38 10s. 0d.; and the Rectories of
Wendy and Sawston, which formed part of their endowment, L66 13s. 4d.
The rest was derived from the fees paid by visitors; for, by the rule
of the Order, the doors of the House were open to all comers. The
expenses of the year amounted to less than half the income, for they
lived frugally, their keep only coming to about L3 a week (in present
value) for the six inmates, besides servants and guests. Men servants
were paid at the rate of L12 a year (besides their keep), and each
knight was allowed the equivalent of L25 a year for clothing and
pocket-money. Thus a large sum was available for the war-chest of the
Order, and was annually forwarded to the headquarters at Jerusalem or
Rhodes.
One of their sources of income was a special privilege which is still
remembered in local tradition. Their House (like those of the
Templars) was exempt from every ban, even that of the Pope himself.
Thus, in the dismal days of King John, when England was placed under
an Interdict, when no rites of religion could be observed, and even
burial of the dead was forbidden, so that "you might see human bodies
lying everywhere about the fields unsepultured," Shingay shone out as
the one spot in the whole district where the consolations of religion
were still attainable. Here Mass continued to be said, here the
departed could still be laid in hallowed earth. And hither they were
brought from all sides. And thus it is that peasants may be found who
still tell how, at some far off, unknown period, those who, for some
forgotten, inexplicable reason, might not be buried like Christians in
their own churchyard, were spirited away by night in a "fairy-cart" to
Shingay, there to be committed in peace to the ground. This
"fairy-cart" is an echo of the word _feretorium_ (or bier on wheels),
in which the conveyance was actually effected.
[Illustration: _Rood Screen, Guilden Morden Church._]
Not a building of any kind now exists at Shingay, and very few at the
adjoining Wendy, where, at every turn, we are greeted by a wealth of
fresh-springing waters, derived from the artesian wells of the old
coprolite diggings. The height in which the water in these wells rises
is strangely variable. They are always made on the same system; an
ordinary well being dug through the upper strata till the impervious
gault is reached, which may be any distance from six to sixty feet
below the surface. A four-inch bore is then made through the gault by
means of a sort of Brobdingnagian cheese-taster, four or five feet
long, screwed to an iron handle three times that length. Again and
again the taster is brought up, full of gault, and its contents or
"core" thrown aside. As the bore gets deeper more irons are added,
till the water-bearing greensand or "rock" is attained, usually in the
second hundred feet of the bore. The taster is then removed and a
"chisel" substituted for "striking the rock," _i.e._, punching a hole
by lifting the entire length of irons a few feet and letting it fall.
By and by up comes the water, quite suddenly for the most part,
gushing from the bore and filling the well till it finds its level.
This, as we have said, is curiously different in different spots; in
some it does not reach the surface, and has to be pumped up; in
others, as here at Wendy, it will supply a fountain eight or ten feet
in height. One of these picturesquely gushes out from the top of an
old wooden gate-post, up which some artistically-minded
coprolite-digger has engineered its course. It is almost medicinal in
the quantity of iron with which it is impregnated, but delicious to
drink, and the softest possible.
This gate-post is beside the lane leading on Guilden Morden, the last
village before we once more reach Ashwell, and itself standing on an
outlying mound of the Ashwell chalk. Round this elevation the Cam
takes a wide sweep. We may record that Wendy is the highest point
along its course which navigation has ever attained. The breadth at
Ashwell at once suggests to visitors that a canoe could reach the
spot, and many an attempt has been made by ambitious undergraduates.
But the upper reaches are so choked up with reeds and weeds and rushes
and bushes that no one has ever penetrated further than this spot,
some four miles, by water-way, below the source.
Guilden Morden has a far-seen church, a conspicuous object from White
Hill, over Barrington, twelve miles away. It is a fine building, with
an unusually spacious tower of Northamptonshire stone, and a Saxon
font. But it is chiefly interesting for the remarkable development of
the fourteenth century rood-screen, which on either side expands into
a small "parclose" or pew, enclosed to the height of twelve feet by
rich decorated tracery, ornately painted (the original pattern having
survived sufficiently to be restored). On the west panel of the
northern parclose may be discerned the figures of St. Erconwald and
St. Edmund, both members of the royal line of East Anglia. The former
was a brother of St. Etheldreda, the foundress of Ely, and became a
much-beloved Bishop of London in the seventh century. The latter was
the hero king martyred by the Danes a century later, the chosen friend
of our great Alfred, of whom so lovely a picture has been left us by
the old chroniclers:--
"From his earliest years the truest of Christians, he showed
himself of such promise that, by the unanimous will of all his
folk, he was not so much chosen as rushed into the kingship over
them. For his very look was worthy of this high estate; so bright
was it with the calm beauty of holiness and of a conscience like
the sea at rest. Kind was he of speech and courteous to all; the
grace of Humility came natural to him; and amongst his comrades
he kept his place as their Lord with wondrous meekness and no
touch of pride. For already the Saint bare in his face that which
he was afterwards, by God's will, to show forth; seeing that as a
boy he had pressed with all his might into the Way of
Righteousness, which, as God's pity foreknew, would end for him
in the Way of Martyrdom.... And walking in the King's Highway, he
turned aside neither to the right hand, by being puffed up with
his own merits, nor to the left, by yielding to the faults of
human weakness. To the needy was he a cheerful giver, to the
widows and orphans the kindest of Patrons; ever keeping before
his eyes the saying of the Wise Man: "Behold they have made thee
Prince; but be thou among them as one of themselves."[180]
[Footnote 180: Chronicle of St. Neots.]
[Illustration: _Cottage at Steeple Morden._]
These parcloses seem to have been made to serve as confessional boxes,
devices which were very rare in England before the Reformation.
"Shrift," of course, was universal; but neither priest nor penitent
were shut from view. The former sat in a chair, usually at the altar
rail, while the latter knelt beside and facing him. In these parcloses
the priest's head as he sat on the seat would be visible to those in
the church, but the kneeling penitent would be hidden. That such was
the purpose here would appear from the lines in old English lettering
painted upon their sides:--
Ad . mortem . duram . Jhesu . de . me . cape . curam .
Vitam . venturam . post . mortem . redde . securam .
Fac . me . confessum . rogo . te . Deus . ante . recessum .
Et . post . decessum . caelo. mihi . dirige . gressum .
"Jesu, in Death's dark vale, be Thou my stay,
Make safe my Life to Come from every foe,
Grant me Confession, Lord, ere hence I go,
And then to Heaven do thou make straight my way."
From Guilden Morden a lane leads straight to Ashwell, leaving on the
left Steeple Morden (which lost its steeple in the great storm of
1703), and Littlington, the cradle of Cambridgeshire Nonconformity, of
which hereafter. Here the old parish Lock-up survives; a dismal den of
red brick, some ten feet square, with iron-clenched door and
closely-barred window.