Fortunately, as some proof of the practical value of an University
education, it can point to men like Cromwell, Pitt, and Macaulay,
whose strenuous lives have in their several ways left a mark on the
nation's history. Though one be not a champion of Cromwell's career,
yet his savagery, his duplicity, his canting hypocrisy fade into the
background and lose their significance beside the firmness of purpose,
the iron determination and the wise policy that made England respected
and feared abroad under the rule of the Protector. The beheading of a
King weighs little in the scale against the upholding of the dignity
of the State; and though a sour Puritanism ruled the land under the
great Oliver, at least the guns of a foreign foe were never heard in
our estuaries under the Commonwealth, as they were heard after the
Restoration. Cambridge gives no sign that she is proud of Oliver,
neither does Sidney Sussex, his old college. But if Cambridge be
not outwardly proud of Old Noll, she abundantly glories in William
Pitt. And rightly, too. None may calculate how the equation stands:
how greatly his natural parts or to what extent his seven years of
University education contributed to his brilliant career; but for
one of her sons to have attained the dignity of Chancellor of the
Exchequer at twenty-three years of age, to have been Prime Minister at
twenty-five, the political dictator of Europe and the saviour of his
country, is a triumph beyond anything they can show on the Isis. The
Pitt Press, the Pitt Scholarship, the Pitt Club, all echo the fame of
his astonishing genius.
XXIV
THE impossibility of giving even a glimpse of the principal colleges
of Cambridge in these pages of a book devoted to the road will be
obvious. Thus, the great quads of Trinity, the many courts of John's,
Milton's mulberry tree at Christ's, the Pepysian Library of Magdalen,
and a hundred other things must be sought elsewhere. Turn we, then, to
further talk of Thomas Hobson, the carrier and livery-stable keeper of
"Hobson's Choice," who lies in an unmarked resting-place in the chancel
of St. Benedict's Church, hard by the Market Hill. Born in 1544, he was
not a native of Cambridge, but seems to have first seen the light at
Buntingford, his father's native place. Already, in that father's time,
the business had grown so profitable and important that we find Hobson
senior a treasurer of the Cambridge Corporation; and when he died, in
1568, in a position to leave considerable landed and other property
among his family. To Thomas, his more famous son, he bequeathed land at
Grantchester and the waggon and horses that industrious son had been
for some years past driving between Cambridge and London for him, with
the surety and regularity of the solar system. "I bequeath," he wrote,
"to my son Thomas the team-ware that he now goeth with, that is to
say, the cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things
thereunto belonging, with the nag, to be delivered to him at such time
and when as he shall attain and come to the age of twenty-five years;
or £30 in money, for and in discharge thereof."
And thus he continued to go once a week, back and forth, for close upon
sixty-three years, riding the nag and its successors beside the waggon
that ploughed its ponderous way along the heavy roads. An ancient
portrait of him, a large painting in oil, is now in the Cambridge
Guildhall, and inscribed, "Mr. Hobson, 1620." This contemporary
portrait has the curious information written on the back, "This picture
was hung up at Ye Black Bull inn, Bishopsgate, London, upwards of one
hundred years before it was given to J. Burleigh 1787."
Hobson scarce fitted the picture of the "jolly waggoner" drawn in the
old song. Have you ever heard the song of the "Jolly Waggoner"? It is
a song of lightly come and lightly go; of drinking with good fellows
while the waggon and horses are standing long hours outside the wayside
inn, and consignees are waiting with what patience they may for their
goods. A song that bids dull care begone, and draws for you a lively
sketch of the typical waggoner, who lived for the moment, whistled as
he went in attempted rivalry with the hedgerow thrushes and blackbirds,
spent his money as he earned it, and had a greeting, a ribbon, and a
kiss for every lass along the familiar highway.
[Illustration: HOBSON, THE CAMBRIDGE CARRIER.
"Laugh not to see so plain a man in print;
The Shadow's homely, yet ther's something in't.
Witness the Bagg he wears, (though seeming poore)
The fertile Mother of a hundred more;
He was a thriving man, through lawfull Gain,
And wealthy grew by warrantable paine,
Then laugh at them that spend, not them that gather,
Like thriveing Sonnes of such a thrifty Father."]
It is a song that goes to a reckless and flamboyant tune, an almost
Handelian melody that is sung with a devil-may-care toss of the head
and much emphasis; a rare, sweet, homely old country ditty--
"When first I went a-waggoning, a-waggoning did go,
I filled my parents' hearts with sorrow, trouble, grief, and woe;
And many are the hardships, too, that since I have gone through.
Sing wo! my lads, sing wo!
Drive on, my lads, heigh-ho!
For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do?
It is a cold and stormy night: I'm wetted to the skin,
But I'll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn,
And then I'll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Sing wo! my lads, etc.
Now summer is a-coming on--what pleasure we shall see!
The mavis and the blackbird singing sweet on every tree.
The finches and the starlings, too, will whistle merrily.
Sing wo! my lads, etc.
Now Michaelmas is coming fast--what pleasure we shall find!
'Twill make the gold to fly, my lads, like chaff before the wind.
And every lad shall kiss his lass, so loving and so kind.
Sing wo!" etc.
And so forth.
Hobson was not this kind of man. He had his horse-letting business in
Cambridge, where, indeed, he had forty saddle-nags always ready, "fit
for travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen
at once, without going from college to college to borrow"; but he
continued throughout his long life to go personally with his waggon,
and died January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year, of the irksome
and unaccustomed inaction imposed upon him by the authorities, who
forbade him to ply to London while one of the periodical outbreaks of
plague was raging in the capital. Dependable in business as Hobson was,
he prospered exceedingly, and amassed a very considerable fortune, "a
much greater fortune," says one, "than a thousand men of genius and
learning, educated at the University, ever acquired, or were capable of
acquiring." This is not a little hard on the learned and the gifted, by
whose favour and goodwill he prospered so amazingly. For, be it known,
he was not merely and solely _a_ carrier; but _the_ carrier, especially
licensed by the University, and thus a monopolist. Those were the days
before a Government monopoly of the post was established, and one of
Hobson's particular functions was the conveying of the mails. He was
thus a very serious and responsible person.
You cannot conceive Hobson "carrying on" like the typical "jolly
waggoner." Look at the portrait of him, taken from a fresco painted
on a wall of his old house of call, the Bull, in Bishopsgate Street.
A very grave and staid old man it shows us; looking out upon the
world with cold and calculating eyes, deep-set beneath knitted brows,
and with a long and money-loving, yet cautious, nose. His hand is
unwillingly extracting a guinea from a well-filled money-bag, and you
may clearly see from his expression of countenance how much rather he
would be putting one in.
Yet in his last years he appeared in the guise of a benefactor to
the town of Cambridge, for in 1628 he gave to town and University
the land on which was built the so-called "Spinning House," or, more
correctly, "Hobson's Workhouse," where poor people who had no trade
might be taught some honest one, and all stubborn rogues and beggars
be compelled to earn their livelihood. A bequest providing for the
maintenance of the water-conduit in the Market Place kept his memory
green for many a long year afterwards. It remained a prominent object
in the centre of the town until 1856, when it was removed; but the
little watercourses that of old used to run along the kennels of
Cambridge streets still serve to keep the place clean and sweet.
[Illustration: HOBSON.
[_From a Painting in Cambridge Guildhall._]]
It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that Hobson, although he
fared the road personally, and attended to every petty detail of his
carrying business, was both a very wealthy and a very important
personage. The second condition is not necessarily a corollary of the
first. But Hobson bulked large in the Cambridge of his time. Indeed,
as much may be gathered from the mass of literature written around
his name. In his lifetime even, some compiler of a Commercial Letter
Writer, for instructing youths ignorant of affairs, could find no more
apt and taking title than that of _Hobson's Horse Load of Letters, or
Precedents for Epistles of Business_; and poets and verse-writers, from
Milton downwards, wrote many epitaphs and eulogies on him. Milton, who
had gone up to Christ's College in 1624, was twenty-three years of age
when Hobson died, and wrote two humorous epitaphs on him, more akin to
the manner of Tom Hood than the majestic periods usually associated
in the mind with the style commonly called "Miltonic.". "Quibbling
epitaphs" an eighteenth century critic has called them. But you shall
judge--
"On the University Carrier, who sickened in the time of the Vacancy,
being forbid to go to London by reason of the Plague.
Here lies old Hobson: Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt;
Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one
He's here stuck in a slough and overthrown.
'Twas such a shifter that, if truth were known,
Death was half glad when he had got him down;
For he had any time this ten years full
Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and the Bull;
And, surely, Death could never have prevailed,
Had not his weekly course of carriage failed;
But, lately, finding him so long at home,
And thinking now his journey's end was come,
And that he had taken up his latest inn,
In the kind office of a Chamberlain
Showed him his room where he must lodge that night,
Pulled off his boots, and took away the light:
If any ask for him, it shall be said,
'Hobson hath supped, and's newly gone to bed.'"
The subject seems to have been an engrossing one to the youthful poet,
for he harked back to it in the following variant:--
"Here lieth one who did most truly prove
That he could never die while he could move;
So hung his destiny, never to rot
While he might still jog on and keep his trot,
Made of sphere-metal, never to decay
Until his revolution was at stay!
Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime
'Gainst old truth) motion numbered out his time;
And, like an engine moved with wheel and weight,
His principles being ceased, he ended straight.
Rest, that gives all men life, gave him his death,
And too much breathing put him out of breath;
Nor were it contradiction to affirm
Too long _vacation_ hastened on his _term_;
Merely to drive the time away he sickened,
Fainted and died, nor would with ale be quickened.
'Nay,' quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretched,
'If I may not carry, sure I'll ne'er be fetched;
But vow' (though the cross Doctors all stood hearers)
'For one _carrier_ put down, to make six _bearers_.'
Ease was his chief disease, and, to judge right,
He died for heaviness that his cart went light;
His leisure told him that his time was come,
And lack of load made his life burdensome;
That even to his last breath, (there be that say't,)
As he were pressed to death, he cried 'More weight!'
But, had his doings lasted as they were,
He had been an immortal Carrier.
Obedient to the moon, he spent his date
In course reciprocal, and had his fate
Linked to the mutual flowing of the seas;
Yet, strange to think, his wain was his increase;
His letters are delivered all and gone;
Only remains this superscription."
The next example--an anonymous one--makes no bad third--
"Here Hobson lies among his many betters,
A man unlearned, yet a man of letters;
His carriage was well known, oft hath he gone
In Embassy 'twixt father and the son:
There's few in Cambridge, to his praise be't spoken,
But may remember him by some good Token.
From whence he rid to London day by day,
Till Death benighting him, he lost his way:
His Team was of the best, nor would he have
Been mired in any way but in the grave.
And there he stycks, indeed, styll like to stand,
Untill some Angell lend hys helpyng hand.
Nor is't a wonder that he thus is gone,
Since all men know, he long was drawing on.
Thus rest in peace thou everlasting Swain,
And Supream Waggoner, next Charles his wain."
The couplet printed below touches a pretty note of imagination, and is
wholly free from that suspicion of affected scholarly superiority to
a common carrier, with which all the others, especially Milton's, are
super-saturated--
"Hobson's not dead, but Charles the Northerne swaine,
Hath sent for him, to draw his lightsome waine."
Charles's Wain, referred to in these two last examples, is, of course,
that well-known constellation in the northern heavens usually known as
the Great Bear, anciently "Charlemagne's Waggon," and more anciently
still, the Greek Hamaxa, "the Waggon."
Coming, as might be expected, a considerable distance after Milton and
the others in point of excellence, are the epitaphs printed in a little
book of 1640, called the _Witt's Recreations, Selected from the Finest
Fancies of the Modern Muses_. Some of them are a little gruesome, and
affect the reader as unfavourably as though he saw the authors of these
lines dancing a saraband on poor old Hobson's grave--
"Hobson (what's out of sight is out of mind)
Is gone, and left his letters here behind.
He that with so much paper us'd to meet;
Is now, alas! content to take one sheet.
He that such carriage store was wont to have,
Is carried now himselfe unto his grave:
O strange! he that in life ne're made but one,
Six Carriers makes, now he is dead and gone."
XXV
THE Market Hill is, as already hinted, the centre of Cambridge. The
University church is there. There, too, the stalls of the Wednesday
and Saturday markets still gather thickly, and on them the inquisitive
stranger may yet discover butter being sold, as from time immemorial,
by the yard. Here a yard of butter is the equivalent of a pound, and
the standard gauge of such a yard--the obsolete symbol of a time when
the University exercised jurisdiction over the markets as well as over
the students--is to this day handed over to the Senior Proctor of the
year on his taking office. It is a clumsy cylinder of sheet iron, a
yard in length and an inch in diameter. A pound of butter rolled out
to this measurement looks remarkably like a very yellow candle of
inordinate length.
[Illustration: MARKET HILL, CAMBRIDGE.]
Hobson's Conduit, as already noted, once stood in the centre of this
market-place. When his silent, hook-nosed Majesty, William the Third,
visited Cambridge in 1689, the Conduit was made by the enthusiastic
citizens to run wine. Not much wine, though, nor very good, we may
surely suppose, for the tell-tale account-books record that it cost
only thirty shillings!
[Illustration: THE FALCON, CAMBRIDGE.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH.]
Few of the old coach-offices or inns stood in this square, but
were--and are now--to be found chiefly in the streets leading out
of it. The Bull, anciently the Black Bull, still faces Trumpington
Street; the Lion flourishes in Petty Cury; the old Three Tuns, Peas
Hill, is now the Central Temperance Hotel; and the Blue Boar, in whose
archway an unfortunate clergyman, the Reverend Gavin Braithwaite, was
killed in 1814 when seated on the roof of the Ipswich coach, still
faces Trinity Street. The Sun, however, in Trinity Street, where Byron
and his cronies dined and caroused, is no more; and of late years the
Woolpack and the Wrestlers, both very ancient buildings, have been
demolished. Foster's Bank stands on the site of one and the new Post
Office on that of the other. For a while the remains of the galleried,
tumbledown Falcon, stand in a court off Petty Cury; the inn in whose
yard Cambridge students entertained and shocked Queen Elizabeth with a
blasphemous stage travesty of the Mass. In Bridge Street stands the
Hoop, notable in its day, and celebrated by Wordsworth--
"Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught,
While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam;
And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn."
Beyond the Hoop, the quaintly-named Pickerel Inn stands by Magdalen,
or Great Bridge, just as it did in days when the carriers dumped down
their loads here, to be transferred to the passage-boats for Ely and
Kings Lynn. In Benet Street the Eagle, once the Eagle and Child, still
discloses a courtyard curiously galleried, and hard by is the old Bath
Hotel. This list practically exhausts the old coaching inns, but of
queer hostelries of other kinds there are many, with nodding gables
and latticed windows, in every other lane and by-way. Churches, too,
abound. Oldest among these is St. Sepulchre's, one of the four round
churches in England; a dark Norman building that in the blackness of
its interior accurately figures the grimness of the Norman mind.
XXVI
CAMBRIDGE, now a town abounding in and surrounded by noble trees, was
originally a British settlement, placed on that bold spur of high
ground, rising from the surrounding treeless mires, on which in after
years the Romans established their military post of Camboricum, and
where in later ages William the Conqueror built his castle. The great
artificial mound, which, like some ancient sepulchral tumulus, is all
that remains to tell of William's fortress and to mark where Roman and
Briton had originally seized upon this strategic point, crowns this
natural bluff, overlooking the river Cam. Standing on it, with the
whole of Cambridge town and a wide panorama of low-lying surrounding
country disclosed, it is evident that this must have been the place
of places for many miles on either hand where, in those remote days,
the river could be crossed. Everywhere else the wide-spreading swamps
forbade a passage; and, consequently, those who held this position, and
could keep it, could deny the whole country to the passage of a hostile
force from either side. Whether one enemy sought to penetrate from
London to Ely and Norfolk, or whether another would come out of Norfolk
into South Cambridgeshire or Herts, he must first of necessity dispose
of those who held the key of this situation. The Romans, before they
could subdue the masters of this position, experienced, we may well
believe, no little difficulty; and it is probable that the perplexity
of antiquaries, confronted by the existence of a Roman camp or station
here, and of another three miles higher up the Cam at Grantchester, may
be smoothed out by the very reasonable explanation that Grantchester
was the first Roman camp over against the British stronghold at
Cambridge, and that, when the Romans had made themselves masters of
Cambridge, that place remained their military post, while Grantchester
became a civil and trading community and a place of residence.
[Illustration: CAMBRIDGE CASTLE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.]
Both place-names derive from this one river, masquerading now as
the Granta and again as the Cam, but by what name the Romans knew
Grantchester we do not know and never shall.
At Roman Camboricum those ancient roads, the Akeman Street and the Via
Devana, crossed at right angles, meeting here on this very Castle hill:
the Via Devana on its way from Colchester to the town of _Deva_, now
Chester; the Akeman Street going from _Branodunum_, now Brancaster, on
the coast of Norfolk, to _Aquæ Solis_, the Bath of our own day.
Cambridge Castle, built in 1068 by William the Conqueror to hold
Hereward the Saxon and his East Anglian fellow-patriots in check,
has entirely disappeared. It never accumulated any legends of sieges
or surprises, and of military history it had none whatever. It was,
therefore, a castle of the greatest possible success; for, consider,
although the first impulse may be to think little of a fortress that
can tell no warlike story, the very lack of anything of the kind is
the best proof of its strength and fitness. It is not the purpose of
a castle to invite attacks, but by its very menace to overawe and
terrify. Torquilstone Castle and the story of its siege and downfall,
in the pages of _Ivanhoe_, make romantic and exciting reading; but,
inasmuch as it fell, it was a failure. That Cambridge Castle not only
never fell, but was not even menaced, is the best proof of its power.
These great fortresses, with their stone keeps and spreading wards
and baileys, dotted here and there over the land, rang the knell of
English liberties. "New and strong and cruel in their strength--how
the Englishman must have loathed the damp smell of the fresh mortar,
and the sight of the heaps of rubble, and the chippings of the stone,
and the blurring of the lime upon the greensward; and how hopeless he
must have felt when the great gates opened and the wains were drawn
in, heavily laden with the salted beeves and the sacks of corn and
meal furnished by the royal demesnes, the manors which had belonged to
Edward the Confessor, now the spoil of the stranger; and when he looked
into the castle court, thronged by the soldiers in bright mail, and
heard the carpenters working upon the ordnance--every blow and stroke,
even of the hammer or mallet, speaking the language of defiance."
William himself occupied his castle of Cambridge on its completion in
1069, and from it he directed the long and weary military operations
against Hereward across the fens toward the Isle of Ely, only twelve
miles away. From his keep-tower he could see with his own eyes that
Isle, rising from the flat, on the skyline, like some Promised Land,
but two years were to pass before he and his soldiers were to enter
there; admitted even then by treachery.
From the Castle Mound the Cam may be seen, winding away through the
flats into the distant haze. Immediately below are Parker's Piece,
and Midsummer and Stourbridge Commons; this last from time beyond
knowledge the annual scene of Stourbridge Fair. "Sturbitch" Fair,
as the country-folk call it, existed, like the University itself,
before history came to take note of it. When King John reigned it was
already an important mark, and so continued until, at the Dissolution
of the Monasteries, its rights and privileges were transferred to the
Corporation of Cambridge.
Whether the story of its origin be well founded, or merely a
picturesque invention, it cannot be said. It is a story telling how
a Kendal clothier, at date unknown, journeying from Westmoreland to
London, his pack-horses laden with bales of cloth, found the bridge
over the Cam at this point broken down, and, trying to ford the river,
fell in, goods and all. Struggling at last to the opposite bank, and
fishing out his property, he spread his cloth to dry on Stourbridge
Common, where so many of the townsfolk came to see it and to bid that
in the end he sold nearly all his stock, and did much better than if he
had gone on to London. The next year, therefore, he took care--not to
fall into the Cam again--but to make Cambridge his mart. Other trades
then became attracted to the place where he found business so brisk,
and hence (according to the legend) the growth of a fair in its prime
comparable only with that greatest of all fairs--the famous one of
Nijni-Novgorod.
To criticise a legend of this kind would be to take it too seriously,
else, among many things that might be inquired into would be the
appearance at Cambridge of a traveller from Westmoreland bound for
London. He must have missed his way very widely indeed!