but it is the merest shadow of its former self. The Horse Fair, on the
25th September, is practically all that remains of serious business.
In old times its annual opening was attended with much ceremony. In
those days, before the computation of time was altered, and Old Style
became changed for New, the dates of opening and closing were 7th and
29th September. On Saint Bartholomew's Day the Mayor and Corporation
rode out from the town to set out the ground, then cultivated. By that
day all crops had to be cleared, or the stall-holders, ready to set
up their stalls and booths, were at liberty to trample them down. On
the other hand, they were under obligation to remove everything by St.
Michael's Day, or the ploughmen, ready by this time to break ground for
ploughing, had the right to carry off any remaining goods. Stourbridge
Fair was then a town of booths. In the centre was the Duddery, the
street where the mercers, drapers and clothiers sold their wares; and
running in different directions were Ironmongers' Row, Cooks' Row,
Garlick Row, Booksellers' Row, and many another busy street. In those
times the three weeks' turnover of the various trades was calculated
at not less than a quarter of a million sterling. The railways that
destroyed the position of Lynn, Ely, and Cambridge as distributing
places along the Cam and Ouse, have wrought havoc with this old-time
Fair.
XXVII
THROUGH Chesterton, overlooked by the Castle and deriving its name from
it, the road leaves Cambridge for Ely, passing through the village
of Milton, where the Fenland begins, or what is more by usage than
true description so-called now the Fens are drained and the land once
sodden with water and covered with beds of dense reeds and rushes made
to bear corn and to afford rich pasture for cattle. This is the true
district of the "Cambridgeshire Camels," as the folk of the shire are
proverbially called. The term, a very old one, doubtless took its
origin in the methods of traversing the Fens formerly adopted by the
rustic folk. They used stilts, or "stetches," as they preferred to call
them, and no doubt afforded an amusing spectacle to strangers, as they
straddled high above the reeds and stalked from one grassy tussock to
another in the quaking bogs.
There is a choice of routes at Milton, the road running in a loop for
two miles. The left-hand branch, through Landbeach, selected by the
Post Office as the route of its telegraph-poles, might on that account
be considered the main road, but the right-hand route has decidedly the
better surface. Midway of this course, where the Slap Up Inn stands, is
the lane leading to Waterbeach, a scattered village near the Cam, much
troubled by the floods from that stream in days gone by.
Something of what Waterbeach was like in the eighteenth century may
be gathered from the correspondence of the Rev. William Cole, curate
there from 1767 to 1770. Twenty guineas a year was the modest sum he
received, but that, fortunately for him, was not the full measure of
his resources, for he possessed an estate in the neighbourhood. The
value of his land could not have been great, and may be guessed from
his letters. Writing in 1769, he says: "A great part of my estate has
been drowned these two years: all this part of the country is now
covered with water and the poor people of this parish utterly ruined."
And again in 1770: "This is the third time within six years that my
estate has been drowned, and now worse than ever." Shortly after
writing that letter he removed. "Not being a water-rat," he says, "I
left Waterbeach," and went to the higher and drier village of Milton,
two miles away.
Waterbeach long retained its old-world manners and customs. May Day was
its greatest holiday, and was ushered in with elaborate preparations.
The young women collected materials for a garland, consisting of
ribbons, flowers, and silver spoons, with a silver tankard to suspend
in the centre; while the young men, early in the morning, or late at
night, went forth into the fields to collect emblems of their esteem
or disapproval of the young women aforesaid. "Then," says the old
historian of these things, "woe betide the girl of loose habits, the
slattern and the scold; for while the young woman who had been foremost
in the dance, or whose amiable manners entitled her to esteem, had a
large branch or tree of whitethorn planted by her cottage door, the
girl of loose manners had a blackthorn at hers." The slattern's emblem
was an elder tree, and the scold's a bunch of nettles tied to the latch
of the door.
After having thus (under cover of darkness, be it said) left their
testimonials to the qualities or defects of the village beauties, the
young men, just before the rising of the sun, went for the garland
and suspended it in the centre of the street by a rope tied to
opposite chimneys. This done, sunrise was ushered in by ringing the
village bells. Domestic affairs were attended to until after midday,
and then the village gave itself up to merrymaking. Dancing on the
village green, sports of every kind, and kiss-in-the-ring were for
the virtuous and the industrious; while the recipients of the elders,
the blackthorns, and the nettles sat in the cold shade of neglect,
wished they had never been born, and made up their minds to be more
objectionable than ever. Such was Waterbeach about 1820.
Some thirty years later the village acquired an enduring title to fame
as the first charge given to that bright genius among homely preachers,
Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It was in 1851, while yet only in his
seventeenth year, that Spurgeon was made pastor of the Baptist Chapel
here. Already his native eloquence had made him famed in Colchester,
where, two years before, he had first spoken in public. The old
thatched chapel where the youthful preacher ministered, on a stipend
of twenty pounds a year, almost identical with that enjoyed by the
Reverend William Cole, curate in the parish church eighty years before,
has long since disappeared, destroyed by fire in 1861; and on its site
stands a large and very ugly "Spurgeon Memorial Chapel" in yellow
brick with red facings. Scarce two years and a half passed before the
fame of Spurgeon's eloquence spread to London, and he was offered, and
accepted, the pastorate of New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, there to
fill that conventicle to overflowing, and presently draw all London to
Exeter Hall. Even at this early stage of his wonderful career there
were those who dilated upon the marvel of "this heretical Calvinist
and Baptist" drawing a congregation of ten thousand souls while St.
Paul's and Westminster Abbey resounded with the echoing footsteps of
infrequent worshippers; but Spurgeon preached shortly afterwards to a
congregation numbering twenty-four thousand, and maintained his hold
until the day of his death, nearly forty years after. Where shall that
curate, vicar, rector, dean, bishop, or archbishop of the Church of
England be found who can command such numbers?
That his memory is held in great reverence at Waterbeach need scarce
be said. There are still those who tell how the "boy-preacher," when
announced to hold a night service in some remote village, not only
braved the worst that storms and floods could do, but how, finding the
chapel empty and the expected congregation snugly housed at home, out
of the howling wind and drenching rain, he explored the place with a
borrowed stable-lantern in his hand, and secured a congregation by dint
of house-to-house visits!
XXVIII
THE left-hand loop, through Landbeach, if an inferior road, has more
wayside interest. Landbeach is in Domesday Book called "Utbech," that
is to say Outbeach, or Beach out (of the water). "Beach" in this and
other Fenland instances means "bank"; Waterbeach being thus "water
bank." Wisbeach, away up in the extreme north of the county, is a
more obscure name, but on inquiry is found to mean Ousebank, that
town standing on the Ouse in days before the course of that river
was changed. Landbeach Church stands by the wayside, and has its
interest for the ecclesiologist, as conceivably also for those curious
people interested in the stale and futile controversy as to who wrote
Shakespeare's plays; for within the building lies the Reverend William
Rawley, sometime chaplain to Bacon, and not only so, but the author
of a life of him and the publisher of his varied acknowledged works.
He, if anyone, would have known it if Bacon had been that self-effacing
playwright, so we must needs think it a pity there is so little in
spiritualism save idiotic manifestations of horseplay and showers of
rappings in the dark; otherwise the obvious thing would be to summon
Rawley's shade and discreetly pump it.
[Illustration: LANDBEACH.]
Beyond Landbeach, close by the fifty-sixth milestone from London,
the modern road falls into the Roman Akeman Street, running from
Brancaster (the Roman "Branodunum") on the Norfolk coast, through Ely,
to Cambridge, to Dunstable, and eventually, after many leagues, to
Bath. Those who will may attempt the tracing of it back between this
point and Cambridge, a difficult enough matter, for it has mostly
sunk into the spongy ground, but here, where it exists for a length
of five miles, plain to see, it is still a causeway raised in places
considerably above the levels, and occasionally showing stretches
of imposing appearance. It remains thus a striking monument to the
surveying and engineering skill of that great people, confronted
here in far-off times with a wilderness of reeking bogs. The object
in view--to reach the coast in as straight a line as possible--meant
wrestling with the difficulties of road-making in the mixed and
unstable elements of mud and water, but they faced the problem and
worked it out with such completeness that a solid way arose that only
fell into decay when the civilisation they had planted here, on the rim
and uttermost verge of the known world, was blotted out. Onwards as far
as Lynn a succession of fens stretched for sixty-five miles, but so
judiciously did the Romans choose their route that only some ten miles
of roadway were actually constructed in the ooze. It picked a careful
itinerary, advancing from isle to isle amid the swamps, and, for all
its picking and choosing of a way, went fairly direct. It was here that
it took the first plunge into the sloughs and made direct, as a raised
bank, through them for the Ouse, where Stretham Bridge now marks the
entrance to the Isle of Ely. How that river, then one of great size
and volume, was crossed we do not know. Beyond it, after some three
miles of floundering through the slime, the causeway came to firm
ground again where the village of Stretham (its very name suggestive
of solid roadway) stands on a rise that was once an island. Arrived
at that point, the road took its way for ten miles through the solid
foothold of the Isle of Ely, leaving it at Littleport and coming, after
struggling through six miles of fen, to the Isle of Southery. Crossing
that islet in little more than a mile, it dipped into fens again at
the point now known as Modney Bridge, whence it made for the eyot of
Hilgay. Only one difficulty then remained: to cross the channel of the
Wissey River into Fordham. Thenceforward the way was plain.
We have already made many passing references to the Fens, and now the
district covered in old times by them is reached, it is necessary, in
order to make this odd country thoroughly understood, to explain them.
What are the Fens like? The Fens, expectant reader, are gone, like the
age of miracles, like the dodo, the pterodactyl, the iguanodon, and the
fancy zoological creatures of remote antiquity. Ages uncountable have
been endeavouring to abolish the Fens. When the Romans came, they found
the native tribes engaged upon the task, and carried it on themselves,
in succession. Since then every age has been at it, and at length, some
seventy or eighty years ago, when steam-pumps were brought to aid the
old draining machinery, the thing was done. There is only one little
specimen of natural fen now left, and that is preserved as a curiosity.
But although the actual morasses are gone, the flat drained fields
of Fenland are here, and we shall presently see in these pages that
although the sloughs are in existence no longer, it is no light thing
in these districts to venture far from the main roads.
No one has more eloquently or more truly described the present
appearance of the Fen country than Cobbett. "The whole country," he
says, "is as level as the table on which I am now writing. The horizon
like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come up, just
as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same way as
at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep
lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye.
Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a pin's
head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground."
The Fenland has, in fact, the wild beauty that comes of boundless
expanse. Only the range of human vision limits the view. Above is the
summer sky, blue and vast and empty to the sight, but filled to the ear
with the song of the soaring skylark, trilling as he mounts higher and
higher; the sound of his song diminishing as he rises, until it becomes
like the "still small voice of Conscience," and at last fades out of
hearing, like the whisper of that conscience overwrought and stricken
dumb.
These levels have a peculiar beauty at sunset, and Cambridgeshire
sunsets are as famous in their way as Cambridge sausages. They (the
sunsets, not the sausages) have an unearthly glory that only a Turner
in his most inspired moments could so much as hint at. The vastness of
the Fenland sky and the humid Fenland atmosphere conspire to give these
effects.
The Fenland is a land of romance for those who know its history and
have the wit to assimilate its story from the days of fantastic legend
to these of clear-cut matter-of-fact. If you have no reading, or even
if you have that reading and do not bring to it the aid of imagination,
the Fens are apt to spell dulness. If so, the dulness is in yourself.
Leave these interminable levels, and in the name of God go elsewhere,
for the flatness of the Great Level added to the flatness of your own
mind will in combination produce a horrible monotony. On the other
hand, if some good fairy at your cradle gave you the gift of seeing
with a vision not merely physical, why, then, the Fenland is fairyland;
for though to the optic nerve there is but a level stretching to the
uttermost horizon, criss-crossed with dykes and lodes and leams of a
severe straightness, there is visible to the mind's eye, Horatio, an
ancient order of things infinitely strange and uncanny. Antiquaries
have written much of the Fens, but they do not commonly present a very
convincing picture of them. They tell of Iceni, of Romans, fierce
Norsemen marauders, Saxons, Danes, and the conquering Normans, but
they cannot, or do not, breathe the breath of life into those ancient
peoples, and make them live and love and hate, fight and vanquish or
be vanquished. The geologists, too, can speculate learnedly upon the
origin of the Fens, and can prove, to their own satisfaction at least,
that this low-lying, once flooded country was produced by some natural
convulsion that suddenly lowered it to the level of the sea; but no
one has with any approach to intimacy with the subject taken us back
to the uncountable æons when the protoplasm first began to move in the
steaming slime, and so conducted us by easy stages through the crucial
and hazardous period when the jelly-fish was acquiring the rudiments
of a backbone (if that was the order of the progress) to the exciting
era when the crocodile played the very devil with aboriginal man, and
the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus wallowed in the mud. The Iceni are
very modern, compared with these very ancient inhabitants, and have
done what those inarticulate protoplasms, neolithic men and others,
could not do; that is, they gave their names to many places in these
East Anglian shires, and a title that still survives to a great road.
Look on any map of East Anglia and the surrounding counties and you
shall see many place-names beginning with "Ick": Ickborough, Ickworth,
Ickleton, Icklington, Ickleford, and Ickwell.
These are the surviving names of Icenian settlements. There is a
"Hickling" on the Broads, in Norfolk, which ought by rights to be
"Ickling"; but the world has ever been at odds on the subject of
aspirate or no aspirate, certainly since the classic days of the
Greeks and the Romans. Does not Catullus speak of a certain Arrius who
horrified the Romans by talking of the "Hionian Sea"? and is not Tom
Hood's "Ben Battle" familiar? "Don't let 'em put 'Hicks jacet' there,"
he said, "for that is not my name."
When the Romans came and found the Iceni here, the last stone-age
man and the ultimate crocodile (the former inside the latter) had
for ages past been buried in the peat of the Fens, resolving into a
fossil state. The Iceni probably, the purposeful Romans certainly,
endeavoured to drain the Fens, or at least to prevent their being
worse flooded by the sea; and the Roman embankment between Wisbeach
and King's Lynn, built to keep out the furious wind-driven rollers of
the Wash, gave a name to the villages of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpole
(once Wall-pool). When the Romano-British civilisation decayed, the
defences against the sea decayed with it, and the level lay worse
flooded than before. Far and wide, from Lynn, on the seacoast in the
north, to Fen Ditton, in the south, almost at the gates of Cambridge;
from Mildenhall in the east, to St. Ives and Peterborough in the west,
a vast expanse of still and shallow water covered an area of, roughly,
seventy miles in length and thirty in breadth: about 2100 square miles.
Out of this dismal swamp rose many islands, formed of knobs of the
stiff clay or gault that had not been washed away with the surrounding
soil. It was on these isles that prehistoric man lived, and where his
wretched wattle-huts were built beside the water. He had his dug-out
canoe and his little landing-stage, and sometimes, when his islet was
very diminutive and subject to floods, he built his dwelling on stakes
driven into the mud. In peaceful and plenteous times he sat on his
staging overhanging the water, and tore and gnawed at the birds and
animals that had fallen to his arrow or his spear. Primitive man was
essentially selfish. He first satisfied his own hunger and then tossed
the remainder to his squaw and the brats, and when they had picked the
bones clean, and saved those that might be useful for fashioning into
arrow-heads, they threw the remains into the water, whence they sent up
in the fulness of time an evil smell which did not trouble him and his
in the least, primitive as they were in every objectionable sense of
the word.
Relics of him and his domestic odds and ends are often found, ten feet
or so beneath the present surface of the land. His canoe is struck by
the spade of the gaulter, his primitive weapons unearthed, his dustbin
and refuse-heap turned over and examined by curious antiquaries and
naturalists, who can tell you exactly what his _menu_ was. Sometimes
they find primitive man himself, lying among the ruins of his dwelling,
overwhelmed in the long ago by some cataclysm of nature, or perhaps
killed by a neighbouring primitive.
To these isles in after centuries, when the Romans had gone and the
Saxons had settled down and become Christians, came hermits and monks
like Guthlac, who reared upon them abbeys and churches, and began in
their several ways to cultivate the land and to dig dykes and start
draining operations. For the early clergy earned their living, and were
not merely the parasites they have since become. These islands, now
that the Fens are drained, are just hillocks in the great plain. They
are still the only villages in the district, and on those occasions
when an embankment breaks and the Fens are flooded, they become the
islands they were a thousand years ago. The very names of these
hillocks and villages are fen-eloquent, ending as they do with "ey" and
"ea," corruptions of the Anglo-Saxon words "ig," an island, and "ea,"
a river. Ely, the largest of them, is said by Bede to have obtained
its name from the abundance of eels, and thus to be the "Eel Island."
There are others who derive it from "helig," a willow, and certainly
both eels and willows were abundant here; but the name, in an ancient
elision of that awkward letter "h," is more likely to come from another
"helig," meaning holy, and Ely to really be the "holy island."
Other islands, most of them now with villages of the same name, were
Coveney, Hilgay, Southery, Horningsea, Swavesey, Welney, Stuntney, and
Thorney. There was, too, an Anglesey, the Isle of the Angles, a Saxon
settlement, near Horningsea. A farm built over the site of Anglesey
Abbey now stands there.
But many Fenland place-names are even more eloquent. There are Frog's
Abbey, Alderford, Littleport, Dry Drayton and Fenny Drayton, Landbeach
and Waterbeach. Littleport, really at one time a port to which the
ships of other ages came, is a port no longer; Fenny Drayton is now as
dry as its fellow-village; and Landbeach and Waterbeach are, as we have
already seen, not so greatly the opposites of one another as they were.
XXIX
A GREAT part of the Fens seems to have been drained and cultivated
at so early a time as the reigns of Stephen and Henry the Second,
for William of Malmesbury describes this as then "the paradise of
England," with luxuriant crops and flourishing gardens; but this
picture of prosperity was suddenly blotted out by the great gale that
arose on the morrow of St. Martin 1236, and continued for eight days
and nights. The sea surged over the embankments and flowed inwards
past Wisbeach, and the rivers, instead of flowing away, were forced
back and so drowned the levels. Some attempts to reclaim the land were
made, but a similar disaster happened seventeen years later, and the
fen-folk seem to have given up all efforts at keeping out the waters,
for in 1505 we find the district described as "one of the most brute
and beastly of the whole realm; a land of marshy ague and unwholesome
swamps." But already the idea of reclamation was in the air, for Bishop
Morton, in the time of Henry the Seventh,--a most worshipful Bishop
of Ely, Lord Chancellor too, churchman, statesman, and engineer,--had
a notion for making the stagnant Nene to flow forth into the sea,
instead of doubling upon itself and seething in unimaginable bogs as
it had done for hundreds of years past. He cut the drain that runs
from Stanground, away up in the north near Peterborough, to Wisbeach,
still known as Morton's Leam, and thus began a new era. But though
he benefited the land to the north-west of Ely, the way between his
Cathedral city and Cambridge was not affected, and remained in his
time as bad as it had been for centuries; and he, like many a Bishop
before him and others to come after, commonly journeyed between Ely and
Cambridge by boat. Our road, indeed, did not witness the full activity
of the good Bishop and his successors. Their doings only attained to
great proportions in the so-called Great Level of the Fens, the Bedford
Level, as it is alternatively called, that stretches over a district
beginning eight miles away and continuing for sixteen or twenty miles,
by Thorney, Crowland, and Peterborough. This map, from Dugdale's work,
showing the Fens as they lay drowned, and the islands in them, will
give the best notion of this curious district. You will perceive how
like an inland sea was this waste of mud and water, not full fathom
five, it is true, but less readily navigable than the sea itself.
Here you see the road from Cambridge to Ely and on to Downham Market
pictured, with no great accuracy, you may be sworn, and doubtless with
as much margin of error as it is customary to allow in the somewhat
speculative charts of Arctic continents and regions of similarly
difficult access. In this map, then, it will be perceived how remote
the Bedford Level lies from our route. Why "Bedford Level," which, in
point of fact, is in Cambridgeshire and not in Bedfordshire at all? For
this reason: that these are lands belonging to the Earls (now Dukes)
of Bedford. To the Russells were given the lands belonging to Thorney
Abbey, but their appetite for what should have been public property was
only whetted by this gift, and when in the reign of Charles the First
proposals were made to drain and reclaim 310,000 acres of surrounding
country, they, in the person of Francis, the then Earl, obtained of
this vast tract no less than 95,000 acres. It is true that this grant
was made conditional upon the Earl taking part in the drainage of the
land, and that it was a costly affair in which the smaller adventurers
were ruined and the Earl's own resources strained; but in the result a
princely heritage fell to the Bedfords.
[Illustration: THE FENS.
[_After Dugdale._]]