contention for rival antiquaries to gnaw at. In face of the clamour
of disputants on this subject, it behoves us to take no side, but
just to report the theories advanced. The most favoured view,
then, is that "Aldreth" enshrines a corruption of St. Etheldreda's
name,--that Etheldreda who was variously known as St. Ethelthryth and
St. Audrey,--and that it was originally none other than St. Audrey's
Hythe, or Landing, on this very stream of Ouse, now much shrunken and
running in a narrow channel, instead of spreading over the country in
foul swamps and unimaginable putrid bogs. "Aldreche"--the old reach
of this Ouse--is another variant put forward; but it does not seem to
occur to any of these disputants that, at anyrate, the termination of
the place-name is identical with that in the names of Meldreth and
Shepreth, where little streams, the mere shadows and wraiths of their
former selves, still exist to hint that it was once necessary to ford
them, and that, whatever the first syllable of Meldreth may mean,
"reth" is perhaps the Celtic "rhyd," a ford, and Shepreth just the
"sheep ford."
But whatever may have been the original form of Aldreth's name, the
village nowadays has nothing to show of any connection with St.
Etheldreda, save the site only of a well dedicated to her, situated
half-way up the steeply rising street. It is a curious street, this
of Aldreth, plunging down from the uplands of the Isle into the peat
and ooze that William so laboriously crossed. Where it descends you
may still see the stones with which he, or others at some later time,
paved the way. For the rest, Aldreth is one long street of rustic
cottages very scattered and much separated by gardens: over all a look
of listlessness, as though this were the end of the known world, and
nothing mattered very much. When a paling from a garden fence falls
into the road, it lies there; when the plaster falls from a cottage
wall, no one repairs the damage; when a window is broken, the hole is
papered or stuffed with rags: economy of effort is studied at Aldreth.
The curious may still trace William's route through the Isle, to Ely
city. It is not a straight course. Geographical conditions forbade it
to be so, and I doubt not, that if the road were to make again, they
would still forbid; for to rule a straight line across the map from
Aldreth to Ely is to plunge into hollows where water still lies, though
actual fens be of the past. His way lay along two sides of a square;
due north for three miles and almost due east for a like distance,
along the track pursued nowadays by the excellent road uphill to where
the mile-long and populous village of Haddenham stands on a crest, and
down again and turning to the right for Witchford, whence, along a
gentle spur, you come presently into Ely.
XXXV
RETURNING to the high road at Cottenham Corner, and passing the
junction of the road from Waterbeach, we come presently, at a point
six and a half miles from Cambridge, to a place marked "Dismal Hall"
on large-scale Ordnance maps. Whatever this may have been in old
days, it is now a small white-brick farmhouse, called by the occupier
"The Brambles," and by the landlord "Brookside." The name perhaps
derived originally from some ruined Roman villa whose walls rose,
roofless and desolate, beside the ancient Akeman Street. It is a name
belonging, in all probability, to the same order as the "Caldecotes"
and "Coldharbours," met frequently beside, or in the neighbourhood
of, Roman ways; places generally conceded to have been ruined houses
belonging to that period. The modern representative of "Dismal Hall"
stands beside a curiously small and oddly-shaped field, itself called
"Dismal"; triangular in form and comprising only two acres.
Half a mile beyond this point, a pretty group of cottages marks where
the way to Denny Abbey lies to the right across a cow-pasture. A
field-gate whose posts are the battered fragments of some Perpendicular
Gothic pillars from that ruined monastery, crowned incongruously with
a pair of eighteenth-century stone urns, clearly identifies the spot.
There has been a religious house of sorts on this spot since eight
hundred years ago, and most of the remains are of the Norman period,
when a settlement of Black Monks from Ely settled here. In succession
to them came the Knights Templars, who made it a preceptory, and when
their Order was suppressed and ceased out of the land, in consequence
of its corruption and viciousness, the nuns of St. Clare were given
a home in these deserted halls. Close upon four hundred years have
gone since they, too, were thrust forth, and it has for centuries past
been a farmhouse. Indeed, if you regard Denny Abbey, as also many
another, in anything else save a conventional light, you will see
that it was really always a farm. What else than a farm was the great
Abbey of Tintern, and what other than farmers those Cistercian monks
who built it and cultivated those lands, the godless, growing fearful
and in expiatory mood, had given them? So also with the Benedictines,
the Templars, and the Clares who succeeded one another here. You may
note the fact in their great barns, and in the fields they reclaimed.
To-day, groups of buildings of uncertain age, as regards their outer
walls, enclose littered rick-yards, but the dwelling-house, for all
the uninteresting look of one side, shows, built into its inner face,
the sturdy piers and arches of one of the aisles; and the otherwise
commonplace hall and staircase of the interior are informed with a
majestic dignity by two columns and a noble arch of the Norman church.
A large and striking barn, approached and entered across a pig-haunted
yard rich in straw and mud, proves, on entering, to be a beautiful
building of the Decorated period, once the refectory.
Leaving Denny Abbey behind, we come to Chittering, a place unknown to
guide-books and chartographers. We need blame neither the one nor the
other for this omission, for Chittering is remarkable for nothing but
its insignificance and lack of anything that makes for interest. It
consists, when you have counted everything in its constituent parts,
of two lonely public-houses, the Traveller's Rest and the Plough and
Horses, a grotesquely unbeautiful Baptist Chapel and a school, five
or six scattered cottages, and one new house, entrenched as it were
in a defensive manner behind a sedgy and duckweedy drain. It is here,
at a right-hand turning, that the exploratory cyclist turns off for
Wicken Fen, the last remaining vestige of the natural Fenland that
once overspread the greater part of the county. In Wicken Fen, a
square mile of peaty bog and quaking morass, where the reeds still
grow tall, and strange aquatic plants flourish, the rarer Fenland
lepidoptera find their last refuge. Dragon-flies, in glittering panoply
of green-and-gold armour and rainbow-hued wings, flash like miniature
lightnings over the decaying vegetation, and the sulphur-coloured,
white-and-scarlet butterflies find a very paradise in the moist and
steamy air. Wicken Fen is jealously preserved in its natural state,
and is a place of pilgrimage, not only for the naturalist, with his
butterfly-net and his collecting-box, but for all who would obtain some
idea of what this country was like in former ages. At the same time
it is a place difficult to find, and the route to it a toilsome one.
The Fens express flatness to the last degree, it is true, but, even
though they be drained, they are not easy to explore. Mountain-ranges
are, indeed, not more weariful than these flats, where you can never
make a straight course when once off the main roads, but are compelled
by dykes and drains to make for any given point by questing hither
and thither as though following the outlines of the squares on a
chessboard. The distance to Wicken Fen, measured from Chittering in
a direct line on the map, is not more than four miles. Actually, the
route is nearly eight.
We have already seen what a Fenland drove is like. To such a complexion
does this treacherous by-way descend in less than a quarter of a mile,
bringing the adventurer into an apparently boundless field of corn.
If the weather has recently been wet, he is brought to a despairing
pause at this point, for the rugged drove here becomes a sea of a
curious kind of black buttery mud, highly tenacious. The pedestrian
is to be pitied in this pass, but the cyclist is in worse case, for
his wheels refuse to revolve, and he finds, with horror, his brake
and his forks clogged with the horrible mess, and his mud-guards
become mud-accumulators instead. To shoulder his machine and carry it
is the only course. If, on the other hand, the weather be dry, with
a furious wind blowing, the mud becomes dust and fills the air with
a very respectable imitation of a Soudan sandstorm. In those happy
climatic conditions when it is neither wet nor too dry, and when the
stormy winds have sunk to sleep, the way to Wicken Fen, though long
and circuitous, loses these terrors. At such times the ditchers may be
seen almost up to their knees in what looks like dry sand, hard at
work clearing out the dykes and drains choked up by this flying dust,
and it becomes of interest to examine the nature of this curious soil.
A handful, gathered at haphazard, shows a kind of black sand, freely
mixed with a fine snuff-coloured mixture of powder and minute fibrous
shreds; pulverised peat from the vanished bogs and morasses that once
stewed and festered where these fields now yield abundant harvests.
This peaty soil it is that gives these fields their fertility, for, as
Sir Humphry Davy once said, "A soil covered with peat is a soil covered
with manure."
It is a curious commentary on the fame of Wicken Fen as an
entomologist's paradise, and on its remoteness, that all the ditchers
and farming-folk assume the stranger who inquires his way to it to be a
butterfly-hunter.
At last, after crossing the railway to Ely, making hazardous passage
over rickety plank-bridges across muddy dykes, and wending an uncertain
way through farmyards inhabited by dogs keenly desirous of tearing
the infrequent stranger limb from limb, the broad river Cam is
approached, at Upware. Upware is just a riverside hamlet, remote from
the world, and only in touch with its doings on those occasions when
boating-parties from Ely or Cambridge come by on summer days.
On the opposite shore, across the reedy Cam, stands a queer building,
partly ferry-house, partly inn, with the whimsical legend, "Five Miles
from Anywhere. No Hurry," painted on its gable. The real sign of
Upware Inn, as it is generally called, is the "Lord Nelson," but this
knowledge is only acquired on particular inquiry, for signboard it has
none.
The roystering old days at Upware are done. They came to an end when
the railway between Cambridge, Ely, and Kings Lynn was opened, and
coals and heavy goods no longer went by barge along the Ouse and
Cam. In that unregenerate epoch, before modern culture had reached
Cambridge, and undergrads had not begun to decorate their rooms with
blue china and to attempt to live up to it, the chief delight of
Cambridge men was to walk or scull down to Upware and have it out with
the bargees. Homeric battles were fought here by the riverside in
those days of beef and beer, and it was not always the University man
who got the worst of it in these sets-to with or without the gloves.
In the last days of this Philistine era the railway navvy came as a
foeman equally well worth the attention of young Cambridge; and thus,
in a final orgie of bloody noses and black eyes, the fame of Upware
culminated. When the navvy had completed his work and departed, the
bargee went also, and peace has reigned ever since along the sluggish
reaches of the Cam. There are, it is true, a few of the barging craft
and mystery still left along this waterway, but, beyond a singular
proficiency in swearing, they have nothing in common with their
forebears, and drink tea and discuss social science.
[Illustration: UPWARE INN.]
In those old robustious days--famous once, but now forgot--flourished
the Republic of Upware, a somewhat blackguardly society composed
chiefly of muscular undergrads. Admission to the ranks of this
precious association was denied to none who could hit hard and drink
deep. In the riverside field that still keeps its name of "Upware
Bustle," the Republic held many of its drunken, uproarious carouses,
presided over by the singular character who called himself, not
President, but "King of Upware." Richard Ramsay Fielder, this pot-house
monarch, "flourished," as histories would say, circa 1860. He was an
M.A. of Cambridge, a man of good family and of high abilities, but
cursed with a gipsy nature, an incurable laziness, and an unquenchable
thirst: the kind of man who is generally, for his sake and their own,
packed off by his family to the Colonies. Fielder perhaps could not
be induced to cross the seas; at anyrate, he enjoyed an allowance
from his family, on the degrading condition that he kept himself at
a distance. He earned the allowance loyally, and found the society
that pleased him most at Upware and in the inns of the surrounding
Fenland villages; so that on leaving the University he continued to
cling to the neighbourhood for many years, becoming a hero to all the
dissolute youngsters at Cambridge. He it was who originally painted
the apt inscription, "Five Miles from Anywhere," on the gable-wall of
this waterside inn, his favourite haunt, where he lounged and smoked
and tippled with the bargees; himself apeing that class in his dress:
coatless, with corduroy breeches and red waistcoat. A contemporary
sketch of him tells of his thin flowing hair of inordinate length, of
his long dirty finger-nails, and of the far from aromatic odour he gave
forth; and describes his boating expeditions. "He used to take about
with him in his boat an enormous brown-ware jug, capable of holding
six gallons or more, which he would at times have filled with punch,
ladling it out profusely for his aquatic friends. This vast pitcher
or 'gotch,' which was called 'His Majesty's pint' ('His Majesty' in
allusion to his self-assumed title), had been made to his own order,
and decorated before kilning with incised ornaments by his own hand.
Amongst these figured prominently his initials 'R. R. F.' and his
crest, actual or assumed, a pheon, or arrow-head." Alluding to his
initials, he would often playfully describe himself as "more R. than
F.," which means (is it necessary to explain?) "more rogue than fool."
Eccentric in every way, he would change his quarters without notice
and without reason, and would remain in bed, smoking and drinking, for
weeks together.
This odd character lingered here for some years after the bargees
had gone, and into the time when even the most rowdy of Cambridge
undergraduates began to find it "bad form" to booze and be hail-fellow
with the village rapscallions of Fenland. Then Fielder himself
"forswore sack and lived cleanly"; or at anyrate deserted his old
haunts. Report tells how he died at last at Folkestone, in comfortable
circumstances and in a quite respectable and conventional manner.
XXXVI
UPWARE INN has lost a great deal of its old-time look. With something
akin to melancholy the sentimental pilgrim sees a corrugated iron roof
replacing the old thatch of reeds, characteristic of Fenland. The great
poplar, too, has had its curious spreading limb amputated: that noble
branch whereon the King of that Republic sat on summer evenings and
held his disreputable Court. But not everything is modernised. The
Cam is not yet bridged. You still are ferried across in an uncouth
flat-bottomed craft, and they even yet burn peat in the domestic grates
at Upware, so that links yet bind the present with the past. Peat is
the traditional fuel of the Fens, largely supplanted nowadays by coal,
but should coal become permanently dear, these Cambridgeshire villages
would, for sake of its cheapness, go back to peat and endure its acrid
smell and dull smouldering humour in place of the brightness of a coal
fire. At Wicken Fen the peat is still forming: perhaps the only place
in England where the process is going on. It is still three miles from
Upware to this relic of the untamed wilderness, past Spinney Abbey, now
a farmhouse with few or no relics of the old foundation to be seen. It
was in this farmstead that Henry Cromwell, one of the Protectors sons,
lived in retirement. He was visited here one September day in 1671 by
Charles the Second, come over from Newmarket for the purpose. What
Charles said to him and what Henry Cromwell replied we do not know,
and imagination has therefore the freer rein. But we spy drama in it,
a "situation" of the most thrilling kind. What would _you_ say to the
man who had murdered--judicially murdered, if you like it--your father?
Charles, however, was a cynic of an easy-going type, and probably
failed to act up to the theatrical requirements of the occasion. At
anyrate, Henry Cromwell was not consigned to the nearest, or any,
dungeon. Nothing at all was done to him, and he died, two years later,
at peace with all men. He lies buried in the little church of Wicken,
and was allowed to rest there.
Wicken Fen is just beyond this abbey farmstead. You turn to the right,
along a green lane and across a field, and there you are, with the
reeds and the sedge growing thick in the stagnant water, water-lilies
opening their buds on the surface, and a lazy hum of insects droning in
the still and sweltering air. The painted lady, the swallow-tail, the
peacock, the scarlet tiger, and many other gaily-hued butterflies float
on silent wings; things crawl and creep in the viscous slime, and on
warm summer days, after rain, the steam rises from the beds of peat and
wild growths as from some natural cookshop. Old windmill pumps here and
there dot the banks of the fen, and in the distance are low hills that
form, as it were, the rim of the basin in which this relic is set.
[Illustration: WICKEN FEN.]
Away in one direction rises the tall majestic tower of Soham Church,
deceiving the stranger into the belief that he is looking at Ely
Cathedral, and overlooking what are now the pastures of Soham Fen; in
the days of King Canute that inland sea--that _mare de Soham_--which
stretched ten miles wide between Mildenhall and Ely. It was across
Soham Mere that Canute came voyaging by Ely, rowed by knights in his
galley, when he heard, while yet a long way off, the sound of melody.
Bidding his knights draw nearer to the Isle, he found the music to
be the monks in the church singing vespers. The story is more than a
legend, and is alluded to in the only surviving stanza of an ancient
song--
"Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut Ching rew therby.
Roweth cnites noer the lant,
And here we thes Muneches saeng."
It is a story that well pictures the reality---the actual isolation--of
the Isle, just as does that other, telling how that same Canute, coming
again to Ely for Christmas, found the waters that encompassed it
frost-bound, but so slightly that crossing the ice was perilous in the
extreme. He was thus of necessity halted on the shores of the frozen
mere, and until they found one Brithmer, a Saxon cheorl of the Fen,
skilled in Fen-lore and able to guide the King and his train across the
shallow places where the ice lay thick and strong, it seemed as though
he and his retinue would be unable to keep the Feast of the Nativity in
Ely. Brithmer was a man of prodigious bulk, nicknamed "Budde," or "the
Fat," and where he led the way in safety men of ordinary weight could
follow without fear. So Canute followed in his sledge, with his Court,
and kept Christmas on the Isle. As for Brithmer, who had performed this
service, he was enlarged from serfdom to be a free man, and loaded with
honours. Indeed, he was probably only known as "the Fat" before this
time, and was doubtless called Brithmer, which means "bright mere,"
after this exploit.
XXXVII
RETURNING to the old coach road from this expedition, and coming to it
again with a thankful heart, we presently come to Stretham Bridge, a
narrow old hunch-backed brick structure spanning the Great Ouse, or Old
West River, and giving entrance to this Isle of Ely, of which already
we have heard so much, and will now hear more. The sketch-map that has
already shown the Conqueror's line of march indicates also the size
and shape of the Isle: the physical Isle. For there are really two,
the physical and the political. The last-named comprises the whole of
the northern part of Cambridgeshire, from this point along the Ouse
to Upware, and thence, following the Cambridgeshire border, round to
Littleport and Tydd St. Giles in the north, by the neighbourhood of
Crowland and Peterborough, and so down to the Ouse again at Earith,
Aldreth, and Stretham Bridge. It is still a political division, and has
its own government, under the style of the County Council of the Isle
of Ely. The real geographical Isle--the one sketched in the map--is
much smaller; only one-third the size of the other; measuring in its
greatest length and breadth but some twelve and eight miles, and
bounded by the Great Ouse from Earith to Upware, by Cam and Little
Ouse to Littleport, and thence by the Old Croft River to the New
Bedford River, returning along that cut to Earith.
As you approach Stretham Bridge along this old causeway the Isle is
plain to see in front, its gentle hills glimpsed between the fringe of
willows and poplars that now begin to line the way. No one has bettered
the description Carlyle wrote of the Fen-country seen from this
causeway that was once the Akeman Street; and no one _can_ better it.
"It has a clammy look," he says, clayey and boggy; the produce of it,
whether bushes and trees or grass and crops, gives you the notion of
something lazy, dropsical, gross. From the "circumfluent mud," willows,
"Nature's signals of distress," spring up by every still slime-covered
drain: willows generally polled and, with that process long continued,
now presenting a very odd and weird appearance. The polled crown of an
ancient willow bears a singularly close resemblance to a knuckly fist,
and these, like so many gnarled giant arms of bogged and smothered
Goliaths thrust upwards in despair, with clenched and imprecatory
hands, give this road the likeness of a highway into fairyland whose
ogres, under the spell of some Prince Charming, have been done to death
in their own sloughs. Pollards, anathema to Cobbett, are in plenty in
these lowlands, but it must not be thought that because of them, or
even because Carlyle's description of the country is so apt, it is
anything but beautiful. Only, to see its beauties and appreciate them,
it is necessary here, more than elsewhere, to have fine weather.
[Illustration: A FENLAND ROAD: THE AKEMAN STREET NEAR STRETHAM
BRIDGE.]
Stretham Bridge, that makes so great a business of crossing the Ouse,
seems an instance of much ado about nothing, for that river, "Great
Ouse" though it be named, is very much to seek in summer, trickling
away as it does between tussocks of rough grass. The Great Ouse is not
of the bigness it once boasted, in days before the Old and New Bedford
Rivers were cut, two hundred and sixty years ago, to carry its sluggish
waters away by a direct route to the sea, and the fair-weather pilgrim
marvels at the bridge and at the great banks he sees stretching away
along its course to protect the surrounding lands from being flooded.
That they are needed is evident enough from the care taken to repair
them, and from a sight of the men digging hard by in the greasy gault
to obtain the repairing materials. These are the "gaulters" and the
"bankers" of Fenland life. It was one of these who, as a witness in
some cause at the Cambridge Assizes, appearing in his working clothes,
was asked his occupation. "I am a banker, my Lord," he replied. "We
cannot have any absurdity," said Baron Alderson testily; to which
the man answered as before, "I am a banker"; and things were at
cross-purposes until the meaning of the term was explained to the Court.
[Illustration: HODDEN SPADE AND BECKET.]