the Fens in general were long known as "Fen-slodgers," a title that,
if indeed unlovely, is at least as expressive of mudlarking as it is
possible for a word to be. You picture a slodger as a half-amphibious
creature, something between a water-sprite and a sewer-man, muddy
from head to foot and pulling his feet out of the ooze as he goes
with resounding "plops," like the noise made in drawing the cork
of a bottle. But if the Fenman did not quite fill all the details
thus conjured up, he was, and is still, a watery kind of creature;
half-farmer, half-fisherman and wild-fowler. He is sometimes a
"gozard," that is to say, a goose-ward or goose-keeper. This occupation
does not seem to have given an abiding surname, as many others have
done, and you may search in many directories for it without avail,
although the Haywards, the Cartwrights, and the Cowards are prominent
enough. The Fenman digs his land with a becket or a hodden spade. The
design of the first-named goes back to Roman times, and is seen figured
on columns and triumphal arches in the Imperial City, just as it is
fashioned to-day. It is this form of spade that is alluded to in such
wayside tavern-signs as the Plough and Becket, apt to be puzzling to
the uninitiated. When the Fenland rustic, weary of the daily routine,
wants a little sport or seeks to grace his table with fish, he goes
"dagging for eels" along the rivers and the drains, "leams," "lodes,"
or "eaus" (which he calls "ees") with a "gleve," which, translated
into ordinary English, means an eel-spear, shaped very like Neptune's
trident.
[Illustration: STRETHAM BRIDGE.]
XXXVIII
CROSSING Stretham Bridge, with Stretham Common on the right and
Stretham village two miles ahead, the Akeman Street appears to be
soon lost, for the way is crooked, and much more like a mediæval than
a classic road. Indeed, the entrance to Stretham is by two striking
right-angle turns and a curve past a low-lying tract called Beggars'
Bush Field.
"Beggars' Bush" is so frequent a name in rural England[2] that it
arouses curiosity. Sometimes these spots bear the unbeautiful name
of "Lousy Bush," as an apt alternative. They were probably the
lurking-places of mediæval tramps. The tramp we have always had with
us. He, his uncleanliness and his dislike of work are by no means new
features. Only, with the increase of population, there is naturally
a proportional increase in the born-tired and the professional
unemployed. That is all. So long ago as Queen Elizabeth's time
legislation was found necessary to suppress the tramp. The Elizabethan
statute did not call him by that name: they were not clever enough in
those times to invent so descriptive a term, and merely called him a
"sturdy rogue and vagrant." Of course he was not suppressed by the
hardness, the whips and scorpions, of the Elizabethans, but endured
them and the branded "R" and "V," and sporting them as his trade-marks,
went tramping to the end of his earthly pilgrimage. These are the
"strangers" whom you will find mentioned in the burial registers of
many a wayside parish church; the "strangers" found dead on the road,
or under the "Beggars' Bushes," and buried by the parish.
[2] There was once a Beggars' Bush on the Old North Road, fifty-five
miles from London and two and a half from Huntingdon. King James the
First seems to have heard of it, when on his progress to London from
Scotland, for he said, on the road, in a metaphorical sense to Bacon,
who had entertained him with a lavish and ruinous hospitality, "Sir
Francis, you will soon come to Beggars' Bush, and I may e'en go along
with you too, if we be both so bountiful."
It was the indiscriminate almsgiving of the religious houses--the
Abbeys and the Priories of old--that fostered this race of vagrom men
and women, the ancestors of the tramps of to-day. Like the Salvation
Army in our times,--either better or worse, whichever way you regard
it,--they fed, and sometimes sheltered, the outcast and the hungry.
Only the hungry are not fed for nothing, nor without payment sheltered
by the Salvationists. They purchase food and lodging off the Army for a
trifle in coin or by a job of work: the monks exacted nothing in return
for the dole or the straw pallet that any hungry wretch was welcome to.
Thus, throughout the land a great army of the lazy, the unfortunate,
and the afflicted were in mediæval times continually tramping from one
Abbey to another. Sometimes they stole, oftener they begged, and they
found the many pilgrims who were always making pilgrimage from one
shrine to another handy to prey upon. Ill fared the straggler from the
pilgrim train that wound its length along the ancient ways; for there
were those among the vagrom gang who would not scruple to rob or murder
him, and that is one among many reasons why pilgrimage was made in
company.
Stretham village, it is scarce necessary in these parts to say, is set
on a hill, or what in the Fens is by courtesy so-called. No village
here has any other site than some prehistoric knob of clay that by
strange chance raised itself above the ooze. The site of Stretham,
being in the Isle of Ely, was an isle within an isle. Still one goes up
to and down from it. Still you see ancient houses there with flights of
steps up to the front doors, so hard put to it were the old inhabitants
to keep out of the way of the water; and even yet, when you are come
to the levels again, the houses cease and no more are seen until the
next rise is reached, insignificant enough to the eye, but to the mind
stored with the old lore of the Fens significant of much. Stretham is a
large village. It does not run to length, as do places in other parts
of the country situated, like it, on a great road. _They_ commonly
consist of one long street: Stretham, built on the crown of a hill, has
odd turns and twists, and streets unexpectedly opening on either hand
as the explorer advances, and is, so to speak, built round and round
itself. In its midst, where the road broadens into as wide a space as a
village squeezed on to the crown of an island hilltop could anciently
afford, stands a market cross.
You may seek far and wide for information about this cross, but you
will not find. All we know is that, by its look, it belongs to the
fifteenth century, and we may shrewdly suspect that the nondescript
plinth it stands upon replaces a broad approach of steps. When the
steps were taken away is a matter as unknown as the history of the
cross itself; but if we do not know the when, we at least, in the
light of Stretham's circumstances, know the why. The street was
inconveniently narrowed by them.
[Illustration: STRETHAM.]
The fine church stands to the left of the road by the cross, and
is adjoined by an ancient vicarage. At the top of the main street,
where the village ends, the traveller obtains his first glimpse of
Ely Cathedral, four miles away. It must have been here, or close
by, that Jack Goodwin, guard on the Lynn "Rover," about 1831, met
Calcraft the hangman, for he tells how the executioner got up as an
outside passenger "about four miles on the London side of Ely," to
which city he had been paying a professional visit, to turn off an
unhappy agricultural labourer sentenced to death for incendiarism, then
a capital offence. Calcraft had been at considerable pains to avoid
recognition, and had appeared in the procession to the scaffold on Ely
Common as one of the Sheriff's javelin-men. Probably he feared to be
the object of popular execration.
When he mounted the coach, he was dressed like a Cambridgeshire farmer,
and thought himself quite unknown. Goodwin took charge of his baggage,
comprising a blue bag, half a dozen red cabbages, _and a piece of
rope_--the identical rope that had put an end to the unhappy wretch of
the day before. He then offered him a cigar (guards were fine fellows
in their way) and addressed Calcraft by name.
The hangman replied that he was mistaken. "No, no," said Goodwin, "I am
not; I saw you perform on three criminals at the Old Bailey a few weeks
ago."
That, of course, was conclusive, and they chatted more or less
pleasantly; although, to be sure, the conversation chiefly turned on
Mr. Calcraft's professional experiences. He told Goodwin, when he left,
that "if ever he had the pleasure of doing the job for him, he would
soap the rope to make it as comfortable as possible."
XXXIX
THERE is little or nothing to say of the way into Ely, and only
the little village of Thetford, and that to one side of the road,
intervenes. Nothing distracts the attention from the giant bulk of the
Cathedral.
How shall we come into Ely? As archæologists, as pilgrims spiritually
inclined and chanting a _sursum corda_ as we go, or shall we be
gross and earthly, scenting lamb and green peas, spring duckling and
asparagus from afar, for all the world like our hearty grandfathers
of the coaching age, to whom the great white-faced Lamb Inn, that is
still the principal hostelry of this city, appealed with much more
force than that great grey religious pile? We will to the Lamb, which
is not a difficult house to find, and in fact presents itself squarely
and boldly as you enter. "Come," it seems to say, "you are expected.
The cloth is laid, you shall dine royally on Ely delicacies. This is
in no traditional way the capital of the Fens. Our ducklings are the
tenderest, our asparagus the most succulent, there never were such
eels as those of Ouse; and you shall conclude with the cream-cheese of
Cottenham." Is an invitation so alluring to be despised?
It is strange to read how Thomas Cross in his _Autobiography of a
Stage Coachman_ devotes pages to an elaborate depreciation of the Lamb
in coaching times. From a "slip of a bar," with a netful of mouldy
lemons hanging from the ceiling, to the catering and the appointments
of the hostelry, he finds nothing good. But who shall say he was not
justified? Lounging one day in this apology for a bar, there entered
one who was a stranger to him, who asked the landlady what he could
have for dinner. "Spitchcocked eels and mutton chops," replied the
hostess, naming what were then, and are still, the staple commodities.
The stranger was indignant. Turning to Cross, he said, "I have used
this house for five-and-twenty years and never had any other answer."
Presently they both sat down to this canonical dinner in a
sparsely-furnished room. The stranger cleaned his knife and fork
(brought into the room in a dirty condition) by thrusting them through
the soiled and ragged tablecloth. The sherry was fiery, if the port was
good; and for gooseberry tart they had a something in a shallow dish,
with twenty bottled gooseberries under the crust. The good cheer of the
Lamb was then, it seems quite evident, a matter of conventional belief
rather than of actual existence.
It has been already said that nothing distracts the attention of
the traveller on approaching the city. Ely, indeed, is nearly all
Cathedral, and very little of that which is not can claim any interest.
It is true that six thousand five hundred people live in Ely, but the
figures are surprising. Where do these thousands hide themselves? The
streets are not so many, and even at that are all emptiness, slumber,
and yawns. The shopkeepers (who surely keep shop for fun) come to
their doors and yawn, and regard the stray customer with severity;
the Divinity students yawn, and the Dean and the Cathedral staff yawn
horribly at the service they have gone through so many times and know
by heart. The only place where they don't yawn is the railway station,
down below by the Ouse, by whose banks you get quite the finest near
view of the Cathedral. Ely, in short, lives chiefly by and on the
Cathedral. If there had never been a cathedral here, it would have been
a village the size of Stretham. Perhaps to that size it will even yet
decline.
"Ely," wrote Cobbett eighty years ago, "is what one may call a
miserable little town; very prettily situated, but poor and mean.
Everything seems to be on the decline, as, indeed, is the case
everywhere where the clergy are masters." True enough, enterprise
and industry are deadened in all such places; but this bull-headed
old prevaricator, in proceeding to account for the decay, furiously
assaults the Protestant religion, and pretends to find it responsible.
It is true that the cleric is everywhere a brake on the wheels of
progress, but what religion plunges its adherents in so abject a
condition of superstitious dependence as the Roman Catholic creed?
Cobbett on Ely is, in short, a monument of blundering clap-trap.
"Arrived at Ely," he says, "I first walked round the beautiful
cathedral, that honour to our Catholic forefathers and that standing
disgrace to our Protestant selves. It is impossible to look at that
magnificent pile without feeling that we are a fallen race of men. You
have only to open your eyes to be convinced that England must have been
a far greater and more wealthy country in those days than it is in
these days. The hundreds of thousands of loads of stone of which this
cathedral and the monasteries in the neighbourhood were built must all
have been brought by sea from distant parts of the kingdom.[3] These
foundations were laid more than a thousand years ago; and yet there
are vagabonds who have the impudence to say that it is the Protestant
religion that has made England a great country."
[3] The stone really came from Barnack, in Northamptonshire,
thirty-five miles distant.
Here we have Cobbett, who ought to have known better, and _did_
actually know, repeating the shambling fallacy that the architectural
art of the Middle Ages was so artistic because it was inspired
by religion, and that its artistry decayed by consequence of the
Reformation. Such an argument loses sight of the circumstance that
edifices dedicated to religious use were not the only large or
beautiful buildings erected in those ages, and that those who wrought
upon secular castle or manor-house wrought as well and as truly as
those who reared the soaring minster or noble abbey. And whence came
the means wherewith to build cathedrals like this of Ely? Did they not
derive from the lands settled upon monasteries by those anxious only
to save their own souls, and by others who sought thus to compound for
their deeds of blood or infamy? And is it possible to think without
aversion of a Church that, accepting such gifts, absolved the givers in
consideration of them?
Life is endeavour; not all cloistered prayer. He prays best whose
prayers are an interlude of toil; and so, when we read Cobbett's long
account of the wretched condition of Ely Cathedral, of its "disgraceful
irrepair and disfigurement," and of the two old men who on a week-day
afternoon formed the whole of the congregation, coupled with his
regretful surmise that in Catholic times five thousand people would
have been assembled here, we are apt to think that sparse congregation
a very healthy sign, and that even those two old men would have been
better employed out in the workaday world. He would be a Goth who
should fail to perceive the beauty of Ely Cathedral and of its like,
but those noble aisles, those soaring towers tell a tale of an enslaved
land, of fettered souls, of a priestcraft that sought to rule the
State, as well as to hold the keys of Heaven and of Hell. No man,
whether he be Pope, Archbishop, or merely the Boanerges of some hideous
Bethel, has the right to enslave another's soul. Let even the lovely
cathedrals of our land be levelled in one common ruin if the sight of
them harks us back to Popery, for in that harking back England would be
utterly undone.
But since the saving common-sense of the Englishman can never again
permit him to deliver up his soul into another's keeping, and since
it follows naturally from this that the Romanising tendencies of our
clergy must of necessity lead nowhere and bear no fruit, it becomes
possible to look with a dispassionate eye upon these architectural
relics of discredited beliefs.
Why was the Cathedral built here? That is a long story. It originated
in the monastery founded on this spot in A.D. 673 by Etheldreda,
daughter of Auna, King of the East Angles. Etheldreda has long since
been canonised, and it behoves us to deal as gently as may be with a
saint; but she was, if the chroniclers tell truth, an eccentric and
original creature, twice wed by her own consent, and yet vowed to a
life-long chastity. Her first husband was one Tondbert, a kinglet of
the Gyrvians or Fen-folk, a monarch of the mudlarks, ruling over many
miles of reed and sedge, in whose wastes Ely was centred. He gave his
Queen this Isle, and died. For five years she remained a widow and
then married again; this time a sturdier and less manageable man, King
Egfrid of Northumbria. He respected her vows for twelve years, but when
at last she took the veil in the north of England and fled from her
Northumbrian home he took the only way open in the seventh century of
asserting conjugal rights, and pursued her with an armed force. When,
however, he arrived at the monastery of Coldingham she was gone, and I
do not think Egfrid ever saw her again, or wanted to, for that matter.
We will not follow Etheldreda in her long and adventurous journey to
Ely, whither she had fled, nor recount the many miracles that helped
her on the way. Miracles were cheap at that period, and for at least
four hundred years to come were freely invented and elaborated by
monkish chroniclers, who were the earliest novelists and writers of
fairy tales, in the scriptorium of many a monastery.
XL
IN the year 673, then, behold the ecstatic Etheldreda come out of
many perils to Ely. Here, where she thought the Isle lifted its crest
highest above the waters, she founded a mixed monastery for monks and
nuns. At this point the ground is one hundred and nine feet above
sea-level: at Haddenham, the crowning crest is but thirteen feet
higher. Here she ruled as Abbess for six years, when she died, and
was succeeded by her sister, the sainted Sexburga. It was Sexburga
who, sixteen years from this time, determined to honour Etheldreda to
the best of her ability, bethought her of translating the body from
the humble graveyard of the monastery to the church itself. She sent
forth a number of the brethren on a roving commission to find a block
of stone for a coffin, and as stone of any kind is the least likely
thing to find for many miles around Ely, theirs looked to be a long
and difficult quest. They had, indeed, wandered as far as the ruins of
Roman Cambridge before they discovered anything, but there they found
a magnificent sarcophagus of white marble, which they joyfully brought
back, and in it the remains of Etheldreda, entire and incorrupt, were
laid.
In 870, the time of the fourth Abbess, St. Withburga, a great
disaster befell the monastery of Ely. For years past the terror of
the heathen Vikings, the ruthless Danes and Jutes from over sea,
had been growing. Wild-eyed fugitives, survivors of some pitiless
massacre of the coastwise settlements by these pirates, had flung
themselves, exhausted, upon the Isle, and now the peril was drawing
near to this sanctuary. A special intercession, "Deliver us, O Lord,
from the Northmen," distinguished morning and evening office, but the
prayer was unanswered. Presently along the creeks came the beaked
prows of the ruthless sea-rovers, and the monastery was sacked and
burnt and all upon the Isle slain. That is history. To it the old
chronicler must needs put a clinching touch of miraculous vengeance,
and tells how a bloodstained pirate, thinking the marble shrine of St.
Etheldreda to be a treasure-chest, burst it open. "When he had done
this there was no delay of Divine vengeance, for immediately his eyes
started miraculously from his head, and he ended there and then his
sacrilegious life."
Before many years had passed, a new monastery was founded upon the
blackened and bloodstained ruins of the old. This was a College of
Secular Clergy, patronised by King Alfred. It was succeeded by a new
foundation, instituted by Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, who made it
a Benedictine House; but even of that we have no trace left, and the
church under whose roof Canute worshipped and Edward the Confessor was
educated was swept away in the great scheme of rebuilding, entered upon
by Simeon, the first Norman Abbot, in 1080. Twenty-six years later the
relics of St. Etheldreda were translated to the choir just completed.
The translation took place on October 17th, a day ever afterwards,
while the Roman Catholic religion prevailed, celebrated by a religious
festival and a secular fair. Pilgrims flocked throughout the year to
St. Audrey's shrine, but many thousands assembled on her feast-day,
and, that no doubt should rest upon their pilgrimage, purchased such
favours and tokens as "St. Audrey's chains," and images of her. The
chains were lengths of coloured silks and laces, and were, like most
articles sold at the stalls, cheap and common. From them, their vulgar
showiness, and their association with the Saint, comes the word
"tawdry."
Two years after this translation of St. Audrey, the Abbey Church was
made the Cathedral of the new diocese of Ely, carved out of the vast
See of Lincoln. Of the work wrought by Abbot Simeon and his successor,
Richard, the great north and south transepts alone remain. The choir
they built was replaced in the thirteenth century by that lovely Early
English work we now see; the nave they had not reached. This is a work
of some sixty years later than their time, and is one of the finest
examples of late Norman architecture in the country. The Norman style
went out with a blaze of architectural splendour at Ely, where the
great west front shows it blending almost imperceptibly into Early
English. It is a singular architectural composition, this western
entrance and forefront of Ely Cathedral; the piling up to a dizzy
height of a great tower, intended to be flanked on either side by two
western transepts each ending in a smaller tower. The north-western
transept fell in ruins at some unknown period and has never been
rebuilt, so that a view of this front presents a curiously unbalanced
look, very distressing to all those good folk whose sensibilities
would be harrowed if in their domestic establishment they lacked a
_pendant_ to everything. To the housewife to whom a fender where the
poker is not duly and canonically neighboured by the tongs looks a
debauched and sinful object; to the citizen who would grieve if the
bronze or cut-glass lustre on one side of his mantel-shelf were not
matched on the other, this is a sight of the most dolorous sort. It
must have been to soothe the feelings of all such that a sum of £25,000
was appealed for when Sir Gilbert Scott was restoring the Cathedral,
many years ago, and its rebuilding was proposed. The money was not
forthcoming, the work was not done, and so Scott did not obtain the
£2500 commission. Scott's loss is our gain, for we are spared one more
example of his way with old cathedrals.
[Illustration: THE WEST FRONT, ELY CATHEDRAL.]
The ruins of the missing transept are plain to see, and a huge and ugly
buttress props up the tower from this side; but, were that building
restored, we should only have again, in its completeness, a curiously
childish design. For that is the note of this west front and of this
great tower, rising in stage upon stage of masonry until the great
blocks of stone, dwarfed by distance, look like so many courses of grey
brick. So does a child build up towers and castles of wooden blocks.