policy of Stephen aimed at nothing more, and the broken Earl was set
free. Some men take their misfortunes with a heroic calm, but Geoffrey
de Magnaville was not of that kind. We are told how he “burst forth from
the presence of the King like a riderless horse, kicking and biting,”
and so made for the Fens, where during a series of years, to the ruin of
the realm, he made his armed support of Maud an excuse for giving full
rein to his native ferocity. As robber and bandit, he was probably as
much feared by those with whom he sided as by his opponents. The
trembling clergy and peasantry knew him well, and feared him with a
deathly fear, for murder and sacrilege were his sport. By an easy twist
of his name they came to know him as “Man-devil,” which is in itself a
kind of backhanded and sinister testimonial to his character, and long
before he met his death he was placed by the outraged Church outside the
pale of salvation. It was at Burwell, whose church tower stands
prominently in the view from Newmarket Heath, his furrow came to an end,
in 1144. It was time. He had for so long been the scourge of these wilds
that at length the King made a determined effort to keep him in check by
building a castle at Burwell and holding it in force. By this plan he
hoped to keep that strenuous evil-doer shut up in his chosen haunt among
the swamps of the Cam, where he might mudlark at will, and it was in
attacking this castle, in an attempt to break through, he was mortally
wounded by a bolt in the head, and died the next day at Mildenhall,
eight miles distant, whither his fellow-outlaws had carried him. He
died, in the language of that time, “excommunicate and unabsolved, nor
was the earth suffered to give a grave to the sacrilegious offender.”
For twenty years, in fact, his body was unburied, remaining meanwhile
soldered in lead, in an orchard belonging to the Templars in London. At
the end of that time, upon some flimsy proof being given of his having
in his last moments made some expressions of repentance, his spirit
received absolution, and the body was buried beside that of his fathers
in the Temple Church. There, on the pavement, in company with seven
others, his effigy may yet be seen, cross-legged and mailed. He wears a
more than usually dour expression of countenance. His head is
represented encased in a helmet in shape something midway between a
saucepan and a frying-pan: possibly a rendering in stone of that
headgear he wore at Burwell, and removed in the midst of that fray, to
get the air, when the missile struck him.
This full-blooded scoundrel’s keep, or robber’s hold, stood upon an
eminence known as Bury Hill. The massive walls, long since robbed of all
architectural features, still show how securely he built, even though
they are at this day only shapeless lumps of rubble. In one corner the
stocks and pillory of Walden are still preserved.
It is a castle without a history. No one knows who destroyed it, and no
tale has ever been told of those great earthworks, once connected with
the fortress, which now, emerald green with luxuriant grass and spangled
in springtime with wild flowers, once defended his market-town of Walden
against surprise. These serried ranks of rampart and ditch were
probably, like the hill on which he built his stronghold, much older
than his time, and merely strengthened for the occasion, but they remain
mystic to this day, and own a very large selection of names, being
“Battle,” “Repel,” “Peddle,” “Pell,” and “Paigle” Ditches in the mouths
of the country folk.
Walden, which owned but that single style before it became in the long
ago the seat of saffron culture, derives its name from “Weal-den,” the
wooded hollow, or perhaps “the hollow in the woods,” and was anciently
situated in the dense glades of the great Forest of Essex. When Geoffrey
de Magnaville obtained the grant of a market for his town it became
“Chipping,” or Market Walden, and it was not until the reign of Edward
III. that this style and title was changed for the name it now bears.
The seal of the borough, dating from the time of Elizabeth, still
alludes to that much-prized plant, and perpetrates the lamentable pun of
three saffron flowers “walled in” by a castle; while the badge of the
mayor’s chain, made in 1873, repeats that hoary play upon words.
[Illustration: ARMS OF SAFFRON WALDEN.]
Saffron, long since disappeared from local ken, is said to have been
introduced to England from Palestine so early as the times of the
Crusaders, and to have been brought over, originally a single bulb,
hidden in a palmer’s staff. Its name is a corruption of the Arabic
“sahafaran,” but to botanists it is _Crocus sativus_, the cultivated, as
opposed to _Crocus agrestis_, the wild crocus. It was the supposed
medicinal virtues of the plant that made it so much in request and so
largely cultivated here in the latter part of the sixteenth century,
when Fuller, writing of the town, speaks of it as one “which saffron may
seem to have coloured with the name thereof.” Those old curative
properties are now quite disregarded, but they were once considered
potent. The very least of the benefits it conferred was the exhilaration
of the spirits, so that the old proverb for a merry fellow was “He hath
slept in a bag of saffron,” and Gerard, in his herbal, says: “The
moderate use of it is good for the head, maketh the sences more quicke
and lively, shaketh off heavie and drowsie sleepe, and maketh a man
merrie.” But other and more convivial things have long been found to
produce the same results. While it was thought to relieve hysterical
depression, it was good also for the small-pox. Placed in bags under the
chins of sufferers from that fearful disease, it was supposed to bring
on the eruptions, and so quickly relieve the patients. Fuller gives very
emphatic testimony to its virtues. “Under God,” he says, “I owe my life,
when sick of the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof.”
So beneficent a plant, of course, commanded a high price. In Fuller’s
time saffron sold at £3 a pound, and in 1665, the year of the Great
Plague of London, it rose to £4 1_s._ 10_d._ Those were, by consequence,
the times of saffron adulteration.
“No precious drug,” he says, “is more adulterated with _cartamus_, the
inward pilling of willow,” and suggests that dealers should look
carefully into the matter.
Of its high qualities he was, as we have seen, fully convinced, but
another proof he advances, is not, to a sceptical modern world,
altogether conclusive. The Age of Faith is past, but it was current in
Fuller’s era. _He_, at any rate, had the capacity for infinite belief,
as we shall see. “In a word,” he sums up, “the sovereign power of
genuine saffron is plainly proved, for the crocodile’s tears are never
true, save when he is forced where saffron groweth (whence he hath his
name of ‘croco-deilos,’ or the saffron-fearer), knowing himself to be
all poison, and it all antidote.” The logical conclusion of this belief
would have been that wholesale saffron-buyers should have kept a staff
of crocodiles as (so to speak) tasters, and by their tears, or the want
of them, have gauged the purity of those purchases.
Hollingshead, writing of saffron cultivation, calls the farmers of it
“crokers.” It was a culture that must then have earned many a fortune,
and so late as 1717 it was worth £1 6_s._ 6_d._ a pound; but, what with
that curse of all industries, over-production, the carelessness of the
growers, and shameless adulteration, price and quality declined. Then,
too, the dependence of medicine upon the old herbalists began to decay,
and the reputation of saffron fell off to such an extent that by 1790 it
was no longer cultivated at Walden, and the “crokers” were in another
sense justified of their name.
Nowadays saffron is chiefly used as a colouring material for aromatic
confections, for liqueurs and varnishes. Put in common cakes, that prove
to have been made of something suspiciously like sawdust and paste, the
yellow hue it gives produces a specious and illusory richness only
discovered too late
XVI
WE regain the high road at Littlebury, a rural village whose church is
said to be built within the lines of a Roman encampment. It may be so,
but the Eye of Faith is required to perceive any relics of it, although
the natural hillock it stands upon, overlooking the river Cam, must be
the “little bury” of the Saxon, once guarding the passage of that
stream, and whose title has now crystallised into the place-name.
Littlebury was the birthplace of Winstanley, the cocksure and
unfortunate designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, who perished with the
destruction of his building. The house where he was born was pulled down
many years ago, and it is ill work questing for the site of it. Your
ordinary villager is no hero-worshipper, and fails to understand such a
search as this. His mind is evenly divided in speculating whether you be
a fool or a rogue, and all he has to say is, “I’ve lived here arl me
loife, and niver hard tell on’t. Pirraps they knaws him at the Post
Orfice.” But they don’t.
The only person whom the present writer met at Littlebury who did know
was stone deaf, and questions had to be put by the slow and cumbrous
process of writing. The house stood on the right-hand side of the
cross-road that goes from the church to the water-mill. Its site is now
a little elm-covered mound in a meadow.
Passing from here along the river-bordered road, within sight of Little
Chesterford, we leave Essex and come into Cambridgeshire, where the
village of Great Chesterford is planted down on the further side of the
river Cam. A gaunt fork of the roads here presents itself to the view,
with an ugly inn at the parting of the ways, a shattered windmill to the
left, on a hillside, and the railway running on to Cambridge through
Great Chesterford station, with a forest of tall signal-posts outlined
against the sky, and the puffings, snortings, and crashings of trains
sounding continually, far into the night.
We do not merely leave the modern county of Essex and enter
Cambridgeshire at this point, but change our soil as well, coming at
once into a chalk country of bare and inhospitable downs, completely
altering the nature of the road and keeping a forbidding solitude,
without sign of the habitations of men, and only the occasional dull
tinkle of a sheep-bell to hint even of farming interests.
Mark well this road onwards from Great Chesterford, for it is the line
of the Icknield Way, and here, at the crossing of the Cam, we enter the
one-time Icenian kingdom, the territory of that great people whom Cæsar
himself, in the name “Cenimagni” he gave them, called great. This
country of the Iceni, comprising (to use that favourite word of the
auctioneers) what we now know as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and
Huntingdonshire, was a country pre-eminently distinguished from other
parts of England by its ancient inaccessibility. We hear much in our own
times of England’s “splendid isolation,” but within this island of
Britain there was then, in this country of the Iceni, an isolation quite
as thorough, if not so splendid; the river Stour and the oozy morasses
spreading on its either banks dividing it most thoroughly from what we
now call Essex, then a part of the nation of Trinobantes; and the whole
of the western and north-western Icenian border was divided from the
present Northants and Lincolnshire by the Ouse and the wide-spreading
meres and morasses of the Fens. Only along the ridges of chalk downs
stretching from Haverhill to Linton on the Essex border, or from Great
Chesterford on to those other chalk downs of Royston was there any line
of advance dryshod, and long lengths of those ridges were in those
remote times covered with almost impenetrable woods. Thus the Icknield
Way was the readiest, and almost only, route to or from the country of
the Iceni, for friend or foe. It led, this “Icen hilde weg,” or _Via
Iceniana_, out of the south-western parts of England, from the
neighbourhood of Weymouth to Old Sarum, Marlborough, the Berkshire White
Horse, East Ilsley, Dunstable, and Baldock, on to Royston and Ickleton,
hard by this village of Great Chesterford we have now reached. It was
never a made road, and in places branches out into several routes, but
it was always the clearest of trackways, and owes its preservation over
many miles to its course lying so greatly out of the way of agricultural
operations, along the crests of the chalk hills, where the plough never
comes and the faint footsteps of prehistoric man are undisturbed.
The existence of such a continuous track far out of the bounds of the
Icenian realm, and the persistence among the peasantry of the different
shires and counties of its old name under the transparent disguises of
Hickling, Acheling, Hackney Way, and other variants, point not only to a
considerable intercourse between the several peoples of this island, but
also to the strong personality of the Iceni, who could thus imperishably
impress their name on the long route, far from their own frontiers.
They were, however, at pains to protect themselves and that part of the
Way which formed the entrance into their own country, and the traveller
still sees, as he journeys on to Newmarket, the means they adopted to
that end, in the various ditches and ramparts athwart the road. This was
the weakest part of their frontier, and thus it is that along these
sixteen miles to Newmarket we find the way to have been barred by three
strong earthworks, stretching on the one hand to the primeval forests on
the hill-tops and on the other to the impassable fens. These are the
Brent, or Pampisford Ditch, over two miles in length, between Abington
Park and Pampisford; the Fleam, or Balsham Dyke, from the heights of
Balsham to Fulbourn Fen and the Cam at Fen Ditton, nine miles long as
the crow flies, but from its winding course some two miles longer; and
that most famous of them all, the “Devil’s Ditch,” on Newmarket Heath, a
seven miles’ barrier stretching from Wood Ditton, or “Ditch End,” to the
fens at Reach.
The Icknield Way was thus well defended. It ran from Great Chesterford,
partly along the course of the present road, to the neighbourhood of
Newmarket, and thence into the heart of Suffolk and Norfolk to Norwich,
the _Venta Icenorum_ of the Romans. From Norwich its course is
uncertain, but it is thought to have made for Yarmouth. Newmarket had
not in those days come into existence, but the village of Exning, two
miles from that town, marks the site of an ancient settlement. From
Newmarket the Way becomes more difficult to trace, but it seems to have
gone by Kentford, and to have crossed the Lark at Lackford. Thence over
the high grounds of Icklingham Heath, by Old Elveden Gap, to Thetford,
it is readily found, in a green track that may be followed for miles.
Not every East Anglian village whose name begins with Ick or Ix can
claim to mark this principal line of communication. There are the twin
villages of Icklingham St. James and Icklingham All Saints, and there
are Ickworth, near Bury St. Edmunds, with Ixworth, Ixworth Thorpe, and
Ickburgh in other parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, but they merely show
those people to have been widely settled in the land, and that the Way,
although their principal track, was by no means the only one.
Here, at Great Chesterford, where the bare swooping downs fall into the
valley of the Cam—here, or at the neighbouring village of Ickleton—the
Iceni would seem to have had a frontier town, and when the Romans so
masterfully subjugated them, that conquering people established beside
this little river their fortified post of _Iciani_, or, as some
antiquaries would have it, _Camboritum_.
Whichever of those two places it really was, it is quite certain a post
was established here. The adjoining fields have, time and again, yielded
treasures in Roman coins and articles of bronze, gold, and brass, and
skeletons, perhaps those of the owners of these finds, have been
unearthed. Great Chesterford, perhaps once really great, is now quite a
small place, but keeps its annual July fair, even though its market,
dating from some time before Domesday Book, has long since decayed. The
only sign of modern life in the village at this day is the new roller
flour-mill by the Cam, using the electric light. Along the village
street, a large, prominent red-brick house with an imposing portico, now
in private occupation, is pointed out as the once important “Crown”
coaching-inn and posting-house, and on the opposite side of the road
another private house, formerly the “Waggon and Horses,” is shown by the
villagers
XVII
IT is a fine road that leads from Great Chesterford to Newmarket, partly
on the line of the old Icknield Way. Ickleton and Hinxton, two
neighbouring villages, are seen down in the distance, on the left hand,
as the road climbs steadily over the chalk downs: pleasant villages in
the valley of the Cam, with brilliantly whitewashed cottages showing
prominently from their setting in green pastures.
This is a no mere track over the downs, but a well-made highway,
embanked in the hollow and cut through the rises. Where it has finally
left the village of Great Chesterford and has begun the climb, at the
several branching roads still known as “Stump Cross”—although that stump
of a wayside cross has long since disappeared—you may look, on the
left-hand road to Cambridge by way of Sawston, for the Deserted Railway.
This is the abandoned line of the Newmarket and Chesterford Railway
Company, incorporated in 1846 for the purpose of constructing a railway
in double track from the Eastern Counties’ station at Great Chesterford
to Newmarket. The undertaking was purchased and opened April 4th, 1848,
by the Eastern Counties (now the Great Eastern), but abandoned in 1852,
as between Great Chesterford and Six Mile Bottom, on the opening of the
existing line from Six Mile Bottom to Cambridge. The result is that the
present railway journey between Great Chesterford and Newmarket is
necessarily through Cambridge, and describes two sides of a triangle, as
you may readily discover by consulting a railway map. The abandoned
railway forming the third side of the triangle, would have gone direct,
but it was discovered, somewhat late in the day, that there was not
sufficient traffic to support both routes, and so the rails of this
particular one were torn up and the line abandoned. Twelve miles of
deserted track have thus for over half a century borne witness to the
otherwise incredible folly of those early railway projectors, who flung
away close on £150,000 upon a line that was not wanted.
It begins at Great Chesterford as an embankment, overgrown with brambles
and undergrowth, but presently sinks to the level at the crossing of the
road to Sawston and Cambridge, and in the fields on either side has been
ploughed out of existence. Where the trains once went, turnips and
clover now grow; but the embankment rises again in the distance and
looks remarkably like another, and an even more gigantic, earthwork of
unknown age. It is singular, indeed, that in this district of
prehistoric dykes a modern rival should be thus added for the confusion
of antiquaries who may even yet, in the remote future, come to speculate
learnedly upon it, to discuss by what tribe it was made or whose kingdom
it divided. It is quite as impressive as the Devil’s Ditch, even
although we know perfectly well that navvies, and not the Devil, made
it. Neighbouring the road all the way to Six Mile Bottom, it sometimes
drops into deep cuttings, with the bridges still spanning them, and
again resumes as a lofty embankment, often shrouded in the fir
plantations that in the course of half a century have developed into
dense woods. It ends at last on the level at Six Mile Bottom
XVIII
THAT cyclist whose way lies in the eye of the wind along these miles to
or from Newmarket is greatly to be pitied, for few sheltering
plantations break the force of the howling gales that sweep the stark
hillsides. But when the summer sun of a still July afternoon shines
mellow upon this country of infinite distances—why, then the way of the
pilgrim is made easy, and he can better appreciate a road whose
bleakness, when overtaken by rain or night, or struggling against
adverse winds, he remembers with horror.
Here we pass the Brent Ditch, going solitary across the unfenced,
uncultivated grassy downs, and come to the equally solitary Cambridge
and Haverhill Railway that runs in single track in a deep cutting across
the road. You see Pampisford station down below as you pass by, and a
railway inn, and that is all. If you linger on the bridge and await the
coming of a train, you will see it stop, and the station-master and one
porter, awakened out of their slumber, like Sleeping Beauties, come
yawning on to the platform to meet the passengers who do not alight and
to assist into the train those who do not put in an appearance.
A little way beyond this lonely spot, at the cross-roads by Bourn
Bridge, where the Bourn, or Linton River, flows across the highway,
there stood a once well-known posting-house and coaching-inn, the
“King’s Arms.” It was demolished, for lack of business, many years
since, and only a row of cottages on the left hand, once forming part of
the stables, now remains, with the embankment of the Deserted Railway,
the cause of the inn’s decay, and itself long ago abandoned, at the
rear.
[Illustration: “MAG’S MOUNT.”]
Still lonelier grows the road as we proceed, attaining the height of
detachment from the busy world at a point near the forty-eighth mile
from London, where the road between Cambridge and Little Abington
crosses our route. This is the Roman road known to antiquaries as the
_Via Devana_, a name coined by them for it, to describe its course
diagonally through England from Colchester to Chester, the _Deva_ of the
Romans. It leads on the left hand to Cambridge, six miles away, over the
Gog Magog Hills, the Cambridgeshire “mountains,” on whose not remarkably
high crest the Roman camp of Vandlebury can still be traced. Ancient
roads are the merest commonplaces of this route to Newmarket, and we
have gone little more than another mile when another is reached,
crossing again at right angles. This is a way, much more ancient than
the Romans, known as “Worstead Street,” and thought to have been the
“War-stead,” or path, of some ancient people, perhaps the Iceni. This
also leads, as a made road, on the left, to Cambridge; but its
continuation to the right hand is now nothing more than a grassy track.
This junction of roads is peculiarly impressive, and bites deeply into
the imagination. A solitary farmhouse on one side of the cross-roads, an
equally solitary cottage on the other, a long length of old malt-houses
topping the rise, and the eerie bulk of “Mag’s Mount,” crowned with
spindly firs, and with a deep cutting of the Deserted Railway scarring
its chalky shoulder: all these combine to fix the spot in the
recollection, although no story belongs to it and no one knows who was
“Mag” of the Mount that bears his name.
In another two miles the Fleam Dyke, or Balsham Ditch, is reached,
almost as perfect now as when first dug, but in places overgrown with
trees, especially to the left hand, where a prehistoric _tumulus_ called
Matlow Hill commands it. Ahead, along the rising and dipping road, the
paltry wayside settlement of Six Mile Bottom comes in sight,
distinguished by the very busy and scandalously dangerous level crossing
at the railway station, where a frequent service of express trains
dashing through at high speed is a menace to life and a hindrance to
users of the highway.
Plantations in thick continuous fringes or belts here begin to shield
the road from the tempestuous winds, and shut out the empty downs, whose
inhospitable nature seems to be reflected in the name of Westley
Waterless, a lonely village marked on the map in their midst.