The Cambridge, Ely and King's Lynn road, the great Fenland highway

THE CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND
KING'S LYNN ROAD

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Brighton Road : Old Times and New
on a Classic Highway.

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries :
To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient
Turnpike.

The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and
Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road : The Story of the West
of England Highway.

The Great North Road : The Old Mail
Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian
Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach
Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

Cycle Rides Round London.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford
Haven Road. [In the Press.

S "2

- s

H S3

THE CAMBRIDGE
ELY AND KING'S

LYNN ROAD THE

GREAT FENLAND HIGHWAY
BY CHARLES G. HARPER

AUTHOR OF "THE BRIGHTON ROAD" "THE PORTS-
MOUTH ROAD" "THE DOVER ROAD" "THE BATH ROAD"
"THE EXETER ROAD" "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD"
"THE NORWICH ROAD" "THE HOLYHEAD ROAD" AND
"CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON"

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR, AND FROM OLD-TIME PRINTS
AND PICTURES

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1902

(All Rights Reserved]

H3

IN the course of an eloquent passage in an eulogy
of the old posting and coaching days, as opposed
to railway times, Ruskin regretfully looks back
upon " the happiness of the evening hours when,
from the top of the last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he
was to rest, scattered among the meadows, beside
its valley stream." It is a pretty, backward
picture, viewed through the diminishing -glass of
time, and possesses a certain specious attractive-
ness that cloaks much of the very real discomfort
attending the old road -faring era. For not
always did the traveller behold the quiet village
under conditions so ideal. There were such things
as tempests, keen frosts, and bitter winds to make
his faring highly uncomfortable ; to say little of
the snowstorms that half smothered him and pre-

viii PREFACE

vented his reaching his destination until his very
vitals were almost frozen. Then there were
MESSIEURS the highwaymen, always to be reckoned
with, and it cannot too strongly be insisted upon
that until the nineteenth century had well dawned
they were always to be confidently expected at
the next lonely bend of the road. But, assuming
good weather and a complete absence of those
old pests of society, there can be no doubt that
a journey down one of the old coaching highways
must have been altogether delightful.

In the old days of the road, the traveller saw
his destination afar off, and — town or city or
village — it disclosed itself by degrees to his
appreciative or critical eyes. He saw it, seated
sheltered in its vale, or, perched on its hill-top,
the sport of the elements ; and so came, witli a
continuous panorama of country in his mind's eye,
to his inn. By rail the present-day traveller has
many comforts denied to his grandfather, but
there is no blinking the fact that he is conveyed
very much in the manner of a parcel or a bale
of goods, and is delivered at his journey s
end oppressed with a sense of detachment never
felt by one who travelled the road in days of
old, or even by the cyclist in the present age.
The railway traveller is set down out of the void
in a strange place, many leagues from his base ;

PREFACE ix

the country between a blank and the place to
which he has come an unknown quantity. In
so travelling he has missed much.

The old roads and their romance are the herit-
age of the modern tourist, by whatever method he
likes to explore them. Countless generations of men
have built up the highways, the cities, towns, villages
and hamlets along their course, and have lived
and loved, have laboured, fought and died through
the centuries. Will you not halt awhile and listen
to their story — fierce, pitiful, lovable, hateful,
tender or terrible, just as you may hap upon it;
flashing forth as changefully out of the past as
do the rays from the facets of a diamond ? A
battle was fought here, an historic murder wrought
there. This way came such an one to seek his
fortune and find it ; that way went another, to
lose life and fortune both. In yon house was
born the Man of his Age, for whom that age
was ripe; on yonder hillock an olden malefactor,
whom modern times would call a reformer, ex-
piated the crime of being born too early — there
is no cynic more consistent in his cynicism than
Time.

All these have lived and wrought and thought
to this one unpremeditated end — that the tourist
travels smoothly and safely along roads once rough
and dangerous beyond belief, and that as he goes

x PREFACE

every place has a story to tell, for him to hear
if he will. If he have no ears for such, so
much the worse for him, and by so much the
poorer his faring.

CHAELES G. HARPER.

PETERSHAM, SURREY,
October 1902.

HIST OF L
ILLUSTRATIONS

SEPARATE PLATES

THE "CAMBRIDGE TELEGRAPH" STARTING FROM THE WHITE

HORSE, FETTER LANE . . . . Frontispiece

From a Print after J. Pollard.

THE "STAR OP CAMBRIDGE" STARTING FROM THE BELLE

SAUVAGE YARD, LUDGATE HILL, 1816 . . . 17

From a Print after T. Young.

" KNEE-DEEP " : THE " LYNN AND WELLS MAIL " IN A SNOW-
STORM ....... 23

.From a Print after C. Cooper Henderson.

A LONDON SUBURB IN 1816 : TOTTENHAM . , .39

From a Drawing by Roivlandson.

WALTHAM CROSS ....... 61

THE "HULL MAIL" AT WALTHAM CROSS . . .65

From a Print after J. Pollard.

CHESHUNT GREAT HOUSE .....

HODDESDON ......

WARE .

BARLEY .......

FOWLMERE : A TYPICAL CAMBRIDGESHIRE VILLAGE

MELBOURN

77
83
89
105
113
129

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PACK

TRUMPINGTON MILL . . . . . .137

TRUMPINGTON STREET, CAMBRIDGE . . . .145

HOBSON, THE CAMBRIDGE CARRIER .... 159

A WET DAY IN THE FENS . . . . .203

ALDRETH CAUSEWAY ...... 219

A FENLAND ROAD : THE AKEMAN STREET NEAR STRETHAM

BRIDGE ....... 245

STRETHAM BRIDGE . . . . . . 249

ELY CATHEDRAL ....... 271

After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.

ELY, FROM THE OUSE ...... 277

JOSEPH BEETON IN THE CONDEMNED CELL . . .311

THE TOWN AND HARBOUR OF LYNN, FROM WEST LYNN . 317
"CLIFTON'S HOUSE" ...... 320

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, LYNN ..... 323

THE FERRY INN, LYNN ...... 327

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

PAGE

VIGNETTE : EEL-SPEARING .... Title-page

PREFACE . ....... vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS : TAKING TOLL . . . xi

THE CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND KING'S LYNN ROAD . . 1

THE GREEN DRAGON, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1856 . . 8

From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd.

THE FOUR SWANS, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1855 . .9

From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd.

TOTTENHAM CROSS ...... 38

BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ' ALMSHOUSES, TOTTENHAM . . 41

WALTHAM CROSS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO . 59

THE ROMAN URN, CHESHUNT ..... 76

CHARLES THE FIRST'S ROCKING-HORSE .. . .79

CLARKSON'S MONUMENT ...... 99

A MONUMENTAL MILESTONE . . . . .111

THE CHEQUERS, FOWLMERE . . . . .115

WEST MILL ....... 118

A QUAINT CORNER IN ROYSTON . . . . 125

CAXTON GIBBET . . . . . . .127

THE FIRST MILESTONE FROM CAMBRIDGE . . .139

HOBSON'S CONDUIT ...... 141

HOBSON ........ 162

From a Painting in Cambridge Guildhall.

MARKET HILL, CAMBRIDGE . . . . .167

THE FALCON, CAMBRIDGE 168

xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

INTERIOR OP ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH . . . 169

CAMBRIDGE CASTLE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO . . .171

LANDBEACH ....... 181

THE FENS ... . .191

After Dugdale.

THE ISLE OF ELY AND DISTRICT .... 215

ALDRETH CAUSEWAY AND THE ISLE OF ELY . . . 218

UPWARE INN ....... 237

WICKEN FEN . . . . . .... 241

HODDEN SPADE AND BECKET ..... 248

STRETHAM. . . . . . . . 254

THE WEST FRONT, ELY CATHEDRAL .... 265

ELY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE LITTLEPORT EOAD . . 289

LITTLEPORT ....... 291

THE KIVER ROAD, LITTLEPORT . . . . . 293

THE OUSE ....... 295

SOUTHERY FERRY. ...... 296

KETT'S OAK . . . . . . . 300

DENVER HALL . . . . . . . 301

THE CROWN, DOWNHAM MARKET . . . ; . 302

THE CASTLE, DOWNHAM MARKET .... 303

HOGGE'S BRIDGE, STOW BARDOLPH • . 305

THE LYNN ARMS, SETCHEY . . . <' . . ' 306

THE SOUTH GATES, LYNN . . . . 308

THE GUILDHALL, LYNN . . . . . ' . 314

THE DUKE'S HEAD, LYNN . . . . .321

ISLINGTON . . 329

THE ROAD TO CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND
KING'S LYNN

London (Shoreditch Church) to —

Kingsland ....... 1|

Stoke Newington ...... 2^

Stamford Hill . . . . . . . 3|

Tottenham High Cross ., . . . . 4|-

Tottenham ....... 5|

Upper Edmonton . . . . . .6

Lower Edmonton . . . . . . 6|

Ponder's End ....... 8|

En field Highway ...... 9J

Enfield Wash 10

Waltham Cross . . . . . .11^

Crossbrook Street . . . . . .12

Turner's Hill . . . . . . .13

Cheshunt . . . . . . 13^

CheshuntWash . . . . . . 13|

Turnford . . . . . . .14

Wormley (cross New River) . . ... . . 14|

Broxbourne . . . . . . . 15|

Hoddesdon . . . . . . .17

Great Amwell (cross New River and the Lea) . .19^

Ware ........ 21

Wade's Mill (cross River Rib) . . . .23

High Cross ....... 23^

Collier's End . . . . . . .25

Puckeridge (cross River Rib) . . . . . 26|

Braughing . . . . . . . 27|

Quinbury ....... 28|

Hare Street ....... 30|

Barkway . . ...... . . 35

Barley . . . ... . . 36|

Fowlmere . . . . . . . 42

Newton ....... 44£

Hauxton (cross River Granta) . . . 47|

xvi THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Trumpington ... . 48J

Cambridge (Market Hill) . . 50f

To Cambridge, through Royston —

Puckeridge (cross River Rib) . . . , 26f

West Mill . . . . . ' '. 29 j

Buntingford . . . . . . .31

Chipping ....... 32£

Buckland ....... 33|

Royston ....... 37f

Melbourn ....... 41^

Shepreth ....... 43|

Foxton Station and Level Crossing . . . .44

Harston ....... 45^

Hauxton (cross River Granta) .... 46^

Trumpington ....... 48|

Cambridge (Market Hill) . . . . .51

Milton ........ 54

Landbeach ....... 54|

Denny Abbey ....... 58

Chittering ....... 58|

Stretham Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) . . . 61|

Stretham ....... 63J

Thetford Level Crossing . . . . 64^

Ely 67J

Chettisham Station and Level Crossing . . . 69|

Littleport ....... 72!

Littleport Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) . . . 73^

Brandon Creek (cross Little Ouse River) . . . 76f

Southery . . . . . . . 783

Modney Bridge (cross Sams Cut Drain) . . . 80£

Hilgay (cross Wissey River) . . . . . 81|

Fordham ....... 82f

Denver ..... 84

Downham Market . . . . . . n g5i

Wimbotsham ....... 86^

Stow Bardolph . . . . . g7i

South Runcton (cross River Nar) . . . . . 89jh

Setchey ..... 92 x

West Winch ..... 933

Hard wick Bridge .... 95 l

King's Lynn ....... 97

" SISTER ANNE, Sister Anne, do you see anyone
coming ? " asks Fatima in the story of Bluebeard.
Clio, the Muse of History, shall be my Sister Anne.
I hereby set her down in the beginnings of the
Cambridge Road, bid her be retrospective, and ask
her what she sees.

" I see," she says dreamily, like some medium or
clairvoyant, — " I see a forest track leading from the
marshy valley of the Thames to the still more marshy
valley of the Lea. The tribes who inhabit the land
are at once fierce and warlike, and greedy for trading
with merchants from over the narrow channel that
separates Britain from Gaul. They are fair-haired
and blue-eyed, they are dressed in the skins of wild
animals, and their chieftains wear many ornaments
of red gold." Then she is silent, for Clio, like her
eight sisters, is a very ancient personage, and like
the aged, although she knows much, cannot recall
sights and scenes without a deal of mental fumbling.

" And what else do you see ? "

2 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

" There conies along the forest track a great con-
course of soldiers. Never before were such seen in
the land. They form the advance-guard of an
invading army, and the tribes presently fly from
them, for these are the conquering Romans, whose
fame has come before them. There are none who
can withstand those soldiers."

" Many a tall Roman warrior, doubtless, sleeps
where he fell, slain by wounds or disease in that
advance ? "

Clio is indignant and corrective. " The Romans,"
she says, " were not a race of tall men. They were
undersized, but well built and of a generous chest-
development. They are, as I see them, imposing as
they march, for they advance in solid phalanx, and
their bright armour, their shields and swords, flash
like silver in the sun.

"I see next," she says, " these foreign soldiers as
conquerors, settled in the land. They have an armed
camp in a clearing of the forest, where a company of
them keep watch and ward, while many more toil at
the work of making the forest track a broad and firm
military way. Among them, chained together like
beasts, and kept to their work by the whips and
blows of taskmasters, are gangs of natives, who
perform the roughest and the most unskilled of the
labour.

" And after that I see four hundred years of
Roman power and civilisation fade like a dream, and
then a dim space of anarchy, lit up by the fitful
glare of fire, and stained and running red with blood.
Many strange and heathen peoples come and go in

IN THE BEGINNING 3

this period along the road, once so broad and flat
and straight, but now grown neglected. The strange
peoples call themselves by many names, — Saxons,
Vikings, Picts, and Scots and Danes, — but their aim
is alike : to plunder and to slay. Six hundred years
pass before they bring back something of that
civilisation the Eomans planted, and the land obtains
a settled Christianity and an approach to rest. And
then, when things have come to this pass, there
comes a stronger race to make the land its own.
It is the coming of the Normans.

"I see the Conqueror, lord of all this land but
the Isle of Ely, coming to vanquish the English
remnant. I see him, his knights and men-at-arms,
his standard-bearers and his bowmen, marching
where the Romans marched a thousand years before,
and in three years I see the shrunken remains of his
army return, victorious, but decimated by those
conquered English and their allies, the agues and
fevers, the mires and mists of the Fens."

" And then — what of the Roman Road, the
Saxon ' Ermine Street ' ? tell me, why does it lie
deserted and forgot ? "

But Clio is silent. She does not know ; it is a
question rather for archaeology, for which there is no
Muse at all. Nor can she tell much of the history
of the road, apart from the larger national concerns
in which it has a part. She is like a wholesale
trader, and deals only in bulk. Let us in these pages
seek to recover something from the past to illustrate
the description of these many miles.

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

II

THE coach-road to Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn

the modern highway — follows in general direction,

and is in places identical with, two distinct Roman
roads. From Shoreditch Church, whence it is
measured, to Royston, it is on the line of the Ermine
Street, the great direct Roman road to Lincoln and
the north of England, which, under the names of the
"North Road" and the "Old North Road," goes
straight ahead, past Caxton, to Alconbury Hill, sixty-
eight miles from London, where it becomes identical
with our own Great North Road, as far as Stamford
and Casterton.

From Royston to Cambridge there would seem
never to have been any direct route, and the Romans
apparently reached Cambridge either by pursuing
the Ermine Street five miles farther, and thence
turning to the right at Arrington Bridge ; or else
by Colchester, Sudbury, and Linton. Those, at
anyrate, are the ways obvious enough on modern
maps, or in the Antonine Itinerary, that Roman
road-book made about A.D. 200-250. We have,
however, only to exercise our own observation to
find that the Antonine Itinerary is a very inaccurate
piece of work, and that the Romans almost certainly
journeyed to Camboricum, their Cambridge, by way
of Epping, Bishop's Stortford, and Great Chester-
ford, a route .taken by several coaches sixty years

ago.

From Cambridge to Ely and King's Lynn the

THE ERMINE STREET 5

coach-road follows with more or less exactness the
Akeman Street, a Koman way in the nature of an
elevated causeway above the fens.

The Ermine Street between London and Lincoln
is not noted by the Antonine Itinerary, which takes
the traveller to that city by two very indirect routes :
the one along the Watling Street as far as High
Cross, in Warwickshire, and thence to the right, along
the Fosse Way past Leicester ; the other by
Colchester. The Ermine Street, leading direct to
Lincoln, is therefore generally supposed to be a
Eoman road of much later date.

We are not to suppose that the Eomans knew
these roads by the names they now bear ; names
really given by the Saxons. Ermine Street enshrines
the name of Eorman, some forgotten hero or divinity
of that people ; arid the Akeman Street, running from
the Norfolk coast, in a south-westerly direction
through England, to Circncester and Bath, is gener-
ally said to have obtained its name from invalids
making pilgrimage to the Bath waters, there to
ease them of their aches and pains. But a more
reasonable theory is that which finds the origin
of that name in a corruption of Aqua? Solis, the
name of Bath.

No reasonable explanation has ever been ad-
vanced of the abandonment of the Ermine Street
between Lower Edmonton and Ware, and the
choosing of the present route, running roughly
parallel with it at distances ranging from half a mile
to a mile, and by a low -lying course much more
likely to be flooded than the old Roman highway.

6 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

The change must have been made at an early period,
far beyond the time when history dawns on the
road, for it is always by the existing route that
travellers are found coming and going.

Few know that the Roman road and the coaching
road are distinct ; and yet, with the aid of a large-
scale Ordnance map, the course of the Ermine Street
can be distinctly traced. Not only so, but a day's
exploration of it, as far as its present condition,
obstructed and diverted in places, will allow, is of
absorbing interest.

It makes eleven miles of, in places, rough walk-
ing, and often gives only the satisfaction of being
close to the actual site, and not actually on it. A
straight line drawn from where the modern road
swerves slightly to the right at Northumberland
Park, Edmonton, to Ware, gives the direction the
ancient road pursued.

The exact spot where the modern road leaves
the Roman way is found at Lower Edmonton, where
a Congregational Church stands in an open space,
and the houses on the left hand are seen curving
back to face a lane that branches off at this point.
This, bearing the significantly ancient name of
" Langhedge Lane," goes exactly on the line of the
Ermine Street ; but it cannot be followed for more
than about a hundred yards, for it is cut through
by railways and modern buildings, and quite obliter-
ated for some distance. Where lanes are found
near Edmonton Rectory on the site of the ancient
way, names that are eloquent of an antiquity closely
allied with Roman times begin to appear. " Bury

THE ERMINE STREET 7

Hall," and, half a mile beyond it, "Bury Farm,"
neighboured by an ancient moat, are examples.
" Bury " is a corruption of a Saxon word meaning
anything, from a fortified camp to a settlement, or
a hillock ; and when, found beside a Koman road
generally signifies (like that constantly recurring
name " Coldharbour ") that the Saxons found de-
serted Eoman villas by the wayside. Beyond Bury
Farm the cutting of the New River in the seven-
teenth century obscured some length of the Ermine
Street. A long straight lane from Forty Hill
Park, past Bull's Cross, to Theobalds, represents it
pretty accurately, as does the next length, by Bury
Green and Cheshunt Great House. Cold Hall and
Cold Hall Green mark its passing by, even though,
just here, it is utterly diverted or stopped up.
" Elbow Lane " is the name of it from the neigh-
bourhood of Hoddesdon to Little Amwell. Beyond
that point it plunges into narrower lanes, and
thence into pastures and woods, descending steeply
therefrom into the valley of the Lea by Ware.
In those hillside pastures, and in an occasional
wheatfield, a dry summer will disclose, in a long line
of dried-up grass or corn, the route of that ancient
paved way below the surface. A sepulchral barrow
in one of these fields, called by the rustics " Penny-
loaf Hill," is probably the last resting-place of some
prehistoric traveller along this way. A quarter of
a mile from Ware the Ermine Street crossed the
Lea to " Bury Field," now a brickfield, where many
Roman coins have been found. Thenceforward it
is one with the present highway to Royston.

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

III

ALTHOUGH Shoreditch Church marks the beginning
of the Cambridge Road, of the old road to the North,
and of the highways into Lincolnshire, it was always
to and from a point somewhat nearer the City of

THE GREEN DRAGON, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1856.
[From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd ]

London that the traffic along these various ways
came and went. Bishopsgate Street was of old the
great centre for coaches and vans, and until quite
modern times — until, in fact, after railways had
come — those ancient inns, the Four Swans, the
Vine, the Bull, the Green Dragon, and many
another, still faced upon the street, as for many
centuries they had done. Coaches were promptly
withdrawn on the opening of the railways, but the

BISHOPSGATE STREET 9

lumbering old road-waggons, with their vast tilts,
broad wheels, swinging horn - lanterns, and long
teams of horses, survived for some years later. Now
everything is changed ; inns, coaches, waggons are
all gone. You will look in vain for them ; and of

THE FOUR SWANS, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1855.

[From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd.]

the most famous inn of all — the Bull, in Bishops-
gate Street Within — the slightest memory survives.
On its site rises that towering block of commercial
offices called " Palmerston House," crawling abund-
antly, like some maggoty cheese, with companies
and secretaries, clerks and office-boys, who seem,

io THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

like mites, to writhe out of the interstices of the
stone and plaster. Overhead, on the dizzy roof, are
the clustered strands of the telegraph-wires, resem-
bling the meshes of some spider's web, exquisitely
typical of much that goes forward in those little
cribs and hutches of offices within. It is a sorry
change from the old Bull — the Black Bull, as
it was originally named — with its cobble-stoned
courtyard and surrounding galleries, whence audiences
looked down upon the plays of Shakespeare and
others of the Elizabethans, and so continued until
the Puritans came and stage-plays were put under
interdict. When plays were not being enacted in
that old courtyard, it was crowded with the carriers'
vans out of Cambridgeshire and the Eastern Coun-

o

ties generally. " The Black Bull," we read in a
publication dated 1633, "is still looking towards
Shoreditch, to see if he can spy the carriers coming
from Cambridge." Would that it still looked
towards Shoreditch !

It was to the Bull that old Hobson, the
Cambridge carrier of such great renown, drove on
his regular journeys, between 1570 and 1631.
Hobson was the precursor, the grand original, of
all the Pickfords and Carter Patersons of this
crowded age, and lives immortal, though his body
be long resolved to dust, as the originator of a
proverb. That is immortality indeed! No deed
of chivalry, no great achievement in the arts of
peace and war, shall so surely render your name
imperishable as the linking of it with some proverb
or popular saying. Who has not heard of "Hobson's

HOBSON, THE CARRIER

i i

Choice " ? Have you never been confronted with
that "take it or leave it" offer yourself? For, in
truth, Hobson's Choice is no choice at all ; and is,
and ever was, " that or none." The saying arose
from the livery-stable business carried on by Thomas
Hobson at Cambridge, in addition to his carrying
trade. He is, indeed, rightly or wrongly, said to
have been the first who made a business of letting
out saddle-horses. His practice, invariably followed,
was to refuse to allow any horse in his stables to
be taken out of its proper turn. " That or none "
was his unfailing formula, when the Cambridge
students, eager to pick and choose, would have
selected their own fancy in horseflesh. Every
customer was thus served alike, without favour.
Hobson's fame, instead of flickering out, has en-
dured. Many versified about him at his death,
but one of the best rhymed descriptions of his stable
practice was written in 1734, a hundred and three
years later, by Charles Water ton, as a translation
from the Latin of Vincent Bourne —

"In his long stable, Cambridge, you are told,
Hobson kept studs for hire in days of old,
On this condition only — that the horse
Nearest the door should start the first on course,
Then next to him, or none : so that each beast
Might have its turn of labour and of rest ;
This granted, no one yet, in college dress,
Was ever known this compact to transgress.
Next to the door — next to the work ; say, why
Should such a law, so just, be doomed to die?
Remember then this compact to restore,
And let it govern as it did before.
This done, O happy Cambridge ! you will see,
Your Hobson's stud just as it ought to be."

I 2

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

IV

WHO was that man, or who those associated
adventurers, to first establish a coach between
London and Cambridge, and when was the custom
first introduced of travelling by coach, instead of on
horseback, along this road ? No one can say. We
can see now that he who first set up a Cambridge
coach must of necessity have been great and forceful :
as great a man as Hobson, in whose time people
were well content to hire horses and ride them ; but
although University wits have sung the fame of
Hobson, the greater innovator and the date of his
innovation alike remain unknown. It is vaguely
said that the first Cambridge coach was started in
the reign of Charles the Second, but Pepys, who
might have been trusted to mention so striking a
novelty, does not refer to such a thing, and, as on
many other roads, we hear nothing definite until
1750, when a Cambridge coach went up and down
twice a week, taking two whole days each way, stay-
ing the night at Barkway going, and at Epping
returning. The same team of horses dragged the
coach the whole way. There was in this year a
coach through to Lynn, once a week, setting out on
Fridays in summer and Thursdays in winter.

In 1 753 a newer era dawned. There were then two
conveyances for Cambridge, from the Bull and the
Green Dragon in Bishopsgate : one leaving Tuesdays
and Fridays, the other Wednesdays and Saturdays,
reaching the Blue Boar and the Red Lion, Cambridge,

STAGES AND WAGGONS 13

the same night and returning the following day,
when that day did not happen to be Sunday.

Each of these stage-coaches carried six passengers,
all inside, and the fares were about twopence-half-
penny a mile in summer and threepence in winter.
The cost of a coach journey between London and
Cambridge was then, therefore, about twelve shillings.
Hobson's successors in the carrying business had
by this time increased to three carriers, owning two
waggons each. There were thus six waggons continu-
ally going back and forth in the mid-eighteenth
century. They took two and a half days to perform
the fifty-one miles, and " inned " at such places as
Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston, and Barkway, where they
would be drawn tip in the coachyards of the inns at
night, and those poor folk who travelled by them at
the rate of three-halfpence a mile would obtain an
inexpensive supper, with a shakedown in loft or barn.
The coaches at this period did by much effort
succeed in performing the journey in one day, but it
was a long day. They started early and came late
to their journey's end ; setting out at four o'clock in
the morning, and coming to their destination at
seven in the evening ; a pace of little more than
three miles an hour.

In 1763, owing partly to the improvements that
had taken place along the road, and more perhaps to
the growing system of providing more changes of
horses and shorter stages, the " London and Cambridge
Diligence" is found making the journey daily,
in eight hours, by way of Royston, "performed
by J. Roberts of the White Horse, Fetter Lane;

I4 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Thomas Watson's, the Red Lyon, Royston ; and Jacob
Brittain, the Sun, Cambridge." The "Diligence"
ran light, carrying three passengers only, at a fare of
thirteen shillings and sixpence. There were in this
same year two other coaches ; the " Fly," daily, from
the Queen's Head, Gray's Inn Lane, by way of Epping
and Chesterford, to the Rose on the Market Hill,
Cambridge, at a fare of twelve shillings; and the
" Stage," daily, to the Red Lion, Petty Cury, carrying
four passengers at ten shillings each.

We hear little at this period of coaches or
waggons on to Ely and King's Lynn. Cambridge-
shire and Norfolk roads were only just being made
good, after many centuries of neglect, and Cambridge
town was still, as it always had been (strange though
it may now seem), something of a port. The best
and safest way was to take boat or barge by Cam
and Ouse, rather than face the terrors of roads
almost constantly flooded. Gillam's, Burleigh's, and
Salmon's waggons, which at this time were advertised
to ply between London and Cambridge, transferred
their loads on to barges at the quays by Great Bridge.
Indeed it was not until railways came that Cambridge
ceased to depend largely upon the rivers, and the
coals burnt, the wine drank, and the timber used
were water-borne to the very last. Hence we find
the town always in the old days peculiarly distressed
in severe winters when the waterways were frozen ;
and hence, too, the remonstrance made by the
Mayor and Corporation when Denver Sluice was
rebuilt in 1745, " to the hindering of the navigation
to King's Lynn."

IMPROVED TRAVELLING 15

In 1796, the roads now moderately safe, a stage-
coach is found plying from Cambridge to Ely and
back in one day, replacing the old "passage-boats" ;
but Lynn, as far as extant publications tell us, was
still chiefly approachable by water. In this year
Cambridge enjoyed a service of six coaches between
the town and London, four of them daily ; the
remaining two running three times a week. The
Mail, on the road ten years past, started at eight
o'clock every night from the Bull and Mouth, London,
and, going by Royston^ arrived at the Sun, Cambridge,
at 3.30 the following morning. The old " Diligence,"
which thirty-three years before had performed the
journey in eight hours, now is found to take nine, and
to have raised its fares from thirteen shillings and six-
pence to one guinea, going to the Hoop instead of
the Sun. The "Fly," still by Epping and Great
Chesterford, has raised its fares from twelve shillings
to eighteen shillings, and now takes " outsides " at
nine shillings. It does not, however, fly very swiftly,
consuming ten hours on the way. " Prior's Stage "
is one of the new concerns, leaving the Bull,
Bishopsgate Street, at eight in the morning on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and, going by
Barkway, arriving at some unnamed hour at the Red
Lion, Petty Cury. It conveys six passengers at
fifteen shillings inside and eight shillings out, like
its competitor, " Hobson's Stage," setting out on
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays from the
Green Dragon, Bishopsgate Street, for the Blue Boar,
Cambridge. "Hobson's" is another new-comer,
merely trading on the glamour of the old name.

,6 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

The " Night Post Coach" of this year, starting from
the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, every afternoon at
5.30, went by Epping and Great Chesterford.
carried only four passengers inside, at fifteen shillings
each, and a like number outside at nine shillings.
Travelling all night, and through the dangerous
glades of Epping Forest, the old advertisement
especially mentions it to be "guarded." Passing
through many nocturnal terrors, the " Night Post
Coach " finally drew up in the courtyard of the still-
existing Eagle and Child (now called the Eagle) at
Cambridge, at three o'clock in the morning.

The next change seems to have been in 1804,
when the " Telegraph " was advertised to cover the
fifty-one miles in seven hours, — and made the promise
good. People said it was all very well, but shook
their heads and were of opinion that it would not
last. In 1821, however, we find the "Telegraph"
still running, and actually in six hours, starting
every morning at nine o'clock from the White Horse
in Fetter Lane, going by Barkway, and arriving at
the Sun at Cambridge at 3 p.m. This is the coach
shown in Pollard's picture in the act of leaving the
White Horse. In the meanwhile, however, in 1816
another and even faster coach, the " Star of
Cambridge," was established, and, if we may go so
far as to believe the statement made on the rare old
print showing it leaving the Belle Sauvage Yard
on Ludgate Hill in that year, it performed the
journey in four hours and a half ! Allowing for
necessary stops for changing on the way, this would
give a pace of over eleven miles an hour ; and we may

CAMBRIDGE COACHES 19

perhaps, in view of what both the roads and coaching
enterprise were like at that time, be excused from
believing that, apart from the special effort of any
one particular day, it ever did anything of the kind ;
even in 1821, five years later, as already shown, the
"Telegraph," the crack coach of the period on this
road, took six hours !

Let us see what others there were in 1821. To
Cambridge went the " Safety," every day, from the
Boar and Castle, Oxford Street, and the Bull,
Aldgate, leaving the Bull at 3 p.m. and arriving at
Cambridge, by way of Royston, in six hours; the
" Tally Ho," from the Bull, Holborn, every afternoon
at two o'clock, by the same route in the same time ;
the " Royal Regulator," daily, from the New Inn,
Old Bailey, in the like time, by Epping and
Great Chesterford ; the old "Fly," daily, from the
George and Blue Boar, Holborn and the Green
Dragon, Bishopsgate, at 9 a.m., by the same route,
in seven hours ; the " Cambridge Union," daily, from
the White Horse, Fetter Lane and the Cross Keys,
Wood Street, at 8 a.m., by Royston, in eight hours,
to the Blue Boar, Cambridge ; the " Cambridge New
Royal Patent Mail," still by Royston, arriving at
the Bull, Cambridge, in seven and a half hours ; the
" Cambridge and Ely " coach, every evening at 6 p.m.,
from the Golden Cross and the White Horse, arriving
at the Eagle and Child, Cambridge, in ten hours ; and
the " Cambridge Auxiliary Mail," and two other
coaches, which do not appear to have borne any
distinctive names, the duration of whose pilgrimage
is not specified.

20 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Cambridge was therefore provided in 1821 with
no fewer than twelve coaches a day, starting from
London at all hours, from a quarter to eight in the
morning until half-past six in the afternoon. There
were also the "Lynn and Wells Mail," every evening,
reaching Lynn in twelve hours thirty-three minutes ;
and the "Lynn Post Coach," through Cambridge,
starting every morning from the Golden Cross,
Charing Cross, and reaching Lynn in thirteen hours.
The " Lynn Union " ran three days a week, in
thirteen and a half hours, through Bark way. Other
Lynn stages were the " Lord Nelson," " Lynn and
Fakenham Post Coach," and two not dignified by
specific names.

By 1828 the average speed was greatly improved,
for although no coach reached Cambridge in less than
six hours, there was, on the other hand, only one
that took so long a time as seven hours and a half.
The Mail had been accelerated by one hour, through-
out to Lynn, and was, before driven off the road, further
quickened, the post-office schedule of time for the
London, Cambridge, King's Lynn, and Wells Mail in
1845 standing as under :—

London (G.P.O.) .... 8.0 p.m.

Wade's Mill .... 10.32 „

Buckland . . . . . 11.43 „

Melbourn . . . . .12.32 a.m.

Cambridge .... 1.36

Ely ..... 3.31

Brandon Creek .... 4.27

Downhara Market . . . 5.21

Lynn ..... 6.33

Wells ..... 10.43

In the 'forties, up to 1846 and 1847, the last

CAMBRIDGE COACHES 21

years of coaching on this road, the number of coaches
does not seem to have greatly increased. The " Star "
was still, meteor-like, making its swift daily journey
to the Hoop at Cambridge, and the " Telegraph,"
"Regulator," "Times," and "Fly," and the "Mail,"
of course, were old-established favourites ; but new
names are not many. The " Regulator," indeed, — the
daily "Royal Regulator" of years before, — is found
going only three times weekly. The " Red Rover,"
however, was a new-comer, between London and
Lynn daily ; with the " Norfolk Hero " (which was
probably another name for Nelson) three days a
week between London, Cambridge, Ely, Lynn, and
Wells. Recently added Cambridge coaches were the
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday " Bee Hive," and
the daily " Rocket " ; while one daily and two tri-
weekly coaches through Cambridge to Wisbeach — the
daily " Rapid " ; the Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday
" Day " ; and the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
" Defiance," make their appearance.

How do those numbers compare with the number
of trains run daily to Cambridge in our own time ?
It is not altogether a fair comparison, because the
capacities of a coach and of a railway train are so
radically different. Twenty-nine trains run by all
routes from London to Cambridge, day by day, and
they probably, on an average, set down five hundred
passengers between them at the joint station. Taking
the average way-bill of a coach to contain ten
passengers, the daily arrivals at Cambridge were a
hundred and sixty, or, adding twenty post-chaises
daily with two passengers each, a hundred and

22 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

eighty. These are only speculative figures, but, un-
supported by exact data though they must be, they
give an approximation to an idea of the growth of
traffic between those times and these. The imagina-
tion refuses to picture this daily host being conveyed
by road. It would have meant some thirty-five
coaches, fully laden, and as for goods and general
merchandise, the roads could not possibly have
sufficed for the carrying of them.

COACHING on the road from London to Lynn has
found some literary expression in the Autobiography
of a Stage Coachman, the work of Thomas Cross,
published in 1861. Cross was a remarkable man.
Born in 1791, he may fairly be said to have been
born to the box-seat, his father, John Cross, having
been a mail-contractor and stage-coach proprietor
established at the Golden Cross, Charing Cross.
The Cross family, towards the end of the eighteenth
century, claimed to rank with the county families
of Hampshire, and John Cross was himself a man
of wealth. He had inherited some, and had made
more by fetching and carrying for the Government
along the old Portsmouth Road in the romantic days
of our long wars with France. He not only had his
establishment in London and a town house in Ports-
mouth, but also the three separate and distinct
country seats of Freeland House and Stodham, near

JOHN CROSS 25

Petersfield, and the house and grounds of Qualletes,
at Horndean, purchased in after years by Admiral Sir
Charles Napier, and renamed by him " Merchistoun."
John Cross was always headstrong and reckless, and
made much money — and lost much. The story of
how he would fill his pockets with gold at his bank
at Portsmouth and then ride the lonely twenty miles
thence to Horndean explains his making and his losing.
No cautious traveller in those times went alone by that
road, and the highwaymen tried often to bag this par-
ticularly well-known man, who carried such wealth on
him. " Many a shot I've had at old John Cross of
Stodham," said one of these gentry when lying, cast
for execution, in Portsmouth Gaol ; adding regret-
fully, " but I couldn't hit him : he rode like the
devil."

This fine reckless character lived to dissipate
everything in ill-judged speculations, and misfortunes
of all kinds visited the family. We are told but
little of them in the pages of his son's book, but
it was entirely owing to one of these visitations that
Thomas Cross found his whole career changed.
Destined by his father for the Navy, he was
entered as a midshipman, but he had been subject
from his birth to fits, and coming home on one
occasion and going into the cellars of a wine business
his father had in the meanwhile taken, he was
seized by one of these attacks, and falling on a
number of wine-bottles, was so seriously injured
that the profession of the Navy had to be abandoned.
We afterwards find him as a farmer in Hampshire,
and then, involved in the financial disasters that

26 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

overtook the family, reduced to seeking an engage-
ment as coachman in the very yard his father had
once owned. It is curious that, either intentionally
or by accident, he does not mention the name of
the coach he drove between London and Lynn, but
calls it always "the Lynn coach." There were
changes on the road between 1821, when he first
drove along it, and 1847, when he was driven off,
but he is chiefly to be remembered as the driver of
the " Lynn Union." He tells how he came to the
box-seat, how miserably he was shuttlecocked from
one to the other when in search of employment, and
how, when the whip who drove the "Lynn coach"
on its stage between Cambridge and London had
taken an inn and was about to relinquish his seat,
he could obtain no certain information that the post
would be vacant. The bookkeeper of the coach-office
said it would ; the coachman himself told a lie and
said he was not going to give up the job. In this
condition of affairs Cross did not know what to do,
until a kindly acquaintance gave him the date upon
which the lying Jehu must take possession of his
inn and of necessity give up coaching, and advised
him to journey down to Cambridge, meet the up
coach there as it drove into the Bull yard, and
present himself as the coachman come to take it up
to London. Cross scrupulously carried out this sug-
gestion, and when he made his appearance, with
whip and in approved coaching costume, at the
Bull, and was asked who he was and what he wanted,
replied as his friend had indicated. No one offered
any objection, and no other coachman had appeared

THOMAS CROSS

27

by the time he drove away, punctual to the very
second we may be quite sure. An old resident of
Lynn, who has written his recollections of bygone
times in that town, tells us that Thomas Cross " was
not much of a whip," a criticism that seems to be
doubly underscored in Cross's own description of
this first journey to London, when he drove straight
into the double turnpike gates that then stretched
across the Kingsland Road, giving everyone a good
shaking, and cause, in many bruises, to remember
his maiden effort.

Cross had a long and varied experience, extending
to twenty-eight years, of this road. At different
times he drove between London and Cambridge,
on the middle ground between Cambridge and Ely,
and for a while took the whole distance between
Ely and Lynn. He drove in his time all sorts and
conditions of men, and instances some of his ex-
periences. Perhaps the most amusing was that
occasion when he drove into Cambridge with a
choleric retired Admiral on the box-seat. The old
sea-dog was come to Cambridge to inquire into the
trouble into which a scapegrace son had managed to
place himself. He confided the whole story to the
coachman. By this it seemed that the Admiral had
two sons. One he had designed to make a sailor ;
the other was being educated for the Church. It
was the embryo parson who had got into trouble :
very serious trouble, too, for he had knocked down
a Proctor, and was rusticated for that offence. The
Admiral, in fact, had made a very grave error of
judgment. His sons had very opposite characters :

28 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the one was wild and high-spirited, and the other
was meek and mild to the last degree of inoffensive-
ness. Unfortunately it was this good young
man whom he had sent to sea, while his devil's
cub he had put in the way of reading for Holy
Orders.

"I have committed a great mistake, sir," he
said. " I ought to have made a sailor of him and
a parson of the other, who is a meek, unassuming
youth aboard ship, with nothing to say for himself ;
while this, sir, would knock the devil down, let
alone a Proctor, if he offended him."

The Admiral was a study in the mingled moods
of offended dignity and of parental pride in this chip
of the old block ; breathing implacable vengeance one

moment and admiration of a " d d high-spirited

fellow " the next. When Thomas Cross set out on
his return journey to London, he saw the Admiral
and his peccant son together, the best of friends.

Cross was in his prime when railways came and
spoiled his career. In 1840, when the Northern and
Eastern line was opened to Broxbourne, and thence,
shortly after, to Bishop Stortford, he had to give
up the London and Cambridge stage and retire
before the invading locomotive to the Cambridge
and Lynn journey. In 1847, when the Ely to Lynn
line was opened, his occupation was wholly gone,
and all attempts to find employment on the railway
failed. They would not have him, even to ring the
bell when the trains were about to start. Then, like
many another poor fellow at that time, he presented an
engrossed petition to Parliament, setting forth how

A COACHMAN'S FATE 29

hardly circumstances had dealt with him, and hoping
that "your honourable House" would do something
or another. The House, however, was largely com-
posed of members highly interested in railways, and
ordered his petition, with many another, to lie on
the table : an evasive but well-recognised way of
utterly ignoring him and it and all such troublesome
and inconvenient things and persons. Alas ! poor
Thomas ! He had better have saved the money he
expended on that engrossing.

What became of him ? I will tell you. For
some years he benefited by the doles of his old
patrons on the " Union," sorry both for him and for
the old days of the road, gone for ever. He then
wrote a history of coaching, a work that disappeared
— type, manuscript, proofs and all — in the bankruptcy
proceedings in which his printers were presently
involved. Then he wrote his Autobiography. He
was, you must understand, a gentleman by birth and
education, and if he had little literary talent, had at
least some culture. Therefore the story of his career,
as told by himself, although discursive, is interesting.
He had some Greek and more Latin, and thought
himself a poet. I have, however, read his epic, The
Pauliad, and find that in this respect he was mis-
taken. That exercise in blank verse was published
in 1.863, and was his last work. Two years later he
found a place in Huggens' College, a charitable
foundation at Northfleet, near Gravesend ; and died
in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year, after twelve years'
residence in that secure retreat. He lies in Northfleet
churchyard, far away from that place where he would

3o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

be, the little churchyard of Catherington beside the

Portsmouth Road, where his father and many of his
people rest.

VI

FEW and fragmentary are the recollections of the
old coachmen of the Cambridge Road. A coloured
etching exists, the work of Dighton, purporting to
show the driver of the "Telegraph" in 1809; but
whether this represents that Richard Vaughan of the
same coach, praised in the book on coaching by Lord
William Pitt-Lennox as "scientific in horseflesh,
unequalled in driving," is doubtful, for the hero of
Dighton's picture seems to belong to an earlier
generation. Among drivers of the "Telegraph"
were "Old Quaker Will" and George Elliott, just
mentioned by Thomas Cross ; himself not much
given to enlarging upon other coachmen and their
professional skill. Poor Tommy necessarily moved
in their circle ; but although with them, he was not
of them, and nursed a pride both of his family and
of his own superior education that grew more
arrogant as his misfortunes increased. As for
Tommy himself, we have already heard much of him
and his Autobiography of a Stage Coachman. The
" Lynn Union," however, the coach he drove down
part of the road one day and up the next, was by no
means one of the crack " double " coaches, but started
from either end only three times a week, and
although upset every now and again, was a jog-

JO WALTON 31

trot affair that averaged but seven miles an hour,
including stops. That the "Lynn Union" commonly
carried a consignment of shrimps one way and the
returned empty baskets another was long one of Cross's
minor martyrdoms. He drove along the road, his
head full of poetry and noble thoughts, and yearning
for cultured talk, while the shrimp-baskets diffused
a penetrating odour around, highly offensive to those
cultured folk for whose society his soul longed.
People with a nice sense of smell avoided the " Lynn
Union " while the shrimp-carrying continued.

Contemporary with Cross was Jo Walton, of the
" Safety," and later of the " Star." He was perhaps
one of the finest coachmen who ever drove on the
Cambridge Road, and it was possibly the knowledge
of this skill, and the daring to which it led, that
brought so many mishaps to the "Star" while he
wielded the reins. He has been described as "a
man who swore like a trooper and went regularly to
church," with a temper like an emperor and a grip like
steel. This fine picturesque character was the very
antithesis of the peaceful and dreamy Cross, and
thought nothing of double - thonging a nodding
waggoner who blocked the road with his sleepy team.
Twice at least he upset the " Star" between Roys ton
and Buntingford when attempting to pass another
coach. He, at last, was cut short by the railway,
and his final journeys were between Broxbourrie
and Cambridge. "Here," he would say bitterly, as
the train came steaming into Broxbourne Station,
" here comes old Hell-in-Harness ! "

Of James Reynolds, of Pryor, who drove the

32 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

" Rocket," of many another, their attributes are lost
and only their names survive. That William Clark,
who drove the " Bee Hive," should have been widely
known as " the civil coachman " is at once a testi-
monial to him and a reproach to the others; and
that memories of Briggs at Lynn should be restricted
to the facts that he was discontented and quarrelsome
is a post-mortem certificate of character that gains
in significance when even the name of the coach he
drove cannot be recovered.

VII

BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHIN and Without, and Norton
Folgate of to-day, would astonish old Hobson, not
only with their press of ordinary traffic, but with
the vast number of railway lorries rattling and
thundering along, to and from the great Bishopsgate
Goods Station of the Great Eastern Kailway ; the
railway that has supplanted the coaches and the
carriers' waggons along the whole length of this
road. That station, once the passenger terminus of
Shoreditch, before the present huge one at Liverpool
Street was built, remains as a connecting-link
between the prosperous and popular " Great Eastern "
of to-day and the reviled and bankrupt "Eastern
Counties" of fifty years ago. The history of the
Great Eastern Kailway is a complicated story of
amalgamations of many lines with the original
Eastern Counties Railway. The line to Cambridge,

EARL Y RAIL WA Y DA YS

33

with which we are principally concerned, was in the
first instance the project of an independent company
calling itself the Northern and Eastern Kailway,
opened after many difficulties as far as Broxbourne
in 1840, and thence, shortly afterwards, to Bishop
Stortford. Having reached that point and the end
of its resources simultaneously, it was taken over by
the Eastern Counties and completed in 1847, the
line going, as the Cambridge expresses do nowadays,
vid Audley End and Great Chesterford.

Having thus purchased and completed the scheme
of that unfortunate line, the Eastern Counties' own
difficulties became acute. Locomotives and rolling
stock were seized for debt, and it fell into bankruptcy
and the Keceiver's hands. How it emerged at last, a
sound and prosperous concern, this is not the place
to tell, but many years passed before any passenger
whose business took him anywhere along the Eastern
Counties' "system" could rely upon being carried
to his destination without vexatious delays, not of
minutes, but of hours. Often the trains never
completed their journeys at all, and came back whence
they had started. Little wonder that this was then
described as " that scapegoat of companies, that
pariah of railways."

" On Wednesday last," said Punch at this time,
" a respectably-dressed young man was seen to go to
the Shoreditch terminus of the Eastern Counties
Railway and deliberately take a ticket for Cambridge.
He has not since been heard of. No motive has
been assigned for the rash act."

The best among the Great Eastern Cambridge
3

34 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

expresses of to-day does the journey of 55| miles in
1 hour 13 minutes. Onward to Lynn, 97 miles,
the best time made is 2 hours 25 minutes..

VIII

IT is a far cry from Shoreditch Church to the open
country. Cobbett, in 1822, journeying from London
to Koyston, found the suburbs far-reaching even
then. " On this road," he says, " the enormous
Wen " (a term of contempt by which he indicated the
Metropolis) " has swelled out to the distance of above
six or seven miles." But from the earliest times
London exhibited a tendency to expand more quickly
in this direction than in others, and Edmonton,
Waltham Cross, and Ware lay within the marches
of Cockaigne long before places within a like radius
at other points of the compass began to lose their
rural look. The reason is not far to seek, and may
be found in the fact that this, the great road to the
North, was much travelled always.

But where shall we set the limits of the Great Wen
in recent times ? Even as these lines are written they
are being pushed outwards. It is not enough to
put a finger on the map at Stamford Hill and to
say, " here, at the boundary of the London County
Council's territory," or "here at Edmonton, the
limit of the 'N' division of the London Postal
Districts," or, again, " here, where the Metropolitan
Police Area meets the territories of the Hertfordshire

WHERE DOES LONDON END ? 35

and the Essex Constabulary at Cheshunt " ; for those
are but arbitrary bounds, and, beyond their own indi-
vidual significances, tell us nothing. Have you ever,
as a child, looking, large-eyed and a little frightened
it may be, out upon the bigness of London, wondered
where the houses ended and God's own country
began, or asked where the last house of the last
street looked out upon the meadows, and the final
flag-stone led on to the footpath of the King's
Highway ?

I have asked, and there was none to tell, and if
you in turn ask me where the last house of the
ultimate street stands on this way out of London—
I do not know ! There are so many last houses,
and they always begin again ; so that little romantic
mental picture does not exist in plain fact. The
ending of London is a gradual and almost insensible
process. You may note it when, leaving Stoke
Newington's continuous streets behind, you rise
Stamford Hill and perceive its detached and semi-
detached residences ; and, pressing on, see the streets
begin again at Tottenham High Cross, continuing to
Lower Edmonton. Here at last, in the waste lands
that stretch along the road, you think the object of
your search is found. As well seek that fabled pot
of gold at the foot of the rainbow. The pot and the
gold may be there, but you will never, never reach
the rainbow.

The houses begin again, absurdly enough, at
Bonder's End. You will come to an end of them at
last, but only gradually, and when, at fifteen and
three-quarter miles from Shoreditch Church, Brox-

36 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

bourne and the first glimpse of "real country" are
reached, the original quest is forgotten.

Very different was the aspect of these first miles
out of London in the days of Izaak Walton, Cowper,
and Lamb. Cowper's Johnny Gilpin rode to
Edmonton and Ware, and Walton and Lamb — the
inspired Fleet Street draper and the thrall of the
Leadenhall Street office — are literary co-parceners in
the valley of the Lea.

"You are well overtaken, gentlemen," says
Piscator, in the Compleat Angler, journeying
from London ; "a good morning to you both. I
have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to over-
take you, hoping your business may occasion you
towards Ware, whither I am going this fine, fresh
May morning." He meant that suburban eminence
known as Stamford Hill, where, in the beginning of
May 1603, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London,
having ridden out in State for the purpose, met
James the First travelling to London to assume the
Crown of England.

Stamford Hill still shadows forth a well-established
prosperity. It was the favoured suburban resort of
City merchants in the first half of the nineteenth
century, and is still intensely respectable and well-
to-do, even though the merchants have risen with
the swelling of their bankers' pass-books to higher
ambitions, and though many of their solid, stolid,
and prim mansions know them no more, and are
converted not infrequently into what we may bluntly
call " boys' and girls' schools," termed, however, by
their respective Dr. Blimber's arid Miss Pinkerton's

STAMFORD HILL 37

" scholastic establishments for young ladies and
young gentlemen." The old-time City merchant
who resided at Stamford Hill when the nineteenth
century was young (a period when people began to
" reside " in " desirable residences " instead of merely
living in houses), used generally, if he were an active
man, to go up to his business in the City on horse-
back, and return in the same way. If not so active,
he came and went by the " short stage," a conveyance
between London and the adjacent towns, to all
intents and purposes an ordinary stage-coach, except
that it was a two-horsed, instead of a four-horsed,
affair. The last City man who rode to London on
horseback has probably long since been gathered to
his fathers, for the practice naturally was discon-
tinued when railways came and revolutionised
manners and customs.

As you top Stamford Hill, you glimpse the
valley of the Lea arid its factory-studded marshes,
and come presently to Tottenham High Cross.
No need to linger nowadays over the scenery of
this populous road, lined with shops and villas and
crowded with tramways and omnibuses ; no need,
that is to say, except for association's sake, and
to remark that it was here Piscator called a halt
to Venator and Auceps, on their way to the
Thatched House at Hoddesdon, now going on for
two hundred and fifty years ago. " Let us now "
(he said) " rest ourselves in this sweet, shady arbour,
which Nature herself has woven with her own fine
fingers ; it is such a contexture of woodbines, sweet
briars, jessamine, and myrtle, and so interwoven as

3g THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

will secure us both from the sun's violent heat and
from the approaching shower." And so they sat
and discussed a bottle of sack, with oranges

and milk.

So gracious a "contexture" is far to seek from
Tottenham nowadays. If you need shelter from

TOTTENHAM CROSS.

the approaching shower you can, it is true, obtain
it more securely in the doorway of a shop than
under a hedgerow in May, when Nature has not
nearly finished her weaving ; but there is something
lacking in the exchange.

Tottenham High Cross that stands here by, over
against the Green, is a very dubious affair indeed ;

4o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

an impostor that would delude you if possible into
the idea that it is one of the Eleanor Crosses ; with
a will-o'-wisp kind of history, from the time in
1466, when it is found mentioned only as existing,
to after ages, when it was new-built of brick and
thereafter horribly stuccoed, to the present, when
it is become a jibe and a jeer in its would-be Gothic.
Much of old Tottenham is gone. Gone are the
" Seven Sisters," the seven elms that stood here in
a circle, with a walnut-tree in their midst, marking,
as tradition would have you believe, the resting-
place of a martyr ; but in their stead is the
beginning of the Seven Sisters' Eoad ; not a
thoroughfare whose romance leaps to the eye.
What these then remote suburbs were like in
1816 may be seen in this charming sketch of
Rowlandson's, where he is found in his more sober
mood. The milestone in the sketch marks four
and three - quarter miles from Shoreditch : this is
therefore a scene at Tottenham, where the tramway
runs nowadays, costermongers' barrows line the
gutters, and crowds press, night and day. Little
enough traffic in Rowlandson's time, evidently,
for the fowls and the pigs are taking their ease
in the very middle of the footpath.

Yet there are still a few vestiges of the old and
the picturesque here. Bruce Grove, hard by, may
be but a name, reminiscent of Robert Bruce and
other Scottish monarchs who once owned a manor
and a castle where suburban villas now cluster
plentifully, and where the modern so-called "Bruce
Castle" is a school; but there are dignified old

OLD ALMSHOUSES 41

red-brick mansions here still, lying back from the
road behind strong walls and grand gates of
wrought iron. The builder has his eye on them,
an Evil Eye that has already blasted not a few,
and with bulging money-bags he tempts the owners
of the others : even as I write they go down before
the pick and shovel.

Old almshouses there are, too, with dedicatory

BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ' ALMSHOUSES, TOTTENHAM.

tablet, complete. The builder and his money-bags
cannot prevail here, you think. Can he not ? My
good sirs, have you never heard of the Charity
Commissioners, whose business it is to sit in their
snug quarters in Whitehall and to propound
"schemes" whereby such old buildings as these
are torn down, their sites sold for a mess of

42 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

pottage, and the old pensioners hustled off to some
new settlement? " But look at the value of the
land," you say : "to sell it would admit of the
scope of the charity being doubled." No doubt;
but what of the original testator's wishes ? I think,
if it were proposed to remove these old almshouses,
the shade of Balthazar Sanchez, the founder,
somewhere in the Beyond, would be grieved.

One Bed well, parson of Tottenham High Cross
circa 1631, and a most diligent Smelfungus, tells
us Balthazar was " a Spanyard born, the first
confectioner or comfit-maker, and the grand master
of all that professe that trade in this kingdom e " ;
and the tablet before-mentioned, on the front of the
old almshouses themselves, tells us something on its
own account, as thus —

" 1600

BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ, Borne in Spayne
in the Cittie of Sherez in Estremadu-
ra, is the Fownder of these Eyght
Almeshowses for the Eeleefe of
Eyght poor men and women of the
Towne of Tattenham High Crasse."

Long may the queer old houses, with their monu-
mental chimney - stalks and forecourt gardens
remain : it were not well to vex the ghost of the
good comfit-maker.

" Scotland Green " is the name of an odd and
haphazard collection of cottages next these aims-
houses, looking down into Tottenham Marshes.
Its name derives from the far-off days when those
Scottish monarchs had their manor-house near by,

EDMONTON 43

and though the weather-boarded architecture of the
cottages by no means dates back to those times,
it is a queer survival of days before Tottenham
had become a suburb ; each humble dwelling a
law to itself, facing in a direction different from
those of its neighbours, and generally approached
by crazy wooden footbridges over what was probably
at one time a tributary of the Lea, now an evil-
smelling ditch where the children of the neighbour-
hood enjoy themselves hugely in making mud-pies,
and by dint of early and constant familiarity
become immune from the typhoid fever that would
certainly be the lot of a stranger.

IX

EDMONTON, to whose long street we now come, has
many titles to fame. John Gilpin may not afford
the oldest of these, and he may be no more than
the purely imaginary figure of a humorous ballad,
but beside the celebrity of that worthy citizen and
execrable horseman everything else at Edmonton
sinks into obscurity.

" John Gilpin was a citizen

Of credit and renown,
A train-band captain eke was he
Of famous London town."

Izaak Walton himself, of indubitable flesh and blood,
forsaking his yard-measure and Fleet Street counter
and tramping through Edmonton to the fishful Lea,

44 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

has not made so great a mark as his fictitious fellow-
tradesman, the draper of Cheapside.

Who has not read of John Gilpin's ride to
Edmonton, in Cowper's deathless verse? Cowper,
most melancholy of poets, made the whole English-
speaking world laugh with the story of Gilpin's
adventures. How he came to write the ballad
it may not be amiss to tell. The idea was suggested
to him at Olney, in 1782, by Lady Austen, who, to
rouse him from one of his blackest moods, related
a merry tale she had heard of a London citizen's
adventures, identical with the verses into which he
afterwards cast the story. He lay awake all that
night, and the next morning, with the idea of
amusing himself and his friends, wrote the famous
lines. He had no intention of publishing them,
but his friend, Mrs. Unwin, sent a copy to the
Public Advertiser. Strange to say, it did not
attract much attention in those columns, and it
was not until three years later, when an actor,
Henderson by name, recited the ballad at Free-
masons' Hall that (as modern slang would put it)
it " caught on." It then became instantly popular.
Every ballad - printer printed, and every artist
illustrated it ; but the author remained unknown
until Cowper included it in a collection of his
works.

There are almost as many originals of John
Grilpin as there are of Sam Weller. There used to
be numbers of respectable and ordinarily dependable
people who were convinced they knew the original
of Sam Weller, in dozens of different persons and in

JOHN GILPIN 45

widely - sundered towns, and the literary world is
even now debating as to who sat as the model for
Squeers. So far back as the reign of Henry the Eighth
the ludicrous idea of a London citizen trying to
ride horseback to Edmonton made people laugh, and
on it Sir Thomas More based his metrical " Merry
Jest of the Serjeant and the Frere." It would be
no surprise to discover that Aristophanes or another
waggish ancient Greek had used the same idea to
poke fun at some clumsy Athenian, and that, even
so, it was stolen from the Egyptians. Indeed, I
have no doubt that the germ of the story is to be
found in the awkwardness of one of Noah's sons
in trying to ride an unaccustomed animal into
the Ark.

The immediate supposititious originals of John
Gilpin were many. Some identified him with a
Mr. Beger, a Cheapside draper, who died in 1791,
aged one hundred. Others found him in Commodore
Trunnion, in Peregrine Pickle, and a John Gilpin
lies in Westminster Abbey. The Gentleman's
Magazine in 1790, five years after Cowper's poem
became the rage, records the death at Bath of a
Mr. Jonathan Gilpin, " the gentleman who was so
severely ridiculed for bad horsemanship under the
title of ' John Gilpin.' " All accidental resemblances
and odd coincidences, without doubt.

But if John had no corporeal existence, the
Bell at Edmonton — at Upper Edmonton, to be
precise — was a very real place, and, in an altered
form, still is. Who could doubt of the man who
ever saw the house ? Is not the present Bell

46 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

real enough, and, for that matter, ugly enough ? and
is not the picture of John, wigless and breathless,
and his coat-tails flying, sufficiently prominent on
the sign ? The present building is the third since
Cowper's time, and is just an ordinary vulgar
London " public," standing at the corner of a shabby
street (where there are no trees), called, with horrible
alliteration, " Gilpin Grove."

Proceed we onwards, having said sufficient of
Gilpin. Off to the right hand turned old Izaak, to
Cook's Ferry and the Bleak Hall Inn by the Lea,
that " honest ale-house, where might be found a
cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty
ballads stuck about the wall." Ill questing it would
be that should seek nowadays for the old inn.
Instead, down by Angel Road Station and the Lea
marshes, you find only factories and odours of the
Pit, horrent and obscene. We have yet to come
to the kernel, the nucleus of this Edmonton. Here
it is, at Lower Edmonton, at the end of many
houses, in a left-hand turning — Edmonton Green ;
the green a little shorn, perhaps, of its old pro-
portions, and certainly by no means rural. On it
they burnt the unhappy Elizabeth Sawyer, the
Witch of Edmonton, in 1621, with the full approval
of king and council : Ahriman perhaps founding
one of his claims to Jamie for that wicked deed.
It was well for Peter Fabell, who at Edmonton
deceived the devil himself, that he practised his
conjuring arts before Jamie came to rule over us,
else he had gone the way of that unhappy Elizabeth ;
for James was of a logical turn of mind, and would

CHARLES LAMB 47

have argued the worst of one who could beat the
Father of Lies at his own game. Peter flourished,
happily for him, in the less pragmatical days of
Henry the Seventh. We should call him in these
matter-of-fact days a master of legerdemain, and
he would dare pretend to no more ; but he was
honoured and feared in his own time, and lies
somewhere in the parish church, his monument
clean gone. On his exploits Elizabethan dramatists
founded the play of the Merry Demi of Edmonton.

The railway and the tramway have between
them played the very mischief with Edmonton
Green and the Wash —

"... the Wash
Of Edmonton so gay" —

that here used to flow athwart the road, and does
actually still so flow, or trickle, or stagnate ; if
not always visible to the eye, at least making its
presence obvious at all seasons to the nose. In the
first instance, the railway planted a station and a
level crossing on the highway, practically in the
Wash ; and then the Tramway Company, in order
to carry its line along the road to Ponder's End,
constructed a very steeply rising road over the
railway. Add to these objectionable details, that of
another railway crossing over the by-road where
Lamb's Cottage and the church are to be found, and
enough will have been said to prove that the Edmon-
ton of old is sorely overlaid with sordid modernity.

Charles Lamb would scarce recognise his Edmon-
ton if it were possible he could revisit the spot, and

48 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

it seems — the present suburban aspect of the road
before us — a curious ideal of happiness he set him-
self: retirement at Edmonton or Ponder's End,
" toddling about it, between it and Cheshunt, anon
stretching on some fine Izaak Walton morning to
Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar, but
walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself
off my legs, dying walking."

Everyone to his taste, of course, but it does not
seem a particularly desirable end. It is curious,
however, to note that this aspiration was, in a sense,
realised, for it was in his sixtieth year that, taking
his customary walk along the London road one day
in December 1834, he stumbled against a stone and
fell, cutting his face. It seemed at the time a slight
injury, but erysipelas set in a few days later, and on
the twenty-seventh of the same month he died. It
was but a fortnight before, that he had pointed out to
his sister the spot in Edmonton churchyard where
he wished to be buried.

Lamb's last retreat — " Bay Cottage " as it was
named, and " Lamb's Cottage " as it has since been
re - christened, "the prettiest, compactest house I
ever saw," says he — stands in the lane leading to
the church ; squeezed in between old mansions, and
lying back from the road at the end of a long
narrow strip of garden. It is a stuccoed little house,
curiously like Lamb himself, when you come to
consider it : rather mean-looking, undersized, and
unkempt, and overshadowed by its big neighbours,
just as Lamb's little talents were thrown into in-
significance by his really great contemporaries. The

CHARLES LAMB

49

big neighbours of the little cottage are even now on
the verge of being demolished, and the lane itself,
the last retreat of old-world Edmonton, is being-
modernised ; so that those who cultivate their Lamb
will not long be able to trace these, his last land-
marks. Already, as we have seen, the Bell has
gone, where Lamb, "seeing off" his visitors on their
way back to London, took a parting glass with
them, stutteringly bidding them hurry when the
c-cu-coach c-came in.

One of the most curious of literary phenomena is
this Lamb worship. Dingy, twittering little London
sparrow that he was, diligent digger-up of Elizabethan
archaisms with which to tune his chirpings, he seems
often to have inspired the warmest of personal
admiration. As the " gentle Elia " one finds him
always referred to, and a halo of romance has been
thrown about him and his doings to which neither he
nor they can in reality lay much claim. Eomance
flies abashed before the picture of Lamb and his
sister diluting down the poet of all time in the
Tales from Shakespeare : Charles sipping gin
between whiles, and Mary vigorously snuffing. Nor
was his wit of the kindly sort readily associated with
the epithet "gentle." It flowed the more readily
after copious libations of gin -and -water, and resolved
itself at such times into the offensive, if humorous,
personalities that were the stock in trade of early
nineteenth-century witlings. His famous witticism
at a card-party on one who had hands not of the
cleanest ("If dirt were trumps, what a hand you'd
have") must have been bred of the juniper berry.
4

5o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Stuttering and blue-lipped the next morning, he was
an object of pity or derision, just according to the
charity of those who beheld him. Carlyle, who
knew Lamb in his latter days, draws him as he was,
in one of those unmerciful pen-portraits he could
create so well : — " Charles Lamb and his sister came
daily once or oftener ; a very sorry pair of phenomena.
Insuperable proclivity to gin in poor old Lamb.
His talk contemptibly small, indicating wondrous
ignorance and shallowness, even when it was serious
and good-mannered, which it seldom was, usually
ill-mannered (to a degree), screwed into frosty
artificialities, ghastly make-believe of wit, in fact
more like ' diluted insanity ' (as I defined it) than
anything of real jocosity, humour, or geniality. A
most slender fibre of actual worth in that poor
Charles, abundantly recognisable to me as to others,
in his better times and moods ; but he was Cockney
to the marrow ; and Cockneydom, shouting * glorious,
marvellous, unparalleled in nature ! ' all his days
had quite bewildered his poor head, and churned
nearly all the sense out of the poor man. He was
the leanest of mankind, tiny black breeches buttoned
to the knee-cap, and no further, surmounting spindle-
legs also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony,
lean, and of a Jew type rather ; in the eyes a kind
of smoky brightness or confused sharpness ; spoke
with a stutter; in walking tottered and shuffled;
emblem of imbecility bodily and spiritual (something
of real insanity I have understood), and yet some-
thing too of human, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully
much enduring. Poor Lamb ! he was infinitely

AN OSTLER'S EPITAPH 51

astonished at my wife and her quiet encounter of
his too ghastly London wit by a cheerful native
ditto. Adieu, poor Lamb ! "

Edmonton Church has lain too near London in
all these years to have escaped many interferences,
and the body of it was until recently piteous with
the doings of 1772, when red brick walls and windows
of the factory type replaced its ancient architecture.
These have now in their turn been swept away, and
good modern Gothic put in their stead, already
densely covered with ivy. The ancient tower still
rises grandly from the west end, looking down upon
a great crowded churchyard ; a very forest of tomb-
stones. Near by is the grave of Charles and Mary
Lamb, with a long set of verses inscribed upon their
headstone.

There was once in this churchyard of Edmonton
a curious epitaph on one William Newberry, ostler to
the Rose and Crown Inn, who died in 1695 from the
effects of unsuitable medicine given him by a fellow-
servant acting as an amateur doctor. The stone
was removed by some clerical prude—

" Hie jacet Newberry, Will
Vitam finivet cum Cochin Pill
Quis administravit ? Bellamy, Sue
Quantum quantitat nescio, scisne tu ?
Ne sutor ultra crepidam."

The feelings of Sue Bellamy will not be envied,
but Sue, equally with William, has long reached
beyond all such considerations, and the Rose and
Crown of that day is no more. There is still,
however, a Rose and Crown, and a very fine building

52 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

it is, with eleven windows in line and wearing a
noble and dignified air. It is genuine Queen Anne
architecture ; the older house being rebuilt only ten
years after the ostler was cut off untimely, as may
be seen by the tablet on its front, dated not only
1705, but descending to the small particular of
actual month and day of completion.

X

THE tramway line, progressing through Edmonton
in single track, goes on in hesitating fashion some
little distance beyond Edmonton Green, and termin-
ates in a last feeble, expiring effort on the open road,
midway between Edmonton and Ponder's End ; like
the railhead of some African desert line halting on
the edge of a perilous country. Where it ends there
stands, solitary, a refreshment house, so like the last
outpost of civilisation that the wayfarer whimsically
wonders whether he had not better provision himself
liberally before adventuring into the flats that lie so
stark and forbidding before him.

It is indeed an uninviting waste. On it the
gipsy caravans halt ; here the sanguine speculative
builder projects a street of cheap houses and generally
leaves derelict " carcases " of buildings behind him ;
here the brick-maker and the market-gardener
contend with one another, and the shooters of
rubbish bring their convoys of dust, dirt, and old
tins from afar. On the skyline ahead are factory

PONDER 'S END 53

chimneys, and to the east — the only gracious note in
the whole scene — the wooded hills of Essex, across
the malodorous Lea,

This desolate tract is bounded by the settlement
of Ponder's End, an old roadside hamlet. " Ponder's
End," says Lamb, "emblematic name, how beautiful!"
Sarcasm that, doubtless, for of what it is emblematic,
and where lies the beauty of either place or name,
who shall discover? The name has a heavily
ruminative or contemplative sound, a little out of
key with its modern note. For even Ponder's End
has been rudely stirred up by the pitchfork of
progress and bidden go forward, and new terraces of
houses and shops — no, not shops, nothing so vulgar ;
" business premises " if you please — have sprung up,
and the oldest inhabitant is distraught with the
changes that have befallen. Where he plodded in
the mud there are pavements ; the ditch into whose
unsavoury depths he has fallen many 'a time when
returning late from the old Two Brewers is filled up,
and the Two Brewers itself has changed from a road-
side tavern to something resplendent in plate-glass
and brilliant fittings. Our typical ancient and his
friends, the market-gardening folk and the loutish
waggoners, are afraid to enter. Nay, even the name
of the village or hamlet, or urban district, or what-
ever the exact slang term of the Local Government
Board for its modern status may be, is not unlikely
to see a change, for to the newer inhabitants it
sounds derogatory to be a Ponder's Ender.

To this succeeds another strip of sparsely-settled
land, and you think that here, at last, the country

54 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

is gained. Vain thought! Enfield Highway, a
populous mile-length, dispels all such ideas, and even
Enfield Wash, where the travellers of old were
content to be drenched in the frequent floods, so
long as they actually escaped with their lives, is
suburban and commonplace. The stretch of road
between the Wash and Waltham Cross still goes by
the shivery name of Freezy water.

Enfield Highway, like Ponder's End, was until
quite recently stodged in sloughs, and resolutely old-
world ; almost as old world indeed as when, in 1755,
Mr. Spencer, the Lord Spencer of a few years later,
came up from the shires in great state with his
bride. Their procession consisted of three chariots,
each drawn by six horses and escorted by two
hundred horsemen. At sight of this cavalcade the
whole neighbourhood was up in arms. The timid
fled, the Jacobites rejoiced and ran off to ring the
church bells in a merry peal, while loyal folks and
brave armed themselves with pitchforks, pokers, and
spades; for all thought the Pretender had come
again and was marching on London.

At Waltham Cross, formerly entered through a
toll-gate, Middlesex is left behind and Hertfordshire
gained. The name of Waltham Cross probably does
not at this period inspire anyone with dread, but
that was the feeling with which travellers approached
it at any time between 1698 and 1780 ; for this was
in all those years a neighbourhood where highway-
men robbed and slew with impunity. Here was the
favourite lurk of those desperate disbanded soldiers
who on the Peace of Eyswick, finding pay and

THE INEVITABLE HIGHWAYMAN 55

occupation gone, banded together, and, building huts
in the coverts of Epping Forest, came forth even in
broad daylight, and, to the number of thirty, armed
with swords and pistols, held up the traffic on this
and the surrounding roads. Even when that for-
midable gang was disposed of by calling out the
Dragoon Guards in a regular campaign against them,
there were others, for in 1722 a London morning
paper stated that the turnpike-men from Shoreditch
to Cheshunt had been furnished with speaking-
trumpets, " as well to give notice to Passengers as
to each other in case any Highwaymen or footpads
are out," and the satisfactory report is added, " we
don't find that any robbery has been committed in
that quarter since they have been furnished with
them, which has been these two months." Was it
not hereabouts, too, that Turpin first met Tom King,
and, taking him for an ordinary citizen, proposed to
rob him ? Ay, and in that self-same Epping Forest,
whose woodlands may even yet be seen, away to
the right-hand, Turpin had his cave. Even so late
as 1775 the Norwich stage was attacked one
December morning by seven highwaymen, three of
whom the guard shot dead. He would perhaps have
finished the whole of them had his ammunition not
failed and he in turn been shot, when the coach was
robbed at leisure by the surviving desperadoes.

56 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

XI

IF the traveller does not know what to expect on
approaching Waltham Cross, then the cross, standing
in the centre of the road, must needs be a pleasant
surprise to him, even though he presently discovers
that they have done a great deal in recent times to
spoil it ; " they " meaning the usual pastors and
masters, the furbishers and titivators of things
ancient and worshipful, applying to such things
their own little nostrums and programmes. But,
woefully re-restored though it be, its crockets and
pinnacles and panellings patched with a stone whose
colour does not match with that of the old work, one
can still find it possible to look upon it with rever-
ence, for among the ancient wayside memorials of
our storied land the beautiful Eleanor Crosses stand
foremost, both for their artistic and their historic
interest. More than any others, they hold the
sentiment and the imagination of the wayfarer, and
their architecture is more complex. The story that
belongs to them is one long since taken to the warm
hearts of the people, and cherished as among the
most touching in all the history of the realm — a
realm rich in stories of a peculiarly heart-compelling
kind.

It is that of Eleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward
the First, who accompanied him to Palestine in 1270,
on his Crusade against the Infidel. History tells
how, on the evening of June 17, 1272, the King
was seated alone and unarmed in a tent of the camp

QUEEN ELEANOR

57

before Acre. It was his birthday, but birthdays
find scant celebration in the tented field, and
Edward on that day was engaged in the sterner
business of receiving proposals of surrender from the
besieged. He had given audience to a messenger
from the Emir of Jaffa, who, having delivered the
letter he had brought, stood waiting. Bending low,
in answering a question the King had put to him, he
suddenly put his hand to his belt, as though to
produce other letters ; but, instead, drew a poisoned
dagger and struck at the King with it. Edward
endeavoured to shield himself, but received a deep
wound in the arm ; then, as the man endeavoured
to strike again, giving him a kick that felled him to
the ground, he wrenched away the would-be assassin's
dagger and plunged it into his body. When the
King's attendants came rushing in, the man was
dead. Fortunate for him it was that he died so
simply, for the imaginations of those who dispensed
the rough justice of the time were sufficiently fertile
to have devised many novel and exquisitely painful
variations of torture for such an one.

The King's wound was serious, and although all
the drugs and balsams in the limited pharmacopoeia
of those times were administered, it grew worse.
Then it was, according to the pretty story univers-
ally received, that the Queen, finding the efforts
of physicians vain, sucked the poison from the
wounded arm of her lord to such good purpose that
he recovered, and sat his charger again within fifteen
days.

Medical criticism on this recorded action of the

58 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

poison could scarce fail of being destructive, and
indeed it is not to be expected that the story of
Eleanor of Castile would be left unassailed in these
days, when history is treated scientifically, and when
all the old and gracious stories are being explained
away or resolved into something repellent and
utterly commonplace. Modern historians have told
us that William Tell is a myth, and that, conse-
quently, the famous incident of the apple could
never have occurred. Eobin Hood, they say, was
equally imaginary, or if any real person existed on
whom that figure of endearing romance was built
up, he had more the attributes of a footpad than
those of the chivalrous outlaw those legends have
made him. They would even take from us Dick
Whittington and his cat. In fact, all these romantic
people are classed with King Arthur, Jack the Giant
Killer, and Little Eed Riding Hood. It is not a
little cruel thus to demolish these glamorous figures,
but historians since Macaulay have been merciless.
It is, therefore, not surprising to read that Eleanor,
instead of being heroic was a very woman, and was
led "weeping and wailing" from the scene when
the surgeons declared that the King's hurt was in-
curable, unless the whole of the poisoned fiesh were
cut away. The cure, says an old chronicler, was
effected by the surgeons, and the romantic story
has in recent times been declared " utterly unworthy
of credit."

Alas ! too, for the gentle and tender character
that has ever been ascribed to Eleanor of Castile ;
for we read that "though pious and virtuous, she

QUEEN ELEANOR

59

was rather grasping," causing scandal by taking part
with Jewish usurers in cozening Christians out of

WALTIIAM CROSS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

their estates. Ancient records, clone on rolls of
sheepskin in mediaeval dog-Latin, and preserved in
the Record Office for all men to see — and read if

60 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

they can — tell how hard a landlord she was, and
how Archbishop Peckham interfered on behalf of
her unfortunate tenants, telling her that reparation
for wrongs done must precede absolution.

And yet, although we allow this to be truth, to
some she must have been winsome and gracious.
Not to the lower herd, almost certainly, for people
below the rank of knights or dames were never, in
those times, thought worthy the least consideration.
To those who more nearly approached her own rank
she may have been the generous personality she has
ever been pictured, although for a true Castilian to
be other than insufferably haughty and arrogant
would seem, if traditions do not lie, to be against
nature. To the King she was evidently all in all,
or how explain the existence of so long and
elaborate a series of crosses raised to the memory
of his chere reine ? Eighteen years after the famous
incident of the poisoned wound the Queen died, on
November 28, 1290. She breathed her last on the
evening of that day at the village of Harby, in
Nottinghamshire, whither she had accompanied the
King on a royal progress he had been making
through the Eastern Counties during the three
preceding months. Parliament in those times was
a perambulating body of lawgivers, following of
necessity the footsteps of the monarch. The King,
therefore, having arranged to stay at his Eoyal
Palace of Clipstone, in Sherwood Forest, at the end
of October, Parliament was summoned to meet there
on the twenty-seventh of that month. Meanwhile,
however, the Queen fell ill of a lingering fever, and

THE QUEEN'S OBSEQUIES 63

for sake of the quiet that could not be obtained in
the neighbourhood of the Court she was housed at
Harby, twenty miles distant. But not all the care
that was hers, nor the syrups and other medicines
detailed in the old accounts, procured in haste from
the city of Lincoln, five miles away, availed to avert
the fatal conclusion of that wasting sickness.

The Queen's body was at once removed to
Lincoln Cathedral, and the funeral procession seems
to have set out from Lincoln city for Westminster
on the fourth day of December. London was not
reached until eleven days later, and the entombment
at Westminster did not take place until the seven-
teenth of the month. Travelling was a slow and
tedious process then, but not necessarily so slow as
this. The reasons for the length of time consumed
between Lincoln and AVestminster were two, and
are found both in the pompous circumstances of
the journey and in the circuitous route taken.
The ordinary route was by Stamford, Huntingdon,
Royston, Puckeridge, and Cheshunt ; but it was
determined that the august procession should pass
through a more frequented part of the country, and
through districts where the Queen had been better
known. Another object was to take some of the
great religious houses on the way, and thus have
suitable places at which to rest. The route chosen,
therefore, included Grantham, Stamford, Geddington,
Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable,
St. Albans, Waltham Abbey, West Cheap, and
Charing. At each of these places the Queen's body
rested, and at each one was subsequently erected a

64 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

memorial cross. This is no place for recounting the
almsgiving, the endowments of charities and monas-
teries, and the payments for tapers and masses for
the repose of her soul. Let it be understood that
all these things were done on a scale of the greatest
magnificence, and that the erection of these twelve
great crosses was but one feature among many in
the means employed to keep her memory alive and
her soul in bliss unending. This last, indeed, was
the principal reason of their building. In these
days one regards the three crosses, that the rage of
rabid men and the slower but scarce less sure fury
of the elements between them have alone left us of
the twelve, as merely beautiful specimens of the
wedded arts of Sculpture and Architecture ; or as
affecting memorials of conjugal love. Those, how-
ever, would be erroneous regards. The crosses were
to attract by their beauty, no doubt ; but their
higher purpose was to inspire the devotional senti-
ment ; their presence by the wayside was to implore
the passers-by to remember the " Queen of Good
Memory," as documents of the time call her, that
they might pray for her. Although they bore no
inscription, they silently bade the traveller " Orate
pro animd" and were, accordingly, consecrated with
full religious ceremonies.

The crosses were not of a uniform pattern,
although many of them seem to have borne strong
likenesses to each other. Nine have so utterly
disappeared that not a single stone of them is
discoverable at this day, but old prints serve to
show, in conjunction with the still existing building

WALTHAM CROSS 67

accounts, their relative size and importance. The
three remaining are those of Geddington, Harding-
stone near Northampton, and this of Waltham.
Waltham Cross stands seventy feet in height. It
cost £95, equal to £1000 of our present money, and
was originally built of stone from the quarries of
Caen, in Normandy, as the lower stage of the work
still shows. The two upper stages and the spirelet
were restored and reconstructed in 1832 at a cost
of £1200, and again, as recently as 1885-92, at
an almost equal expense.

The beautiful old engraving of 1806, reproduced
here, proves into what a dilapidated condition the
Cross had at that time fallen. It would appear to
have been even worse in 1720, when Dr. Stukeley
was commissioned by the Society of Antiquaries to
see that posts were placed round for its protection ;
and in 1757 it was in danger of falling, for Lord
Monson, the then Lord of the Manor of Cheshunt,
was petitioned to build some brickwork round the
base and to set up some other posts. A later Lord
of the Manor, a certain Sir George Fresco tt, in 1795,
with colossal impudence endeavoured to remove it
to his park at Theobalds, and would have done so
had not his workmen found the stone too decayed
to be displaced.

In the old print already referred to, and in the
coaching print of some thirty years later, it will be
noticed that a portion of that old coaching hostelry,
the Falcon, actually abutted upon the Cross. The
inn, indeed, occupied the site of a chantry chapel
adjoining, where prayers for the soul of the Queen

68

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had been said for some two hundred and fifty years
after her -death. It may be suspected that those
prayers, endowments notwithstanding, had grown
somewhat perfunctory after that lapse of time, and
the Queen herself little more than a legend ; and so,
when all Chantries were dissolved under Edward the
Sixth, their revenues seized and the mumbling priests
ejected, the world was well rid of a hoary piece of
humbug. The Falcon was demolished when the
latest restoration was brought to a conclusion, and
a portion of its site thrown into the roadway, so
that the Cross stands once more free from surround-
ing buildings.

In choosing a stone for those parts to be restored,
the gross mistake was made of selecting a brownish-
red stone from the Ketton quarries, in Northants.
The reason for making this selection was that Caen
stone is perishable and that of Ketton particularly
durable ; but in the result the restored Cross wears
to-day a sadly parti-coloured appearance.

XII

THE already named Falcon was not the only hostelry
at Waltham Cross. The Four Swans, whose great
gallows sign still straddles across the highway, writh
the four swans themselves represented in effigy
against the sky, was the other house. There is
always Another in everything, even in Novelettes and
on the Stage, where he or she, as the case may

A COACHING ADVENTURE 69

happen, is generally accorded a capital letter. That
there should always be a rival, that is to say,
Another, shows, I suppose, that competition is a
heaven-sent condition of affairs, and incidentally
that " Trusts " and " Combines " are immoral and a
direct challenge to Providence. That, however, is
another matter. But, in this case, which is " the
other" it would be difficult, if not impossible, to
determine. Whether the Falcon or the Four Swans
was established first cannot be told with certainty,
although if it be true that the Four Swans is built
on the site of the ancient manor-house of Cheshunt,
it seems likely that to this queer rambling old
coaching-inn must be given the honour.

A story used to be told of an adventure here
that might have had unpleasant consequences, had
it not been for the ready wit of the guard attached
to the "York Mail." When the Mail reached the
village and drew up in front of the inn, shortly after
nine o'clock, a quiet, gentlemanly-looking man took
a vacant seat inside, and remained silent and in-
offensive until the coach started on its way to Ware,
when he suddenly became very talkative. Address-
ing a lady present with some absurd remarks, the
other gentlemen turned upon him arid said, if he
did not cease they would put him in the road.
This was no sooner said than he began to adopt a
threatening tone ; but no notice was taken of him,
as Ware was being neared, when he could be better
dealt with than by stopping the coach. When it
came to a halt, the guard was beckoned to and told
quietly what an odd customer was seated within.

7o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

The guard looked inside, and at once recognised the
strange person as a gentleman of that neighbourhood
who had been consigned to a lunatic asylum, and

must have escaped. " Ah ! Mr. F ," he said,

" how are you ? Are you going far down the

road ? " " I'm going," said Mr. F , " to Stamford

to catch that rascal C , who has stolen my estates."

" Why," rejoined the guard, with the well-known
promptitude of his class, " you needn't go any
farther, I've just seen him in the back parlour,
behind the bar." " Have you ? " shouted the mad-
man. " By Jove ! let me find him," and he leapt out
of the coach. " Right away, Bill," sang out the
guard, and the Mail was off. How the people at
Ware dealt with the poor wretch is not recorded.

As this, so far as Eoyston, was a part of the
original great post-road to Scotland, many royal and
noble processions, besides that attendant on the
obsequies of Queen Eleanor, passed of necessity
through Waltham Cross, and the coaching and
posting traffic was of huge dimensions, up to the last
days of the road.

Royal processions and progresses have a way, as
you read them, of being insufferably dull ; hedged
about with formula and rule and precedent surround-
ing the gilded and be-crowned fetish for the time
being, who, generally wrapped up warm in selfishness
and greed, and dealing out lies and condescension,
passes by and affords no interest or amusement to
later generations, who merely yawn when they read
of the dusty old properties, the tinsel and the gold
lace. It is otherwise when the faults and foibles of

JAMES THE FIRST 71

the fetish are known and can be displayed to show
that a monarch is, after all, human ; and sometimes
even a very poor specimen of humanity. James the
First (of England and Sixth of Scotland, as the
tender susceptibilities of Scots put it) came up this
way to his Kingdom of England, on Elizabeth's
death in 1603. He had set out from Edinburgh on
the 5th of April, and only arrived in London on the
7th of May. Abundant and overbrimming loyalty
had kept him long on the road. The noblemen and
gentry of the shires lavished attentions on James
and his following, and festive gatherings enlivened
every manor-house on the way. Many a squire
loaded his estates with encumbrances, in his anxiety
to royally entertain the new sovereign and his
numerous suite, and the story told of one of their
halting-places very eloquently illustrates the sacrifices
made. After staying some days with his host, the
King remarked upon the disappearance of a particu-
larly fine herd of cattle he had noticed in the park
on his arrival, and asked what had become of them ?
As a matter of fact, they had been all slaughtered
for the use of James's hungry Scots, and his host
unwillingly told him so. " Then," said the King
ungraciously, it is time we were going "•; and so, when
the food was exhausted, they went.

So prodigal was the display made for him that
James might almost have thought the country tired
of Elizabeth's long rule, and glad to welcome a new
monarch. He conferred titles with a lavish hand
as he went, and knights - bachelors sprouted up
in every town and village like mustard-and-cress

72 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

after a dewy evening. He came across the Border
mild enough, but by degrees rid himself of the
humility proper to a King of Scots, and as King
of England assumed an imperious air not even
inferior to that of Henry the Eighth himself. Such
an air sat ill upon James, at once constitutionally
weak in body and simultaneously timid and braggart
in disposition. The " British Solomon " his toadies
called him, and indeed he was in many ways the
Superior Person. Educated in all the 'ologies, and
accounting himself in especial a master of theology
and demonology, he was learned and superstitious
at once. Witchcraft he firmly believed possible, and
made it a capital offence, and was thus the prime
cause of many an ill-favoured old woman or eccentric
person being cruelly put to death as warlocks and
wizards. The Duke of Sully, better informed than
James's satellites, or more candid, pronounced him
"the wisest fool in Europe."

At no place was the new monarch so lavishly
entertained as at Theobalds, the princely residence
of Lord Burleigh, whose estates bordered the road
between Waltham Cross and Cheshunt. Who was
the original owner of Theobalds, history does not tell
us. Doubtless some Saxon notable, Theobald by
name, thus immortalised in unilluminative fashion.
In the late Elizabeth's time it had been acquired
by the great Cecil, dead some six years before the
coming of this northern light. Cecil's son, only less
great than his father, now ruled, and received James
right nobly in those magnificent halls his sire had
added, where Elizabeth herself had been royally

AN UNKING L Y KING 73

entertained. Four days he stayed, hunting and
feasting, and left with so profound an admiration
of the place that he never rested until he had ex-
changed the Koyal Palace of Hatfield for it. Cecil
made no bad bargain in the transfer, and in addition
secured much favour and many added dignities,
ending as Earl of Salisbury.

James's passion for the chase explains his eager-
ness to secure Theobalds, surrounded in those times
by far-reaching and ancient woodlands. Epping
Forest and the woods of Waltham lay for miles to
the east, and the green alleys of Enfield Chase and
Northaw (really "north holt," i.e. north wood) to
the south and the north-west.

The figure of James is thus prominent on this
part of the road. By no means an imposing figure,
this King, as he reels in his saddle, or shambles
rather than walks, his weak knees threatening a
collapse, his thin yellow beard scarce disguising a
chin striking the mean between obstinacy and weak
irresolution ; his wide-staring, watery, light-blue eyes
rimmed with red eyelids ; and lips running with the
thin slobber of the drunkard, or rather of the in-
veterate tippler, not honestly drunken but grown
maudlin, babbling and bubbling like a spring. This
poor creature, who pretends to Eight Divine, has the
tense nerves of a hare ; a hunted, hare-like glance
too, when not primed and blusterous with Greek
wine. He has a ludicrously acute sense of personal
danger, and yet chases the deer a-horseback, seated
on a padded saddle and plentifully equipped with
drink. I see him very plainly, though much of the

74 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

great domain of Theobalds be disparked, and land-
marks grown dim and confused, hunting and halloing
in the greenwood, and cursing and raving like a
madman when the quarry escapes him — forgetful,
in the excitement of the moment, of the Solomonic
character he has to sustain — and falling out of his
saddle and biting the grass in frenzy.

But James's domestic character bears more
scrutiny than that of many of his predecessors.
He would have pleased Mr. Squeers, for his " morrils "
(in the common and restricted sense) were distinctly
good — much better than those of the Hebrew Solomon.

It is quite evident that James delighted in his
nickname and failed to discover any hidden vein
of sarcasm in it, for in one of the extravagant
masques he gave in honour of his father-in-law,
Christian the Fourth of Denmark, at Theobalds,
he took the part of that incarnation of Wisdom.
Conceive the gorgeousness and the scandal of the
occasion. Koyal James as Solomon, and no less
royal Christian, his part not stated, seated on a
throne awaiting the Queen of Sheba, coming to
offer precious gifts : attendant upon her, Faith,
Hope, and Charity. The Queen of Sheba, sad to
say, had taken too much to drink, and, there being
no one to advise her to " Mind the step ! " she tripped
over the throne and shot all the gifts, some very
treacly and sticky, into the lap of his Danish
majesty, who rose and essayed a dance with her,
but fell down and had to be taken off to bed, like
many a jolly toper before and since. Then the
Three Virtues, hiccoughing and staggering, tried

THE ROMAN URN

75

their parts, but nature forbade, and they retired
very sick. The spectacle of the drunken endeavour-
ing to carry off the drunk must have been vastly
entertaining to His Majesty, himself too well seasoned
to be quite helpless. It seems probable that, picking
an unsteady way among the courtiers who strewed
the floor, he saw himself to bed without the aid of
chamberlains and grooms-in-waiting and their kind.
James the First and Sixth died at Theobalds in
1625, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, cut off in
part by the agency of Greek wine. The halls where
he revelled, and where between whiles he piously
translated the Psalms, are gone, dismantled under
the rule of the Commonwealth, a period especially
fatal to Royal Palaces. The site of the Palace is
commemorated by " Theobalds Square." The modern
mansion of Theobalds is a mile distant.

XIII

AN inn bearing the odd name of the Roman Urn
stands by the wayside on entering the hamlet of
Cheshunt called Crossbrook Street. An urn in a
niche of the wall over the front door bears the
inscription " Via Una," and is witness to the finds of
Roman remains close by. It gives point to the old
belief that Cheshunt itself was a station on that
Roman road, the Ermine Street.

Turner's Hill, Cheshunt, and Cheshunt Wash are
all one loosely -joined stretch of houses : recent houses,

76

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

houses not so recent, dignified old mansions, and
undignified second- and third-rate shops. It is an
'effect of shabbiness, of a halting two ways, between
remaining as it was and developing into a modern
suburb. The road itself shares this uncertainty, for
it is neither a good country highway nor a decent
town street, being bumpy macadam and gravel
alternating, and full of holes. Cheshunt's modern
fame is for roses, and the nurseries where they are
cultivated spread far and wide. Its ancient fame

THE ROMAN UKN, CHESHUNT.

was not so pleasing, for the Wash, when the Lea was
in flood, made Cheshunt a place to be dreaded, as we
learn from the diary of Ralph Thoresby, who travel-
led prayerfully this way between 1680 and 1720.
Coming up from Yorkshire to London on one
occasion, he found the washes upon the road near
Ware swollen to such a height that travellers had to
swim for their lives, one poor higgler being drowned.
Thoresby prudently waited until some country-

A HAUNTED HOUSE

79

people came and conducted him over the meadows,
to avoid the deepest part of Cheshunt Wash. Even
so, he tells how " we rode to the saddle-skirts for a
considerable way, but got safe to Waltham Cross."

Cheshunt possesses a local curiosity in the shape
of " Cheshunt Great House," a lonely mansion of red
brick, standing in a meadow within what was once a
moated enclosure. It is a gloomy old place belong-
ing to the time of Henry the Seventh, but altered
and patched to such a degree that even the genuine
parts of it look only
doubtfully authentic.
A large central hall
with hammer - beam
carved roof is the
feature of the interior,
hung with tapestry,
suits of armour, and
portraits of historic
personages, in which
are mixed together
real antiquities and

forgeries of such age that they even are antique.
Among them is a rude and battered rocking-horse,
said to have been used by Charles the First when an
infant.

Obviously Cheshunt Great House should be
haunted, and is ! Cardinal Wolsey's is the unquiet
shade that disturbs the midnight hours beneath this
roof, lamenting the more or less authentic murders
he is said to have perpetrated here. There is not,
of course, the slightest foundation for these wild

CHARLES THE FIRSTS ROCKING-HORSE.

So THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

stories, and the great Cardinal, so far as Cheshunt is
concerned, leaves the court without a stain on his
character.

But we must hasten onward to Ware, halted,
however, in half a mile, at Turnford, a place for-
gotten by most map-makers. Writers of guide-books,
too, pass it coldly by. And indeed, if you be of the
hurrying sort, you may well pass and never know
the individual existence of the hamlet ; so close are
Cheshunt on the one hand and Wormley on the
other. As the poet remarks —

" Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air " ;

and Turnford is a modest place, consisting, all told,
of an old residence or so, a farmstead, and the Bull
Inn : the sign showing a bull's head with a remark-
ably coy expression. One no longer splashes through
the ford that gave the place its name ; a bridge has
long since replaced it.

Why, it may be asked, linger over Turnford ?
Because here, in some lowly cot not now to be
identified, somewhere about the year 1700, was
born, of the usual poor but honest parents, one
who might have been truly great in his profession
had not the accursed shears of Fate cut him off
before he had time to develop himself. I speak of
16 Dr." William Shelton, apothecary and highwayman.
William was at an early age apprenticed to an
apothecary at Enfield, and presently distinguished
himself in an endeavour to elope with the apothe-
cary's sister, an elderly charmer by no means

AN UNFORTUNATE HIGHWAYMAN 81

averse from being run away with. The attempt
miscarried, and our poor friend was soundly
cudgelled for his pains. His second enterprise,
the carrying off of a widow's daughter, was more
fortunate. The runaways were married at the Fleet,
and afterwards settled at Enfield, where, with the
aid of his wife's fortune, Shelton eked out a living
while trying to develop a practice. Tiring, after
a while, of this, he obtained an appointment as
surgeon in Antigua, but although generally liked
in that island, he was obliged to return home on
account of some wild escapades. He then settled
in succession at Buntingford and Braughing, but
doctors were at a discount at those places, and so,
like many another wild spirit, he took to the road.
A good horse and a reliable pair of pistols did more
for him than his dispensary, and he prospered for
a little while. There is no knowing to what
eminence he might have risen — for he robbed with
grace and courtesy — had not the authorities seized
him one evil day. He made a dignified exit at
Tyburn in 1732.

At Wormley, a roadside village of nondescript
character, the New River is crossed, bringing us
into Broxbourne, lying in a dip of the road, with
that famous Cockney resort, Broxbourne Gardens,
off to the right, by the river Lea. The Gardens
themselves are as popular as ever, but the medicinal
spring — the "rotten-egg water" is the eloquently
descriptive name of it — has fallen into neglect.

The traveller along the highroad has left
Broxbourne behind before he has quite discovered
6

82 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

lie has reached it, and comes into Hoddesdon
unawares. Broxbourne, where the " brocks," or
badgers, were once plentiful enough to give a name
to the little stream running into the Lea, is indeed a
much more shy and retiring place than those who
on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays visit the
tea-gardens aforesaid have any idea of. This is
by way of a testimonial. Hoddesdon, too, which
to be sure is not a tiny village like Broxbourne,
but quite a little town, is altogether delightful.
It has not been modernised, and its inhabitants still
obtain their water in pailsful from the public pump
in the middle of the broad street, which remains
much as it was when the Cambridge "Telegraph"
came through, and when the Newmarket and
Bishop Stortford traffic branched off to the right
in the midst. To this day most of its old inns
remain, clustering round the fork of the roads : the
Bull, its gabled porch and projecting sign quickening
the traveller's pace as he sees it afar ; the Salisbury
Arms, the Maiden's Head, the Swan.

The Bull is a famous house, finding, as it does,
a mention in Prior's "Down Hall." It was in 1715
that Matthew Prior, one of the most notable poets
of his day, and sometime Ambassador at the Court
of Versailles, travelled this road to Down Hall, near
Hatfield Broadoak. His "chariot" halted at the
Bull, as he tells us—

" Into an old inn did this equipage roll,
At a town they call Hodsdon, the sign of the Bull,
Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway,
And into a puddle throws mother of tea."

PRIOR AND HODDESDON 85

Nymph and urn and puddle are gone long since,
and where they were placed there stands at this
day the ugly modern building that Hoddesdon
folk call the "Clock House": really a fire-engine
house with a clock-tower ; the tower surmounted
by a weather-vane oddly conjoining the character-
istics of a fiddler, a Sagittarius, and a dolphin.
Inquiry fails to discover what it symbolises.
Before ever the nymph or the present building
occupied this site, there stood here the wayside
chapel of St. Catherine, whose ancient bell hangs
in the clock-tower.

Prior writes as though the Bull had long been
familiar to him, but his intimate touches of the life
and character of an inn came, doubtless, from his
own youthful observation ; for his uncle had been
landlord of the Kummer at Charing Cross, where
as a boy he had been a waiter and general help.
Doubtless he had heard many an old frequenter
of the Rummer put questions similar to these he
asks : —

" ' Come here, my sweet landlady ! how do you do 1
Where's Cic'ly so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue ?
And where is the widow that lived here below ?
And the other that sang, about eight years ago ?
And where is your sister, so mild and so dear,
Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear ? '

'By my troth,' she replies, 'you grow younger, I think.

And pray, sir, what wine does the gentleman drink 1

But now, let me die, sir, or live upon trust,

If I know to which question to answer you first,

For things since I saw you most strangely have varied —

The ostler is hanged, and the widow is married ;

86 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse ;
And Cic'ly went off with a gentleman's purse ;
And as to my sister, so mild and so dear,
She has lain in the churchyard full many a year.'"

What a sorry catalogue of changes and dis-
asters !

A mile or more distant, along the Bishop Stort-
ford road, is the gatehouse of the famous Eye House,
its clustered red-brick chimneys and thick walls still
left to remind the historically-minded of that Eye
House Plot of 1681 which was to have ended
Charles the Second, and his brother, the Duke of
York, on their way past from Newmarket to London.
Although the Bishop Stortford road does not concern
us, the house is alluded to in these pages because it
now contains that notorious piece of furniture, the
Great Bed of Ware.

Hoddesdon gives place to Amwell, steeply down-
hill. The village is properly " Great Amwell," but
ho one who knows his Lamb would think of calling
it so, although there is a " Little Amwell " close at
hand. To the Lambs it was just "Amwell," and
that is sufficient for us. Moreover, like so many
places named " Great," it is now really very small.
It is, however, exceedingly beautiful, with that
peculiarly park-like beauty characteristic of Hertford-
shire. The old church, also of the characteristically
Hertfordshire type, stands, charmingly embowered
amid trees, on a bank overlooking the smoothly-
gliding stream of the New Eiver, new-born from its
source in the Chadwell Spring, and hurrying along
on its beneficent mission toward the smoke and fog

WARE 87

of London. Two islands divide the stream ; one of
them containing a monument to Sir Hugh Myddelton,
and a stone with lines from Scott, the " Quaker poet

of Amwell," commencing—

"Am well, perpetual be thy stream,
Nor e'er thy spring be less."

An aspiration which, let us hope, will be fulfilled.

XIV

ALTHOUGH to hurry past spots so interesting and
so beautiful looks much like the act of a Vandal,
our business is with the road, and linger we must
not ; and so, downhill again, by the woods of Charley
—or "Charl-eye" as the country folk insist on
calling them — we come to a vantage-point overlook-
ing Ware ; an old town of many maltings, of the
famous Bed aforesaid, and of Johnny Gilpin's ride.
Fortunate are those who come thus in view of Ware
upon some still golden afternoon of summer, when
the chimes from the old church-tower are spelling
out the notes of that sentimental old song, " Believe
me, if all those endearing young charms." Time and
tune conspire to render Ware romantic.

The town takes its name from the weir or dam
built across the Lea by invading Danes in the year
896. Coming up the Lea in a great flotilla of what
historians call ships, more correctly perhaps to be

88 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

named sailing-barges, they halted here, and, design-
ing a fort beside the dam they built, imagined them-
selves secure. Around them in the Lea valley
between Ware and Hertford stretched the great
lake their dam had created, and all King Alfred's
men could not by force dislodge them.

Can you not find it possible to imagine that

great King — that King truly great in counsels both

of war and peace, that contriver and man of his

hands — on these Amwell heights and looking down

upon that Danish fortress and its ceinture of still

water, with twice a hundred prows lying there,

proudly secure ? Truly, despite the dark incertitude

of history on these doings, we may clearly see that

monarch. He knits his brows and looks upon the

country spread out beneath him : just as you may

look down to-day upon the valley where the Lea and

the railway run, side by side. He — we have said it

with meaning — is a contriver ; has brains of some

quality beneath that brow ; will not waste his men

in making glorious but wasteful attacks upon the

foe : they shall work — so he wills it — not merely

fight ; or, working, fight the better for King and

Country. Accordingly, his army is set to digging a

great channel down this selfsame valley ; a channel

whose purport those Danes, lying there, do by no

means comprehend ; nor, I think, many even in this

host of the great Alfred himself; for the spy has

ever watched upon the doings of armies, and he who

keeps his own counsel is always justified of his

reticence.

This great ditch, then, excavated over against

ALFRED THE GREAT

the camp and harbour of the sea-rovers, is therefore
inexplicable, and doubtless the subject of much jest
among the enemy : jesting that dies away presently,
when, the excavation completed, it is found to touch
the river above and below the weir, and indeed to
be designed to drain away the Lea from its old
channel and so steal away those cherished water-
defences.

With what rejoicings Alfred turned the stream
into this artificial course we know not, nor anything
of the Saxon advance when the old channel ran dry
and the Danish war-fleet presently lay stranded ;
the black hulls canted in all manner of ridiculous
and ineffective angles ; the sails with the cog-
nisance of the raven on them flapping a farewell
to the element they were to know no more. Only
this we know, that the Danish host were forced to
fly across the country to Cambridge and the
fens ; those unfailing resorts of fugitives in the
long ago.

Alfred probably burnt the deserted fleet ; but
there may yet lie, somewhere in this pleasant valley
between Hertford and Ware, deep down in im-
memorial ooze and silt, the remains of those hapless
craft.

Ware, seen from a distance, is a place of singular
picturesqueness ; its Dutch-like mass of mellow red
roofs endowed with a skyline whose fantastic ap-
pearance is due to the clustered cowls of the four-
score malthouses that give the old town a highly
individual character. Here, as elsewhere, the sunset
hour touches the scene to an unearthly beauty : only

92 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

here those slanting cowls assume the last note of
melodramatic significance, to which, ordinarily, in the
broad eye of day, they are by no means entitled ;
being just so many ventilators to buildings in whose
dark recesses is carried on the merely commercial
work of drying the malt of which it is fondly assumed
our beer is made.

The town, when you come to it, resolves itself
into zigzag streets, coal-dust, and bargees. It is a
very back-door kind of entrance you find, coming
downhill, past a railway goods-yard and a smelly
waterside with wharves and litter, where solemn
horses stolidly drag barges and railway-trucks, and
modern Izaak Waltons, sublime in faith, diligently
"fysshe with an angle," with ill results. What they
seek, these hapless sportsmen, is known only to them-
selves. Is it the festive tiddler, dear to infantile
fisherfolk, or do they whip the water for the lordly
trout, the ferocious pike, the grey mullet, or the
carp ? I know not ; but what they find is the Old
Boot, the discarded hat, the derelict gamp ; in short,
the miscellaneous floatable refuse of Hertford. To
see one of these brothers of the angle carefully
playing what ultimately discloses itself as a ragged
umbrella affords one of the choicest five minutes that
life has to offer.

Crossing an iron bridge over this fishful stream,
you are in Ware. To the left stands the old
Saracen's Head, now a little out of date and
dreamy, for it is the veritable house where the
principal coaches changed horses, and it has re-
mained outwardly the same ever since. Here it was

THE GREAT BED OF WARE 93

that the Great Bed of Ware stood for many years,
conferring fame upon the town until 1869, when it
was spirited away to the Rye House, there to be
made a show of.

He wTho would correctly rede the riddle of the
Great Bed would be a clever man, for its history is
so confounded with legend that to say where the one
begins and the other ends is now impossible. The
Bed is a huge four-poster of black oak, elaborately
carved with Renaissance designs, and is now twelve
feet square, having been shorn of three feet of its
length by a former landlord of the Saracen's Head.
The date, 1463, painted on the head is an ancient
and impudent forgery intended to give verisimilitude
to the legend of this monumental structure's origin.
This story tells how it was the work of one Jonas
Fosbrooke, a journeyman carpenter, who presented
it to Edward the Fourth " for the use of the royal
family or the accommodation of princes, or nobles,
or for any great occasion." The King, we are told,
was highly pleased with this co-operative bedstead,
and pensioned the ingenious Fosbrooke for life ; but
history, curiously, fails to tell us of royal or any other
families herding together in this way. The legend
then goes on to tell how, not having been used for
many years by any noble persons, it was put to use
when the town was very full of strangers. These
unfortunate plebeian persons found it anything but
a bed of roses, for they were tormented throughout
the night by the snobbish and indignant ghost of
Jonas, who objected to anyone beneath the rank of a
knight-bachelor sleeping in his bed, and savagely

94 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

pinched all who could not claim gentility. This
weird ghost-story was probably invented by the
landlords of the several inns in which the Bed has
been housed to account for a vigorous and hungry
race of fleas that inhabited the old four-poster, and
must have been originated at a very early date, for
on it hangs the story of Harrison Saxby, Master of
Horse to Henry the Eighth. Saxby fell violently in
love with the daughter of a miller near Ware, and
swore he would do anything to win her from her
many other suitors. The King, passing through the
town, heard of this and promised to give her (those
were autocratic times !) to him who should sleep in
the Great Bed, and, daring all that the ferocious
apparition of Fosbrooke could do, should be found
there in the morning. All save the valorous Saxby
held back, but he determined that no disembodied
spirit should come between him and his love, and,
duly tucked in, was left to sleep — no, not to sleep,
for the powers of darkness were exalted to con-
siderable purpose in the night, and when day
dawned the rash Saxby was discovered on the
floor, covered with bruises. If we seek rather the
practical joker than the supernatural visitant to
poor Saxby, we shall probably be on the right
quest.

The Great Bed was not always housed at
the Saracen's Head. Coming originally from
Ware Priory, it was next at the Crown, where
it remained until that old house was pulled
down, in 1765, being in turn transferred to the
Bull.

OLD-TIME WARE 95

Ware was always a place of great traffic in the
long ago. Railways have altered all that, and it is
now a gracious old town, extraordinarily rich in the
antique entries of ancient hostelries disappeared so
long since that their very signs are forgot. As you
go along its High Street there are between twenty
and thirty of these arched entries countable, most of
them relics of that crowded era of road-faring when
Ware was a thoroughfare town at the end of a day's
journey from London on the main road to the North.
It was, in the words of an Elizabethan poet, "the
guested town of Ware," and so remained for centuries,
even when day's journeys grew longer and longer,
and until the road became an obsolete institution.
Some of these entries, on the other hand, always
were, and others early became, features in the
warehouse premises of the old maltsters, for Ware has
ever been a place dedicated to the service of John
Barleycorn.

Long centuries ago, ere railways were dreamt of,
this was the great warehousing place of the malt
from five neighbouring counties. It came in vast
quantities by road and by river from up country, and
was stored here, over against the demands of the
London brewers ; being sent to town chiefly by the
river Lea. The Lea and its ready passage to London
built up this distinctive trade of Ware : the railway
destroyed it, and the maltsters' trade exists here
nowadays only because it always has been here and
because to utterly kill its local habitation would be
perhaps impossible. But it is carried on with a
difference, and malt is not so much brought and

96 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

warehoused here as made on the spot. Many of the
old houses in which the old-established maltsters
reside, adjoining their own warehouses, in the good
old style absolutely obsolete in other places, are of
early eighteenth century date, and rich in exquisite
moulded plaster ceilings and carved oak panelling.
One at least dates back to 1625, and is nothing less
in appearance than the home of an old prince of
commerce.

To have an opportunity of inspecting this is a
privilege not lightly to be valued. On one side of
the entry, and over the archway, is the residence, and
on the other the old-world counting-house, with a
narrow roadway between for the waggons to and
from the maltings at the farther end. The maltings
themselves are rebuilt and fitted with modern
appliances, but they strike the only note out of key
with the general harmony of the place, and, even so,
they are not altogether unpleasing, for they are
earnest of trade still brisk and healthy, in direct
descent from days of old. Beyond the maltings are
old walled gardens where peaches ripen, and velvet
lawns and queer pavilions overhanging the river Lea :
the whole, from the entry in the High Street, down
the long perspective to the river, embowered in
flowers.

For the rest, Ware commands much interest, not
greatly to be enlarged upon here. The church-
tower, rising nobly above the roof-tops of the town,
amid a thickly clustered group of oast-house cowls,
the interior of the building, noble beyond the
common run ; the so-called " John Gilpin's House " ;

WADE'S MILL 97

the river scenery up the delightful valley to Hertford :
all these things are to be seen and not adequately
written about in this place.

XV

UPHILL goes the road out of Ware, passing the
Royston Crow Inn and some old cottages on the
outskirts. The two miles between this and Wade's
Mill form the dividing-line between the valleys of
the Lea and the Rib, and consequently the way, after
climbing upwards, has to go steeply down again.
The Sow and Pigs is the unusual name of an inn
standing on the crest of the hill before descending
into Wade's Mill. Who was Wade of the mill that
stands to this day in the hollow where the little
stream called the Rib runs beneath the highway ?
History, imperial, national, or parochial, has nothing to
tell us on this head. Perhaps — nay, probably — there
never was a Wade, a person so-named ; the original
mill, and now the hamlet that clusters in the bottom,
taking its name from the ford— the ford, or water-
splash, or " wade "-—that was here before ever a bridge
was built. The parish of St. Nicholas-at-Wade,
beside the channel that formerly divided the Isle of
Thanet from Kent, obtained its name from the ford
at that point, and in like manner derives the name
of Iwade, overlooking the King's Ferry entrance to
Sheppey.
7

98 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

The hamlet of Wade's Mill is a product of the
coaching age. Before folks travelled in any large
numbers there stood only the mill in the hollow ; but,
as road-faring progressed, there at length rose the
Feathers Inn beside the way, and by degrees a dozen or
so cottages to keep it company. Here they are still ;
standing, all of them, in the parish of Thundridge,
whose old church, a mile distant, is now in ruins.
The new church is built on the height overlooking
Wade's Mill, and may be noticed in the illustration
on the following page.

Steeply rising goes the road out of this sleepy
hollow ; passing, when half-way up the hill, a mean
little stone obelisk perched on a grassy bank. This
is a memorial to Thomas Clarkson, a native of
Wisbeach, and marks the spot where in his youth
he knelt down and vowed to dedicate his life to the
abolition of the slave trade. It was placed here in
1879 by Arthur Giles Puller, of Youngsbury, in the
neighbourhood. Clarkson was born in 1760, the
son of the Rev. John Clarkson, Headmaster of
Wisbeach Free Grammar School. He graduated at
Cambridge in 1783, and two years later gained the
first prize in the Latin Essay competition on the
subject of " Slavery and Commerce of the Human
Species, particularly the African." This success
finally fixed his choice of a career, and he forthwith
set afoot an agitation against the slave trade. In
an introduction to the wealthy William Wilberforce,
he succeeded in enlisting the support of that phil-
anthropist, to whom the credit of abolishing the
nefarious traffic is generally given. A Committee

CLARKSON

99

was formed to obtain the passing of an Abolition
Bill through Parliament ; an object secured after
twenty years' continued agitation and strenuous
work on the platform. Clarkson's health and sub-
stance were alike expended in the effort, but he
was not eventually without reward for his labours,

CLAKKSON'S MONUMENT.

a recompense in subscriptions to which he seems
to have looked forward in quite a business-like
way ; more soothing than Wordsworth's pedestrian
sonnet beginning—

" Clarkson, it was an obstinate hill to climb ;
How toilsome, nay, how dire it was."

ioo THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Doubtless he argued the labourer was worthy of his
hire.

Abolition in the West Indian Islands followed,
and then the Emancipation Act of 1833, liberating
800,000 slaves and placing the sum of twenty
millions sterling, as compensation, into the pockets of
Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow slave-owners. That
sturdy beast of burden, the British taxpayer, of
course paid for this expensive burst of sentiment.
Clarkson, already an old man, and weary with his
long labours, received the Freedom of the City of
London in 1839, and died in his eighty-seventh year,
in 1846.

Midway between the hamlets of High Cross and
Collier's End, at the second of the two left-hand
turnings sign-posted for " Eowney Abbey and the
Mundens," is the other hamlet of Standon Green
End — if the two cottages and one farmhouse in
a by-lane may so be dignified. Some three hun-
dred yards along this lane, in the centre of a
meadow, stands the singular monument known in
all the country round about as the " Balloon Stone,"
a rough block of sandstone, surrounded by an iron
railing, placed here to record the alighting on this
spot of the first balloon that ever ascended in
England. Tradition still tells of the terror that
seized the rustics when they saw " a summat " drop-
ping out of the sky, and how they fled for their
lives.

On lifting a hinged plate, the astonishing facts
of this antique aeronautical adventure may be found
duly set out in an amusingly grandiloquent inscription,

THE "BALLOON STONE" 101

engraved on a bronze tablet let into the upper part
of the stone—

" Let Posterity Know
And Knowing be Astonished

That

On the 15 Day of September 1784

Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany

The first Aerial Traveller in Britain

Mounting from the Artillery Ground

in London

And

Traversing the Regions of the Air
For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes,

In this Spot

Eevisited the Earth.

On this Rude Monument

For Ages be Recorded
That Wondrous Enterprise

Successfully atchieved

By the Powers of Chemistry

And the Fortitude of Man

That Improvement in Science

Which

The Great Author of all Knowledge

Patronising by His Providence

The Invention of Mankind

Hath graciously permitted

To their Benefit

And
His own Eternal glory."

"This Plate
A facsimile of the Original

One was placed here

in the month of November

1875 by Arthur Giles

Puller of Youngsbury."

Collier's End is a wayside hamlet of a few timber-
framed and plaster cottages, leading to Puckeridge,

102 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

where the ways to Cambridge divide : one going by
Buntingford, Koyston, and Melbourn ; the other by
Braughing, Barkway, Barley, and Fowlmere, meeting
again at Harston in another nineteen miles. Away
to the left, between Collier's End and Puckeridge, is
St Edmund's College, a Koman Catholic seminary.

Puckeridge itself, standing where the roads
branch, grew in the old road-faring days from a
tiny hamlet to be considerably larger than its mother-
parish of Standon, a village nearly two miles distant,
to the right-hand. That it developed early is quite
evident in its two old inns, the fifteenth century
Falcon, and the Old George, scarcely a hundred years
younger.

XVI

WE will first take the right-hand road to Cambridge,
by Barkway, for that would appear in early days to
have been the favourite route. Braughing, the first
village on this route, is soon reached, lying down
below the highway beside the river Kib, with the
usual roadside fringe of houses. The local pro-
nunciation of the place-name is " Braffing."

The road now begins to climb upwards to the
crest of the Chilterns at Barley, passing the small
hamlets of Quinbury and Hare Street, and through
a bold country of rolling downs to Barkway, whose
name, coming from Saxon words meaning " a way
over the hill," is descriptive of its situation. Few
signs of habitation are seen on the way, and those

BARK WAY 103

at great distances ; Great and Little Hormead and
Ansty peering down upon the road from distant
hillsides.

Since the coaches left the road, Barkway has
gone to sleep, and dreams still of a bygone century.
At the beginning of its broad street there stands the
old toll-house, with the clock even yet in its gable
that marked the flight of time when the Cambridge
" Telegraph " passed by every day, at two o'clock in
the afternoon ; and old houses that once were inns
still turn curiously gabled frontages to the street.
The Wheatsheaf, once the principal coaching house,
still survives ; outside it a milestone of truly monu-
mental proportions, marking the thirty-fifth mile
from London. It stands close upon six feet in
height, and besides bearing on its face a bold
inscription, setting forth that it is thirty-five miles
from London and sixteen from Cambridge, shows
two shields of arms, one of them bearing a crescent,
the other so battered that it is not easily to be
deciphered. This is one of a series of milestones
stretching between this point and Cambridge ; a series
that has a history. It seems that Dr. William
Mouse, Master of Trinity Hall, and a Mr. Robert
Hare, left between them in 1586 and 1599 the sum
of £1600 in trust to Trinity Hall, the interest to be
applied to mending the highway along these sixteen
miles ; as the Latin of the original document puts it,
"in et circa villam nostram Cantcibrigise prsecipue
versus Barkway." Whatever Trinity Hall may have
done for the repair of the road in the hundred
and twenty-six years following the bequest, there

104 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

were certainly no milestones along its course until
1725, when Dr. William Warren, the then Master,
set up on October 20th the first five, starting from
the church of Great St. Mary in Cambridge Market
Square. On the 25th June, in the following year,
another five stones were placed in continuation, and
the next year another five. The sixteenth was not
placed until 29th May 1728. Of this series the
fifth, tenth, and fifteenth were about six feet in
height, with the Trinity Hall arms carved on them ;
in heraldic jargon described as " sable, a crescent in
fess ermine, with a bordure engrailed of the second."
The others were originally small, with merely the
number of miles engraved on them, but were replaced
between 1728 and 1732 by larger stones, each
bearing the black crescent ; as may be seen to this
day.

These stones, very notable in themselves, and
more so from the open and exposed character of the
road, have not only the interest of the circumstances
already narrated, but gain an additional notability
in the fact that, excluding those set up by the
Eomans, they are the earliest milestones in England.
Between Koman times and the date of these examples
the roads knew no measurement, and miles were a
matter of repute. It was not until the Turnpike Act
of 1698 that, as part of their statutory obligations,
Turnpike Trusts were always bound not only to
maintain the roads on which they collected tolls,
but to measure them as well, and to set up a stone
at every mile.

The road between Barkway and Barley is a

BAP LEY 107

constant succession of hills ; steep descents, and
correspondingly sharp rises, with the folds of the
Chilterns, bare in places and in others heavily
wooded, rising and falling for great distances on
either hand. It was while ascending Barkway Hill
on the up journey that the " Lynn Union," driven
by Thomas Cross, was involved in a somewhat
serious affair. Three convicts were being taken to
London in charge of two warders, and the whole
party of five had seats on the roof. As the coach
slowed to a walking pace up the ascent, one of the
gaol-birds quietly slipped off at the back, and was
being followed by the other two when attention was
drawn to their proceedings. The principal warder,
who was on the box-seat, was a man of decision.
He drew a pistol from his pocket, and, cocking it,
said, " If you do not immediately get up I'll shoot
you ! " The one who had already got down, there-
upon, with a touching faith in the warder's marks-
manship, returned to his place, and the others
remained quiet. They finished the remainder of the
journey handcuffed. It is, indeed, surprising that
they were not properly secured before.

The road on to Barley is of a switchback kind,
finally rising to the ridge where Barley is perched,
overlooking a wild treeless country of downs.
Barley is a little village as thoroughly agricultural
as its name hints, and consists of but a few houses,
mostly thatched, with a not very interesting church
on a by-way, and a very striking inn, the Fox and
Hounds, on the main road. It is the sign of the inn,
rather than the house itself, that is so notable, for it

io8 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

is one of those gallows signs, stretching across the
road, that are now becoming so few. The illustration
sufficiently describes its quaint procession of fox,
hounds, and huntsmen, said to have been placed here
in allusion to a fox that took refuge in a dog-kennel
of the inn.

If the name of Barley hints strongly of agri-
cultural pursuits, it does not by any means derive it
from that kind of grain. Its earliest Saxon name is
" Berle," coming from the words " beorh " and " lea,"
and meaning a cleared space in a forest. Barley,
in fact, stands on the final ridge where the Chiltern
Hills end and the East Anglian heights and the
forest of Essex begin, overlooking a valley between
the two where the trees fell back and permitted a
way through the primeval woods.

The restored and largely rebuilt church contains
little of interest, but in the churchyard lies one
whose career claims some notice. There the passing
stranger may see a simple stone cross, bearing the
words, "Heinrich, Count Arnim. Born May 10th,
1814. Died October 8th, 1883." Beside him lies
his wife, who died in 1875. The story of Count
Arnim is one of political enthusiasms and political
and personal hatreds. One of the greatest nobles
in conservative Germany, he early developed Radical
ideas, and joined Kossuth in his struggle for
Hungarian liberty, refusing to desert that ill-fated
cause, and disregarding the call of his own country
to arms. The neglect of this feudal duty rendered
his vast estates liable to forfeiture, and placed him
in danger of perpetual confinement in a military

A NOBLE EXILE 109

prison ; a danger aggravated by the personal and
bitter animosity of the all-powerful Bismarck, and
the hatred of the relatives of two antagonists whom
he had slain in duels. To escape this threatened
lifelong imprisonment he fled to England, and, after
much privation, established a school of fencing and
physical exercise, under the assumed name of Major
Loeffler. In the meanwhile he had married a
German governess. His association with Barley
arose from the then Kector resorting to his school
for a course of exercise, and becoming in time a
fast friend, to whom the Count disclosed his iden-
tity. The Kector interested himself in Arnim's
fortunes, and went so far as to write to the German
Emperor on behalf of his son, then growing to
manhood. As a result of these efforts young Arnim
was permitted to enter the German Army and to
enjoy his father's estates. Unfortunately his mother
accompanied him, and as, according to the savage
notions of German society, she was not of noble
birth and not ennobled by marriage, she was re-
stricted to the servants' hall at every place her son
visited, while he was received in the highest circles.
Count Arnim had, in his long residence in England,
adopted the sensible views prevailing here, and
indignantly recalled his son. " I would rather," he
said in a noble passage, " I would rather have my
son grow up a poor man in England, in the service
of his adopted country, than as a rich man in the
service of his Fatherland, where he would have to
be ashamed of his mother."

It was his friendship with the Rector that made

no THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the Count choose this as the resting-place of his
wife and himself. His body was brought by train
to Buntingford, and thence by road, being buried
by the light of torches at midnight, after the old
German custom.

XVII

A MILE beyond Barley the road leaves Hertfordshire
and enters Essex, but passes out of that county
again and enters Cambridgeshire in another two
miles. Midway, amid the solemn emptiness of the
bare downs, the Icknield Way runs as a rugged
chalk-and-grass track athwart the road, neighboured
by prehistoric tumuli. Amidst all these reminders
of the dead-and-gone Iceni, at the cross-roads to
Royston and Whittlesford, and just inside the
Cambridgeshire border, stands a lonely inn once
known as the Flint House. Beside it is one of the
Trinity Hall milestones, with the crescent badge of
the college, and hands with fingers like sausages
pointing down the weirdly straight and empty
roads.

The two miles of road through Essex long bore
the name of the " Recorder's Road." It seems that
when in 1725 an Act of Parliament was obtained
for mending the then notoriously bad way from
Cambridge to Fowlmere and Barley "in the counties
of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire," the fact that
two miles lay in Essex was overlooked. In conse-

THE "RECORDER'S ROAD"

in

quence of this omission nothing was done to the
Essex portion, which became almost impassable for
carriages until the then Kecorder of Cambridge,
Samuel Pont, obtained the help of several of the
colleges, and at last mended it.

TO- .

CA&TORIDGE

A MONUMENTAL MILESTONE.

It is a good enough road now, though passing
through very exposed and open country, with
tumuli, the solemn relics of a prehistoric race,
forming striking objects on the bare hillsides and

ii2 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the skyline. In cosy and sheltered contrast with
these comes the village of Fowlmere, snugly nestled
amid the elms and poplars aptly named "Crows'
Parlour."

Fowlmere is a very Proteus in the spelling of
its name. In Domesday Book it is set down as
" Fugelesmare," and has at any time since then
been written in half a dozen different ways, in
which "Foulmere" and "Fowlmere" are the most
prominent. Old-time travellers, who found the road
inexpressibly bad, adopted the first of these two
styles, and thought the place well suited with a
name : others — and among them local patriots —
adopted the variant less expressive of mud and mire.
In so doing they were correct, for the village takes
its name from a marshy lake or mere, thickly over-
grown with reeds in ancient times, in whose recesses
myriads of wild -fowl found a safe harbourage.
Even when the nineteenth century had dawned the
mere was still in existence, and wild-fowl frequented
it in some numbers. To-day it is but a spot where
watercress grows and the grass springs a thought
more luxuriant than elsewhere.

Here we are on the track of Samuel Pepys, who
makes in his Diary but a fleeting appearance on
this road, — a strange circumstance when we consider
that he was a Cantab. It is, however, an appear-
ance of some interest. In February 1660, then,
behold him rising early, taking horse from London,
and setting out for Cambridge, in company with a
Mr. Pierce, at seven o'clock in the morning, in-
tending to make that town by night. They rode

SAMUEL PEPYS 115

twenty-seven miles before they drew rein, baiting
at Puckeridge, — doubtless at that old house the
Falcon, — the way "exceeding bad" from Ware.
" Then up again and as far as Fowlmere, within
six miles of Cambridge, my mare almost tired."

Almost ! Good Heavens ! he had ridden the
poor beast forty-six miles. At anyrate, if the mare
was not quite tired, Samuel at least was, and at
Fowlmere he and Mr. Pierce stayed the night, at

THE CHEQUERS, FOWLMEIIE.

the Chequers. An indubitable Chequers still stands
in the village street, but it is not the house under
whose roof the old diarist lay, as the inscription,
" W.T., Ano Dom. 1675," on the yellow-plastered front
sufficiently informs us. The next morning Samuel
was up betimes, and at Cambridge by eight o'clock.

Thriplow Heath once stretched away between
Fowlmere and Newton, our next village, but it is

n6 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

all enclosed now, and cultivated fields obscure that
historic portion of the Heath where, in June 1647,
Cromwell's troops, victorious over the last struggles
of the Koyalists, assembled and sent demands to
the Parliament in London for their long overdue
pay. A striking position, this. The Parliament
had levied war upon the King and had brought him
low, and now the hammer that had shattered his
power was being threatened against itself. Cromwell
and a military dictatorship loomed ominous before
my lords and gentlemen of Westminster, and they
hastily sent down two months' pay, with promises of
more, to avert Cromwell's threat that he would seize
the captive King, and, placing him at the head of
the army, march upon London. That payment and
those promises did not suffice, and how Cornet Joyce
was sent across country from this point, with a troop
of horse, to seize Charles from the custody of the
Parliamentary Commissioners at Holmby House is a
matter of history, together with the military usurpa-
tion that did actually follow.

Newton village itself has little interest, but a
small hillside obelisk on the right calls for passing
notice. It marks the spot where two friends were
in the habit of meeting in the long ago. The one
lived at Newton and the other at Little Shelford.
Every day for many years they met at this spot, and
when one died the survivor erected this memorial.
The left-hand hillside also has its interest, for the
commonplace brick building on the hilltop is all
that remains of one of a line of semaphore telegraph
stations in use between London and Cambridge over

BUNTINGFORD 117

a hundred years ago. A descending road brings us
from this point to a junction with the Royston route
to Cambridge, at Harston.

XVIII

THE Royston route to Cambridge now demands
attention. Harking back to Puckeridge, we have by
this road certainly the most difficult way, for eight
of the eleven miles between Puckeridge and Royston
lead, with few and unimportant intervals, steadily
uphill, from the deep valley of the Rib up to the
tremendous and awe-inspiring climax of Royston
Downs ; from whose highest point, on Reed Hill, the
road drops consistently for three miles in a
staggering descent into Royston town.

At West Mill, where the valley opens out on the
left, the road continues on the shoulder of the hill,
with the village and the railway lying down below ;
a sweetly pretty scene. West Mill is a name whose
sound is distinctly modern, but the place is of a
venerable age, vouched for by its ancient church,
whose architecture dates back to the early years of
the thirteenth century. It is the fashion to spell
the place-name in one word — Westmill — an ugly
and altogether objectionable form.

Buntingford succeeds to West Mill. A brick
bridge crossing a little river, an old red-brick chapel
bulking large on the left hand, a long, long street of
rustic cottages and shops and buildings of more

n8 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

urban pretensions, and over all a sleepy half-holiday
air: that is Buntingford. It is difficult to take
Buntingford seriously, even though its street be half
a mile in length, for its name recalls that hero of
nursery rhyme, that Baby Bunting whose father
went a-hunting, and went to buy a rabbit-skin to
put the Baby Bunting in. Buntingford, for all the

WEST MILL.

length of its long street and the very considerable
age of it, is but a hamlet of Layston, close upon a
mile distant. That is why Buntingford has no old
parish church, and explains the building of the red-
brick chapel aforesaid in 1615, to the end that the
ungodly might have no excuse for not attending
public worship and the pious might exercise their
piety without making unduly long pilgrimage.
" Domus Orationis " is inscribed on the gable-wall of

TURNPIKE TRUSTS 119

the chapel, lest perhaps it might be mistaken for
some merely secular building ; an easy enough
matter. Behind it, stands the little group of eight
almshouses built in 1684 by Dr. Seth Ward, "born
in yis town," as the tablet over the principal door
declares ; that Bishop of Salisbury who lent his
carriage - horses to King James's troops to drag
the ordnance sent against the Monmouth rebels on
Sedgemoor.

Layston Church stands in a meadow, neglected,
and with daylight peering curiously through its
roof ; and the village itself has long disappeared.

The fifteen miles between Wade's Mill and
Royston, forming the " Wade's Mill Turnpike Trust,"
continued subject to toll long after the railway was
opened. With the succeeding trusts on through
Royston to Kirby's Hut and Caxton, on the Old
North Road, and so on to Stilton, it was one of the
earliest undertakings under the general Turnpike
Act of 1698, and, like them, claimed direct descent
from the first turnpike gates erected in England in
1663, under the provisions of the special Act of that
year, which, describing this " ancient highway and
post-road" to the North as almost impassable,
proceeded to give powers for toll-gates to be erected
at Stilton and other places.

To this particular Trust fell the heavy task of
lowering the road over the London Road hill, the
highest crest of the Downs ; a work completed in
1839, at a cost of £1723, plus £50 compensation
paid to a nervous passenger on one of the coaches
who jumped off the roof while it was crossing a

120 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

temporary roadway and broke his leg. The tolls
at this time were let for £4350 per annum.

Reed Hill, to which we now come, passing on
the way the hamlets of Buckland and Chipping,
commands the whole of Royston Downs, a tract of
country whose bold, rolling outlines are still im-
pressive, even though the land be enclosed and
brought under cultivation in these later years. This
chalky range is a continuation of the Chiltern Hills,
and gives Royston, lying down below in the deep
hollow, a curiously isolated and remote appearance.
Indeed, whether it be the engineering difficulties in
tunnelling these heights, or whether the deterrent
cause lies in rival railway politics, or in its not being
worth while to continue, the branch of the Great
Eastern Railway to Buntingford goes no farther, but
comes ingloriously to a terminus in that little town ;
while the Great Northern Railway reaches Royston
circuitously, by way of Hitchin and Baldock, and
artfully avoids the heights.

A wayside inn — the Red Lion — crowns the
summit of Reed Hill, and looks out upon vast distances.
The Red Lion himself, a very fiercely -whiskered
vermilion fellow projecting over the front door of
the house, and looking with an agonised expression
of countenance over his shoulder — passant regardant,
as the heralds say — hails from Royston itself, where
he occupied a similar position in front of the old
coaching-inn of the same name. Alas ! when old
coaching days ended and those of railways dawned,
the Red Lion at Royston, ever in the forefront of
coaching affairs in the town, was doomed. The

THE ROYSTON CROW 121

High Street knows it no more, and the Bull reigns
in its stead as the principal house.

These windy downs, now robbed of much of their
wildness of detail, but losing nothing of their bold
outline, long harboured two forms of wild life not
commonly found elsewhere. The Koyston Crow,
indeed, still frequents this range of hills ; and on
some undisturbed slopes of turf the wandering
botanist is even yet rewarded in his Eastertide search
for the Anemone, Pulsatilla, the Pasque Flower. The
Koyston Crow, the Corvus comix of ornithologists,
is a winter visitor from Sweden and Norway, and is
known in other parts of the country as the " hooded
crow." He is distinguished from his cousin corvi by
his grey head and back, giving him an ancient and
venerable appearance. He is not a sociable bird,
and refuses to mix with the blackbirds, the thrushes,
and his kindred crows, who, for their part, are con-
tent to leave him alone, and doubtless rejoice when
in April he wings his way to northern latitudes.

The Pasque Flower, so named from the paschal
season of its blossoming, affects the windiest and most
unlikely situations in chalk and limestone pastures,
and thrives where it might be supposed only the
coarsest grasses would grow. In these exposed places
its purple blooms flourish. They nestle close to the
ground, and are only to be easily discovered by the
expert. Do not attempt to transplant this wild beauty
of the downs. You may dig roots with the greatest
care, and cherish them as tenderly as possible ; but,
torn from its stern surroundings and lapped in
botanical luxury, the Pasque Flower droops and dies.

122 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

XIX

ROYSTON stands where the Ermine Street and the
Icknield Way intersect one another. To old Cobbett,
travelling with a censorious eye upon men and
things and places in the early years of the nineteenth
century, it appeared to be " a common market-town.
Not mean, but having nothing of beauty about it."
This is not a very shrewd or illuminating opinion,
because, while it is true that Royston is not beauti-
ful on the one hand, nor exactly mean on the other,
this description is not quite descriptive, and fails to
explain where the town stops short of beauty or of
meanness. Royston, in fact, is a little grim, and
belies the preconceived notion of the expectant
traveller, who, doubtless with some wild idea of a
connection between Royston and roystering, is
astonished at the grave, almost solemn, look of its
narrow streets. The grim shadow of the Downs is
thrown over the little town, and the houses huddle
together as though for company and warmth.

There are those to whom the place - name
suggests a Norman - French derivation — Roy's ton,
or the King's Town, — but although the name arose
in Norman times, it had a very different origin from
anything suggested by royal patronage. Eight
hundred years ago, when this part of the country
remained little but the desolate tract the fury of the
Conqueror had made it, the Lady Rohesia, wife of
the Norman lord of the manor, set up a wayside
cross where the roads met. The object of this cross

JROYSTON 123

does not clearly appear, but it probably filled the
combined purpose of a signpost and wayside oratory,
where those who fared the roads might pray for a
happy issue from the rigours of their journey. At
anyrate, the piety of the Lady Rohesia (or Roesia,
for they were very uncertain about their h's in those
times) has kept her name from being quite forgot,
preserved as it is in Royston's designation ; but it is
not to be supposed that the pilgrims, the franklins,
and the miscellaneous wayfarers along these roads
tortured their tongues much with this awkward
word, and so Rohesia's Cross speedily became known
as " Roise's," just as to the London 'bus-conductors
High Holborn has become " 'iobun." A town
gathered in course of time round the monastery—
" Monasterium de Cruce Roesise" — founded here a
century after this pious lady had gone her way.
Monastery and cross are alike gone, but the parish
church is the old priory church, purchased by the
inhabitants for public worship when the monastic
establishment was dissolved, and Royston Fair, held
on 7th July in every year, is a reminiscence of that
old religious house, for that day is the day of
St. Thomas a Becket, in whose honour it was
dedicated. As " Becket's Fair " this annual celebra-
tion is still known.

For centuries afterwards Royston was a town
and yet not a parish, being situated in portions of
the five adjoining parishes of Melbourn, Bassing-
bourn, Therfield, Barley, and Reed ; and for centuries
more, after it had attained parochial dignity, its
chief cross street, Melbourn Street, divided the

124 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

place into two Roystons — Royston, Hertfordshire,
and Royston, Cambridgeshire. The doings of one
with the other afford amusing reading : how a
separate workhouse was established and separate
assessments made for each parish, and how at length,
in 1781, an Act was passed for consolidating the
two for local government purposes ; all these incon-
venient and absurdly conflicting jurisdictions of
parishes and counties being eventually swept away
in 1895, when the Cambridgeshire portion of Royston
was transferred to Hertfordshire, the whole of the
town now being in that county.

They still cherish the memory of King James the
First at Royston, though the open Heath where he
hunted the hare is a thing of the past, and the races
and all the ancient jollifications of that time are now
merely matters for the antiquary. Where the four
roads from the four quarters of the compass still meet
in the middle of the town stood the old Palace. Its
remains, of no very palatial appearance, are there
even yet, and form private residences. Close by is
that prime curiosity, Royston Cave. James and his
courtiers and all their gay world at this corner never
knew of the Cave, which was only discovered in 1742.
It is a bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk, situated
immediately under the roadway. Its age and
original purpose are still matters in dispute.
Whether it was excavated to serve the purpose of
dust-bin to a Roman villa, or was a flint quarry, we
shall never know, but that it certainly was in use
by some religious recluse in the twelfth century is
assured by the curious rough carvings in the chalk,

THE RED LION, ROYSTON

125

representing St. Catherine, the Crucifixion, mitred
abbots, and a variety of subjects of a devotional
character. The hermit whose singular piety led
him to take up his abode in this dismal hole
must have had great difficulty in entering or
leaving, for it was then only to be approached by
plunging as it were into the neck of the bottle.

A QUAINT CORNER IN ROYSTON.

The staircase by which visitors enter was only made
in modern times.

The old Eed Lion at Royston has already been
mentioned as having ceased to be. It was kept for
many years in the eighteenth century by Mrs.
Gatward, a widow, assisted in the posting and
coaching business attached to the house by her two
sons. One of them came to a terribly tragic end.
What induced him to turn highwayman we shall

126 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

never know ; but he took to the road, as many a
roving blade in those times did. Perhaps his life
lacked excitement. If that were so, he took the
readiest means of adding variety to existence, for he
waylaid the postboy carrying His Majesty's Mails on
the North Road, between Roys ton and Huntingdon,
and robbed the bags. There was in those times no
method of courting death with such success as robbing
the mails, and accordingly young Gatward presently
found himself convicted and cast for execution.
They hanged him in due course and gibbeted his
body, pursuant to the grim old custom, near the
scene of his crime. The story of this unhappy
amateur highwayman is told — and, a tale of horror
it is — by one Cole, a diligent antiquary on Cambridge-
shire affairs, whose manuscript collections are in the
British Museum. Hear him : "About 1753-54, the
son of Mrs. Gatward, who kept the Red Lion at
Royston, being convicted of robbing the mail, was
hanged in chains on the Great Road. I saw him
hanging, in a scarlet coat, and after he had hung
about two or three months it is supposed that the
screw was filed which supported him, and that he
fell in the first high wind after. Mr. Lord, of Trinity,
passed by as he lay on the ground, and, trying to
open his breast, to see what state his body was in,
not being offensive, but quite dry, a button of brass
came off, which he preserves to this day, as he told
me at the Vice-Chancellor's, Thursday, June 30th,
1779. I sold this Mr. Gatward, just as I left college
in 1752, a pair of coach horses, which was the only
time I saw him. It was a great grief to his mother,

A TRAGIC NOTE

127

who bore a good character, and kept the inn for many
years after."

This account of how a malefactor's body might
lie by the roadside, the sport of any wayfarer's idle
curiosity, gives no very flattering glimpse of this
England of ours a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet
these were the " good old times."

The story goes that the agonised mother of the
gibbeted man secretly conveyed his body to the inn

CAXTON GIBBET.

and gave it decent, if unconsecrated, burial in the
cellar. His brother, James Gatward, was for many
years afterwards part proprietor of the London,
Koyston, and St. Ives coach, running past the
gibbet.

Caxton Gibbet, where Gatward's body hung in
chains, is still marked by a tall post standing on a
mound by the wayside, on the North Road, thirteen
miles from Royston. It is a singularly lonely spot,
even though a public-house with the gruesome name

i28 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

of the Gibbet Inn stands close by. A mile distant
is the village of Caxton, with its old coaching-inns
converted into farmhouses ; the only other places on
the twelve miles being the old Hardwicke Arms
Posting House and the gates of Wimpole Park at
Arrington Bridge, and the solitary " Old North Eoad "
railway station.

Koyston's old inns have lost much of their old-time
air. Among them, the George possessed one of
those old " gallows " signs crossing the road in a
fashion similar to that of the Fox and Hounds
at Barley, but, somewhere towards the close of the
eighteenth century, it fell at the moment when a
London-bound waggoner was passing beneath, and
killed him. Since then such signs have not been in
favour in the town.

XX

EOYSTON has of late years spread out largely to the
north, over those grassy heaths where James hunted.
Looking back when midway between the town and
Melbourn, this modern growth is readily noted, for
the houses of it are all of Cambridgeshire white brick.
At this distance they give a singularly close imitation
of a tented military camp.

Melbourn — why not spelled with a final * e,' like

other Melbournes, is a mystery no inquiry can satisfy

—is a large village of much thatch. Especially is

the grey-green velvety moss on the thatch of a row

of yellow plaster cottages beyond the church a thing

FRUIT-FARMING 131

of beauty, however rotten the thatch itself may be.
Melbourn has a beautiful church and church-tower,
seen in the accompanying picture, but its other
glory, the Great Elm that for many centuries spread
a shade over the road by the church, is now only a
memory, — a memory kept green by the sign of the
inn opposite. Everyone in Melbourn lives on fruit.
In other words, this is a great fruit-growing district.
This village and its neighbour, Meldreth, specialise
in greengages, and from the railway station that
serves the two, many hundreds of tons of that fruit
are despatched to London in the season. These
terms are perhaps vague, but they are reduced to a
more definite idea of the importance of the greengage
harvest when some returns are noted. From Mel-
bourn, station, then, thirty tons a day is an average
consignment. Little wonder, then, that when one
has come down from the bleak downs and heaths
of Royston to these sheltered levels, the swelling
contours of the windy pastures and breezy cornfields
give place to long lines of orchards.

Cambridgeshire very soon develops its flat and
fenny character along this route, and Melbourn left
behind, the road on to Cambridge is a dead level.
The low church - tower just visible to a keen eye,
away to the left, among some clustered trees, is that
of Shepreth. Shepreth hides its modest self from
the road : let us take the winding by-way that
leads to it and see what a purely agricultural Cam-
bridgeshire village, set down in this level plain, and
utterly out of touch with the road, may be like. It
needs no great exercise of the deductive faculty to

i32 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

discover, on the way to Shepreth, that it is not a
place of great or polite resort, for the lane is a
narrow and winding way, half muddy ruts and half
loose stones. Beside it crawls imperceptibly in its
deep, ditch-like bed, overhung by pollard willows,
a stream that takes its rise in the bogs of Fowlmere.
By what lazy, snakish windings it ultimately finds
its way into the Cam does not concern us. Here
and there old mud-walled cottages, brilliantly white-
washed and heavily thatched, dot the way ; the sum
total of the village, saving indeed the church, stand-
ing adjoining a farmyard churned into a sea of
mud.

The appearance of Shepreth Church is not
altogether prepossessing. The south aisle has been
rebuilt in white brick, in a style rivalling the worst
efforts of the old-time chapel-builder ; and the old
tower, whose upper stages have long fallen in ruin,
shows in the contorted courses of its stonework how
the building has sunk and settled in the waterlogged
soil.

Beyond this soddened village, coming to the high-
road again, the station and level-crossing of Foxton
are reached ; the situation of Foxton itself clearly
fixed by the church-tower, rising from the flat fields
on the right, half a mile away. There is something
of a story belonging to this line of railway from
Royston to Shepreth, Foxton, Shelford, and Cam-
bridge. As far as Shepreth it is a branch of the
Great Northern, anxious in the long ago to find a
way into Cambridge and so cut up the Great Eastern's
trade. The Great Eastern could not defeat the

RAIL WA Y RIVALRIES 1 33

scheme altogether, but stopped it at Shepreth, to
which point that line was opened in 1848. This
was awkward for the Great Northern, brought to a
halt seven miles from Cambridge, at a point which
may, without disrespect to Shepreth, well be called
" nowhere in particular." But the Great Northern
people found a way out of the difficulty. Parliament,
in the interests of the Great Eastern, would not
permit them to build a railway -into Cambridge,
but no one could forbid them conveying passengers
by coach along these last few miles. And so, for
close upon four years, Great Northern passengers left
the trains at Shepreth and were conveyed by a forty
minutes' coach journey the rest of the way. Thus,
along these few miles at anyrate, coaching survived
on the Cambridge road until 1851, when the Great
Eastern built a short line from Shelford to Foxton
and Shepreth, to join the Great Northern branch,
allowing running-powers to that Company into Cam-
bridge station.

Harston village succeeds to Foxton. Its present
name is a corruption of " Harleston," which itself was
a contraction of " Hardeliston." It stands at a bend
of the road, with a very small village green and a
very large church to the left, and the long village
street of small cottages and large gardens following
the high road, and bringing the traveller presently
to an inn — the Old English Gentleman — where the
Barkway route to Cambridge meets this ; both thence-
forward joining forces for the remaining four miles
and a half. Hauxton Church starts up on the right,
by the Granta, which comes down from AudleyEnd and

i34 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

is crossed here, over a little bridge, the only striking
object in what has now become a very desolate road,
so lonely and empty that an occasional thorn-tree,
rising from the dwarf hedges of the immense flat
fields, becomes quite companionable, and a distant
clump of leafy elms a landmark. Those distant
trees mark where Trumpington village church lies
hid, and, if the horizon ahead be closely scanned,
the long line of King's College Chapel will presently
be seen. We are coming at last into Cambridge.

XXI

THE entrance to Cambridge town through Trumping-
ton is singularly noble and dignified. This is an age
when almost every ancient town or city is approached
through a ring of modern suburbs, but Cambridge
is one of the few and happy exceptions. You cannot
enter Oxford by the old coach road from London
without passing through the modern suburb of St.
Clements, whose mean street pitifully discounts the
approach to the city over Magdalen Bridge ; but at
first, when nearing Cambridge, nothing breaks the flat
landscape save the distant view of King's College
Chapel, that gigantic pile of stone whose long flat
skyline and four angle - turrets so wrought upon
Ruskin's feelings that he compared it with a billiard-
table turned upside down. It is not because of
the great Chapel that the entrance to Cambridge
is noble : it will add nothing to the beauty of the

TRUMPINGTON 135

scene until that day — perhaps never to come — when
the building shall be completed with a stately bell-
tower after the design contemplated by its founder,
Henry the Sixth. No ; it is rather by reason, firstly,
of the broad quiet rural village street of Trumping-
ton, set humbly, as it were, in the gates of learning,
and secondly of the still broad and quiet, but more
urban, Trumpington Road that follows it, that
Cambridge is so charmingly entered. A line of old
gabled cottages with old-fashioned gardens occupies
either side of the road ; while an ancient mansion
or two, together with the village church, are hid, or
perhaps glimpsed for a moment, off to the left, where
a by-road goes off. past the old toll-house, to Grant-
chester. This is Trumpington. In that churchyard
lies a remarkable man : none other, indeed, than Henry
Fawcett — we will not call him by his title of " Pro-
fessor," for that seems always so blatant a dignity
— who died at Cambridge in 1884, thus ending
a life that had risen triumphant above, surely,
the keenest affliction Fate can inflict. Completely
blinded in youth by an accident of the most deplor-
able kind, he yet lived to fill a career in life and
politics apparently denied by loss of sight. The
text on his gravestone — a garbled passage from
Exodus, chap. xiv. ver. 15 — is singularly appropriate :
" Speak unto the people, that they go forward/7

It is down this leafy by-way, past the church,
that one finds Grantchester Mill, a building generally
thought to occupy the site of that " Trumpington
Mill " made famous in one of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales.

136 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

For Trumpington has a certain literary fame, in
association with Chaucer's " Reeve's Tale " : —

"At Trompington, not fer fro Cantebrigge,
Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge,
Upon the whiche brook ther stont a melle."

The " Reeve's Tale " is not precisely a part of Chaucer
to be discussed in every drawing-room, and is indeed
a story well calculated to make a satyr laugh and
the judicious grieve. Therefore, it is perhaps no
great pity that the mill stands no longer, so that you
cannot actually seek it out and say, " Here the proud
Simon, the ' insolent Simkin,' ground the people's
corn, taking dishonest toll of it, and hereabouts
those roystering blades of University scholars, Allen
and John, played their pranks." Grantchester Mill
is a building wholly modern.

It is a grave and dignified road, tree-shaded and
echoing to the drowsy cawing of rooks (like tired
professors weary of lecturing to inattentive classes),
that conducts along the high road through Trumping-
ton village to the beginnings of the town. Here, by
the bridge crossing the little stream called the " Vicar's
Brook," one mile from Great St. Mary's Church, the
very centre of Cambridge, stands the eight-foot high
milestone, the first in the series set up between
Cambridge and Barkway in the early years of the
eighteenth century, and paid for out of " Dr. Mouse's
and Mr. Hare's Causey Money." This initial stone
cost £5, 8s. The arms of Dr. Mouse may still be
traced, impaling those of Trinity Hall.

Beyond this hoary but little-noticed relic begin

CAMBRIDGE WATER 139

the Botanic Gardens, and beside them runs or creeps
that old Cambridge water-supply, the "little new
river," brought in 1610 from the Nine Wells under-
yonder gentle hills that break the flatness of the
landscape away on the right.

The idea of bringing pure water into Cambridge

THE FIRST MILESTONE FROM CAMBRIDGE.

originated, in 1574, with a certain Dr. Perne, Master
of Peterhouse ; its object both to cleanse the King's
Ditch, " which," says Fuller, " once made to defend
Cambridge by its strength, did in his time offend it
with its stench," and to provide drinking water for

140 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the University and town. This clear-running stream
has an interest beyond its local use, for the cutting
of its course was designed by Edward Wright, of
Gonville and Caius College, who also drew the plans
for Sir Hugh Myddleton's " New Kiver," whose course
so closely neighbours this old road between Ware
and London.

The Conduit — " Hobson's Conduit," as it is
called — that once stood on Market Hill, was re-
moved in 1854, and now stands at the very be-
ginning of Cambridge, where Trumpington "Boad"
becomes " Street," at the head of this open stream.

The Nine Wells are not easy to find. They are
situated near the village of Great Shelford, under
a shoulder of the Gog Magog Hills, and are ap-
proached across two rugged pastures, almost im-
practicable in wet weather. The term "wells" is
misleading. They are springs, found trickling
feebly through the white clay in the bed of a deep
trench with two branches, cut in the hillside. Above
them stands a granite obelisk erected by public
subscription in 1861, and setting forth all the
circumstances at great length. The term " Nine
Wells" is not especially applied to this spot, but
is used throughout Cambridgeshire for springs, what-
ever their number. A similar custom obtained in
classic Greece, but the evidence by which our
Cambridgeshire practice might possibly be derived
from such a respectable source, and so be linked
with the Pierian spring and the Muses Nine, is
entirely lacking.

The Gog Magogs—" the Gogs," as the country-

THE GOG MAGOGS

141

folk irreverently abbreviate their mysterious name —
are the Cambridgeshire mountains. They are not
particularly Alpine in character, being, indeed, just
a series of gently rising grassy downs, culminating
in a height of three hundred feet above sea-level.

HOBSON S CONDUIT.

No one will ever be able to explain how these very
mild hills obtained their terrific title ; and Gog and
Magog themselves, mentioned vaguely in Eevelations,
where the devil is let loose again after his thousand

142 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

years' imprisonment in the bottomless pit, are equally
inexplicable.

The crowning height of the Gog Magogs was
in Koman times the summer camp of a cohort of
Vandals, quartered in this district to overawe the
conquered British. It was then the policy of Rome,
as it is of ourselves in India and elsewhere at the
present day, to enrol into her service the strange
tribes and alien nations she had conquered, and to
bring them from afar to impress her newest subjects
with the far-reaching might and glory of the Empire.
This Vandalian cohort was formed from the barbarian
prisoners defeated on the Danube by Aurelian, and
enlisted by the Emperor Probus. The earthworks
of their camp are still traceable within the grounds
of the mansion and estate of ^7andlebury, on the
hilltop, once belonging to the Duke of Leeds. From
this point of view Cambridge is seen mapped out
below, while in other directions the great rolling
fields spread downwards in fold upon fold. Immense
fields they are, enclosed in the early years of last
century, when Cambridgeshire began to change its
immemorial aspect of open treeless downs, where the
sheep grazed on the short grass and the bustard still
lingered, for its present highly cultivated condition.
Fields of this comparatively recent origin may
generally be recognised by their great size, in strik-
ing contrast with the ancient enclosures whose area
was determined by the work of hand-ploughing.
These often measure over half a mile square, and
mark the advent of the steam-plough.

" THE FITZBILL Y" 143

XXII

THE old Cambridge water-supply, meandering down
from the hills, has induced a similar discursiveness
in these last pages. Onward from Trumpington
Koad it runs in a direct line to the Conduit, and
our course shall, in sympathy, be as straight.

The Fitzwilliam Museum is the first public
building to attract notice on entering the town : a
huge institution in the classic style, notable for the
imposing Corinthian columns that decorate its front ;
its effect marred by the stone screen that interrupts
the view up the noble flights of steps. " The Fitz-
billy," as all Cambridge men know it, derives from
the noble collections of art objects and antiquities,
together with great sums of money, left to the
University in 1816 by a Lord Fitzwilliam for the
establishment of a museum and art gallery. It was
completed some forty years ago, and has since then
been the great architectural feature in the first
glimpse of Cambridge. The coloured marble decora-
tions and the painting and gilding of the interior
are grandiose rather than grand ; and although the
collections, added to by many later bequests, contain
many priceless and beautiful objects, the effect of
the whole is a kind of mental and optical indigestion
caused by the "fine confused feeding" afforded by
the very mixed arrangement of these treasures, — a
bad arrangement, like that of an overgrown private
collection, and utterly unsuited for public and educa-
tional needs. You turn from a manuscript to a

i44 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

picture, from a picture to a case of china, from that
to missals, and so all through the varied incarnations
of art throughout the centuries.

Just beyond the Fitzwilliam Museum comes
Peterhouse College, the oldest of all the colleges in
the University. To understand something of the
meaning of the colleges and their relation to the
supreme teaching and governing body, it will be
necessary to recount, as briefly as may be, the
circumstances in which both University and Colleges
had their origin.

The origin of Cambridge University, as of that of
Oxford, is of unknown date, and the manner of its
inception problematical. Who was the great teacher
that first drew scholars to him at this place ? We
cannot tell. That he was a Churchman goes without
saying, for the Church, in the dark ages when learn-
ing began to be, held letters and culture in fee-
simple. Nor can we tell why Cambridge was thus
honoured, for it was not the home, like Ely, Crowland,
or Thorney, of a great monastic establishment, whence
learning of sorts radiated. One of the untrustworthy
early chroniclers of these things gives, indeed, a
specific date to the beginnings of the University, and
says that Joffrid, Abbot of Crowland, in 1110 sent
monkish lecturers to the town ; but the earliest
record, beyond which we must not go into the regions
of mere surmise, belongs to a hundred and twenty-
one years later, when royal regulations respecting
the students were issued. Already a Chancellor and
a complete governing body appear to have been in
existence. It is arguable that a century and more

10

ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY 147

must have been necessary for these to have been
evolved from the earliest days of a teaching body ;
but these affairs are for pundits. Such special
pleaders as John Caius and Thomas Key, who fought
with great bitterness and amazing pertinacity in the
sixteenth century on the question as to whether
Oxford or Cambridge were the older of the two, had
the hardihood to trace them back to astonishing
lengths. According to Caius, arguing for Cambridge,
it was one Cantaber, a Spanish prince, who founded
the University here in the very remote days when Gur-
guntius was King of Britain. To this prince he traces
the name of the town itself, and I think that fact
alone serves to discredit anything else he has to say.

But no matter when and how the University
originated. To those early teachers came so many
to listen in the one room or hall, that probably
constituted the original University, that the town did
not suffice to accommodate them, and, both for the
sake of convenience and discipline, the first college
was founded, as primarily a lodgment or hostel for
the scholars. As their numbers continually grew,
and as benefactors began to look with increasing
kindliness upon learning, so were more and more
colleges added.

The first of all the colleges was, as already stated,
this of Peterhouse, founded so far back as 1280 by
Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely. It was at first
established in the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist,
near by, but was removed, only six years later, to
the present site, for convenient access to the Church
of St. Peter. It is to the fact that the chancel of this

i48 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

church was used as its chapel that the college owes
its official but rarely heard title of " St. Peter's." In
1352 St. Peter's Church was given a new consecra-
tion, and has ever since been known as St. Mary the
Less. Meanwhile, in 1632, the college built a chapel
of its own.

Peterhouse has points of interest other than being
the first of the colleges. It has nurtured men not
only of distinction, but of fame. Men so opposite in
character as the worldly Cardinal Beaufort — the
great Cardinal who figures in Shakespeare — and the
pious Archbishop Whitgift were educated here ; and
in later times that great man of science, Lord
Kelvin ; but perhaps the most famous of all is Gray,
the poet, whose " Elegy Wrote in a Country Church-
yard " has done more to endear him to his country
than the acts of any statesman or divine.

Peterhouse does not present a cheerful front to
the street. It is heavy and gloomy, and its build-
ings, as a whole, do not help out the story of its age.
The chapel, whose weather-vane bears the emblem of
a key, an allusion to St. Peter, stands recessed
behind the railings that give upon the street, and
blocks the view into the first of the three quads. It
is flanked on one side by the venerable brick build-
ing seen on the extreme left of the illustration
representing Trumpington Street, and on the other
by a great ugly three-storeyed block of stone, interest-
ing only because the rooms overlooking the street on
the topmost floor were those occupied by Gray. They
are to be identified by iron railings across one of
the windows. A story belongs to these rooms.

THE POET GRAY 149

Gray, it seems, lived long in them as a Fellow of his
College, and might have eked out his morbid life
here, dining according to habit in Hall, and then,
unsociable and morose, retiring to his elevated eyrie,
reading the classics over a bottle of port. Gray had
a very pretty taste in port, but it did not suffice to
make him more clubbable. His solitary habits,
perhaps, were responsible for a morbid fear of fire
that grew upon him, and increased to such a degree
that he caused the transverse bars, that still remain,
to be placed outside his window overlooking the
churchyard of Little St. Mary's, and kept in constant
readiness a coil of rope to tie to them and so let him-
self down in case of an alarm. His precautions were
matters of common knowledge, and at last his fears
were taken advantage of by a band of skylarking
students, who placed a bath full of water beneath his
rooms one winter night and then, placing themselves
in a favourable position for seeing the fun, raised
cries of "Fire !"

Their best expectations were realised. The
window was hurriedly flung up, and the frenzied
poet, nightcapped and lightly clad, swiftly descended
into the bath, amid yells of delight. These intimate
facts seem to hint that Gray had not endeared him-
self to the scholars of Peterhouse. This practical
joke severed his connection with the college, for he
immediately removed across the street, to Pembroke.

Pembroke is prominent in this view down the
long, quiet, grave street ; and the quaint turret of its
chapel, built by Sir Christopher Wren, is very
noticeable. Gravity is, we have said, the note here,

150 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

and so solid a quality is quite in order, for
Trumpington Street and the road beyond have ever
been the favourite walks of dons and professors,
walking oblivious to their surroundings in what we
are bound to consider academic meditation rather
than that mere mental vacuity known as absent-
mindedness. There is a story told of the late
Professor Seeley exquisitely illustrating this mental
detachment. It is a story that probably has been
told of many earlier professors, to be re-incarnated
to suit every succeeding age : a common enough thing
with legends. It seems, however, that the late Pro-
fessor of History was walking past the Conduit one
fine day, speculating on who shall say what abstruse
matters, when a mischievous boy switched a copious
shower of water over him from the little stream in
the gutter. The Professor's physical organism felt the
descending drops, some lazy, unspeculative brain-cell
gave him the idea of a shower of rain, and he immedi-
ately unfurled his umbrella, and so walked home.

Next the new buildings of Pembroke, over against
Peterhouse, the Master of that college has his
residence, behind the high brick walls of a seventeenth
century garden. On the left hand are Little St.
Mary's, a Congregational Church, and the church-like
pinnacled square tower of the Pitt Press, all in
succession. Beyond, but hid from this view-point
by a gentle curve of the street, are " Cats," otherwise
St. Catherine's, and Corpus ; and then we come to
that continuation of Trumpington Street called
" King's Parade," opposite King's College. Here we
are at the centre of Cambridge, with Market Hill

MARKET HILL 151

opening out on the right and the gigantic bulk of
King's College Chapel on the left, neighboured by
that fount of honour, or scene of disgraceful failure,
the beautiful classic Senate House, where you take
your degree or are ignominiously " plucked."

In midst of Market Hill stands the church of
Great St. Mary's, the University Church. Town and
University are at this point inextricably mixed.
Shops and churches, colleges, divinity schools and
Town Hall all jostle one another around this wide
open space, void on most days, but on Saturday so
crowded with the canopied stalls of the market that
it presents one vast area of canvas. Few markets are
so well supplied with flowers as this, for in summer-
time growing plants are greatly in demand by the
undergrads to decorate the windows of their
lodgings. This living outside the colleges is, and
has always been, a marked feature of Cambridge,
where college accommodation has never kept pace with
requirements. It is a system that makes the town
cheerful and lively in term., but at vacation times,
when the " men " have all " gone down," its emptiness
is correspondingly noticeable. To " go down " and
to " come up " are, by the w^ay, terms that require
some little explanation beyond their obvious meaning
of leaving or of arriving at the University. They
had their origin in the old-standing dignity of Alma
Mater, requiring that all other places should be
considered below her — even the mighty Gog Magogs
themselves. From Cambridge to London or elsewhere
is therefore a /carafiasis — a going downward.

The Cambridge system of lodging out does not

152 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

make for discipline, and creates a lamentable laxity
in a man keeping his proper quota of chapels. To
attend chapel at an early hour of the morning seems
much more of an infliction when living in the
freedom of lodgings than when in the cloistered shades
of a college quad, and has led to many absences,
summonses before the Dean, and mild lectures from
that generally estimable and other-worldly personage.
You, in the innocence of your heart and your first
term, advance the excuse that late study makes it
difficult to always keep chapels. Observe that it is
always midnight study, never card-parties and the
like, and never that very natural disinclination to turn
out of bed in the morning that is answerable for
these backslidings. All very specious and unoriginal,
and that Dean has heard it all before, so many times,
and years and years ago, from men now gone into the
world and become middle-aged. Why, in his own
youth lie gave and attended parties, and missed
chapels, and made these ancient blue-mouldy pre-
varications to the Dean of his college, — and so back
and back to the infinities. Is he angry : does he
personally care a little bit? Not at all. It is
routine. " Don't you think, young man," he says, in
his best pulpit- cum-grandfather style, "don't you
think that if you were to try to study in the morning
it would be much better for your health, much better
in every way than reading at night ? When I was
your age / studied at night. It gave me headaches.
Now try and keep chapel. It is so much better to
become used to habits of discipline. They are of such
value to us in after life "• — and so forth.

THE CAM 153

XXIII

CAMBRIDGE is often criticised because it is not
Oxford. As well might one find fault with a lily
because it is not a rose. Criticism of this kind
starts with the belief that it is a worse Oxford, an
inferior copy of the sister University. How false
that is, and how entirely Cambridge is itself in out-
ward appearance and in intellectual aims need not be
insisted upon. It is true that Trumpington Street
does not rival " the High " at Oxford, but it was not
built with the object of imitating that famous
academic street ; and if indeed the Isis be a more
noble stream than the Cam, Oxford at least has
nothing to compare with the Cambridge "Backs."

" The Backs " are the peculiar glory of Cambridge,
and he who has not seen them has missed much.
They are the back parts of those of the colleges —
Queens', King's, Clare, Trinity, and John's — whose
courts and beautiful lawns extend from the main
street back to the Cam, that much-abused and much
idealised stream.

" The Cam," says a distinguished member of the
University, with a horrid lack of enthusiasm for the
surroundings of Alma Mater, " is scarcely a river at
all ; above the town it is a brook ; below the town it
is little better than a sewer." Can this, you wonder,
be the same as that "Camus, reverend sire," of the
poets ; the stream that " went footing slow, His
mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge."

That, undoubtedly, is too severe. Above the

154 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

town it is a brook that will at anyrate float such
craft as Cambridge possesses, and has shady nooks
like ''Paradise" and Byron's Pool, where the canoe
can be navigated and bathing of the best may be
found ; and now that Cambridge colleges no longer-
drain into the river, the stream below town does not
deserve that reproach. Everything, it seems, depends
upon your outlook. If you are writing academic odes,
for example, like Gray's, you praise the Cam ; if, like
Gray again, writing on an unofficial occasion, you en-
large upon its sluggish pace and its mud. Gray, it will
be observed, could be a dissembling poet. His " In-
stallation Ode," as official in its way as the courtly lines
of a Poet Laureate, pictures Cambridge delightfully,
in the lines he places in the mouth of Milton —

" Ye brown, o'er- arcli ing groves,

That contemplation loves,
Where willowy Carnus lingers with delight !

Oft at the blush of dawn

I trod your level lawn —

Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright,
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy."

Few lines in the whole range of our poetry are so
beautiful as these.

But Gray's own private and unofficial idea of the
Cam was very different. When he took the gag off
his Muse and allowed her to be frank, we hear of the
" rushy Camus," whose

"... Slowly- wind ing flood
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud."

Yet "the Backs" give a picture of mingled

CAMBRIDGE POETS 155

architecture, stately trees, emerald lawns, and placid
stream not to be matched anywhere else : an ideal
picture of what a poet's University should be. If,
on entering the town from Trumpington Street, -you
turn to the left past the Leys School, down the lane
called Coe Fen, you come first upon the Cam where
it is divided into many little streams running and
subdividing and joining together again in the oozy
pasture of Sheep's Green, and then to a water-mill.
Beyond that mill begin " the Backs," with Queens'
College, whose ancient walls of red brick, like some
building of romance, rise sheer from the water.
From them springs a curious "mathematical"
wooden bridge, spanning the river and leading from
the college to the shady walks on the opposite side.

With so dreamy and beautiful a setting, it is not
surprising that Cambridge, although the education
she gave was long confined largely to the unim-
aginative science or art of mathematics, has been
especially productive of poets. Dryden was an
alumnus of Trinity ; Milton sucked wisdom at
Christ's ; Wordsworth, of John's, wrote acres of
verse as flat as the Cambridgeshire meads, and much
more arid ; Byron drank deep and roystered at
King's ; and Tennyson was a graduate of Trinity.
Other poets owning allegiance to Cambridge are
that sweet Elizabethan songster, Robert Herrick,
Marlowe, Waller, Cowley, Prior, Coleridge, and
Praed. Poetry, in short, is in the moist relaxing
air of Cambridge, and in those

". . . . brown o'er-arching groves
That contemplation loves."

156 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Cambridge would stand condemned were poets
its only product. Fortunately, as some proof of the
practical value of an University education, it can
point to men like Cromwell, Pitt, and Macaulay,
whose strenuous lives have in their several ways left
a mark on the nation's history. Though one be not
a champion of Cromwell's career, yet his savagery,
his duplicity, his canting hypocrisy fade into the
background and lose their significance beside the
firmness of purpose, the iron determination and the
wise policy that made England respected and feared
abroad under the rule of the Protector. The be-
heading of a King weighs little in the scale against
the upholding of the dignity of the State ; and
though a sour Puritanism ruled the land under
the great Oliver, at least the guns of a foreign
foe were never heard in our estuaries under the
Commonwealth, as they were heard after the
Restoration. Cambridge gives no sign that she
is proud of Oliver, neither does Sidney Sussex,
his old college. But if Cambridge be not out-
wardly proud of Old Noll, she abundantly glories
in William Pitt. And rightly, too. None may
calculate how the equation stands : how greatly
his natural parts or to what extent his seven
years of University education contributed to
his brilliant career ; but for one of her sons to
have attained the dignity of Chancellor of the
Exchequer at twenty -three years of age, to
have been Prime Minister at twenty-five, the
political dictator of Europe and the saviour of his
country, is a triumph beyond anything they can

HOB SON THE CARRIER 157

show on the Isis. The Pitt Press, the Pitt Scholar-
ship, the Pitt Club, all echo the fame of his astonishing
genius.

XXIV

THE impossibility of giving even a glimpse of the
principal colleges of Cambridge in these pages of a
book devoted to the road will be obvious. Thus, the
great quads of Trinity, the many courts of John's,
Milton's mulberry tree at Christ's, the Pepysian
Library of Magdalen, and a hundred other things
must be sought elsewhere. Turn we, then, to
further talk of Thomas Hobson, the carrier and
livery-stable keeper of " Hobson's Choice," who lies
in an unmarked resting-place in the chancel of St.
Benedict's Church, hard by the Market Hill. Bora
in 1544, he was not a native of Cambridge, but
seems to have first seen the light at Buntingford,
his father's native place. Already, in that father's
time, the business had grown so profitable and
important that we find Hobson senior a treasurer of
the Cambridge Corporation ; and when he died, in
1568, in a position to leave considerable landed and
other property among his family. To Thomas, his
more famous son, he bequeathed land at Grantchester
and the waggon and horses that industrious son had
been for some years past driving between Cambridge
and London for him, with the surety and regularity
of the solar system. " I bequeath," he wrote, " to my
son Thomas the team-ware that he now goeth with,

158 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

that is to say, the cart and eight horses, and all the
harness and other things thereunto belonging, with
the nag, to be delivered to him at such time and
when as he shall attain and come to the age of
twenty-five years ; or £30 in money, for and in
discharge thereof."

And thus he continued to go once a week, back
and forth, for close upon sixty-three years, riding
the nag and its successors beside the waggon that
ploughed its ponderous way along the heavy roads.
An ancient portrait of him, a large painting in oil,
is now in the Cambridge Guildhall, and inscribed,
"Mr. Hobson, 1620." This contemporary portrait
has the curious information written on the back,
" This picture was hung up at Ye Black Bull inn,
Bishopsgate, London, upwards of one hundred years
before it was given to J. Burleigh 1787."

Hobson scarce fitted the picture of the "jolly
waggoner" drawn in the old song. Have you ever
heard the song of the " Jolly Waggoner" ? It is a song
of lightly come and lightly go ; of drinking with good
fellows while the waggon and horses are standing
long hours outside the wayside inn, and consignees are
waiting with what patience they may for their goods.
A song that bids dull care begone, and draws for you
a lively sketch of the typical waggoner, who lived
for the moment, whistled as he went in attempted
rivalry with the hedgerow thrushes and blackbirds,
spent his money as he earned it, and had a greeting,
a ribbon, and a kiss for every lass along the familiar
highway.

It is a song that goes to a reckless and flamboyant

HOBSON, THE CAMBKIDGE CARRIER.

" Laugh not to see so plain a man in print ;

The Shadow's homely, yet ther's something in't.

Witness the Bagg he wears, (though seeming poore)

The fertile Mother of a hundred more ;

He was a thriving man, through lawfull Gain,

And wealthy grew by warrantable paine,

Then laugh at them that spend, not them that gather,
Like thriveing Sonnes of such a thrifty Father."

160 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

tune, an almost Handelian melody that is sung
with a devil-may-care toss of the head and much
emphasis ; a rare, sweet, homely old country ditty—

"When first I went a-waggoning, a- waggoning did go, »
I filled my parents' hearts with sorrow, trouble, grief, and woe ;
And many are the hardships, too, that since I have gone through.

Sing wo ! my lads, sing wo !

Drive on, my lads, heigh-ho !

For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do?

It is a cold and stormy night : I'm wetted to the skin,
But I'll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn,
And then I'll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Sing wo ! my lads, etc.

Now summer is a-coming on — what pleasure we shall see !
The mavis and the blackbird singing sweet on every tree.
The finches and the starlings, too, will whistle merrily.
Sing wo ! my lads, etc.

Now Michaelmas is coming fast — what pleasure we shall find !
'Twill make the gold to fly, my lads, like chaff before the wind.
And every lad shall kiss his lass, so loving and so kind.
Sing wo ! " etc.

And so forth.

Hobson was not this kind of man. He had his
horse-letting business in Cambridge, where, indeed,
he had forty saddle-nags always ready, " fit for
travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish
the gentlemen at once, without going from college
to college to borrow " ; but he continued throughout
his long life to go personally with his waggon, and
died January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year, of
the irksome and unaccustomed inaction imposed upon
him by the authorities, who forbade him to ply to
London while one of the periodical outbreaks of

HOB SON THE CA UTIO US 1 6 1

plague was raging in the capital. Dependable in
business as Hobson was, he prospered exceedingly,
and amassed a very considerable fortune, " a much
greater fortune," says one, " than a thousand men of
genius and learning, educated at the University,
ever acquired, or were capable of acquiring." This
is not a little hard on the learned and the gifted,
by whose favour and goodwill he prospered so
amazingly. For, be it known, he was not merely
and solely a carrier ; but the carrier, especially
licensed by the University, and thus a monopolist.
Those were the days before a Government monopoly
of the post was established, and one of Hobson's
particular functions was the conveying of the mails.
He was thus a very serious and responsible person.

You cannot conceive Hobson " carrying on " like
the typical "jolly waggoner." Look at the portrait
of him, taken from a, fresco painted on a wall of his
old house of call, the Bull, in Bishopsgate Street.
A very grave and staid old man it shows us ; look-
ing out upon the world with cold and calculating
eyes, deep-set beneath knitted brows, and with a
long and money-loving, yet cautious, nose. His
hand is unwillingly extracting a guinea from a well-
filled money-bag, and you may clearly see from his
expression of countenance how much rather he
would be putting one in.

Yet in his last years he appeared in the guise
of a benefactor to the town of Cambridge, for in
1628 he gave to town and University the land on
which was built the so-called " Spinning House," or,
more correctly, " Hobson's Workhouse," where poor

1 1

162

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

people who had no trade might be taught some
honest one, and all stubborn rogues and beggars be
compelled to earn their livelihood. A bequest pro-
viding for the maintenance of the water-conduit in
the Market Place kept his memory green for many
a long year afterwards. It remained a prominent

HOBSON.

[From a Painting %n Cambridge Guildhall]

object in the centre of the town until 1856, when
it was removed ; but the little watercourses that of
old used to run along the kennels of Cambridge
streets still serve to keep the place clean and sweet.

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that
Hobson, although he fared the road personally, and
attended to every petty detail of his carrying busi-

HOBSON'S EPITAPHS 163

ness, was both a very wealthy and a very important
personage. The second condition is not necessarily
a corollary of the first. But Hobson bulked large
in the Cambridge of his time. Indeed, as much
may be gathered from the mass of literature written
around his name. In his lifetime even, some com-
piler of a Commercial Letter Writer, for instructing
youths ignorant of affairs, could find no more apt
and taking title than that of Hobson s Horse Load
of Letters, or Precedents for Epistles of Business ;
and poets and verse-writers, from Milton downwards,
wrote many epitaphs and eulogies on him. Milton,
who had gone up to Christ's College in 1624, was
twenty-three years of age when Hobson died, and
wrote two humorous epitaphs on him, more akin
to the manner of Tom Hood than the majestic
periods usually associated in the mind with the style
commonly called " Miltonic." " Quibbling epitaphs "
an eighteenth century critic has called them. But
you shall judge —

"On the University Carrier, who sickened in
the time of the Vacancy, being forbid to
go to London by reason of the Plague.

Here lies old Hobson : Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas ! hath laid him in the dirt ;
Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one
He's here stuck in a slough and overthrown.
'Tvvas such a shifter that, if truth were known,
Death was half glad when he had got him down ;
For he had any time this ten years full
Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and the Bull;
And, surely, Death could never have prevailed,
Had not his weekly course of carriage failed ;
But, lately, finding him so long at home,
And thinking now his journey's end was come,

1 64 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

And that he had taken up his latest inn,

In the kind office of a Chamberlain

Showed him his room where he must lodge that night,

Pulled off his boots, and took away the light :

If any ask for him, it shall be said,

'Hobson hath supped, and's newly gone to bed.533

The subject seems to have been an engrossing
one to the youthful poet, for he harked back to it
in the following variant :—

" Here lieth one who did most truly prove
That he could never die while he could move ;
So hung his destiny, never to rot
While he might still jog on and keep his trot,
Made of sphere-metal, never to decay
Until his revolution was at stay !
Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime
'Gainst old truth) motion numbered out his time;
And, like an engine moved with wheel and weight,
His principles being ceased, he ended straight.
Eest, that gives all men life, gave him his death,
And too much breathing put him out of breath;
Nor were it contradiction to affirm
Too long vacation hastened on his term ;
Merely to drive the time away he sickened,
Fainted and died, nor would with ale be quickened.
'Nay,' quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretched,
' If 1 may not carry, sure I'll ne'er be fetched ;
But vow' (though the cross Doctors all stood hearers)
Tor one carrier put down, to make six bearers.'
Ease was his chief disease, and, to judge right,
He died for heaviness that his cart went light ;
His leisure told him that his time was come,
And lack of load made his life burdensome;
That even to his last breath, (there be that say't,)
As he were pressed to death, he cried ' More weight ! '
But, had his doings lasted as they were,
He had been an immortal Carrier.
Obedient to the moon, he spent his date
In course reciprocal, and had his fate

HOB SON'S EPITAPHS 165

Linked to the mutual flowing of the seas ;
Yet, strange to think, his wain was his increase ;
His letters are delivered all and gone ;
Only remains this superscription."

The next example — an anonymous one — makes
no bad third—

" Here Hobson lies among his many betters,
A man unlearned, yet a man of letters ;
His carriage was well known, oft hath he gone
In Embassy 'twixt father and the son :
There's few in Cambridge, to his praise be't spoken,
But may remember him by some good Token.
From whence he rid to London day by day,
Till Death benighting him, he lost his way :
His Team was of the best, nor would he have
Been mired in any way but in the grave.
And there he stycks, indeed, styll like to stand,
Untill some Angell lend hys helpyng hand.
Nor is't a wonder that he thus is gone,
Since all men know, he long was drawing on.
Thus rest in peace thou everlasting Swain,
And Supream Waggoner, next Charles his wain."

The couplet printed below touches a pretty note
of imagination, and is wholly free from that sus-
picion of affected scholarly superiority to a common
carrier, with which all the others, especially Milton's,
are super-saturated —

"Hobson's not dead, but Charles the Northerne swaine,
Hath sent for him, to draw his lightsome waine."

Charles's Wain, referred to in these two last ex-
amples, is, of course, that well-known constellation
in the northern heavens usually known as the Great
Bear, anciently " Charlemagne's Waggon," and more
anciently still, the Greek Hamaxa, " the Waggon."

166 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Coming, as might be expected, a considerable
distance after Milton and the others in point of
excellence, are the epitaphs printed in a little book
of 1640, called the Witt's Recreations, Selected
from the Finest Fancies of the Modern Muses. Some
of them are a little gruesome, and affect the reader
as unfavourably as though he saw the authors of these
lines dancing a saraband on poor old Hobson's grave—

"Hobson (what's out of sight is out of mind)
Is gone, and left his letters here behind.
He that with so much paper us'd to meet ;
Is now, alas ! content to take one sheet.

He that such carriage store was wont to have,
Is carried now himselfe unto his grave :
O strange ! he that in life ne're made but one,
Six Carriers makes, now he is dead and gone."

XXV

THE Market Hill is, as already hinted, the centre of
Cambridge. The University church is there. There,
too, the stalls of the Wednesday and Saturday
markets still gather thickly, and on them the in-
quisitive stranger may yet discover butter being
sold, as from time immemorial, by the yard. Here a
yard of butter is the equivalent of a pound, and the
standard gauge of such a yard — the obsolete symbol
of a time when the University exercised jurisdiction
over the markets as well as over the students — is to
this day handed over to the Senior Proctor of the
year on his taking office. It is a clumsy cylinder of

CHEAP REJOICINGS 167

sheet iron, a yard in length and an inch in diameter.
A pound of butter rolled out to this measurement
looks remarkably like a very yellow candle of
inordinate length.

Hobson's Conduit, as already noted, once stood
in the centre of this market-place. When his silent,
hook-nosed Majesty, AVilliam the Third, visited

MARKET HILL, CAMBRIDGE.

Cambridge in 1689, the Conduit was made by the
enthusiastic citizens to run wine. Not much wine,
though, nor very good, we may surely suppose, for
the tell-tale account-books record that it cost only
thirty shillings !

Few of the old coach-offices or inns stood in this
square, but were — and are now — to be found chiefly
in the streets leading out of it. The Bull,
anciently the Black Bull, still faces Trumpington

i68

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Street ; the Lion flourishes in Petty Cury ; the
old Three Tuns, Peas Hill, is now the Central
Temperance Hotel ; and the Blue Boar, in whose
archway an unfortunate clergyman, the Eeverend
Gavin Braithwaite, was killed in 1814 when seated
on the roof of the Ipswich coach, still faces Trinity
Street. The Sun, however, in Trinity Street, where

THE FALCON, CAMBRIDGE.

Byron and his cronies dined and caroused, is no
more ; and of late years the Woolpack and the
Wrestlers, both very ancient buildings, have been
demolished. Foster's Bank stands on the site of one
and the new Post Office on that of the other. For
a while the remains of the galleried, tumbledown

THE FALCON

169

Falcon, stand in a court off Petty Cury ; the inn
in whose yard Cambridge students entertained and

INTERIOR OF ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH.

shocked Queen Elizabeth with a blasphemous stage
travesty of the Mass. In Bridge Street stands the

1 70 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Hoop, notable in its day, and celebrated by
Wordsworth—

" Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught,
While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam ;
And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn."

Beyond the Hoop, the quaintly-named Pickerel
Inn stands by Magdalen, or Great Bridge, just as it
did in days when the carriers dumped down their
loads here, to be transferred to the passage-boats for
Ely and King's Lynn. In Benet Street the Eagle,
once the Eagle and Child, still discloses a courtyard
curiously galleried, and hard by is the old Bath Hotel.
This list practically exhausts the old coaching inns,
but of queer hostelries of other kinds there are many,
with nodding gables and latticed windows, in every
other lane and by-way. Churches, too, abound.
Oldest among these is St. Sepulchre's, one of the
four round churches in England ; a dark Norman
building that in the blackness of its interior accur-
ately figures the grimness of the Norman mind.

XXVI

CAMBRIDGE, now a town abounding in and surrounded
by noble trees, was originally a British settlement,
placed on that bold spur of high ground, rising from
the surrounding treeless mires, on which in after
years the Eomans established their military post of
Camboricum, and where in later ages William the
Conqueror built his castle. The great artificial

WHERE CAMBRIDGE STANDS 171

mound, which, like some ancient sepulchral tumulus,
is all that remains to tell of William's fortress and to
mark where Koman and Briton had originally seized
upon this strategic point, crowns this natural bluff,
overlooking the river Cam. Standing on it, with
the whole of Cambridge town and a wide panorama
of low-lying surrounding country disclosed, it is
evident that this must have been the place of places
for many miles on either hand where, in those remote

CAMBRIDGE CASTLE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

days, the river could be crossed. Everywhere else
the wide-spreading swamps forbade a passage ; and,
consequently, those who held this position, and could
keep it, could deny the whole country to the passage
of a hostile force from either side. Whether one
enemy sought to penetrate from London to Ely and
Norfolk, or whether another would come out of
Norfolk into South Cambridgeshire or Herts, he must
first of necessity dispose of those who held the key
of this situation. The Romans, before they could

172 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

subdue the masters of this position, experienced, we
may well believe, no little difficulty ; and it is probable
that the perplexity of antiquaries, confronted by the
existence of a Roman camp or station here, and of
another three miles higher up the Cam at Grant-
chester, may be smoothed out by the very reasonable
explanation that Gran tch ester was the first Roman
camp over against the British stronghold at Cam-
bridge, and that, when the Romans had made
themselves masters of Cambridge, that place remained
their military post, while Grantchester became a civil
and trading community and a place of residence.

Both place-names derive from this one river,
masquerading now as the Granta and again as the
Cam, but by what name the Romans knew Grant-
Chester we do not know and never shall.

At Roman Camboricum those ancient roads, the
Akeman Street and the Via Devana, crossed at right
angles, meeting here on this very Castle hill : the
Via Devana on its way from Colchester to the town
of Deva, now Chester ; the Akeman Street going
from Branodunum, now Brancaster, on the coast of
Norfolk, to Aquse Solis, the Bath of our own day.

Cambridge Castle, built in 1068 by William the
Conqueror to hold Hereward the Saxon and his
East Anglian fellow-patriots in check, has entirely
disappeared. It never accumulated any legends of
sieges or surprises, and of military history it had
none whatever. It was, therefore, a castle of the
greatest possible success ; for, consider, although the
first impulse may be to think little of a fortress that
can tell no warlike story, the very lack of anything

CAMBRIDGE CASTLE 173

of the kind is the best proof of its strength and
fitness. It is not the purpose of a castle to invite
attacks, but by its very menace to overawe and
terrify. Torquilstone Castle and the story of its
siege and downfall, in the pages of Ivanhoe, make
romantic and exciting reading ; but, inasmuch as it
fell, it was a failure. That Cambridge Castle not
only never fell, but was not even menaced, is the
best proof of its power.

These great fortresses, with their stone keeps and
spreading wards and baileys, dotted here and there
over the land, rang the knell of English liberties.
" New and strong and cruel in their strength — how
the Englishman must have loathed the damp smell
of the fresh mortar, and the sight of the heaps of
rubble, and the chippings of the stone, and the
blurring of the lime upon the greensward ; and how
hopeless he must have felt when the great gates
opened and the wains were drawn in, heavily laden
with the salted beeves and the sacks of corn and
meal furnished by the royal demesnes, the manors
which had belonged to Edward the Confessor, now
the spoil of the stranger ; and when he looked into
the castle court, thronged by the soldiers in bright
mail, and heard the carpenters working upon the
ordnance — every blow and stroke, even of the
hammer or mallet, speaking the language of
defiance."

William himself occupied his castle of Cambridge
on its completion in 1069, and from it he directed
the long and weary military operations against
Hereward across the fens toward the Isle of Ely,

174 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

only twelve miles away. From his keep-tower he
could see with his own eyes that Isle, rising from the
flat, on the skyline, like some Promised Land, but
two years were to pass before he and his soldiers
were to enter there ; admitted even then by
treachery.

From the Castle Mound the Cam may be seen,
winding away through the flats into the distant haze.
Immediately below are Parker's Piece, and Mid-
summer and Stourbridge Commons; this last from
time beyond knowledge the annual scene of Stour-
bridge Fair. "Sturbitch" Fair, as the country-folk
call it, existed, like the University itself, before
history came to take note of it. When King John
reigned it was already an important mark, and so
continued until, at the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
its rights and privileges were transferred to the
Corporation of Cambridge.

Whether the story of its origin be well founded,
or merely a picturesque invention, it cannot be said.
It is a story telling how a Kendal clothier, at date
unknown, journeying from Westmoreland to London,
his pack-horses laden with bales of cloth, found the
bridge over the Cam at this point broken down, and,
trying to ford the river, fell in, goods and all.
Struggling at last to the opposite bank, and fishing
out his property, he spread his cloth to dry on
Stourbridge Common, where so many of the towns-
folk came to see it and to bid that in the end he sold
nearly all his stock, and did much better than if he
had gone on to London. The next year, therefore, he
took care — not to fall into the Cam again — but to

STOURBRIDGE FAIR 175

make Cambridge his mart. Other trades then
became attracted to the place where he found business
so brisk, and hence (according to the legend) the
growth of a fair in its prime comparable only with
that greatest of all fairs — the famous one of Nijni-
Novgorod.

To criticise a legend of this kind would be to
take it too seriously, else, among many things that
might be inquired into would be the appearance at
Cambridge of a traveller from Westmoreland bound
for London. He must have missed his way very
widely indeed !

The Fair still lasts three weeks, from 18th
September to 10th October, 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

176 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

WATERBEACH 177

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 Kev. 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

12

178 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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

SPURGEON 179

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, South-
wark, 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 number-
ing 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 ?

i8o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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. Land-
beach 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

LANDBEACH 181

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 Kawley's shade and discreetly pump it.
Beyond Landbeach, close by the fifty-sixth mile-

LANDBEACH.

stone from London, the modern road falls into the
Roman Akeman Street, running from Brancaster
(the Eoman " 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 con-

182

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

siderably 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 civilisa-
tion 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

THE FENS 183

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 Kiver 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 Komans 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 de-
scribed the present appearance of the Fen country

1 84

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 Fenian d 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

HISTORY OF THE FENS 185

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 Fenian d 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 learns of a severe straightness, there is
visible to the mind's eye, Horatio, an ancient order
of things infinitely strange and uncanny. Anti-
quaries have written much of the Fens, but they do
not commonly present a very convincing picture of
them. They tell of Iceni, of Komaiis, fierce Norse-
men 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 seons when the protoplasm first began
to move in the steaming slime, and so conducted

1 86 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

us by easy stages through the crucial and hazardous
period when the jelly-fish was acquiring the rudi-
ments 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 settle-
ments. 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 pur-

PREHISTORIC MAN 187

poseful Komans 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
Mildeuhall 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 stag-
ing 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

i88 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

Kelics 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 neigh-
bouring primitive.

To these isles in after centuries, when the Eomans
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 uey" and
" ea," corruptions of the Anglo-Saxon words " ig,"

FENLAND PLACE-NAMES 189

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, Little-
port, 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

i9o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 embank-
ments 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 Vas 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 Stan-
ground, away up in the north near Peterborough,
to Wisbeach, still known as Morton's Learn, 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,

EARL Y FEN-DRAINING

191

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.

THE FENS.
[After Dugdale.]

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

1 92 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

The great engineering figure at this period of
reclamation was the Dutchman, Cornelius Vermuydeii,
who began his dyking and draining under royal
sanction and with Bedfordian aid in 1629. Yermuy-
den's is a great figure historically considered, but
his works are looked upon coldly in these times, and
it is even said that one of the principal labours of

THE PENMEN 193

modern engineers has been to rectify his errors.
That view probably originated with Kennie, who in
1810 was employed to drain and reclaim the exten-
sive marshland between Wisbeach and Lynn, and
was bound, in the usual professional manner, to
speak evil things of one of the same craft. There
was little need, though, to be jealous of Vermuyden,
who had died obscurely, in poverty and in the cold
shade of neglect, some hundred and fifty years
before. Vermuyden, as a matter of course, em-
ployed Flamands and Hollanders in his works, for
they were not merely his own countrymen, but
naturally skilled in labour of this technical kind.
These strangers aroused the enmity of the Fenmen,
not for their strangeness alone, but for the sake of
the work they were engaged upon, for the drainage
of the Fens was then a highly unpopular proceeding.
The Fenmen loved their watery wastes, and little
wonder that they did so, for they knew none other,
and they were a highly specialised race of amphi-
bious creatures, skilled in all the arts of the wild-
fowler and the fisherman, by which they lived.
Farming was not within their ken. They trapped
and subsisted upon the innumerable fish and birds
that shared the wastes with them ; birds of the
cluck tribe, the teal, widgeon, and mallard ; and
greater fowl, like the wild goose and his kind. For
fish they speared and snared the eel, the pike, and
the lamprey — pre-eminently fish of the fens ; for
houses they contrived huts of mud and stakes,
thatched with the reeds that grew densely, to a
height of ten or twelve feet, everywhere ; and as for
'3

194

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

firing, peat was dug and stacked and burnt. Con-
sider. The Fenman was a product of the centuries.
His father, his grandfather, his uttermost ancestors,
had squatted and fished and hunted where they
would, and none could say them. nay. They paid
no rent or tithe to anyone, for the Fens were common,
or waste. And now the only life the Fenman knew
was like to be taken from him. What could such
an one do on dry land ? A farmer put aboard ship
and set to navigate it could not be more helpless
than the dweller in those old marshes, dependent
only upon his marsh lore, when the water was
drained off and the fishes gone, reed-beds cut down,
the land cultivated, and the wild-fowl dispersed.
The fears of this people were quaintly expressed in
the popular verses then current, entitled "The
Powte's Complaint." " Powte," it should be said,
was the Fen name for the lamprey—

"Come, brethren of the water, and let us all assemble
To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble ;
For we shall rue, if it be true the fens be undertaken,
And where we feed in fen and reed they'll feed both beef an
bacon.

They'll sow both beans and oats where never man yet thought it ;
Where men did row in boats ere undertakers bought it ;
But, Ceres, thou behold us now, let wild oats be their venture,
And let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.

Behold the great design, which they do now determine,
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine ;
For they do mean all fens to drain and waters overmaster,
All will be dry, and we must die, 'cause Essex Calves want
pasture.

CROMWELL 195

Away with boats and rudders, farewell both boots and skatches,
No need of one nor t'other ; men now make better matches ;
Stilt-makers all and tanners shall complain of this disaster,
For they will make each muddy lake for Essex Calves a pasture.

The feather'd fowls have wings, to fly to other nations,

But we have no such things to help our transportations ;

We must give place, 0 grievous case ! to horned beasts and cattle,

Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle."

Other verses follow ^ where winds, waves, and
moon are invoked in aid, but enough has been
quoted to show exactly how affairs stood at this
juncture. But the Ferimen were not without their
defender. He was found in a certain young Hunt-
ingdonshire squire and brewer, one Oliver Cromwell,
Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, reclaimed
from his early evil courses, and now, a Puritan and
a brand plucked timeously from the burning, posing
as champion of the people. Seven years past this
draining business had been going forward, and now
that trouble was brewing between King and people,
and King wanted money, and people would withhold
it, the popular idea arose that the Fens were being
drained to provide funds for royal needs. Cromwell
was at this time resident in Ely, and seized upon
the local grievances and exploited them to his own
end, with the result that the works were stopped
and himself raised to the extreme height of local
popularity. But when the monarchy was upset and
Cromwell had become Lord Protector, he not only
authorised the drainage being resumed, but gave
extreme aid and countenance to William, Earl of
Bedford, sending him a thousand Scots prisoners

196 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

from Dunbar, as pressed men, practically slaves, to
work in his trenches. Appeal from Philip drunk
to Philip sober is a famous remedy, but appeal to
Oliver, besotted with power, must have seemed
helpless to our poor Fen-slodgers, for they do not
seem to have made resistance, and the work pro-
gressed to its end.

XXX

IF most of those who have described Fenland have
lacked imagination, certainly the charge cannot be
brought against that eighth -century saint, Saint
Guthlac, who fled into this great dismal swamp and
founded Crowland Abbey on its north - easterly
extremity. Crowland has nothing to do with the
Ely and King's Lynn Road, but in describing what
he calls the " develen and luther gostes " that made
his life a misery, Guthlac refers to the evil inhabitants
of the Fens in general. Precisely what a "luther"
ghost may be, does not appear. A Protestant
spook, perhaps, it might be surmised, except that
Lutheran schisms did not arise for many centuries
later.

Saints were made of strange materials in ancient
times, and Guthlac was of the strangest. Truth was
not his strong point, and he could and did tell tales
that would bring a blush to the hardy cheek of a
Sir John Mandeville, or arouse the bitter envy of a
Munchausen. But Guthlac's character shall not be
taken away without good cause shown. He begins

SAINT GUTHLAC 197

reasonably enough, with an excellent descriptive
passage, picturing the " hideous fen of huge bigness
which extends in a very long track even to the sea,
ofttimes clouded with mist and dark vapours, having
within it divers islands and woods, as also crooked
and winding rivers " ; but after this mild prelude
goes on to make very large demands upon our
credulity.

He had a wattle hut on an island, and to this
poor habitation, he tells us, the " develen and hither
gostes" came continually, dragged him out of bed
and " tugged and led him out of his cot, and to the
swart fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy
waters." Then they beat him with iron whips. He
describes these devils in a very uncomplimentary
fashion. They had " horrible countenances, great
heads, long necks, lean visages, filthy and squalid
beards, rough ears, fierce eyes, and foul mouths ;
teeth like horses' tusks, throats filled with flame,
grating voices, crooked shanks, and knees big and
great behind." It would have been scarce possible
to mistake one of these for a respectable peasant.

After fifteen years of this treatment, Guthlac
died, and it is to be hoped these hardy inventions of
his are not remembered against him. No one else
found the Fens peopled so extravagantly. Only the
will-o' -wisps that danced fitfully and pallid at night
over the treacherous bogs, and the poisonous miasma
exhaled from the noxious beds of rotting sedge ; only
the myriad wild-fowl made the wilderness strange
and eerie.

Guthlac was the prime romancist of the Fens,

198 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

but others nearly contemporary with him did not
altogether lack imagination and inventive powers ;
as where one of the old monkish chroniclers gravely
states that the Fen -folk were born with yellow
bellies, like frogs, and were provided with webbed
feet to fit them for their watery surroundings.

Asthma and ague were long the peculiar
maladies of these districts. Why they should have
been is sufficiently evident, but Dugdale, who has
performed the difficult task of writing a dry book
upon the Fens, uses language that puts the case very
convincingly. He says, " There is no element good,
the air being for the most part cloudy, gross, and
full of rotten harrs ; the water putrid and muddy,
yea, full of loathsome vermin ; the earth spungy and
boggy." No wonder, then, that the terrible disease
of ague seized upon the unfortunate inhabitants of
this watery waste. Few called this miasmatic
affection by that name : they knew it as the " Bailiff
of Marshland," and to be arrested by the dread bailiff
was a frequent experience of those who worked early
or late in the marshes, when the poisonous vapours
still lingered. To alleviate the miseries of ague the
Fen-folk resorted to opium, and often became slaves
to that drug. Another very much dreaded " Bailiff"
was the " Bailiff of Bedford," as the Ouse, coming
out of Bedfordshire, was called. He of the marsh-
land took away your health, but the flooded Ouse,
rising suddenly after rain or thaw, swept your very
home away.

Still, in early morn, in Wicken Fen, precautions
are taken by the autumn sedge-cutter against the

FENLAND HABITS 199

dew and the exhalations from the earth, heavy with
possibilities of marsh fever. He ties a handkerchief
over his mouth for that purpose, while to protect
himself against the sharp edges of the sedge he
wears old stockings tied round his arms, leather
gaiters on his legs, and a calfskin waistcoat.

The modern Fen-folk are less troubled with ague
than their immediate ancestors, but the opium habit
has not wholly left them. Whether they purchase
the drug, or whether it is extracted from the white
poppies that are a feature of almost every Fenland
garden, they still have recourse to it, and "poppy
tea" is commonly administered to the children to
keep them quiet while their parents are at work
afield. The Fenlanders are, by consequence, a solemn
and grim race, shaking sometimes with ague, and at
others " as nervous as a kitten," as they are apt to
express it, as a result of drugging themselves. An-
other, and an entirely innocent, protection against
ague is celery, and the celery-bed is a cherished part
of a kitchen-garden in the Fens.

One of the disadvantages of these oozy flats is
the lack of good drinking-water. The rivers, filled
as they are with the drain ings of the dykes and
ditches, can only offer water unpleasant both to
smell and taste, if not actually poisonous from the
decaying matter and the myriad living organisms in
it ; and springs in the Fens are practically unknown.
Under these circumstances the public-houses do a
good trade in beer and spirits.

200 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

XXXI

CAMBRIDGESHIRE is a singularly stoneless country,
and in the Fens there is not so much as a pebble to
be found. Thus it has become a common jest of the
Cambridgeshire farmers to offer to swallow all the
stones you can pick up in their fields. Farm horses
for this reason are never shod, and it sounds not a
little strange and uncanny to see one of the great
waggon-horses plodding along a Fenland " drove," as
the roads are named, and to hear nothing but the
sound of his bells and the indistinct thudding of his
shoeless feet in the dust or the mud, into whichever
condition the weather has thrown the track.

A Fenland road is one thing among others
peculiar to the Fens. It is a very good illustration
of eternity, and goes on, flat and unbending, with a
semi-stagnant ditch on either side, as far as eye can
reach in the vast solitary expanse, empty save for an
occasional ash-tree or group of Lombardy poplars, with
perhaps a hillock rising in the distance crowned by a
church and a village. No " metal " or ballast has ever
been placed on the Fenland drove. In summer it is
from six to eight inches deep in a black dust, that
rises in choking clouds to the passage of a vehicle or
on the uprising of a breeze ; in winter it is a sea of
mud, congealed on the approach of frost into ruts and
ridges of the most appalling ruggedness. The Fen-
folk have a home-made way with their execrable
"droves." When they become uneven they just
harrow them, as the farmer in other counties harrows

FENLAND FIELDS 201

his fields, and, when they are become especially hard,
they plough them first and harrow them afterwards ;
a procedure that would have made Macadam faint
with horror. The average-constituted small boy,
who throws stones by nature, discovers something
lacking in the scheme of creation as applied to these
districts. Everywhere the soil is composed of the
ancient alluvial silt brought down to these levels by
those lazy streams, the Nene, the Lark, the Cam,
and the Ouse, and of the dried peat of these some-
time stagnant and festering morasses. Now that
drainage has so thoroughly done its work, that in
ardent summers the soil of this former inland sea
gapes and cracks with dryness, it is no uncommon
sight to see water pumped on to the baking fields
from the learns and droves. The earth is of a light,
dry black nature, consisting of fibrous vegetable
matter, and possesses the well-known preservative
properties of bog soil. Thus the trees of the primeval
forest that formerly existed here, and were drowned
in an early stage of the world's history, are often dug
up whole. Their timber is black too, as black as coal,
as may be seen by the wooden bridges that cross the
drains and cuts, often made from these prehistoric
trees.

Here is a typical dyke. Its surface is richly
carpeted with water- weeds, and the water-lily spreads
its flat leaves prodigally about it ; the bright yellow
blossoms reclining amid them like graceful naiads on
fairy couches. But the Fenland children have a
more prosaic fancy. They call them " Brandy-balls."
The flowering rush, flushing a delicate carmine, and

202 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the aquatic sort of forget-me-not, sporting the
Cambridge colours, are common inhabitants of the
dykes ; and in the more stagnant may be found the
" water-soldier," a queer plant without any roots, liv-
ing in the still slime at the bottom until the time
comes for it to put forth its white blossoms, when it
comes to " attention " in the light of day, displays its
fleeting glory, and then sinks again, " at ease," to its
fetid bed. There is a current in the dykes, but the
water flows so imperceptibly that it does not deflect
the upstanding spikes of the daintiest aquatic plant
by so much as a hair's-breadth. Indeed, it would
not flow at all, and would merely stagnate, were it
not for the windmill-worked pumps that suck it
along and, somewhere in the void distance, impel it
up an inclined plane, and so discharge it into the
longer and higher drain, whence it indolently flows
into one of the canalised rivers, and so, through a
sluice, eventually finds its way into the sea at ebb-
tide.

The means by which the Fens are kept drained
are not without their interest. A glance at a map
of Cambridgeshire and its neighbouring counties will
show the Great Level to be divided up into many
patches of land by hard straight lines running in
every direction. Some are thicker, longer, and
straighter than others, but they all inter-communi-
cate, and eventually reach one or other of the rivers.
The longest, straightest, and broadest of these repre-
sents that great drain already mentioned, the Old
Bedford River, seventy feet wide and twenty-one
miles long ; cut in the seventeenth century to shorten

FENLAND DRAINS

205

the course of the Ouse and to carry off the floods.
Others are the New Bedford River, one hundred feet
in width, cut only a few years later and running
parallel with the first ; Vermuyden's Eau, or the
Forty Foot Drain, of the same period, feeding the
Old Bedford River from the Nene, near Ramsey,
with their tributaries and counter-drains. The North
Level cuts belong principally to the early part of
the nineteenth century, when Rennie drained the
Wisbeach and Lynn districts.

The main drains are at a considerably higher
level than the surrounding lands, the water in them
only prevented from drowning the low-lying fields
again by their great and solid banks, fourteen to

O J

sixteen feet high, and about ten feet in breadth
at the top. These banks, indeed, form in many
districts the principal roads. Perilous roads at night,
even for those who know them well, and one thinks
with a shudder of the clangers encountered of old by
local medical men, called out in the darkness to
attend some urgent case. Their custom was—
perhaps it is in some places still observed — to mount
their steady nags and to jog along with a lighted
stable-lantern swinging from each stirrup, to throw
a warning gleam on broken bank or frequent sunken
fence.

At an interval of two miles along these banks is
generally to be found a steam pnmping-engine, busily
and constantly occupied in raising water from the
lodes and dykes in the lower levels and pouring it
into the main channel. The same process is repeated
in the case of raising the water from the field-drains

206 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

into the smaller dykes by a windmill or " skeleton-
pump," as it is often called. It is a work that is
never done, but goes forward, year by year, and is
paid for by assessments on the value of the lands
affected by these operations. Commissioners, them-
selves local landowners and tenants, and elected by
the same classes, look after the conduct and the
efficiency of the work, and see that the main drains
are scoured by the " scourers " ; the banks duly
repaired by the "bankers" and the "gaulters"; the
moles, that might bring disaster by burrowing
through them, caught by the "molers"; and the
sluices kept in working order. The rate imposed for
paying the cost of these works is often a heavy one,
but the land is wonderfully rich and productive.
Nor need the Fenland farmer go to extraordinary
expense for artificial manure, or for marling his fields
when at length he has cropped all the goodness out
of the surface soil. The very best of restoratives lies
from some five to twelve feet under his own land, in
the black greasy clay formed from the decaying
vegetable matter of the old forests that underlie the
Fens. A series of pits is sunk on the land, the clay
obtained from them is spread over it, and the fields
again yield a bounteous harvest.

Harvest-work and farm-work in general in the
Fens is in some ways peculiar to this part of the
country, for farm-holdings are large and farmsteads
far between. The practice, under these conditions,
arose of the work being done by gangs ; the hands
assembling at break of day in the farmyard and
being despatched in parties to their distant day's

FARM-HANDS IN THE FENS 207

work in hoeing, weeding, or picking in the flat and
almost boundless fields ; returning only when the day's
labour is ended. Men, women, and children gathered
thus in the raw morning make a picture — and in
some ways a pitiful picture — of farming and rustic
life, worthy of a Millet. But our Millet has not yet
come ; and the gangs grow fewer. If he does not
hasten, they will be quite gone, and something
characteristic in Fenland-life quite lost. A Fenland
farm-lass may wear petticoats, or she may not.
Sometimes she acts as carter, and it is precisely in
such cases that she sheds her feminine skirts and
dons the odd costume that astonishes the inquisitive
stranger new to these parts, who sees, with doubt as
to whether he sees aright, a creature with the boots
and trousers of a man, a nondescript garment, half
bodice and half coat with skirts, considerably above
the knees, and a sun-bonnet on her head, working
in the rick-yards, or squashing heavily through the
farmyard muck. Skirts are out of place in farmyards
and in cattle-byres, and the milkmaid, too, of these
parts is dressed in like guise. If you were to show
a milkmaid in the Fens a picture illustrating " Where
are you going to, my pretty maid ? " in the conven-
tional fashion, she would criticise very severely, as
quite incorrect, the skirted figure of a poet's dream
usually presented. She saves her skirts and her
flower-trimmed hat for Sundays.

208 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

XXXII

AND now we must come from the general to the
especial ; from Fens and Fen-folk in the mass to a
bright particular star.

The greatest historical figure along the whole
course of this road is that of Hereward the Wake, the
" last of the English," as he has been called. " Here-
ward," it has been said, means " the guard of the
army," while " the Wake " is almost self-explanatory,
signifying literally the Wide Awake, or the Watch-
ful. He is thought to have been the eldest son of
Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and of the famous Godiva,
and to have been banished by his father and out-
lawed. Like objects dimly glimpsed in a fog, the
figure of Hereward looms gigantic and uncertain
through the mists of history, and how much of him
is real and how much legendary no one can say.
When Hereward was born, in the mild reign of
Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxons who six
hundred and fifty years before had conquered Britain,
and, driving a poor remnant of the enervated race
of Romanised Britons to the uttermost verge of the
island, changed the very name of the country from
Britain to England, had themselves degenerated.
The Saxons were originally among the fiercest of
savages, and derived their name from the " ssexe,"
or short sword, with which they came to close and
murderous combat; but the growth of civilisation
and the security in which they had long dwelt in the
conquered island undermined their original combative-

HERE WARD THE WAKE 209

ness, and for long before the invasion of England by
William the Conqueror they had been hard put to it
to hold their own against the even more savage
Danes. Yet at the last, at Hastings under Harold,
they made a gallant stand against the Normans, and
if courage alone could have won the day, why then
no Norman dynasty had ever occupied the English
throne. The Battle of Hastings was only won by
superior military dispositions on the part of William.
His archers gained him the victory, and by their
disconcerting arrow-flights broke the advance of the
Saxons armed with sword and battle-axe.

That most decisive and momentous battle in the
world's history was lost and won on the 14th day of
October 1066. It was followed by a thorough-going
policy of plunder and confiscation. Everywhere the
Saxon landowners were dispossessed of their property,
and Normans replaced them. Even the Saxon
bishops were roughly deprived of their sees, and
alien prelates from over sea took their place. The
Saxon race was utterly degraded and crushed, arid to
be an Englishman became a reproach ; so that the
Godrics, Godbalds, and Godgifus, the Ediths, the
Alfreds, and other characteristic Saxon names, began
to be replaced by trembling parents with Roberts,
and Williams, and Henrys, and other names of
common Norman use.

Now, in dramatic fashion, Hereward comes upon
the scene. Two years of this crushing tyranny had
passed when, one calm summer's evening in 1068, a
stranger, accompanied by only one attendant, entered
the village of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, the place now

210 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

identified with Bourne ; Bourne and its Teutonic orig-
inal form of Brunne meaning a stream. It was one
of his father's manors. Seeking, unrecognised, shelter
for the night, he was met by lamentations, and was
told that Leofric, the great Earl, was dead ; that his
heir, the Lord Hereward, was away in foreign parts ;
and that his younger brother, now become heir, had
only the day before been foully murdered by the
Normans, who had in derision fixed his head over the
doorway. Moreover, the Normans had seized the
house and the manor. " Alas ! " wailed the unhappy
Saxon dependants, " we have no power to revenge
these things. Would that Hereward were here !
Before to-morrow's sunrise they would all taste of
the bitter cup they have forced on us."

The stranger was sheltered and hospitably
entertained by these unhappy folk. After the
evening meal they retired to rest, but their guest
lay sleepless. Suddenly the distant sounds of singing
and applause burst on his ears. Springing from his
couch, he roused a serving-man and inquired the
meaning of this nocturnal merrymaking, when he
was informed that the Norman intruders were
celebrating the entry of their lord into the patrimony
of the youth they had murdered. The stranger
girded on his weapons, threw about him a long black
cloak, and with his companion repaired to the scene
of this boisterous revelry. There the first object that
met his eyes was the head of the murdered boy. He
took it down, kissed it, and wrapped it in a cloth.
Then the two placed themselves in the dark shadow
of a doorway whence they could command a view into

HEREWAR&S VENGEANCE 211

the hall. The Normans were scattered about a
blazing fire, most of them overcome with drunken-
ness and reclining on the bosoms of their women.
In their midst was a jongleur, or minstrel, chanting
songs of reproach against the Saxons and ridiculing
their unpolished manners in coarse dances and
ludicrous gestures. He was proceeding to utter
indecent jests against the family of the youth they
had slain, when he was interrupted by one of the
women, a native of Flanders. " Forget not," she
said, " that the boy has a brother, named Here ward,
famed for his bravery throughout the country whence
I come, ay, and even in Spain and Algiers. Were
he here, things would wear a different aspect on the

morrow."

The new lord of the house, indignant at this,
raised his head and exclaimed, " I know the man
well, and his wicked deeds that would have brought
him ere this to the gallows, had he not sought safety
in flight ; nor dare he now make his appearance
anywhere this side the Alps."

The minstrel, seizing on this theme, began to
improvise a scurrilous song, when he was literally
cut short in an unexpected manner — his head clove
in two by the swift stroke of a Saxon sword. It
was Hereward who had done this. Then he turned
on the defenceless Normans, who fell, one after the
other, beneath his furious blows ; those who attempted
to escape being intercepted by his companion at the
door. His arm was not stayed until the last was
slain, and the heads of the Norman lord and fourteen
of his knights were raised over the doorway.

212 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

The historian of these things goes on to say
that the Normans in the neighbourhood, hearing of
Hereward's return and of this midnight exploit, fled.
This proves their wisdom, at the expense of their
courage. The Saxons rose on every side, but
Hereward at first checked their zeal, selecting only
a strong body of relations and adherents, and with
them attacking arid slaying those of the Normans
who dared remain on his estates. Then he repaired
to his friend Brand, the Saxon Abbot of Peter-
borough, from whom, in the Anglo-Saxon manner,
he received the honour of knighthood. After sud-
denly attacking and killing a Norman baron sent
against him, he dispersed his followers, and, promising
to rejoin them in a year, sailed for Flanders. We
next hear of Hereward in the spring of 1070, when
he appears in company with the Danes whom
William the Conqueror had allowed to winter on the
east coast. Together they raised a revolt, first in
the Humber and along the Yorkshire Ouse ; and
then they are found sacking and destroying Peter-
borough Abbey, by that time under the control of
the Norman Abbot Turold. A hundred and sixty
armed men were gathered by the Abbot to force
them back to their lair at Ely, but they had already
left. With the advent of spring Hereward's Danish
allies sailed away, rich in plunder, and he and his
outlaws were left to do as best they could. For a
year he remained quiet in his island fastness, secured
by the trackless bogs and fens from attack, while
the discontented elements were being attracted to
him. With him was that attendant who kept the

HERE WARD IN ELY 213

door at Bourne : Martin of the Light Foot was his
name. Others were Leofric " Prat," or the Cunning,
skilful in spying out the dispositions of the enemy ;
Leofric the Mower, who obtained his distinctive
name by mowing off the legs of a party of Nor-
mans with a scythe, the only weapon he could lay
hands on in a hurry; Ulric the Heron, and Ulric
the Black — all useful lieutenants in an exhausting
irregular warfare. Greater companions were the
Saxon Archbishop Stigand, Bishop Egelwin of
Lincoln, and the Earls Morcar, Edwin, and Tosti.
All these notables, with a large following, flocked
into the Isle of Ely, as a Camp of Refuge, and
quartered themselves on the monks of the Abbey of
Ely. There they lay, and constituted a continual
menace to the Norman power. Sometimes they
made incursions into other districts, and burnt and
slew ; at others, when hard pressed, they had simply
to retire into these fens to be unapproachable. None
among the Norman conquerors of other parts of the
land could cope with Here ward, and at last William,
in the summer of 1071, found it necessary to take
the field in person against this own brother to Will-
o'-the-Wisp. His plan of campaign was to attempt
the invasion of the Isle of Ely simultaneously from
two different points ; from Brandon on the north-
east, and from Cottenham on the south-west. The
Brandon attempt was by boat, and soon failed : the
advance from Cottenham was a longer business.
Why he did not advance by that old Roman road,
the Akeman Street, cannot now be explained. That
splendid example of a causeway built across the

214

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

morasses must still have afforded the better way,
even though the Komans who made it had been
gone six hundred years. But the Conqueror chose
to advance from Cambridge by way of Impington,
Histon, and Cottenham. It is, of course, possible
that the defenders of the Isle had destroyed a portion
of the old road, or in some way rendered it im-
practicable. His line of march can be traced even
to this day. Leaving the old coaching road here at
Cottenham Corner, we make for that village, famed
in these days for its cream cheeses and grown to
the proportions of a small town.1 It was here, at
Cottenham and at Kampton, that William collected
his invading force and amassed the great stores of
materials necessary for overcoming the great diffi-
culty of entering the Isle of Ely, then an isle in the
most baulking and inconvenient sense to an invader.
Before the Isle could be entered by an army, it was
necessary to build a causeway across the two miles'
breadth of marshes that spread out from the Ouse
at Aldreth, and this work had to be carried out in the
face of a vigorous opposition from Hereward and his
allies. It was two years before this causeway could
be completed. Who shall say what strenuous labour
went to the making of this road across the reedy
bogs ; what vast accumulations of reeds and brush-

1 Famous, too, in that Cambridgeshire byword, " a Cottenham
jury," which arose (as the inhabitants of .every other village will have
you believe) from the verdict of a jury of Cottenham men, in the case
of a man tried for the murder of his wife. The foreman, returning
into Court, said, " They were unanimously of opinion that it sarved
her right, for she were such a tarnation bad 'un as no man could live
with."

TO ALDRETH

215

wood, felled trees and earth ? The place has an
absorbing interest, but to explore it thoroughly
requires no little determination, for the road that
William made has every appearance of being left

Ear.ffv

Cambridge Ely, am)
KingUynn'Road ~
Deserfcd Roman Road
from Giinbridge— "•

THE ISLE OF ELY AND DISTRICT.

just as it was when he had done with it, more than
eight hundred years ago, and the way from Kampton,
in its deep mud, unfathomable ruts and grassy
hollows, soddened for lack of draining, is a terrible
damper of curiosity. The explorer's troubles begin

si6 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

immediately he has left the village of Rampton.
Turning to the right, he is instantly plunged into
the fearful mud of a mile-long drove described on the
large-scale Ordnance maps as " Cow Lane," a dismal
malebolge of black greasy mud that only cattle can
walk without difficulty. The unfortunate cyclist
who adventures this way and pushes on, thinking
these conditions will improve as he goes, is to be
pitied, for, instead of improving, they go from bad
to worse. The mud of this horrible lane is largely
composed of the Cambridgeshire clay called " gault,"
and is of a peculiarly adhesive quality. When he is
at last obliged to dismount and pick the pounds
upon pounds of mud out of the intimate places of
his machine, his feelings are outraged and, cursing
all the road authorities of Cambridgeshire in one com-
prehensive curse, he determines never again to leave
the highways in search of the historic. A few yards
farther progress leaves him in as bad case as before,
and he is at last reduced to carrying the machine on
his shoulder, fearful with every stride that his shoes
will part company with his feet, withdrawn at each
step from the mud with a resounding " pop," similar
to the sound made by the drawing of a cork from a
bottle. But it is only when at last, coming to the
end of Cow Lane and turning to the left into Irani
Drove, he rests and clears away the mud and
simultaneously finds seven punctures in one tyre
and two in the other, that his stern indignation
melts into tears. The wherefore of this havoc
wrought upon the inoffensive wheelman is found in
the cynical fact that although Cow Lane never

BELSAR'S HILL 217

receives the attentions of the road-repairer, its
thorn-hedges are duly clipped and the clippings
thrown into what, for the sake of convenience, may
be called the road.

The geographical conditions here resemble those
of Muckslush Heath in Colman's play, and although
Irani Drove is paradise compared with what we have
already come through, taken on its own merits it is
not an ideal thoroughfare. One mile of it, past
Long Swath Barn, brings us to the beginning of
Aldreth Causeway, here a green lane, very bumpy
and full of rises and hollows. Maps and guide-books
vaguely mention Belsar's Hill near this point, and
imaginative guides who have not explored these
wilds talk in airy fashion of it " overlooking " the
Causeway. As a matter of fact, the Causeway is
driven squarely through it, and it is so little of a hill,
and so incapable of overlooking anything, that you
pass it and are none the wiser. The fact of the
Causeway being thus driven through the hill and
the ancient earthworks that ring around six acres
of it, proves sufficiently that this fortress is much
more ancient than William the Conqueror's time.
It is, indeed, prehistoric. Who was Belsar ? History
does not tell us ; but lack of certain knowledge has
not forbidden guesswork, more or less wild, and
there have been those who have found the name to
be a corruption of Belisarius. We are not told,
however, what that general — that unfortunate
warrior whom tradition represents as begging in his
old age an obolus in the streets of Constantinople —
was doing here. But the real " Belsar " may perhaps

2l8

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

have been that " Belasius, Prseses Militum versus
Elye," mentioned in the " Tabula Eliensis," one of
William's captains in this long business, from whom
descended the Belasyse family.

Two miles of green lane, solitary as though fdot
of man had not passed by for years, lead down to the
Ouse. Fens spread out on either hand — Mow Fen,
Willingham. Fen, Smythy Fen, Great North Fen-
fens everywhere. It is true they are now chiefly

ALDRETH CAUSEWAY AND THE ISLE OF ELY.

cultivated fields, remarkable for their fertility, but
they are saved from being drowned only by the
dykes and lodes cut and dug everywhere and drained
by the steam pumping-station whose chimney-shaft,
with its trail of smoke, is seen far off across the
levels. In front rises the high ground of the Isle of
Ely, a mile or more away across the river : high
ground for Cambridgeshire, but likely, in any other
part of England, to be called a low ridge. Here it
is noticeable enough of itself, and made still more so
by a windmill and a row of tall slender trees on the

WILLIAM ATTACKS ELY 221

skyline. A new bridge now building across the
Ouse at this point is likely to bring Aldreth Cause-
way into use and repair again. On the other shore,
at High Bridge Farm, the Causeway loses its grassy
character, becoming a rutted and muddy road,
inconceivably rugged, and so continuing until it
ends at the foot of the rising ground of Aldreth.
Drains and their protecting banks lie to the left of
it ; the banks used by the infrequent pedestrians in
preference to the Causeway, low-lying and often
flooded.

XXXIII

THIS, then, was the way into that Isle of Eefuge to
which the Normans directed their best efforts. At
the crossing of the Ouse, the fascines and hurdles,
bags of earth and bundles of reeds, that had thus far
afforded a foundation, were no longer of use, and a
wooden bridge had of necessity to be constructed in
the face of the enemy. Disaster attended it, for the
unlucky timbering gave way while the advance was
actually in progress, and hundreds were drowned.
A second bridge was begun, and William, calling
in supernatural aid, brought a "pythonissa" -a
sorceress — to curse Hereward and his merry men and
to weave spells while the work was going forward.
William himself probably believed little in her un-
holy arts, but his soldiers and the vast army of
helpers and camp-followers gathered together in this
unhealthy hollow, dying of ague and marsh-sickness,

222 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

and disheartened by failure and delay, fancied forces
of more than earthly power arrayed against them.
So the pythonissa was provided with a wooden tower
whence she could overlook the work and exercise her
spells while the second bridge was building. Fisher-
men from all the countryside were impressed to aid
in the work. Among them, in disguise, came
Hereward, so the legends tell, and when all was
nearly done, he fired the maze of woodwork, so that
the sorceress in her tower was sent, shrieking, in
flames to Ahrimanes, and this, the second bridge, was
utterly consumed. Kingsley, in his very much over-
rated romance of Hereward the Wake, makes him
fire the reeds, but the Fenland reed does not burn
and refuses to be fired outside the pages of fiction.

It was at last by fraud rather than by force that
the Isle of Ely was entered. A rebel earl, a
timorous noble, might surrender himself from time
to time, and most of his allies thus fell away, but it
was the false monks who at last led the invader in
where he could not force his way. Those holy men,
with the Saxon Abbot, Thurston, at their head, who
prayed and meditated while the defenders of this
natural fortress did the fighting, came as a result of
their meditations to the belief that William, so
dogged in his efforts, must in the end be successful.
He had threatened — pious man though he was — to
confiscate the property of the monastery when he
should come to Ely, and so, putting this and that
together, they conceived it to be the better plan to
bring him in before he broke in ; for in this way
their revenues might yet be saved. It is Ingulphus,

TREACHERY

223

himself a monk, who chronicles this treachery.
Certain of them, he says, sending privily to William,
undertook to guide his troops by a secret path
through the fens into the Isle. It was a chance too
good to be thrown away, and was seized. The
imagination can picture the mail-clad Normans
winding single file along a secret path among the
rushes, at the tail of some guide whose life was to be
forfeit on the instant if he led them into ambush;
and one may almost see and hear the swift onset
and fierce cries when they set foot on firm land and
fell suddenly upon the Saxon camp, killing and
capturing many of the defenders.

But history shows the monks of Ely in an ill
light, for it really seems that William's two years' siege
of the Isle might have been indefinitely prolonged,
and then been unsuccessful, had it not been for this
treachery. Does anyone ever stop to consider how
great a part treachery plays in history ? It was the
monks who betrayed the Isle, otherwise impregnable,
and endless in its resources, as Hereward himself
proved to a Norman knight whom he had captured.
He conducted his prisoner over his water- and -
morass-girdled domain, showed him most things
within it, and then sent him back to the besieging
camp to report what he had seen. This is the
tale he told, as recorded in the Liber Eliensis : —

" In the Isle, men are not troubling themselves
about the siege ; the ploughman has not taken his
hand from the plough, nor has the hunter cast aside
his arrow, nor does the fowler desist from beguiling
birds. If you care to hear what I have heard and

224 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

seen with my own eyes, I will reveal all to you.
The Isle is within itself plenteously endowed, it is
supplied with various kinds of herbage, and in
richness of soil surpasses the rest of England. Most
delightful for charming fields and pastures, it is
also remarkable for beasts of chase, and is, in no
ordinary way, fertile in flocks and herds. Its woods
and vineyards are not worthy of equal praise, but it
is begirt by great meres and fens, as though by a
strong wall. In this Isle there is an abundance of
domestic cattle, and a multitude of wild animals ;
stags, roes, goats, and hares are found in its groves
and by those fens. Moreover, there is a fair
sufficiency of otters, weasels, and polecats ; which in
a hard winter are caught by traps, snares, or any
other device. But what am I to say of the kinds of
fishes and of fowls, both those that fly and those
that swim ? In the eddies at the sluices of these
meres are netted innumerable eels, large water-
wolves, with pickerels, perches, roaches, burbots, and
lampreys, which we call water-snakes. It is, indeed,
said by many that sometimes salmon are taken there,
together with the royal fish, the sturgeon. As for
the birds that abide there and thereabouts, if you
are not tired of listening to me, I will tell you about
them, as I have told you about the rest. There you
will find geese, teal, coots, didappers, water-crows,
herons, and ducks, more than man can number,
especially in winter, or at moulting-time. I have
seen a hundred — nay, even three hundred — taken at
once ; sometimes by bird-lime, sometimes in nets and
snares." The most eloquent auctioneer could not do

TREACHER Y RE WARDED 225

better than this, and if this knight excelled in
fighting as he did in description, he must have been
a terrible fellow.

It is pleasant to think how the monks of Ely met
with harder measures than they had expected.
William was not so pleased with their belated
submission as he was angered by their ever daring to
question his right and power. Still, things might
have gone better with them -had they not by ill-luck
been at meals in the refectory when the King
unexpectedly appeared. None knew of his coming
until he was seen to enter the church. Gilbert de
Clare, himself a Norman knight, but well disposed
towards the monks, burst in upon them : " Miserable
fools that you are," he said, " can you do nothing
better than eat and drink while the King is here ? "

Forthwith they rushed pellmell into the church ;
fat brothers and lean, as quickly as they could, but
the King, flinging a gold mark upon the altar, had
already gone. He had done much in a short time.
Evidently he was what Americans nowadays call a
" hustler," for he had marked out the site for a
castle within the monastic precincts, and had already
given orders for its building by men pressed from
the three shires of Cambridge, Hertford, and Bedford.
Torn with anxiety, the whole establishment of the
monastery hasted after him on his return to Aldreth,
and overtook him at Witchford, where, by the in-
tercession of Gilbert de Clare, they were admitted
to an audience, and after some difficulty allowed to
purchase the King's Peace by a fine of seven hundred
marks of silver.
15

226 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Unhappily, their troubles were not, even then,
at an end, for when on the appointed day the
money, raised by the sacrifice of many of the
cherished ornaments of the church, was brought to
the King's officers at Cambridge, the coins were
found, through some fraud of the moneyers, to be of
light weight. William was studiously and politically
angry at what he affected to believe an attempt on
the part of the monks to cheat him, and his
forbearance was only purchased by a further fine of
three hundred marks, raised by melting down the
remainder of the holy ornaments. The quality of
William's piety is easily to be tested by a comparison
of the value of his single gold mark, worth in our
money one hundred pounds, with that of the one
thousand silver marks, the sum total of the fines he
exacted. A sum equal to thirty thousand pounds was
extracted from the monastery and church of Ely, and
forty Norman knights were quartered upon the
brethren; one knight to each monk, as the old
" Tabula Eliensis " specifies in detail.

XXXIV

WHAT in the meanwhile had become of Hereward ?
What was he doing when these shaven-pated traitors
were betraying his stronghold ? One would like to
find that hero wreaking a terrible vengeance upon
them, but we hear of nothing so pleasing and
appropriate. The only vengeance was that taken by
William upon the rank and file of the rebels, and

DEA TH OP HERE WARD 227

that was merely cowardly and unworthy. It was
not politic to anger the leaders of this last
despairing stand of the Saxons, and so they obtained
the King's Peace ; but the churls and serfs felt the
force of retribution in gouged eyes, hands struck off,
ears lopped, and other ferocious pleasantries typical
of the Norman mind. Hereward who, I am afraid,
was not always so watchful as his name signifies,
seems to have found pardon readily enough, and one
set of legends tells how at last he died peacefully and
of old age in his bed.

Others among the old monkish chroniclers give
him an epic and more fitting end, in which, like
Samson, he dies with his persecutors. They marry
him to a rich Englishwoman, one Elfthryth, who had
made her peace with the King, and afterwards ob-
tained pardon for her lover. But the Normans still
hated him, and one night, when his chaplain Ethel-
ward, whose duty was to keep watch and ward
within and without his house and to place guards,
slumbered at his post, a band of assassins crept in
and attacked Hereward as he lay. He armed himself
in haste, and withstood their onslaught. His spear
was broken, his sword too, and he was driven to
use his shield as a weapon. Fifteen Frenchmen lay
dead beneath his single arm when four of the party
crept behind him and smote him with their swords
in the back. This stroke brought him to his knees.
A Breton knight, one Ralph of D61, then rushed on
him, but Hereward, in a last effort, once more wielded
his buckler, and the Englishman and the Breton fell
dead together.

228 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

However, whenever, or wherever he came to his
end, certainly the great Hereward was laid to rest
in the nave of Crowland Abbey, but no man knows
his grave. Just as the bones and the last resting-
place of Harold at Waltham Abbey have disappeared,
so the relics of " the Watchful," that " most strenuous
man," that hardy fighter in a lost cause, are scattered
to the winds.

There are alleged descendants of Hereward to
this day, and a "Sir Herewald Wake" is at the
head of them ; but we know nothing of how they
prove their descent. " Watch and pray " is their
motto, and a very appropriate one, too ; although
it is possible that Here ward's praying was spelt with
an " e," and himself not so prayerful as predatory.

Hereward, the old monkish chroniclers tell us,
was " a man short in stature but of enormous
strength." By that little fragment of personal
description they do something to wreck an ideal.
Convention demands that all heroes be far above
the height of other men, just as all knights of old
were conventionally gentle and chivalric and all
ladies fair ; though, if history do not lie and limners
painted what they saw, the chivalry and gentleness
of knighthood were as sadly to seek as the loving-
kindness of the hysena, and the fair ladies of old
were most furiously ill-favoured. Hereward's figure,
without that personal paragraph, is majestic. The
feet of him squelch, it is true, through Fenland
mud and slime, but his head is lost in the
clouds until this very early piece of journalism
disperses the mists and makes the hero some-

ALDRETH 229

thing less of the demi-god than he had otherwise
been.

The name of Here ward's stronghold offers a fine
blue-mouldy bone of 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 Ethel-
dreda 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

230 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

DISMAL HALL 231

XXXV

RETURNING to the high road at Cottenham Corner,
and passing the junction of the road from Water-
beach, 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
Eoman 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 fre-
quently beside, or in the neighbourhood of, Roman
ways ; places generally conceded to have been ruined
houses belonging to that period. The modern repre-
sentative 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 Per-
pendicular 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

232 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 con-
ventional 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 Bene-
dictines, 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

TO WICKEN FEN 233

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 con-
sists, when you have counted everything in its
constituent parts, of two lonely public-houses, the
Traveller's Kest 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 butter-
flies 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

234

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 bound-
less 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 in 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 arid 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 con-
ditions 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

UPWARE 335

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/1

It is a curious commentary on the fame of
Wickeu 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 Upwart\
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 Cam-
bridge 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 Any-
where, No Hurry," painted on its gable. The real

236 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 King's 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 com-
pleted 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.

In those old robustious days — famous once, but
now forgot — flourished the Kepublic of Upware, a
somewhat blackguardly society composed chiefly of

THE "KING OF UP WARE" 237

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." Eichard Ramsay Fielder, this pot-house

UPWARE INN,

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 unquench-
able 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 any rate, he enjoyed an allow-
ance from his family, on the degrading condition

238 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 sur-
rounding Fen] and villages ; so that on leaving the
University he continued to cling to the neighbour-
hood 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

MODERN UP WARE

239

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 con-
ventional 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

24o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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
Protector's 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.

WICKEN FEN 241

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

WICKEN FEN.

were, the rim of the basin in which this relic
is set.

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
16

242 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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—

"Merle sungen tlie Muneches binnen Ely
Tlia Cnut Ching rew therby.
Koweth 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 ser-
vice, he was enlarged from serfdom to be a free man,
and loaded with honours. Indeed, he was probably

THE ISLE OF EL Y 243

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

244 ™E CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Ouse to Littleport, and thence by the Old Croft
Kiver to the New Bedford Kiver, 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.

ZENLAND OCCUPATIONS

247

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, trick-
ling 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 Kivers
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.

The local occupations all have curious names,
and the inhabitants of 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

248 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 some-
times 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 Hay-
wards, the Cartwrights, and the
Cowards are prominent enough.
HODDEK The Fenman digs his land with

an

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, "learns," "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.

HODDEN SPADE AND
BECKET.

OLD-TIME VAGABONDS

25 i

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 mediaeval
than a classic road. Indeed, the entrance to Stret-
ham 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 l 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 mediaeval 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

1 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."

252 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

suppressed by the hardness, the whips and scorpions,
of the Elizabethans, but endured them and the
branded "B." 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.

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 pur-
chase 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 mediaeval 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

A FENLAND VILLAGE

253

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 hill-
top 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

254 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

Cf*****.

STEETHAM.

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 " Kover,"
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

THE HANGMAN

255

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

256 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

one side of the road, intervenes. Nothing distracts
the attention from the giant bulk of the Cathedral.

How shall we come into Ely ? As archaeologists,
as pilgrims spiritually inclined and chanting a sursum
corda as we go, or shall we be gross and earthly, scent-
ing lamb and green peas, spring duckling and asparagus
from afar, for all the world like our hearty grand-
fathers 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 justi-
fied ? 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

ELY ALL YAWNS

257

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
'7

258 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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, enter-
prise 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 respon-
sible. 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 Koman 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 Pro-
testant 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

FALLACIES

259

the kingdom.1 These foundations were laid more
than a thousand years ago ; and yet there are vaga-
bonds who have the impudence to say that it is the
Protestant religion that has made England a great
country."

Here we have Cobbett, who ought to have known
better, and did actually know, repeating the shamb-
ling fallacy that the architectural art of the Middle
Ages was so artistic because it was inspired by
religion, and that its artistry decayed by conse-
quence of the Eeformation. 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 "dis-
graceful irrepair and disfigurement," and of the two

1 The stone really came from Barnack, in Northamptonshire,
thirty-five miles distant.

260 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 Komanising
tendencies of our clergy must of necessity lead
nowhere and bear no fruit, it becomes possible to
look with a dispassionate eye upon these architec-
tural 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 Etheldredd, daughter of
Auna, King of the East Angles. Etheldreda has
long since been canonised, and it behoves us to deal

MIRACLES

261

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 manage-
able man, King Egfrid of Northumbria. He re-
spected 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.

262 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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 Hadden-
ham, 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

MORE MIRACLES 263

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, 0 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

264 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

17th, a day ever afterwards, while the Koman
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, arid 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, Eichard, 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

MATTERS OF TASTE

265

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 establish-
ment they lacked a pendant to everything. To the

THE WEST FRONT, ELY CATHEDRAL.

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

266 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

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.

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 complete-
ness, 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.

We must, however, not accuse the original
designers of the tower of this mere striving after
enormous height. The uppermost stage, where the
square building takes an octagonal form, is an
addition of nearly two hundred years later, when
the nice perceptions and exquisite taste of an earlier
period were lost, and size was the goal of effort,
rather than beauty. Those who built at that later
time would have gone higher had they dared, but if
they lacked something as artists, they must at least
be credited with engineering knowledge. They
knew that the mere crushing weight of stone upon
stone would, if further added to, grind the lower

ALAN OF WALSINGHAM 267

stages into powder and so wreck the whole fabric.
So, at a height of two hundred and fifteen feet, they
stayed their hands ; but, in earnest of what they would
have done, had not prudence forbade, they crowned
the topmost battlements with a tall light wooden
spire, removed a century ago in one of the restorations.
It was from the roof of this tower, in 1845, that
Basevi, an architect interested in a restoration then in
progress, fell and was killed.

The octagonal upper stage of this great western
tower was added in the Decorated period, about 1350,
when the great central octagon, the most outstand-
ing and peculiar feature of the Cathedral, was built.
Any distant view of this vast building that com-
mands its full length shows, in addition to the
western tower, a light and fairy like lantern, like
some graceful coronet, midway of the long roof-ridge,
where choir and nave meet. This was built to re-
place the tall central tower that suddenly fell in
ruins in 1332 and destroyed much of the choir. To
an architect inspired far above his fellows fell the
task of rebuilding. There are two works among the
whole range of ancient Gothic art in these islands
that stand out above and beyond the rest and
proclaim the hand and brain of genius. They are
the west front of Peterborough Cathedral and the
octagonal lantern of Ely. We do not know who
designed Peterborough's daring arcaded front,
but the name of that resourceful man who
built the great feature of Ely has been preserved.
He was Alan of Walsingham, the sacrist and sub-
prior of the monastery. He did not build it in

268 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

that conventional and deceitful sense we are
accustomed to when we read that this or that
mediaeval Abbot or Bishop built one thing or
another, the real meaning of the phrase being that
they provided the money and were anything and
everything but the architects. No : he imagined it ;
the idea sprang from his brain, his hands drew
the plans, he made it grow and watched it to its
completion.

No man dared rebuild the tower that had fallen ;
not even Alan, or perhaps he did not want to, being
possessed, as we may well believe, by this Idea.
What it was you shall hear, although, to be sure, no
words have any power to picture to those who have
not seen it what this great and original work is like.
The fallen tower had been reared, as is the manner
of such central towers, upon four great pillars where
nave and choir and transepts met. Alan cleared
the ruins of them away, and built in their stead a
circle of eight stone columns that not only took in
the width of nave and the central alleys and
transepts and choir that had been enclosed by the
fallen pillars, but spread out beyond it to the whole
width of nave aisles and the side aisles of choir and
transepts. This group of columns carries arches and
a masonry wall rising in octagonal form above the
roofs, and crowned by the timber structure of the
lantern itself. The interior view of this lantern
shows a number of vaulting ribs of timber spreading
inwards from these columns, and supporting a whole
maze of open timber -work pierced with great
traceried windows and fretted and carved to wonder-

A GIANT CATHEDRAL 269

ment. The effect is as that of a dome, " the only
Gothic dome in the world" as it has been said.
How truly it is a " lantern" may be seen when the
sun shines through the windows and lights up the
central space in the great church below. Puritan
fury did much to injure this beautiful work, and its
niches and tabernacles, once filled with Gothic
statuary, are now supplied with modern sculptures,
good in intention but a poor substitute. The modern
stained -glass, too, is atrocious.

To fully describe Ely Cathedral in any but an
architectural work would be alike impossible and
unprofitable, and it shall not be attempted here :
this giant among English minsters is not easily
disposed of. For it is a giant. Winchester, the
longest, measuring from west front to east wall of its
Lady Chapel five hundred and fifty-five feet, is but
eighteen feet longer. Even in that particular, Ely
would have excelled but for the Lady Chapel here
being built to one side, instead of at the end, owing to
the necessity that existed for keeping a road open at
the east end of the building.

Like the greater number of English minsters,
Ely stands in a grassy space. A triangular green
spreads out in front, with the inevitable captured
Russian gun in the foreground, and the Bishop's
Palace on the right. By turning to the south and
passing through an ancient gateway, once the en-
trance to the monastery, the so-called "Park" is
entered, the hilly and magnificently wooded southern
side of what would in other cathedral cities be named
the "Close," here technically "the College," and

270 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

preserving in that title the memory of the ancient
College of Secular Clergy which ruled sometime in
that hundred years between A.D. 870 and 970.

It was from this point of view, near the ancient
mound of " Cherry Hill," the site of William the
Conqueror's Castle, that Turner painted his picture.
Many remains of the monastic establishment are to
be seen, built into charming and comfortable old
houses, residences of the Cathedral dignitaries.
Here are the time-worn Norman pillars and arches of
the Infirmary, and close by is the Deanery, fashioned
out of the ancient thirteenth-century Guesten Hall.
Quiet dignity and repose mark the place ; every
house has its old garden, and everyone is very well
satisfied with himself. It is a pleasant world for
sleepy shepherds, if a sorry one for the sheep.

XLI

LET them sleep, for their activity, on any lines that
may be predicated from past conduct, bodes no one
good. Times have been when these shepherds
themselves masqueraded as wolves, acting the part
with every convincing circumstance of ferocity. The
last of these occasions was in 1816. I will set forth
in detail the doings of that time, because they are
intimately bound up with the story of this road
between Ely and Downham Market.

It was not until after Waterloo had been fought
and Bonaparte at last imprisoned, like some bottle-

AN EVIL HOUR 273

imp, at St. Helena, that the full strain of the past
years of war began to be felt in its full severity.
It is true that for years past the distress had been
great, and that to relieve it, and to pay for Imperial
needs, the rates and taxes levied on property had in
many places risen to forty and even forty-eight
shillings in the pound, but when military glory had
faded and peace reigned, internal affairs grew more
threatening. Trade was bad, harvests were bad, wheat
rose to the unexampled figure of one hundred and three
shillings a quarter, and any save paper money was
scarce. A golden guinea was handled by many with
that curiosity with which one regards some rare and
strange object. Everywhere was the one-pound note,
issued for the purposes of restricting cash payments
and restoring credit ; but so many banks issuing
one-pound notes failed to meet their obligations
that this medium of exchange was regarded with
a very just suspicion, still echoed in the old song
that says —

"I'd rather have a guinea than a one-pound note."

Everyone at this period of national exhaustion was
"hard up," but worse off than any were the un-
fortunate rural folk — the farm-labourers and their
like.

The agricultural labourer is now an object of
solicitude, especially at election times. There are,
in these happy days, always elections ; elections to
Parliament, elections to parish and other councils,
always someone to be elected to something, and as
our friend Hodge has oftentimes a vote to give his
18

274 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

best friend, his welfare is greatly desired. But at
this unhappy time of which we have been speaking,
Hodge had no vote and, by consequence, no friends.
His wages, when he could get any work, ranged
from seven to nine shillings a week, and the quartern
loaf cost one shilling and sixpence. Tea was eight
shillings a pound, sugar one shilling, and other
necessaries at famine prices. How, then, did Hodge
live ? It is a difficult question to answer. In many
cases the parish made him an allowance in augmenta-
tion of wages, but it need scarce be added that this
extraordinary system did not help him much. In-
deed, the odd idea of financially relieving a man in
work tended directly to injure him, for it induced
the farmers to screw him down by a corresponding
number of shillings. This difficulty of answering
the question of how Hodge managed to exist was
felt by himself, in the words of a doleful ballad then
current —

" Eighteen pence for a quartern loaf,
And a poor man works for a shilling :
'Tis not enough to find him bread,
How can they call it living ? "

Observe : Hodge did not ask for anything more than
to be allowed to live. It is not a great thing to
ask. His demand was for his pay to be raised to
the equivalent of a stone of flour a day ; eleven
shillings a week. He desired nothing to put by ;
only enough to fill the hungry belly. No one paid
the least heed to his modest wants. Eather did
events grind him and his kind deeper into the dust.
Many rustics in those days, when half the land was

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLT 275

common fields, kept geese. Some, a little better off,
had a cow. Fine pasturage was found on these
commons. But towards the end of the eighteenth
century, and well on into the nineteenth, there began,
and grew to enormous proportions, a movement for
enclosing the commons. Most of them are gone
now. Very early in this movement Hodge began to
feel the pinch, and, when his free grazing was ended,
was provided with a grievance the more bitter
because entirely new and unusual.

All over the country there were ugly disturb-
ances, and at last the stolid rustics of the Fens began
to seethe and ferment. Still no one cared. If
Hodge threatened, why, a troop or so of Yeomanry
could overawe him, and were generally glad of the
opportunity, for those yeomen were drawn from the
squirearchy and the farming classes, who regarded
him as their natural slave and chattel. To no one
occurred the idea of relieving or removing these
grievances.

At last the starving peasantry of these districts
broke into revolt. The village of Southery seems to
have been the origin of the particular disturbance
with which we are concerned. One May day the
farm -labourers assembled there to the number of
some eight hundred, and marched to Downham
Market, nearly seven miles distant, calling at the
farms on the way and bringing out the men engaged
on them. Arrived at Downham,. they numbered
fifteen hundred ; a very turbulent and unruly mob,
ready for any mischief. The first to feel their re-
sentment were the millers and the bakers, who had

276 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

put up the price of flour and bread. Their mills
and shops were sacked and the contents flung into
the roadway, so that the streets of the little town
were ankle-deep in flour, and loaves were kicked
about like footballs. The butchers suffered next,
and by degrees the whole shopkeeping fraternity.
It is not to be supposed that the inns were let alone.
Determined men stormed them and brought out the
beer in pails. At one inn — the Crown — the local
magistrates were holding their weekly sitting, and
with some difficulty escaped from an attack made
upon them. Their escape enraged the rioters, who
redoubled their energies in wrecking the shops, and
were still engaged upon this pastime when the
magistrates returned, either at the head, or perhaps
(counsels of prudence prevailing) in the rear, of a
troop of Yeomanry. The Eiot Act was read while
the air was thick with stones and brickbats, and
then the Yeomanry fell upon the crowds and be-
laboured them with the flat of their swords. The
net results of the day were streets of pillaged shops,
and ten men and four women arrested by the
special constables who had hastily been sworn in.
A renewal of the riot was threatened the next
morning, and only stopped by the release of these
prisoners and an agreement among employers to
advance the rate of wages.

This first outbreak was no sooner suppressed
than another and much more serious one took place
at Littleport. Gathering at the Globe Inn one
morning to the number of a hundred and fifty,
armed with cleavers, pitchforks, and • clubs, the

INCIDENTS OF THE RISING 279

desperate labourers set out to plunder the village.
At their head marched a man bearing a pole with
a printed statement of their grievances flying from
it. The first object to feel their rage was a shop
kept by one Martin, shopkeeper and farmer. Martin
attempted to buy them off with the offer of a
five-pound note, but they took that and burst into
the shop as well, smashing everything and carrying
off tea and sugar. An amusing side to these in-
cidents is seen in an account telling how one
plunderer staggered away with a whole sugarloaf,
and how a dozen of Martin's shirts, " worth a guinea
apiece," as he dolefully said afterwards, disappeared
in the twinkling of an eye.

Then they visited a retired farmer and de-
molished his furniture. He had a snug hoard of a
hundred guineas tucked away in an old bureau.
Alas ! when these men of wrath had gone, the
guineas were found to have gone with them. And
so forth, throughout the long day.

XLII

NIGHT at last shuts down on Littleport. The village
is in deshabille : furniture lying broken in the streets,
the household gods defiled, the beer-barrels of all
the public-houses run dry. Every oppressor of the
poor has been handsomely served out, and, in-
cidentally, a good many unoffending people too :
for a mob maddened with the sense of wrongs long

28o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

endured is not discriminating. One there is, how-
ever, not yet punished. This is the vicar, conspicuous
earlier in the day, alternately threatening and cajoling,
but, many hours since, prudently retired to his vicar-
age. With a savage growl, they invest the house
and batter at the door, demanding money. The vicar
offers two one-pound notes ; scornfully rejected, and
ten pounds at the very least is demanded. He refuses,
and to his refusal he adds the folly of presenting a
pistol at the heads of these furious men ; a pistol
instantly snatched from his hands and like to be
used against him. From this very patent danger
and the sudden dread of murder he runs ; runs
upstairs to his wife and daughters, and presently
they are out somewhere at the back door, all flying
together, — the women, as I gather, in their night-
gowns,— making for Ely, where they arrive at mid-
night.

Meanwhile, all this night, Littleport is trembling :
the shopkeepers, the farmers, anyone who has anything
to lose, with fear : those who have nothing to lose,
something even to gain, with certain wild hopes and
exaltations. Not without fear, they, either ; for it
is a brutal Government with which, in the end, they
must reckon. So far, these wild despairing folk
have had no leader, but now they turn to one well-
known to sympathise with them : one John Dennis,
an innkeeper and small farmer, and by consequence
of the hated class of oppressors. By conviction,
however, he sides with them : a very Saul among
the prophets. To him, late at night, they come.
He is abed and asleep, but they rouse him. Will

THE GUNS OF ARC AD Y

281

he lead them to Ely on the morrow, to urge their
needs and their desperate case upon the authorities ?

He will not : it is useless, he says. Nay, but
you must, you shall, say they, else we will shoot
you, as one forsworn.

So poor Dennis, whose fate is sealed from this
hour, leaves his bed and dresses himself, while the
excited peasantry loot all Littleport of its gunpowder,
bullets, and small shot, used in wild-fowling. Some
sixty muskets and fowling-pieces they have found,
and eight of those curious engines of destruction
called " punt-guns " or " duck-guns." A gun of
this kind is still used in duck-shooting. It has a
barrel eight feet long, with two inches bore, and is
loaded with three-quarters of a pound of shot and
about an ounce of gunpowder. It is mounted on a
swivel, generally at the end of a punt.

Guns of this calibre they have mounted in a
farm- waggon, drawn by two horses, and at the
back of the waggon they have placed a number of
women and children : with some idea of moving
hearts, if not by fear of their quaint artillery, at least
in pity for their starving families. It is daybreak
when at last they set out on the five miles to Ely,
a band of two hundred, armed with muskets, fowling-
pieces, scythes, pitchforks, clubs, and reaping-hooks.
Ely has heard something of this projected advance,
and sends forth three clerical magistrates and the
chief constable to parley and ask the meaning of
this unlawful assembly. The meaning, it seems, is
to demand wages to be fixed at not less than two
shillings a day, and that flour shall be sold at not

282

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

more than two shillings and sixpence a stone.
Meanwhile, the duck-guns look these envoys in the
eyes perhaps a little more sternly than we are
disposed nowadays to credit. At anyrate, the
magistrates temporise and promise to inquire into
these things. They retire to the Cathedral precincts
to consult, and — ah ! yes, will these demonstrators
please go home ?

No ; they will not do anything of the kind.
Instead, they advance into the Market Square,
where their battery is wheeled, pointing up the
High Street, much to the consternation of the
citizens, firmly persuaded that this is the end of
all things and now busily engaged in secreting their
little hoards, their silver spoons and precious things,
in unlikely places. The rioters, conscious of having
easily overawed the place, now determine to put it
under contribution, beginning with those who have
ground the faces of the poor — the millers and their
kind. Dennis, armed with a gun, and at the head
of a threatening crowd, appears before the house of
one Rickwood, miller. " They must have fifty pounds,"
he says, "or down come house and mill." Little
doubt that they mean it : in earnest thereof, observe,
windows are already smashed. Bring out those
fifty sovereigns, miserable ones, before we pull the
house about your ears !

They send off to the bank accordingly; Mrs.
Rickwood going in haste. On the way she meets
the Bank Manager, a person who combines that
post with the civil over]prdship of Ely. He is, in
point of fact, the chief constable. Something

COLLAPSE OF THE REVOLT 283

grotesquely appropriate, if you think of it, in
these two posts being in the hands of one man.
' They shall not have a penny," he stoutly declares,
assisting Mrs. Kickwood from the crowds that beset
her ; but certain blows upon head and body determine
him to be more diplomatic, and after some parley
he agrees to pay the fifty pounds in cash to those who
constitute themselves leaders of three divisions of
rioters. These three men alone, representing Ely,
Littleport, and Downham, shall be admitted to the
bank, and each shall — and does actually — receive
one-third of that sum, signing for it. Kesourceful
manager ! They are paid the coin, and sign : they
might as well have signed their death-warrants, for
those signatures are evidence of the very best
against them when proceedings shall subsequently
be taken.

Other houses are visited and people terrified,
and then they are at a loss for what next. You
cannot make a revolution out of your head as you
go on : what is needed is a programme, some definite
scheme, and of such a thing these poor wretches have
no idea. So, gradually, as afternoon comes on, they
disperse and fall back upon discontented Littleport,
just before the arrival of a troop of the 18th Dragoons
and a detachment of the Koyston Volunteer Cavalry,
sent for to Bury St. Edmunds and Koyston by the
magistrates who had in the early morning parleyed
with the rioters. Ely is saved !

We — we the authorities — have now the upper
hand, and mean to be revenged. On the morrow,
then, behold the military, with the Prebendary of

284 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Ely, Sir Bate Dudley, and many gentlemen and
persons of consideration, invading Littleport and
wilfully stirring up again the excitement that had
spent itself. Kumours of this advance have been
spread, and on entering the village they find the
men of the place hidden behind doors and windows,
whence they fire with some effect, wounding a few.
The soldiers return the fire, and one man is killed
and another pitifully mangled. The rest flee,
soldiers and magistracy after them, hunting for some
days in fen and dyke, and taking at last seventy-
three ; all marched into Ely and clapped in gaol,
there to await the coming of the Judge presiding over
the Special Assize appointed to try them.

The proceedings lasted six days, opened in state
by a service in the Cathedral : an exultant service
of thanksgiving to God for this sorry triumph. To
it the Judge and his javelin-men went in procession,
behind the Bishop, and escorted by fifty of the
principal inhabitants carrying white wands. The
Bishop himself, the last to wield the old dual
palatine authority of Church and State, was pre-
ceded kby his butler, bearing the Sword of State
that symbolised the temporal power ; and as he
entered the Cathedral the organ burst forth in the
joyful strains of Handel's anthem: "Why do the
heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing ? "
with its triumphant chorus, "Let us break their
bands asunder ! "

Nothing else so well portrays the unchristian
savagery of the time as the doings of this prelate —
let us record his name, Bishop Bowyer Edward

VENGEANCE

285

Sparke, that it may Le execrated — a veritable Hew-
Agag-in-pieces-before-the-Lord, who preached earthly
vengeance and spiritual damnation to the three-score
and thirteen in prison close by. Truly, a wolf sent
to shepherd the flock.

Those were times when to steal to the value of
forty shillings, and to steal to the value of a shilling,
accompanied by violence, were capital offences. Five
of the prisoners, convicted on these counts, were
sentenced to be hanged, and five were transported
for life. To the others were dealt out various terms
of imprisonment. Chief among the ill-fated five was
John Dennis, the leader, somewhat against his own
judgment, of the outbreak. His, we must allow, is a
figure tragical above the rest, touched with some-
thing like the dignity of martyrdom. They hanged
him and the four others, in due course, on Ely
Common, on a day of high holiday, when three
hundred wand-bearers and bodies of troops assembled
to protect the authorities and to see execution done.
It may be read, in old records, how the whole of the
city was searched for a cart to take the condemned
men to the scaffold, and how at last five pounds was
paid for the use of one ; so there was evidently a public
opinion opposed to this policy of bloodshed. Let
us not seek to discover who was that man who took
those five pounds, and with the taking of them sold
his immortal soul.

The victims of the combined fear and rage of the
authorities were buried in one common grave in the
churchyard of St. Mary's, hard by the great Cathedral's
western front, and on the wall of that church-tower

286 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

was placed the tablet that may still be seen, record-
ing that—

" Here lye in one grave the bodies of William
Beamiss, George Crow, John Dennis, Isaac Harley,
and Thomas South, who were all executed at Ely on
the 28th day of June 1816, having been convicted
at the Special Assizes holden there of divers robberies
during the riots at Ely and Littleport in the month
of May in that year. May their awful fate be a
warning to others ! "

There is no place more sacred to me in the whole
of Ely than this humble and neglected spot, where
these men, victims of this pitiful tragedy in corduroy
and hobnailed boots, martyrs to affrighted and re-
vengeful authority, lie. It is a spot made additionally
sad because the sacrifice was sterile. Nothing re-
sulted from it, so far as our human vision can reach.
Bishop Sparke and Prebendary Sir Bate Dudley and
the host of Cathedral dignitaries continued to feast
royally, to clothe themselves in fine raiment, and to
drink that old port always so specially comforting to
the denizens of cathedral precincts ; and every night
the watchman went his rounds, as even now, in our
time, he continues to do, calling the hours with their
attendant weather, and ending his cry with the con-
ventional " All's Well !"

To the soldiers employed in the unwelcome task
of suppressing these disturbances and of shooting
down their fellow-countrymen, no blame belongs :
they did but obey orders. Yet they felt it a dis-
grace. The 18th Dragoons had fought at Waterloo
the year before, and one of the troopers who had

TRAGEDY

287

come through that day unscathed received in this
affair a wound that cost him his arm. He thought
it hard that fate should serve him so scurvy a trick.
But among the soldiery employed was a Hanoverian
regiment, whose record is stained deeply and foully
with the doings of one German officer. Patrolling
Ely in those tempestuous days, his company were
passing by the old Sextry Barn, near the Cathedral,
when he heard a thatcher employed on the roof call
to his assistant in the technical language of thatchers
" Bunch ! bunch ! " He was merely asking for another
bundle of reeds, but the foreign officer, not properly
understanding English, interpreted this as an insult
to himself, and ordered his men to fire. They did
so, and the unfortunate thatcher fell upon the open
doors of the barn, his body pierced by a dozen
bullets. There it hung, dropping blood, for three
days, the officer swearing he would serve in the same
way anyone who dared remove it.

XLIII

THOSE days are far behind. When Bishop Sparke
died in 1836, the temporal power was taken away
from the See, and his Sword of State was buried
with him: a fitting piece of symbolism. These
memories alone are left, found only after much
diligent and patient search ; but with their aid the
grey stones and the soaring towers of Ely, the quiet
streets, and the road on to Littleport, take on a more

288

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

living interest to the thoughtful man, to whom
archaeology, keenly interesting though it be, does
not furnish forth the full banquet of life.

Save for these memories, and for the backward
glance at the Cathedral, looming dark on the sky-
line, much of the way to Littleport might almost be
called dull. A modern suburb called "Little London"
has thrown out some few houses in this direction
during the last century, but why or how this has
been possible with a dwindling population let others
explain, if they can do so. At any rate, when the
Reverend James Bentham, the historian, was Canon
here, from 1737 to 1794, no dwellings lined the way,
for he planted a mile-long avenue of oaks where
these uninteresting houses now stand. A few only
of his trees remain, near the first milestone ; a
clump of spindly oaks, more resembling elms in their
growth, and in midst of them a stone obelisk with a
Latin inscription stating how Canon James Bentham,
Canon of the Cathedral Church of Ely, planted them
in 1787, his seventieth year, not that he himself
might see them, but for the benefit of future ages.
The Latin so thoroughly succeeds in obscuring this
advertisement of himself from the understanding of
the country-folk that the obelisk is generally said to
mark the grave of a favourite racehorse !

The descent from the high ground of the Isle
begins in another half mile from this point. Past
Chettisham Station and its level crossing, standing
solitary on the road, we come down Pyper's Hill, at
whose foot is the field called, on the large Ordnance
maps, "Gilgal." Why so-called, who shall say?

LITTLEPORT 289

Did some old landowner, struck perhaps by its
situation near the verge of this ancient Fen-island,
name this water-logged meadow after that biblical
Gilgal where the Israelites made their first encamp-
ment across the Jordan, and where they kept their
first Passover in the Land of Canaan ? It may be,
for we have already seen how that Norman knight,
shown the riches of the Isle of Ely by Hereward,

ELY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE LITTLEPORT ROAD.

described it even as another Canaan, a land figur-
atively flowing with milk and honey.

An old toll-house still stands here by the wayside
and heralds the approach to Littleport, whose name,
preparing the stranger for some sleepy, old-world
decayed creek-side village, with rotting wharves and
a general air of picturesque decrepidness, ill fits the
busy, ugly place it is. Littleport is more populous
than Ely. It stands at the confluence of the Great
Ouse and the Old Croft rivers, and at the lower end
'9

2 9o THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

of its long, long gritty streets, lined with whitey-grey
brick houses, the road is bordered by yet another
stream — the " Holmes River." Indeed, speaking of
its situation in the Fens and by these waters, Carter,
the eighteenth-century historian of Cambridgeshire,
tells us that in his time it was " as rare to see a
coach there as a ship at Newmarket." Much of its
recent prosperity derives from the factories of the
prominent London firm of hosiers and clothiers,
" Hope Brothers," established here. The church and
the adjoining vicarage, where the rioters of 1816 so
terrified the clergyman and his family, stand on an
elevated site behind the main street. There was,
until recent years, when it was built up, a passage
through the tower, said to have been a short cut to
the Fenland. If this was its real purpose, it vividly
shows how little solid ground there was here in old
days. The tower top, too, has its story, for it burnt
a nightly beacon in those times ; a light in beneficent
competition with the marshland Jacks-o'-Lantern,
to guide the wanderer to the haven where he would
be.

It must not be forgotten that Littleport is a place
famed in the annals of a certain sport. It is not a
sport often to be practised, for a succession of open
winters will render the enjoyment of it impossible,
and its devotees stale and out of form. It is the
healthful and invigorating sport and pastime of
skating. Nowhere else in all England is there such
a neighbourhood as this for skating and sliding, for
when the flooded fields of winter are covered with a
thin coating of ice you may skate pretty well all the

FENLAND SKATING

291

way to Lynn on the one hand and to Peterborough
on the other. The country is then a vast frozen
lake. Indeed, years before skating was a sport it
had been a necessity ; the only way by which a
Fenman could travel from place to place in a hard
winter. That is why Fenland skaters became such
marvellous proficients, rivalling even the Dutchmen.
Who that knows anything of skating and skating-
matches has not heard of those champions of the Fens,

LITTLEPORT.

it T

Turkey" Smart and "Fish" Smart? And Little-
port even yet takes the keenest of interest in skating
carnivals, as the traveller along the roads in mid-
summer may see, in the belated bills and placards
relating to them that still hang, tattered and
discoloured, on the walls of roadside barn and
outhouse. Reading them, he feels a gentle coolness
steal over him, even on a torrid afternoon of the
dog-days.

292 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

One leaves Littleport by a bridge, a single-span
iron bridge of great width, that crosses the Great
Ouse. As you cross it, the way to Mildenhall lies
straight and flat, as far as eye can see, ahead. When
that picturesque tourist, William Gilpin, visited
Mildenhall a century ago, he found little to say in
its praise, and of the scenery all he can find to
record is that the roads were lined with willows
whose branches were hung with slime.

Our way is not along the Mildenhall road, but
by the left-hand track following the loops and
windings of the Ouse ; flat, like that other way, but
by no means straight. It is a road of the most
peculiar kind, somewhat below the level of that river
and protected from it by great grassy banks, in some
places from twelve to fourteen feet high. Windmills
are perched picturesquely on the opposite shore,
patient horses drag heavy barges along the stream,
and the sodden fields stretch away on the right to
infinity. Houses and cottages are few and far
between ; built below the river banks, with their
chimney-pots rarely looking over them.

The reclaimed Fens being themselves things of
recent history, there are few houses in the Fenland,
except on the islands, and these few are comparatively
modern. A cottage or a farmstead in these levels
may be a weather-boarded affair, or it may be of
brick, but it is always built on timber piles, for there
is no other way of obtaining a sure foundation ; and
a frequent evidence of this is the sight of one of the
older of these buildings, perched up at an absurd
height through the gradual shrinkage of the land in

FENLAND BUILDINGS

293

consequence of the draining away of the water and
the wasting of the peat. This subsidence averages
six feet over the whole extent of the Fens, and in
some places is as much as eight or nine feet. As a
result of this, a man's front door, once on a level
with the ground, is often approached by a quite
imposing flight of steps, and instances are not

THE RIVER ROAD, LITTLEPORT.

unknown where a room has been added underneath
the original ground floor, and a two-floored cottage
promoted by force of circumstances to the dignity of
a three-storeyed residence.

A brick building in these districts is apt to be
exceedingly ugly. For one thing, it has been built
within the severely utilitarian period, and is just

294 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

a square box with a lid for roof and holes for doors
and windows. For another, the brick, made of the
local gault, is of the kind called by courtesy " white,"
but really of a dirty dough-like hue : distressing to
an artist's eye.

XLIV

BRANDON CREEK bridge, where the Great Ouse and
the Little Ouse and Crooked Dyke pour their waters
into one common fund, and send it crawling lazily
down to Lynn, marks the boundaries of Cambridge-
shire and Norfolk. On the hither side you are in
the territory of the Cambridgeshire Camels, and on
the thither are come into the land of the Norfolk
Dumplings.

It is here, at this meeting of the waters, that
" Kebeck, or Priests' Houses," is marked on the
maps of Speed and Dugdale, and attributed to the
thirteenth century, but what this place was, no man
knoweth. It has clean vanished from sight or
knowledge, and the houses of Brandon Creek hamlet
afford no clue, being wholly secular and commonplace,
from the inn that stands at the meeting of the rivers
to the humble cottages of the bankers and the

gaulters.

Southery Ferry is but a little distance ahead,
to be recognised by the inn that stands on the river
bank. It is a lonely ferry, and little wonder that it
should be, considering the emptiness of the country
on the other side, — all fens at the Back of Beyond, to

SOUTHERY

295

whose wastes cometh the stranger never, where the
bull-frogs croak, the slodger slodges among the dykes,
and the mists linger longest.

Away ahead sits Southery village, enthroned
upon its hillock, once an island in the surrounding
fen, and still, in its prominence against the skyline,
telling its story plain for all to learn. Even if it
were not thus evident from Southery Ferry how the
village of old sat with its feet in the mud and its

THE OUSE.

head on the dry land, at least the pilgrim's wheels
presently advise him in unmistakable fashion that he
is on an ascent. There is little in the village itself
to interest the stranger. The spire so picturesquely
crowning the hill in the distant view is found on close
acquaintance to be that of a modern church, filled
with the Papistical abominations commonly found in
these days of the forsworn clergy of the Church of
England. The old church of St. Mary, disused forty
years ago, and now in ruins, stands at a little distance,

296

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

in a bend of the road, overlooking many miles of
what was once fen. There it stands in its heaped-up
graveyard, a shattered and roofless shell of red-brick
and rubble walls, thickly overgrown with ivy, and
neighboured by an old windmill as battered and
neglected as itself. From a field-gate overlooking
the levels you see, in the distance, the high ground
about Thetford, and, near at hand, an outlying part
of Southery called Little London. An old inhabitant

SOUTHERY FERRY.

shares the field-gate and the outlook with the present
writer, and surveys the many miles with a jaundiced
eye. He remembers those lands below, when he was
a boy, all swimming with water. Now they are
drained, and worth ever so much an acre, "'cause
they'll, as you might say, grow anything. But a
man can't earn mor'n fourteen shillun a week here.
No chance for nobody."

No local patriot he. He was bom here, married
in the old church forty years ago, and went. away to
live in Sheffield. " Ah ! that is a place," says he.

LEAVING THE FENS 297

That is a phrase capable of more than one interpreta-
tion, and we feelingly remark, having been there,
that indeed a place it is. His regretful admiration of
Sheffield is so mournful that we wonder why he ever
left.

The road between Southery and Hilgay dips but
slightly and only for a short distance, proving the
accuracy, at this point at least, of Dugdale's map
showing the Fen-islands of Hilgay and Southery
conjoined. They are divided by the long, straight,
and narrow cut called "Sam's Cut Drain," crossed
here at Modney Bridge. Here the true Fenland
begins only to be skirted, and hedgerows once more
line the way, a sign that of itself most certainly
proclaims fields enclosed and cultivated in the long
ago. The ditches, too, are dry, and not the brimming
water-courses they have been these last twenty-five
miles. Moreover, here is hedgerow timber : ancient
elms and oaks taking the place of the willows and
poplars that have been our only companions through-
out a whole county. They have not consciously
been missed, but now they are come again, how
fresh and dear and welcome they are, and how
notable the change they produce !

Between Hilgay and that old farmhouse called
" Snore Hall," from an absurd tradition that King
Charles once slept there, we cross the river Wissey
and the Catchwater Drain. The road between is still
known as " the Causeway," and, with the succeeding
village of Fordham, teaches in its name a lesson in
old-time local geography.

In 1809, when that old tourist, William Gilpin,

298

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

passed this way, Hilgay Fen extended to one
thousand acres. According to the picturesque story
told him, the district was periodically visited, every
six or seven years, by an innumerable host of field-
mice, which began to destroy all vegetation and
would have laid everything bare but for a great flight
of white horned-owls that, as if by instinct, always
arrived at such times from Norway and, immediately
attacking the mice, destroyed them all, when they
disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

XLV

RYSTON STATION, between Ryston Park and Fordham,
marks the neighbourhood of a very interesting spot,
for Ryston, though a place of the smallest size and
really but a woodland hamlet, is of some historic
note, with " Kett's Oak," or the Oak of Reformation,
standing in the Park, as a visible point of contact
with stirring deeds and ancient times. It is a
gigantic tree with hollow trunk and limbs carefully
chained and bound together, and marks one of
the encampments of the Norfolk peasantry in Kett's
Rebellion of 1549. This was a popular outbreak
caused by the lawless action of the Norfolk gentry
of that time in enclosing wastes and common lands.
'The peasant whose pigs and cow and poultry had
been sold, or had died because the commons where
they had once fed were gone ; the yeoman dis-
possessed of his farm; the farm-servant out of

KETTS REBELLION

299

employ because where once ten ploughs had turned
the soil, one shepherd watched the grazing of the
flocks ; the artisan smarting under the famine prices
the change of culture had brought — all these were
united in suffering, while the gentlemen were
doubling, trebling, quadrupling their incomes, and
adorning their persons and their houses with
splendour hitherto unknown."

The outbreak began at Attleborough in June
1549, and a fortnight later there was fighting at
Wymondham, where the country-folk, led by Robert
Kett, a tanner, of that place, destroyed many illegal
fences. Thence, headed by Kett and his brother
William, an army of sixteen thousand peasants
marched to Household Heath, overlooking Norwich,
where their greatest camp was pitched. Under
some venerable tree in these camps Robert Kett was
wont to sit and administer justice, and Conyers,
chaplain to the rebel host, preached beneath their
shade while the rising of that memorable summer
lasted. Never were the demands of rebellion more
reasonable than those put forward on this occasion.
They were, that all bondsmen should be made free,
" for God made all free with His precious blood-
shedding " ; that all rivers should be made free and
common to all men for fishing and passage ; that
the clergy should be resident, instead of benefices
being held by absentees ; and, in the interest of
tenants' crops, that no one under a certain degree
should keep rabbits unless they were paled in, and
that no new dove-houses should be allowed. That
last stipulation sounds mysterious, but it referred to

3oo

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

a very cruel grievance of olden times, when only the
Lord of the Manor might keep pigeons and doves,
and did so at the expense of his tenants. The
manorial pigeon-houses often seen adjoining ancient
Hall or old-world Grange are, in fact, relics of that
time when the feudal landowner's pigeons fattened
on the peasants' crops.

The story of how the people's petition was dis-

KETT S OAK.

regarded, and how the city of Norwich was taken
and retaken with much bloodshed, does not belong
here. The rebellion was suppressed, and Robert and
William Kett hanged, but the memory of these
things still lingers in the rural districts, and every-
one in the neighbourhood of Ryston knows " Ked's
Oak," as they name it. There were Pratts of Ryston

KETTS OAK

301

Hall then, as now, and old legends still tell how
Robert Kett seized some of the Squire's sheep to
feed his followers, leaving this rhymed note
acknowledgment —

in

Mr. Prat, your shepe are verry fat,
And wee thank you for that.
Wee have left you the skinnes
To buy your ladye pinnes
And you may thank us for that."

Some of the insurgents were hanged from this

DENVERtHALL.

very tree, as the rhyme tells us—

"Surely the tree that nine men did twist on
Must be the old oak now at Ryston."

The present Squire has recorded these things on a
stone placed against the trunk of this venerable relic.
Denver, which presently succeeds Fordham and
Ryston, is remarkable for many things. Firstly, for
that beautiful old Tudor mansion, Denver Hall, by
the wayside, on entering the village ; secondly, for

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

the semicircular sweep of the high road around the
church; and, thirdly, for the great " Denver Sluice"
on the river Ouse, a mile away. This is the massive
lock that at high tide shuts out the tidal waters
from flooding the reclaimed Fens, and at the ebb is
opened to let out the accumulated waters of the
Ouse and the innumerable drains of the Great Level.

THE CROWN, DOWNHAM MARKET.

The failure of Denver Sluice would spell disaster and
ruin to many, and it has for that reason been specially
protected by troops on several occasions when Irish
political agitators have entered upon " physical force "
campaigns, and have been credited with a desire to
blow up this main protection of two thousand square
miles of land slowly and painfully won back from
bog and waste.

DO WNHAM MARKET 303

Denver gives its name to a town in America —
Denver, Colorado — and has had several distinguished
natives; but, despite all these many and varied
attributes of greatness, it is a very small and very
modest place, quite overshadowed by the little town
of Downham Market, a mile onward. Downham, as
Camden informs us, obtains its name from " Dun "

THE CASTLE, DOWNHAM MARKET.

and " ham," signifying the home on the hill ; and the
ancient parish church, which may be taken as stand-
ing on the site of the original settlement, does
indeed rise from a knoll that, although of no intrinsic
height, commands a vast and impressive view over
illimitable miles of marshland. It is not a church of
great interest, nor does the little town offer many
attractions, although by no means unpleasing.

3°4

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

They still point out the house where Nelson once
went to school ; and two old inns remain, very much
as they were in coaching days. In the Crown
yard you may still look up at the windows of the
room where the magistrates were sitting on that day
in 1816 when the rioters made them fly.

Villages on these last twelve miles between
Downham and Lynn are plentiful. No sooner is
the little town left behind than the church of
Wimbotsham comes in sight, with that of Stow
Bardolph plainly visible ahead. Both are interesting
old buildings, with something of almost every period
of architecture to show the curious. Beyond its
church, and a farmstead or two, Wimbotsham has
nothing along the road, but Stow Bardolph is a
village complete in every story-book particular.
Here is the church, and here, beneath a spreading
chestnut (or other) tree the village smithy stands ;
while opposite are the gates of the Park and the
shady avenue leading up to the Hall where, not
Bardolphs nowadays, but Hares, reside in dignified
ease ; as may be guessed from the village inn, the
Hare Arms, with its armorial sign and motto, Non
videre, sed esse — "not to seem, but to be," the
proud boast or noble aspiration of the family. Alms-
houses, cottages with pretty gardens, and a very
wealth of noble trees complete the picture of
" Stow," as the country-folk solely know it, turning
a bewildered and stupid gaze upon the stranger who
uses the longer title.

The pilgrim through many miles of fen revels in
this wooded mile from Stow Bardolph village to

STO W BARDOLPH

3°5

Hogge's Bridge, where the road makes a sharp bend
to the left amid densely overarching trees, command-
ing a distant view of Stow Bardolph Hall at the
farther end of a long green drive. South Euncton
Church, standing lonely by the road beyond this
pretty scene, is an example of how not to restore a

HOGGE'S BKIDGE, STOW BARDOLPH.

pure Norman building. It still keeps a very
beautiful Norman chancel arch, but the exterior,
plastered to resemble stone, is distressing.

At Setchey, originally situated on a navigable
creek of the river Nar and then named Sedge-hithe,
or Seech-hithe— meaning a sedge and weed-choked

20

306

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

harbour — we are come well within the old Dutch
circle of influence over local building design. There
are still some characteristic old Dutch houses at
Downham ; and Lynn, of course, being of old a port
in closest touch with Holland, is full of queer gables
and quaint architectural details brought over from
the Low Countries. Here at Setchey, too, stands a
very Dutch-like old inn — the Lynn Arms.

THE LY;NN ARMS, SETCHEY.

Commons — " Whin Commons " in the local
phrase— and the scattered houses of West Winch,
lead on to Hard wick Bridge, where, crossing over the
railway, the broad road bends to the right. There,
facing you, is an ancient Gothic battlemented gate-
house, and beyond it the long broad street of a
populous town : the town of King's Lynn.

LYNN 307

XLVI

THERE is a tintinnabulaiy, jingling sound in the
name of Lynn that predisposes one to like the place,
whether it be actually likeable or not. Has anyone
ever stopped to consider how nearly like the name of
this old seaport is to that of London ? Possibly the
conjunction of London and Lynn has not occurred to
any who have visited the town, but to those who
have arrived at it by the pages of this book, the
similarity will be interesting. The names of both
London and Lynn, then, derive from the geograph-
ical peculiarities of their sites, in many respects
singularly alike. Both stand beside the lower
reaches of a river, presently to empty itself into the
sea, and the ground on which they stand has always
been marshy. At one period, indeed, those were
not merely marshes where Lynn and London now
stand, but wide-spreading lakes — fed by the lazy
overflowings of Ouse and Thames. The Celtic
British, who originally settled by these lakes, called
them llyns, and this ancient seaport has preserved
that prehistoric title in its original purity, only
dropping the superfluous " 1 " ; but London's present
name somewhat disguises its first style of Llyn dun,
or the " hill by the lake " ; some inconsiderable, but
fortified, hillock rising above the shallow waters.

When the Saxons came, Lynn was here, and
when the Norman conquerors reached the Norfolk
coast they found it a busy port. To that early
Norman prelate, Herbert de Losinga, a tireless

3o8

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

builder of churches throughout East Anglia, the
manor fell, and the town consequently became known
for four hundred and thirty years as Lynn Episcopi.
It was only when the general confiscation of religious
property took place under Henry the Eighth that
it became the "King's Lynn" it has ever since
remained.

To the " average man," Lynn is well known.

THE SOUTH GATES, LYNN.

Although he has never journeyed to it, he knows
this ancient seaport well ; not as a port or as a town
at all, but only as a name. The name of Lynn, in
short, is rooted in his memory ever since he read
Hood's poem, the "Dream of Eugene Aram."

Aram was no mere creation of a poet's brain, but
a very real person. His story is a tragic one, and
appealed not only to Hood, but to Bulwer Lytton,

EUGENE ARAM 309

who weaved much romance out of his career. Aram
was born in 1704, in Yorkshire, and adopted the
profession of a schoolmaster. It was at Knares-
borough, in 1745, that the events happened that
made him a wanderer, and finally brought him to the
scaffold.

How a scholar, a cultured man of Aram's remark-
able attainments (for he was a philologist and
student of the Celtic and Aryan languages) could
have stooped to commit a vulgar murder is not
easily to be explained, and it has not been de-
finitely ascertained how far the motive of revenge,
or in what degree that of robbery, prompted him to
join with his accomplice, Houseman, in slaying
Daniel Clarke. The unfortunate Clarke had been
too intimate a friend of Aram's wife, and this may
explain his share in the murder, although it does not
account for Houseman's part in it. Clarke was not
certainly known to have been murdered when he
suddenly disappeared in 1745, and when Aram
himself left Knaresborough, although there may have
been suspicions, he was not followed up. It was
only when some human bones were found in 1758 at
Knaresborough that Houseman himself was suspected.
His peculiar manner when they were found, and his
assertions that they "could not* be Dan Clarke's"
because Dan Clarke's were somewhere else, of course
led to his arrest. And, as a matter of fact, they
were not Clarke's, as Houseman's confession under
arrest sufficiently proved.

Whose they were does not appear. He told how
he and Aram had killed that long-missing man and

3io THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

had buried his body in St. Kobert's Cave ; and, on
the floor of that place being dug up, a skeleton was
in due course discovered.

Aram was traced to King's Lynn and arrested.
Tried at York, he defended himself with extraordinary
ability, but in vain, and was sentenced to death.
Before his execution at York he confessed his part,
and so to this sombre story we are at least spared
the addition of a mystery and doubt of the justice of
his sentence.

Hood's poem makes Aram, conscience-struck,
declare his crime to one of his Lynn pupils, in the
form of a horrible dream. How does it begin, that
ghastly poem ? Pleasantly enough —

'"Twas in the prime of summer time,

An evening calm and cool ;
And four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school."

The Grammar School of those young bounders was
pulled down and rebuilt many years ago, and so
much of association lost.

"Pleasantly shone the setting sun
Over the town of Lynn,"

but Eugene Aram, the Usher, on this particular
evening,

"Sat remote from all,
A melancholy man."

Presently, Hood tells us, he espied, apart from the
romping boys, one who sat and " pored upon a book."
This morbid youngster was reading the " Death of
Abel," and Aram improved the occasion, and " talked

JOSEPH BEETON IN THE CONDEMNED CELL.

A LYNN HIGHWAYMAN 313

with him of Cain." With such facilities for entering
intimately into Cain's feelings of blood-guiltiness, he
conjured up so many terrors that, if we read the
trend of Hood's verses correctly, the boy thought
there was more in this than the recital of some
particularly vivid nightmare, and informed the
authorities, with the well-known result —

" Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,

Through the cold and heavy mist,
And Eugene Aram walked between,
With gyves upon his wrist."

Twenty -five years later, Lynn turned off a local
criminal on its own account, Joseph Beeton being
executed, February 22, 1783, on the spot where
a few weeks previously he had robbed the North
Mail, on what is called the " Saddlebow Koad." This
spot, now commonplace enough, was long marked by
a clump, of trees known as "Beeton's Bush." An
old engraving shows poor Joseph in the condemned
hold, and represents him of an elegant slimness,
heavily shackled and wearing what, under the
circumstances, must be described as an extraordinarily
cheerful expression of countenance. A contemporary
account of his execution makes interesting, if
gruesome, reading —

" The culprit was conveyed from Lynn Gaol in a
mourning coach to the place of execution near the
South Gates, and within a few yards of the spot
where the robbery took place, attended by two
clergymen : — the Rev. Mr. Horsfall and the Rev. Mr.
Merrist. After praying some time with great fervency,

3 14 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

and a hymn being sung by the singers from St.
Margaret's Church, the rope was fixed about his neck,
which was no sooner done than he instantly threw
himself off and died amidst the pitying tears of
upwards of 5000 spectators. His behaviour was

&&**

THE GUILDHALL, LYNN.

devout and excellent. This unfortunate youth had
just attained his 20th year, and is said to have been
a martyr to the villainy of a man whom he looked
upon as his sincere friend. Indeed, so sensible were
the gentlemen of Lynn that he was betrayed into the
commission of the atrocious crime for which he
suffered by the villainy of this supposed friend, that

OLD L YNN

a subscription was entered into and money collected
to employ counsel to plead for him at his trial."

The barbarous method of execution in those days
placed the condemned in the dreadful alternative of
slow strangulation, or what was practically suicide.
To save themselves from the lingering agonies of
strangulation, those who were possessed of the
slightest spirit flung themselves from the ladder and
so ended, swiftly and mercifully.

The old account of Beeton's execution ends
curiously like a depraved kind of humour: "The
spirit of the prisoner, the constancy of his friends,
and the church-parade made bright episodes in a
dreadful scene."

XLVII

IT is a long, long way from the entrance through the
South Gates, on the London road, into the midst of
the town, where, by the Ouse^side, along the wharves
of the harbour, and in the maze of narrow streets
between the Tuesday and the Saturday market-
places, old Lynn chiefly lies. In the Tuesday
market-place, Losinga's great church of St. Margaret
stands ; that church whose twin towers are prominent
in all views of the town. Many of the old merchants
and tradesmen lie there, but many more in the vast
church of St. Nicholas, less well known to the casual
visitor. On the floor of that noble nave, looked
down upon by the beautiful aisle and clerestory
windows, and by the winged angels that support the

3z6

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

open timber roof, you may read the epitaphs of
many an oversea trader and merchant prince, as well
as those of humbler standing. Crusos are there, and
among others a certain Simon Duport " Marchand, Ne
en risle de Ke en France," whose epitaph is pre-
sented bi-lingually, in French and English, for the
benefit of those not learned in both. That of "Mr.
Thomas Hollingworth, an Eminent Bookseller," is
worth quoting. He, it appears, was " a Man of the
Strictest Integrity In His Dealings and much
esteemed by Gentlemen of Taste For the neatness
and Elegance of his Binding."

The merchants of Lynn are an extinct race, and
most of their old mansions are gone. Yet in the
old days, when Lynn supplied seven counties with
coals, timber, and wine from the North of England,
from the Baltic, and from many a port in Holland,
France, Italy, and Spain, to be a Lynn merchant was
no mean or inconsiderable thing. They lived, these
princely traders, in mansions of the most noble
architectural character, furnished with the best that
money could buy and hung with tapestry and
stamped leather from the most artistic looms and
workshops of France and Spain. It never occurred
to them that trade was a thing despicable and to be
disowned. Instead of disconnecting themselves from
their business, they lived with it; their residences
and their warehouses in one range of buildings.

A typical mansion of this old period is Clifton's
House. The Cliftons and their old business are
alike gone, and many of the beautiful fittings of
their mansion have been torn out and sold, but the

A L YNN ARCHITECT 319

house itself stands, a grand memorial of their
importance and of the patronage they and their kind
extended to art. It faces Queen Street, at the
corner of King's Staith Lane, and its courts and
warehouses extend back to those quays where
Clifton's ships, richly laden, once came to port from
many a foreign clime. How anxiously those vessels
were awaited may perhaps be judged from the tall
red-brick tower rising in many storeys from the first
courtyard, and commanding panoramic views down
the river, out to the Wash, and away to the open
sea at Lynn Deeps ; so that from the roof-top the
coming of Clifton's argosies might early be made
known.

This house owes its fine Renaissance design to a
Lynn architect whose name deserves to be remem-
bered. Henry Bell, who built it in 1707, and whose
works still enrich the town in many directions,
flourished between 1655 and 1717. To him is due
the beautiful Custom House overlooking the river
and harbour, a work of art that in its Dutch-like
character seems to have been brought bodily from
some old Netherlands town and set down here by
the quay. It was built as an Exchange, in the time
of Charles the Second, whose statue still occupies an
alcove ; but very shortly afterwards was taken over
by the Customs.

The great Tuesday market-place was once graced
by a Renaissance market-cross from Bell's designs,
but it was swept away in 1831. The Duke's Head
Hotel, so originally named in honour of James,
Duke of York, is another of Bell's works, not

L YAW COACHING 32I

improved of late by the plaster that has been spread
entirely over the old red-brick front.

The Duke's Head was in coaching days one of
those highly superior houses that refused to entertain
anyone who did not arrive in a carriage, or, at the
very least of it, in a post-chaise. The principal inns
for those plebeian persons who travelled by coach
were the Globe and the Crown. It was to the
Crown that old Thomas Cross and his " Lynn Union "

THE DUKE S HEAD, LYNN.

came. It is still standing, in Church Street, over
against the east end of St. Margaret's Church, but
in a pitifully neglected and out-at-elbows condition,
as a Temperance House, its white plastered front,
contemporary with the coaching age, even now
proclaiming it to be a "Commercial and Family
Hotel."

The coaching age ended, so far as Lynn was
concerned, in 1847, when the East Anglian Railway,
from Ely to Lynn, with branches to Dereham,

21

322 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

Wisbeach, and Huntingdon, was opened. It was
an unfortunate line, an amalgamation of three
separate undertakings : the Lynn and Dereham,
the Ely and Huntingdon, and the Lynn and Ely
Railways. By its junction with the Eastern
Counties, now the Great Eastern, at Ely, a through
journey to London was first rendered possible.
Three trains each way, instead of the twenty now
running, were then considered sufficient for all needs.
They were not, at that early date, either swift or
dignified journeys, for engine-power was often
insufficient, and it was a common thing for a train
to be stopped for hours while engine-driver and
stoker effected necessary repairs. It was then, and
on those not infrequent occasions when trains ran
by favour of the sheriff, accompanied by a " man in
possession " and plastered with ignominious labels
announcing the fact, that passengers lamented the
coaches. The East Anglian Railway, indeed, like
the Great Eastern, which swallowed it, had a very
troubled early career.

Lynn in those early years of innovation still
retained many of its old-world ways. It was a
sleepy time, as Mr. Thew, who has written his
reminiscences of it, testifies. For police the town
possessed one old watchman, who bore the old East
Anglian name of Blanchflower, and patrolled the
streets " with one arm and a lantern." The posting
of letters was then a serious business, calling for
much patience, for you did not in those days drop
them into a letter-box, but handed them through a
window at which you knocked. When the clerk in

Ss

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, LYNN.

cxusos

325

charge, one John Cooper, had satisfied his official
dignity and kept you waiting long enough, he was
graciously pleased to open the window and receive
the letters. The successor to this upholder of official
traditions, was one Charles Eix, addicted to Declaiming
Shakespeare from his window.

The postmaster of Lynn at this easy-going time was
Mr. Eobinson Cruso, who also filled the miscellaneous
occupations of auctioneer and estate agent, and wine'
and spirit merchant, and was a member of the Town
Council. He was a descendant of an old Lynn
family, many of whose representatives lie in the
church of St. Nicholas. This Cruso (they spelled
their name without the "e") was an upholsterer,
and born ten years after Defoe's famous book was
published ; hence the " Robinson." There are still a
number of the name in Norfolk and Suffolk.

XLVIII

WE must now make an end. Of Lynn's long
municipal history, of the treasures stored in its
ancient Guildhall, of King John's disastrous journey
from the town across the Wash ; of many another
stirring scene or historic pile this is not the place to
speak. The Story of the Road is told, and, that
being done, the task is completed ; but it is not
without regret that a place like Lynn, so rich in
picturesque incident, is thus left. Many a narrow,
cobbled lane, lined with quaint houses, calls aloud to

326 THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

be sketched ; there, too, are the ancient Keel Mount
Chapel, in the lovely park-like "walks" that extend
into the very heart of the town, and the ancient
Greyfriars Tower to be noted ; but Lynn has been,
and will be again, the subject of a book entirely
devoted to itself.

One pilgrimage, however, must be made ere
these pages close : to Islington, four miles away on
the Wisbeach road, for it is to that secluded place
the sweet old ballad of the " Bailiff's Daughter of
Islington " refers, and not to the better known
" merry Islington " now swallowed up in London.

The ballad of the "Bailiffs Daughter" is of
unknown origin. It is certainly three hundred years
old, and probably much older ; and has survived
through all those centuries because of that sentiment
of true love, triumphant over long years and distance
and hard-hearted guardians, which has ever appealed
to the popular imagination. Who was that Marsh-
land bailiff and who the squire's son we do not know.
It is sufficient to be told, in the lines of the sweet
old song, that

"There was a youth, and a well beloved youth,

And he was a Squire's son ;
He loved the Bailiff's daughter dear
That lived at Islington."

She was coy and reluctant and rejected his
advances; so that, in common with many another,
before and since, love-sickness claimed him for its
own. Then, for seven long years, he was sent away,
bound apprentice in London. Others in those

0

AN OLD BALLAD

circumstances would have forgotten the fair maid of
Islington, but our noble youth was constancy itself,
and, when his seven years had passed, came riding
down the road, eager to see her face again. With
what qualities of face and head and heart that maid
must have been endowed !

Meanwhile, if we read the ballad aright, no one

ISLINGTON.

else came a-courting. Seven years mean much in
such circumstances, and our maid grew desperate —

"She pulled off her gown of green,

And put on ragged attire,
And to fair London she would go,
Her true love to enquire.

And as she went along the high road

The weather being hot and dry,
She sat her down upon a green bank,

And her true love came riding by.

33°

THE CAMBRIDGE ROAD

She started up, with a colour so red,
Caught hold of his bridle rein;

'One penny, one penny, kind sir,' she said,
' Will ease me of much pain.'

'Before I give you a penny, sweetheart,
Pray tell me where you were born.'

' At Islington, kind sir,' said she,
'Where I have had many a scorn.'

'Prythee, sweetheart, then tell to me,
Oh, tell me whether you know

The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington?'
'She is dead, sir, long ago.'

' If she be dead, then take my horse,
My saddle and bridle also;

For I will into some far countrye
Where no man shall me know.'

'Oh, stay, oh stay, thou goodly youth,

She is standing by thy side ;
She is here alive, she is not dead,

But ready to be thy bride.'"

I cannot read those old lines, crabbed and
uncouth though they be, without something sus-
piciously like a mist before the eyes and a certain
difficulty in the throat. " God forbid I should
grieve any young hearts," says Miss Matty, in
Cranford. Sentiment will have its way, deny it
though you will.

Islington itself is, for these reasons, a place for
pious pilgrimage. And a place difficult enough to
find, for it is but an ancient church, a Park and
Hall, and two cottages, approached through a

A SENTIMENTAL CONCLUSION

33'

farmyard. That is all of Islington, the sweet
savour of whose ancient story of true love has
gone forth to all the world, and to my mind
hallows these miles more than footsteps of saints
and pilgrims.

THE END

INDEX

Akeman Street, 5, 172, 181-183,

213, 231, 244 251.
Aldreth, 214, 225, 229, 243.

Causeway, 217-221.

Alfred the Great, 88-91, 263.
Amwell, Great, 86.
Aram, Eugene, 308-313.
Arnim, Count, 108-110.
Arrington Bridge, 4.

Balloon Stone, 100.

Barkway, 102-104.

Barley, 102, 107-110, 123.

Beggars' Bush, 251.

Bishopsgate Street, 8-10, 32.

Brandon Creek, 294.

Braughing, 81, 102.

Bread Riots, 273-287.

Broxbourne, 35, 81.

Bruce Grove, 40.

Buckland, 120.

Buntingford, 81, 110, 117-119,157.

Cam, The, 153-155, 171, 172, 174,
177, 201, 235, 236, 239, 243.

Cambridge, 4, 14, 134-176, 226,
262.

Castle, 170-174.

Caxton, 4.

Gibbet, 127.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 135.

Cheshunt, 35, 67, 69, 72, 75-80.

Great House, 7, 77-80.

Wash, 75-79.

Chesterton, 176.

Chettisham, 288.

Chipping, 120.

Chittering, 233.

Clarkson, Thos., 98-100.

Coaches —

Bee Hive, 21, 32.

Cambridge Auxiliary Mail, 19.
- Lynn, and Wells Mail, 20.

Mail, 15, 19, 21.

Stage, 14.

and Ely Stage, 19.

Telegraph, 16, 19, 21, 82,

103.

Union, 19.

Day (Cambridge and Wisbeach),
21.

Defiance (Cambridge and Wis-
beach), 21.

Diligence (Cambridge), 13, 15.

Fly (Cambridge), 14, 15, 19.

Hobson's Stage (Cambridge), 15.

Lord Nelson (Lynn), 20.

Lynn and Fakenham Post
"Coach, 20.

Post Coach, 20.

Union, 20, 26, 29, 31, 107,

321.

Night Post Coach (Cambridge),
16.

Norfolk Hero (Lynn and Wells),
21.

Prior's Stage (Cambridge), 15.

Rapid (Cambridge and Wis-
beach), 21.

Red Rover (Lynn), 21, 254.

Rocket (Cambridge), 21, 32.

Royal Regulator (Cambridge),
19, 21.

Safety (Cambridge, Lynn, and
Wells), 19, 31.

Star of Cambridge (Cambridge),
16-19, 21, 31.

Tally Ho (Cambridge), 19.

334

INDEX

Coaches — continued.
Telegraph (Cambridge), 16, 19,

21, 82, 103.

Times (Cambridge), 21.
York Mail, 69.
Coaching, 12-32, 69, 133.
Notabilities —

Briggs, — , 32.

Clark, William, 32.

Cross, John, 22-25.

Cross, Thomas, 22-31, 107,
256, 321.

Elliott, George, 30.

Goodwin, Jack, 254.

Pryor, — , 31.

"Quaker Will," 30.

Reynolds, James, 31.

Vaughan, Richard, 30.

Walton, Jo, 31.

Denny Abbey, 231.
Denver, 301-303.

— Sluice, 14, 302.
Dismal Hall, 231.
Downham Market, 192, 270, 275,
283, 303, 306.

Edmonton, Lower, 5, 34, 35, 36,

46-52.

— , Upper, 6, 34, 36, 43-46.
Eleanor, Queen, 56-68.
Ely, 4, 190, 195, 225, 230, 241, 258,

270, 281-288, 321, 322.

Cathedral, 254, 256-270.

— , Isle of, 3, 182, 189, 212-226,

230, 243, 289.
Enfield Highway, 54.

Wash, 54.

Ermine Street, 3, 4-7, 75, 122.
Etheldreda, Saint, 229, 260-264.

Fens, The, 176, 182-208, 214-223,
233-235, 239-248, 253, 275,
291-298.

Fielder, Richard Ramsay, 237-239.

Fordham, 183, 298, 301.

Fowlmere, 110, 112-115.

Foxton, 132.

Freezywater, 54.

Gog Magog Hills, 140-142, 151.
Granta, The, 133, 172.
Grantchester, 135,172.

Gray, Thomas, 148, 154.
Great Amwell, 86.

Eastern Railway, 31-34, 120,

132, 236, 322.

— Northern Railway, 120, 132.
Shelf ord, 133, 140.

Guthlac, Saint, 196-198.

Haddenham, 230, 262.

Hardwick Bridge, 306.

Hare Street, 102.

Harston, 117, 133.

Hauxton, 133.

Hereward the Wake, 172, 208-214,

221-223, 226-229.
High Cross, 100.
Highwaymen (in general), 54.
Highwaymen —

Beeton, Joseph, 313-315.

Gatward, — , 125-127.

King, Tom, 55.

Shelton, Dr. Wm., 80.

Turpin, Dick, 55.
Hilgay, 297.
Hobson, Thomas, 10-12, 32, 140,

157-166.

Hobson's Conduit, 140, 167.
Hoddesdon, 7, 37, 82-86.
Hogge's Bridge, 305.

Iceni, The, 185.
Inns (mentioned at length) —
Bath Hotel, Cambridge, 6, 170.
Bell, Edmonton, 45, 49.
Blue Boar, Cambridge, 15, 19,

168.
Bull, Bishopsgate Street Within,

8-10, 12, 15, 158, 161.
Bull, Cambridge, 19, 167.
Bull, Hoddesdon, 82.
Castle, Downham Market, 303.
Chequers, Fowlmere, 115.
Crown, Downham Market, 276,

302, 304.

, King's Lynn, 321.

Duke's Head, King's Lynn, 319-

321.

Eagle, Cambridge, 16, 19, 170.
Falcon, Cambridge, 169.

— , Waltham Cross, 67-69.
Four Swans, Bishopsgate Street

Within, 8.
, Waltham Cross, 68.

INDEX

335

Inns — continued.

Fox and Hounds, Barley, 107.

Green Dragon, Bishopsgate
Street Within, 8, 12, 15, 19.

Hoop, Cambridge, 170.

Lamb, Ely, 256.

Lion, Cambridge, 14, 168.

Lord Nelson, Upware, 235-239.

Lynn Arms, Setchey, 306.

Pickerel, Cambridge, 170.

Eed Lion, Reed Hill, 120.

, Royston, 14, 120, 125-127.

Roman Urn, Crossbrook Street,
75.

Rose and Crown, Upper Edmon-
ton, 51.

Saracen's Head, Ware, 92, 94.

Sun, Cambridge, 14, 15, 16.

Three Tuns, Cambridge, 168.

Two Brewers, Ponder's End, 53.

Upware Inn, 235-239.

White Horse, Fetter Lane, 13,
16.

Woolpack, Cambridge, 168.

Wrestlers, Cambridge, 168.
Islington, 326-331.

Kett's Oak, 298-300.
Kingsland Road, 27.
King's Lynn, 4, 34, 306-326.

Lamb, Charles, 36, 47-51, 53, 86.
Landbeach, 177, 180, 189.
Layston, 119.

Littleport, 182, 189, 243, 244, 276-
281, 283, 284, 289-292.

Melbourn, 123, 128-131.
Milestones, Early examples of,

103, 110, 136.
Milton, 176, 177.

, John, 155, 163.

Modney Bridge, 183, 297.

Newton, 115.

Nine Wells, The, 140.

Old-time travellers—

Cobbett, Richard, 34, 122, 184,

244, 258.

Gilpin, John, 36, 38, 43-46, 87,
96.

Old-time travellers — continued.
James the First, 36, 46, 71-75.
Pepys, Samuel, 12, 112-115.
Prior, Matthew, 82-85.
Thoresby, Ralph, 76-79.
Walton, Izaak, 36-38, 43.
Ouse, The, 180, 182, 198, 201, 205,
218-221, 229, 236, 243, 257,
289, 292, 294, 302, 315.

Pasque Flower, The, 121.
Ponder's End, 35, 47, 48, 52-54.
Puckeridge, 102, 117.

Quinbury, 102.

Railways, 22, 28, 32-34, 95, 120,

132, 236, 321.
Rampton, 214.
Roman roads, 34-37, 75, 122, 172,

181-183, 213, 231, 244, 251.
Royston, 4, 7, 117, 119, 120, 122-

128.

— Cave, 124.
Crow, 121.

— Downs, 117, 119-122.
Ryston, 298, 300.

Scotland Green, 42.
Setchey, 305.
Seven Sisters Road, 40.
Shelford, Great, 133, 140.
Shepreth, 131-133,229.
Shoreditch Church, 10, 34, 35, 48.
Southery, 183, 189, 275, 295-297.
South Runcton, 305.
Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, 179.
Stamford Hill, 34, 35, 36.
Standon Green End, 100.
Stoke Newington, 35.
Stow Bardolph, 304.
Stretham, 182, 253.

— Bridge, 182, 243, 247-251.

Theobalds, 7, 67, 72-75.
Thetford, 255.
Thriplow Heath, 115.
Tottenham, 36, 38-43.

High Cross, 35, 37, 38-43.

Trumpington, 134-136.
Turner's Hill, 75.
Turnford, 80.

336 INDEX

Turnpike Acts, 119.
Trusts, 119.

Upware, 235-240, 243.

Wade's Mill, 97, 119.
Walsingham, Alan of, 267.
Waltham Cross, 34, 54-70, 79.
Ware, 5, 6, 7, 34, 36, 87-97.
, Great Bed of, 86, 87, 93.

Waterbeach, 177-180, 189.

West Mill, 117.

West Winch, 306.

Wicken Fen, 198, 233-235, 240.

William the Conqueror, 3, 170-

173, 209, 212-215, 217, 221-

227, 230, 270.
Wimbotsham, 304.
Witchford, 225, 230.
Worrnley, 81.

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