Читать книгу Cambridge and Its Story - Charles William Stubbs - Страница 7

“In process of time, when Alfred, or Alred, supported by divine Comfort, after many Tribulations, had obtained the Monarchy of all England, he translated to Oxford the scholars, which Penda, King of the Mercians, had with the leave of King Ceadwald carried from Cambridge to Kirneflad (rather Cricklade, as above), to which scholars he was wont to distribute Alms in three several Places. He much honour’d the Cantabrigians and Oxonians, and granted them many Privileges.

“Afterwards he erected and establish’d Grammar Schools throughout the whole Island, and caus’d the Youth to be instructed in their Mother Tongue. Then perceiving that the Scholars, whom he had conveyed to Oxford, continually applied themselves to the Study of the Laws and expounded the Holy Scriptures: he appointed Grimwald their Rector, who had been Rector and Chancellor of the City of Cambridge.”

The severer canons of modern historical criticism have naturally made short work of all these absurd fables; nor do they even allow us to accept as authentic the otherwise not unpleasing story quoted from the Chronicle, or rather historical novel, of Ingulph, in the quaint pages of Thomas Fuller, written a generation later than Richard Parker’s book, which tells how, early in the twelfth century, certain monks were sent to Cambridge by Joffrey, Abbot of Crowland, to expound in a certain public barn (by later writers fondly thought to be that which is now known by the name of Pythagoras’ School) the pages of Priscian, Quintillian, and Aristotle.

There is little doubt, I fear, that we may find the inciting motive of all this exuberant fancy and invention in the desire to glorify the one University at the expense of the other, which is palpably present in that last quotation from Parker’s book, and which is perhaps not altogether absent from the writings and the conversation of some academic patriots of our own day. We may, however, more wisely dismiss all these foolish legends and myths as to origins in the kindlier spirit of quaint old Fuller in the Introduction to his “History of the University of Cambridge”:—

“Sure I am,” he says, “there needeth no such pains to be took, or provision to be made, about the pre-eminence of our English Universities, to regulate their places, they having better learned humility from the precept of the Apostle, In honour preferring one another. Wherefore I presume my aunt Oxford will not be justly offended if in this book I give my own mother the upper hand, and first begin with her history. Thus desiring God to pour his blessing upon both, that neither may want milk for their children, or children for their milk, we proceed to the business.”

Descending then from the misty cloudland of Fable to the hard ground of historic Fact, we are shortly met by a question which, I hope, Fuller would have recognised as businesslike. How did it come about that our forefathers founded a University on the site which we now call Cambridge—“that distant marsh town,” as a modern Oxford historian somewhat contemptuously calls it? The question is a natural one, and has not seldom been asked. We shall find, I think, the most reasonable answer to it by asking a prior question. How did the town of Cambridge itself come to be a place of any importance in the early days? The answer is, in the first place, geographical; in the second, commercial. We may fitly occupy the remaining space of this chapter in seeking to formulate that answer.

And first, as to the physical features of the district which has Cambridge for its most important centre. “The map of England,” it has been strikingly said by Professor Maitland, “is the most wonderful of all palimpsests.” Certainly that portion of the map of England which depicts the country surrounding the Fenlands of East Anglia is not the least interesting part of that palimpsest. Let us take such a map and try roughly to decipher it.[2]

If we begin with the seaboard line we shall perhaps at first sight be inclined to think that it cannot have changed much in the course of the centuries. And most probably the coast-line of Lincolnshire, from a point northwards near Great Grimsby or Cleethorpes at the mouth of the Humber to a point southwards near Waynefleet at the mouth of the Steeping River, twenty miles or less north of Boston, and again the coast-line of Norfolk and Suffolk from Hunstanton Point at the north-east corner of the Wash round past Brancaster and Wells and Cromer to Yarmouth and then southwards past Southwold and Aldborough to Harwich at the mouth of the Orwell and Stour estuary, has not altered much in ten or even twenty centuries. But that can hardly be said with regard to the coast-line of the Wash itself. For on its western side our palimpsest warns us that there is a considerable district called Holland; that on its south side, a dozen miles or more from the present coast-line, is a town called Wisbech (or Ouse-beach); that still farther inland, within a mile or two of Cambridge itself, are to be found the villages of Waterbeach and Landbeach; and that scattered throughout the whole district of the low-lying lands are villages and towns whose place-names have the termination “ey” or “ea,” meaning “island”—such, as Thorney, Spinny, Sawtrey, Ramsey, Whittlesea, Horningsea; and that one considerable tract of slightly higher ground, though now undoubtedly surrounded by dry land, is still called the Isle of Ely. These place-names are significant, and tell their own story. And that story, as we try to interpret it, will gradually lead us to the conclusion that the ancient seaboard line of the Wash, instead of being marked on the map of England as we have it now, by a line roughly joining Boston and King’s Lynn, would on the earliest text of the palimpsest require an extended sea boundary on which Lincoln, and Stamford and Peterborough, and Huntingdon and Cambridge, and Brandon and Downham Market would become almost seaboard towns, and Ely an island fifteen miles or so off the coast at Cambridge.

Such a conclusion, of course, would be somewhat of an exaggeration, for the wide waste of waters which thus formed an extension of the Wash southwards was not all or always sea water. So utterly transformed, however, has the whole Fen country become in modern times—the vast plain of the Bedford level contains some 2000 square miles of the richest corn-land in England—that it is very difficult to restore in the imagination the original scenery of the days before the drainage, when the rivers which take the rainfall of the central counties of England—the Nene, the Welland, the Witham, the Glen, and the Bedfordshire Ouse—spread out into one vast delta or wilderness of shallow waters.

The poetic glamour of the land, now on the side of its fertility and strange beauty, now on the side of its monotony and weird loneliness, has always had a strange fascination for the chroniclers and writers of every age. In the first Book of the Liber Eliensis (ii. 105), written by Thomas, a monk of Ely, in the twelfth century, there is a description of the fenlands, given by a soldier to William the Conqueror, which reads like the report of the land of plenty and promise brought by the spies to Joshua. In the Historia Major of Matthew Paris, however, it is described as a place “neither accessible for man or beast, affording only deep mud, with sedge and reeds, and possest of birds, yea, much more by devils, as appeareth in the Life of S. Guthlac, who, finding it a place of horror and great solitude, began to inhabit there.” At a later time Drayton in his Polyolbion gives a picture of the Fenland life as one of manifold industry:—

“The toiling fisher here is towing of his net;

The fowler is employed his limèd twigs to set;

One underneath his horse to get a shoot doth stalk;

Another over dykes upon his stilts doth walk; There other with their spades the peats are squaring out, And others from their cars are busily about To draw out sedge and reed to thatch and stover fit: That whosoever would a landskip rightly hit, Beholding but my Fens shall with more shapes be stored Than Germany or France or Thuscan can afford.”

This eulogy of the Fenland, however, Drayton is careful to put into the mouth of a Fenland nymph, who is not allowed to pass without criticism by her sister who rules the uplands:—

“O how I hate

Thus of her foggy fens to hear rude Holland prate

That with her fish and fowl here keepeth such a coil,

As her unwholesome air, and more unwholesome soil,

For these of which she boasts the more might suffered be.”

But probably the most picturesque and truthful imaginative sketch of the old fenlands is that which was given in our own time by the graphic pen of Charles Kingsley in his fine novel of “Hereward the Wake,” somewhat amplified afterwards in the chapters of “The Hermits,” which he devoted to the history of St. Guthlac:—

“The fens in the seventh century,” he says, “were probably very like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now in summer one sea of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines of poplar trees. Of old it was a labyrinth of black wandering streams, broad lagoons, morasses submerged every spring-tide, vast beds of reed and sedge and fern, vast copses of willow and alder and grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallowing up slowly, all devouring, yet preserving the forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us) beneath the sea from age to age. Trees torn down by flood and storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back on the land. Streams bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature left to herself ran into wild riot and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one ‘dismal swamp,’ in which at the time of the Norman Conquest, ‘the last of the English,’ like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale, took refuge from their tyrants and lived like him a free and joyous life awhile.”

Such was one aspect, then, in the early days of English history, of the great plain that stretches from Cambridge to the sea. But our map-palimpsest has further physical facts to reveal which had an important influence on the civic and economic development of Cambridge. To the south-east of this great plain of low-lying fenlands rises the upland country of boulder clay, stretching in a line almost directly west and east from the downs at Royston, thirteen miles below Cambridge, to Sudbury-on-the-Stour. The whole of this ridge of high ground, which roughly corresponds with the present boundaries between Cambridgeshire and Suffolk and Essex, was in the early days covered with dense forest. Thus the Forest and the Fen between them formed a material barrier separating the kingdom of East Anglia from the rest of Britain. At one point only could an entrance be gained. Between the forest and the fen there runs a long belt of land, at its narrowest point not more than five miles wide, consisting partly of open pasture, partly of chalk down. In the neck, so to say, of this natural pass into East Anglia lies the town of Cambridge. A careful scrutiny of our map will show, on the under-text of our palimpsest, a remarkable series of British earthworks, all crossing in parallel lines this narrow belt of open land between the fen and the forest, marked on the map as Black Ditches, Devil’s Dyke, the Fleam or Balsham Dyke, the Brent or Pampisford Ditch, and the Brand or Heydon Way. Of these the longest and most important is the well-known Devil’s Dyke, near Newmarket. It is some eight miles long in all, and consists of a lofty bank twelve feet wide at the top, eighteen feet above the level of the country, and thirty feet above the bottom of the Ditch, which is itself some twenty feet wide. The ditch is on the western side of the bank, thus showing that it was used as a defence by the people on the east against those on the west. It was near this ditch that the defeat of the ancient British tribe of the Iceni by the Romans, as described by Tacitus (“Annals,” xii. 31), took place in A.D. 50.[3]

At Cambridge itself the ancient earthwork known as Castle Hill may belong to this British period, and have formed a valuable auxiliary to the line of dykes in defending the ford of the river and the pass behind; but upon this point authorities are divided.[4] Indeed, there is good ground for the opinion that the Castle Hill is a construction of the later Saxon period, and may, in fact, be referred to the time of the Danish incursions in the ninth century, during which time Cambridge is known to have been sacked more than once.

However that may be, there is ample proof that the site of the Castle at any rate was occupied by the Romans, for the remains of a fosse and vallum, forming part of an oblong enclosure within which the Castle Hill, whether early British or later Saxon, is included, seem to indicate the position of a Roman station here. Moreover, to this place converge the two great Roman roads, of which the remains may still be traced: Akeman Street, leading from Cirencester (Corinium) in the south through Hertfordshire to Cambridge, and thence across the fen (by the Aldreth Causeway, the scene of William the Conqueror’s two years’ campaign with Hereward) to Ely, and so onwards to Brancaster in Norfolk; and the Via Devana, which, starting from Colchester (Colonia or Camelodunum), skirted the forest lands of Essex through Cambridge and Huntingdon (Durolifons) northwards to Chester (Deva). Whether the Roman station, however, at the junction of these two roads can be identified as the ancient Camboritum is still a little doubtful. Certainly the common identification of Cambridge with Camboritum, because of the resemblance between the two names, cannot be justified. That resemblance is a mere coincidence. The name Cambridge, in fact, is comparatively modern, being corrupted, by regular gradations, from the original Anglo-Saxon form which had the sense of Granta-bridge. The name of the town is thus not, as is generally supposed, derived from the name of the river (Cam being modern and artificial), but, conversely, the name of the river has, in the course of centuries, been evolved out of the name of the town.[5]

To return, however, to the Castle Hill. It may be doubtful, as we have said, whether the Roman station there was Camboritum or not, but there can be no doubt that the station, whatever it may have been called by the Romans, must have been a fairly important one, not only as commanding the open pass-way between the forest and the fen leading into East Anglia, but also as standing at the head of a waterway leading to the sea. It is difficult, of course, to estimate the extent of the commerce in these early days, or even perhaps to name the staple article of export that must have found its way by means of the fenland rivers to the Continent, but that it must have been at times considerable we may at least conjecture from the fact that in the records of the sacking of the Fenland abbeys—Ely, Peterborough, Ramsey, and Crowland—by the Danes in the seventh century there is evidence of a great store of wealth, costly embroideries, rich jewels, gold and silver, which can hardly have been the product of native industry alone, but seem to indicate a fair import trade from the Continent.

The geographical position, in fact, of Cambridge at the head of a waterway directly communicating with the sea is a factor in the history of the town the importance of which cannot be exaggerated. In direct communication with the Continent by means of the river, and on the only, or almost the only, line of traffic between East Anglia and the rest of England, it naturally became the chief distributing centre of the commerce and trade of eastern England, and the seat of a Fair which in a later age boasted itself the largest in Europe.

In his “History of the University,” Thomas Fuller gives an account of the origin of this Fair, which is perhaps more picturesque than accurate:—

“About this time,” he says—that is, about A.D. 1103, in the reign of the first Henry—“Barnwell,[6] that is, Children’s Well, a village within the precincts of Cambridge, got both the name thereof and a Fair therein on this occasion. Many little children on Midsummer (or St. John Baptist’s) Eve met there in mirth to play and sport together; their company caused the confluence of more and bigger boys to the place: then bigger than they: even their parents themselves came thither to be delighted with the activity of their children. Meat and drink must be had for their refection, which brought some victualling booths to be set up. Pedlers with toys and trifles cannot be supposed long absent, whose packs in short time swelled into tradesmen’s stalls of all commodities. Now it is become a great fair, and (as I may term it) one of the townsmen’s commencements, wherein they take their degrees of wealth, fraught with all store of wares and nothing (except buyers) wanting therein.”

This description of Fuller is obviously a rough translation of a passage from the Liber Memorandorum Ecclesia de Bernewelle, commonly called the “Barnewell Cartulary,” given at page xii. of Mr. J. W. Clark’s “Customs of Augustinian Canons,” and dated about 1296.

It is possible, of course, that the celebrated Stourbridge Fair, which in later centuries was held every autumn in the river Meadow, a mile or so below the town, adjoining Barnwell Priory, did date back to these early times, but its two earliest charters undoubtedly belong to the thirteenth century, one belonging to the reign of King John, granting the tolls of the Fair to the Friars of the Leper Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, the other to Henry III.’s time fixing the date of the Fair for the four days commencing October 17, being the Festival of St. Etheldreda, Virgin, Queen and Abbess of Ely. From this time onward at any rate the annual occurrence of this Fair furnishes incidents, not always commendable, in the annals of both town and University. It is said with probability that John Bunyan, who in his Bedfordshire youth may well have been drawn to its attractions, made the Fair at Stourbridge Common the prototype of his “Vanity Fair.” And certainly any one who will take the trouble to compare the description of the Fair given by the Cambridgeshire historian Carter with the well-known passage in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” cannot but feel that the details of Bunyan’s picture are touches painted from life:—

“Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the Wilderness, they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of that Town is Vanity; and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity Fair ... therefore at this Fair are all such Merchandise sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones and what not.

“And moreover at this Fair there is at all times to be seen Jugglings, Cheats, Games, Plays, Fools, Apes, Knaves, and Rogues, and that of all sorts.

“And as in other Fairs of less moment, there are the several Rows and Streets under their proper names, where such and such wares are vended; so here likewise you have the proper places, Rows, Streets ... where the wares of this Fair are soonest to be found. Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the German Row, where several sorts of vanities are to be sold.”

The historian, it is true, speaks of “the Sturbridge Fair as like to a well-governed city, with less disorder and confusion than in any other place where there is so great a concourse of people,” yet when one reads in Bunyan’s “Progress” of the Peremptory Court of Trial, “under the Great One of the Fair,” ever ready to take immediate cognisance of any “hubbub,” one cannot but remember that the judicial rights of the University in the regulation of the ale-tents and show-booths on Midsummer Common were at least a fertile theme for satire with the licensed wits of both Universities, whether of “Mr. Tripos” at Cambridge, or of the “Terræ Filius” at Oxford, and wonder what amount of truth there may have been in the rude statement of the latter that “the Cambridge proctors at Fair time were so strict in forbidding undergraduates to enter public-houses in the town because it would spoil their own trade in the Fair.”

But as Fuller would say, “Enough hereof. It tends to slanting and suppositive traducing of the records.” Let us proceed with our history. And that we may do so let us end this introductory chapter of Fable and Fact by enforcing the point, of which the incident of Stourbridge Fair was but an illustration, that Cambridge became the seat of an English University, because it had already become a chief centre of English trade and commerce, and had so become because in the early centuries it had stood as guardian of the only pass-way which crossed the frontier line of the kingdoms of Mercia and the West Saxons and the kingdom of the East Anglians, and at a later time had been the busy porter of the river gate, by which the merchandise of northern Europe, borne to the Norfolk Wash and the Port of Lynn by the ships of Flanders and the Hanse towns of the Baltic, found its way, by the sluggish waters of the Cam and the Ouse, to a place which was thus well fitted to become the great distributing centre of trade for southern England and the Midlands. Stourbridge Fair is a thing of the past. Cambridge as a distributing centre for the trade of northern Europe has ceased to be. The long line of river barges no longer float down the stream. The waters of the Wash are silting up. The fame of the town has been eclipsed by the fame of the University. But town and University alike may still gaze with emotion at the old timbered wharfs and clay hithes of the river, the green earthwork of the Castle Hill, the far-stretching roads once known as Akeman Street and the Icknield Way, the grass-grown slopes of the Devil’s Dyke, as the symbols of mighty forces which in their day brought men from all parts of Europe to this place, and have been potent to make it through many centuries a centre of light and learning to England and the world.