CHAPTER XI

London Road.--Hauxton Bridge, Indulgences, Church, Becket Fresco.--Burnt Mill.--Haslingfield.--White Hill, View, Clunch Pits, Chapel, Papal Bulla.--Barrington, Green, Church, Porch, Seats, Chest, Fountains, Finds, Coprolite Digging, Hall.--Foxton.--Shepreth.--Meldreth, Parish Stocks.--Melbourn, Shipmoney.--Royston, Origin, Cave, Heath.--Bassingbourn, Old Accounts, Villenage.--Black Death.--Ashwell, Source of Cam, Church, Graffiti.--Akeman Street.--Barton, Butts.--Comberton, Maze.--Harlton Church, Old Pit.--Orwell Maypole, Church, Epitaph.--Wimpole Hall, Queen Victoria.--Arrington.--Shingay, Hospitallers, Fairy Cart.--Wendy.--Artesian Wells.--Guilden Morden, Screen, St. Edmund, Confessionals.

The Cam Valley road from Trumpington leads us over a singularly bare mile, edged by sparse thorn-trees, to Hauxton Mill, where we cross the Granta. The repair of the bridge here was, in mediaeval days, paid for by the grant to all who aided this good object of a forty days' Indulgence. This does not mean a licence to sin with impunity for that period, as perfervid Protestants imagine, but merely the abrogation of any ordinary ecclesiastical censure incurred. The little church of Hauxton, not far beyond, is one of the few Norman village churches existing in Cambridgeshire, for the county suffered so severely in the Norman Conquest that little church building could be afforded till a century later, when Norman had given place to Early English.

In this church, upon the east wall of the south aisle is a fine fresco of Thomas a Becket, dating from within a few decades of his own lifetime. Representations of this Saint are extremely rare, for, as an ecclesiastic who had braved his king--and that king a Henry,--he was specially detested by Henry the Eighth. His Festivals were all suppressed, his name was erased from every Service Book, and his effigies were destroyed with ruthless diligence, so that this is almost the only one known to exist in all England. It was only saved by the niche in which it is painted being hastily bricked up and plastered over; to be forgotten for upwards of three centuries, till accidentally discovered in 1860 during some restoration work.

Hauxton Church stands a little off the main road, on a by way running from Shelford on the Granta to Haslingfield on the Cam. West of Hauxton this route becomes a mere field track, but quite a pretty one, crossing the Cam at an idyllic nook called Burnt Mill Bridges, where the green banks and clear waters are closed in by ancient elms and thorn bushes. It brings to the mind Milton's lines in Il Penseroso:

There in close covert, by some brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from day's garish eye."

Haslingfield (which is more directly reached from Cambridge by the Barton Road) has a fine and spacious church of the fourteenth century, the steeple being of special merit. Above it rises steeply the eastern extremity of a chalk spur to the height of 220 feet. From the summit, though so low, we get one of the widest panoramic views in England, embracing the whole valley of the Cam. "Ashwell Bush,"[170] which marks the source of the river, is conspicuous on a hill some ten miles to the south-westward, and Ely Cathedral, just beyond its junction with the Ouse, may be seen, twice as far away to the north; Cambridge, with its spires and pinnacles, lying between, five or six miles distant. Our eastward limit of vision is the long line of the East Anglian Heights, from Swaffham steeple[171] on their northernmost visible swell, twenty miles away, to the far-off jut of Sharpinhoe, near Dunstable, more than thirty miles in the opposite direction. Beneath us, in the valley, steeple after steeple rises amid its village elms, dotting the landscape like knots in net-work. No fewer than eighty of these can be made out, the most conspicuous being the cruciform church of Triplow.[172]

[Footnote 170: This "bush" is actually a group of young elms.]

[Footnote 171: See p. 191.]

[Footnote 172: See p. 230.]

[Illustration: _Haslingfield Church._]

This eminence was anciently known as White Hill, from the three great "clunch" quarries,[173] which still conspicuously scar its sides, and must have done so much more conspicuously of old, when this material was much more generally used for building than it is now. From these quarries came, for example, the stone used in the First Court of St. John's College, Cambridge. The "pits," as they are locally called, are rapidly greening over, for the clunch is now only dug for the mending of farm roads, and occasionally for marling the fields; as Pliny records that the ancient Britons marled them two thousand years ago.

[Footnote 173: See p. 198.]

At the summit of the ridge a small roadside cottage, known as "Chapel Bush," represents the once famous shrine of "Our Lady of White Hill"; in mediaeval days a noted centre of local devotion, which drew pilgrims in large numbers from a wide area, so that their accommodation, as we read, was no small profit (and, often, difficulty) to the neighbouring villages. No ruins, even, of this ancient chapel remain; but, in 1885, there was discovered on its site a leaden _bulla_ of Pope Martin the Fifth, the first Pope to be generally acknowledged after the Great Schism; when for forty years two (or three) claimants to the Holy See were reigning simultaneously, supported some by one part of Christendom, some by another. He reigned 1417 to 1431, and was the consecrator of Milan Cathedral. It was he who, at the "Assize of Barnwell" (1430), pronounced that all spiritual jurisdiction over the students of Cambridge was exclusively vested in the University authorities. His _bulla_ bears the heads of SS. Peter and Paul, with the traditional features, which Lanciani has now established as historical; St. Peter having a broad face with curly hair and beard, while St. Paul is thin-faced and straight-haired.

On the southern side of the hill lies Barrington, perhaps the loveliest of all Cambridgeshire villages. It consists of two long lines of scattered cottages, straggling along either side of a Village Green nearly a mile in length. The Green is traversed from end to end by the "Church Path," a pebbled causeway of immemorial antiquity. The church, to which this leads, stands at the north-eastern extremity of the Green, and is a noble structure of the twelfth century, with later developments. The south doorway and door are thirteenth century, and are wonders of graceful work; while the fourteenth century seats are of special interest as having been constructed with book-boards, showing that reading was not the rare accomplishment in those days that it is commonly supposed to have been.[174] There is also an iron-bound chest dating from the tenth century, a splendid specimen of the smiths-work for which England was then so famous. The font, too, is equally old, showing on its margin the depressions (now filled in), often provided in fonts of the period when baptism by immersion was the rule, as outlets for accidental overflow.

[Footnote 174: The Chantry Priests, of whom there were two in Barrington, often acted as village schoolmasters, the Chantries themselves serving as classrooms.]

[Illustration: _Farmhouse at Haslingfield._]

Here and there along the Green gush out bright fountains of delicious water from artesian wells driven into the "greensand," some 200 feet below the surface. Throughout all its length the village is sheltered, on the north, by the ridge of White Hill, while, on the south, the orchards and closes with their "hedge-row elms," slope down to the Cam and its water-meadows. The stream here runs beneath a gravel-terrace of its own formation, which has proved exceptionally rich in the remains of pleistocene mammalia, mostly, as has been said,[175] connoting a semi-tropical climate. Specimens of elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, bison, urus, lion, bear, hyaena, derived from Barrington, are to be seen in the Sedgwick Museum at Cambridge. Associated palaeolithic flint implements, and red-deer antlers rudely cut, show that human intelligence existed here along with these monsters, at least 5000 years ago, at the lowest estimate, which some geologists multiply fifty fold; and excavation has shown that the site has been populated pretty well ever since. Neolithic, British, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Mediaeval relics have here been unearthed in quite astonishing abundance; and, though no Roman villa has yet been located, Roman coins have been found literally by the hundred.

[Footnote 175: See p. 221. The gravel here is older than that at Grantchester.]

This wealth of finds has been largely due to the "coprolite" digging, as it was inaccurately called, which went on here (and throughout the neighbourhood) during the whole latter half of the nineteenth century. It had been discovered that the "upper greensand"[176] (here a narrow deposit immediately over the gault and usually some fifteen or twenty feet below the surface) was full of organic remains worth extracting for manure. These remains were never true coprolites, but mostly formless nodules rich in phosphate of lime, many being sponges, along with abundance of sea-urchins, mollusca, crabs, and innumerable sharks' teeth.

[Footnote 176: So called because full of green grains of "glauconite," which appear to be the internal casts of the shells of foraminifera. This bed, however, is not the true Upper Greensand, but "riddlings" from it.]

The industry brought a wave of prosperity to the district; for coprolites were worth some L3 per ton, and the average yield was some 300 tons per acre. The merchants were, therefore, willing to pay well for the privilege of digging them out, and usually offered the landowner L150 or more per acre for three years' occupation of the land (more than its capital value); being bound also to level and resoil it at the end of their tenancy. Wages, too, ran high; a good "fossil-digger" could earn his 40_s_. per week. This produced a corresponding rise in agricultural wages, which went up from 10_s_. or 12_s_. per week to double that amount. The fossil-digging was all piecework, the men being paid by the cubic yard of earth moved.

[Illustration: _South Porch, Barrington Church._]

After being brought to the surface the fossil-bearing greensand was washed in a horse-mill on the spot, an artesian well being bored, if necessary, to supply the water. This separated out the nodules, while the greensand and water was run off as thick mud; used, when dry, for levelling the land, and sometimes for brick-making. The nodules were ground to powder in central works at Royston and elsewhere, and treated with sulphuric acid, thus producing super-phosphate of lime adapted for manure. At the height of the industry as many as 55,000 tons per year were extracted from the Cambridgeshire beds; but with their gradual exhaustion the trade dwindled away till it was finally destroyed by imports from Charleston, U.S.A., where the like "coprolites" are found as a superficial deposit, needing no digging. And with the trade has disappeared the artificial prosperity which it brought, to be succeeded by the full weight of the agricultural depression.

Barrington Hall is the seat of one of the oldest of English county families, the Bendyshes, who have held their estate here since the reign of John. Their residence at Barrington dates, however, only from that of Edward the Third, for whom, during his siege of Calais, they raised money by mortgaging their earlier abode at Radwinter, in Essex, to the monks of that place. Before the king by repaying their loan put them in case to redeem the mortgage, the monks had foreclosed; thus driving the family to reside on their Cambridgeshire property at Barrington. They are not, however, lords of the Manor there (though they are in the adjoining parish of Foxton). That position belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge, who are also rectors of the church, by the gift of their earliest founder, Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor to Edward the Second.

From either end of Barrington lanes lead southward across the Cam to Foxton and Shepreth respectively. Both these villages are hard by the main road which we are following. Foxton Church has a most beautiful Early English east window, and some very good Geometrical tracery. Here is found that rare form of rural industry, a book-printing establishment, which to some extent mitigates the depression mentioned above. At Shepreth this is done on a larger scale by the making of cement, for which the clay procurable here is, like that on the Medway, peculiarly adapted. This is a little gem of a village, with a clear and copious brook running across its maze of thick-shaded lanes. The source of these waters is in the ancient Fowl Mere already spoken of.[177]

[Footnote 177: See p. 230.]

Another such tributary rises in our next village, Melbourn, and runs, on its way to the Cam, through the adjoining Meldreth, an old-world place, where the parish stocks are still to be seen at the village cross-roads. Till the nineteenth century was well on its way, these instruments of punishment were in actual use for the correction of minor offences such as vagrancy. They consist of a low upright frame of rough wood, so contrived that the prisoner's feet, as he sat upon the ground beside it, were passed through holes in the structure and there secured. The parish constable was supposed to keep sentry over him, but actually seldom kept off either the friends, who might alleviate his captivity by beer and tobacco, or the more numerous enemies, who found it a good joke to tease and pelt his helplessness. The hands were sometimes also secured, sometimes not; but in any case the culprit's situation was exceedingly unpleasant, and the stocks proved a most wholesome deterrent.

[Illustration: _Shepreth._]

Melbourn is a larger place, and boasts that rare possession, a village trysting-tree. This is a huge elm, standing by the roadside at the churchyard gate. It is now at the extremity of elm life, some three hundred years old, and only the stump (still clothed with leafage) remains. But the vast massiveness of the roots show its former grandeur. At this tree, in 1640, the villagers spontaneously gathered to resist the imposition of the "ship-money," whereby Charles the First was striving to recruit his exhausted exchequer. "And they fell upon the sheriff's men with stones and staves, and hedgestakes and forks, and beat them and wounded divers of them, and did drive them out of the highway into a woman's yard for their safety. And were forced for saving of their lives to get out of the town a back way; which, notwithstanding, some thirty or forty able men and boys pursued them above a quarter of a mile, stoning them, and driving the bailiffs into a ditch, where some of their horses stuck fast. And the multitude got some of the bailiffs' horses and carried them away, and would not redeem them without money."

This stirring episode shows that the men of Melbourn were already Puritan stalwarts, a character which the place has ever since maintained. Three years later the parson himself removed from the church "sixty superstitious pictures," and a cross from the steeple, and digged down the altar steps. And after the Restoration, when Nonconformity was put under the straitest ban of the law, its worship still continued here to be practised, so that the place became, as it still remains, the chief centre of the Free Church form of religion in this part of the county.

Three miles further the road brings us to the small but flourishing town of Royston, which, though now wholly in Hertfordshire, was till a few years ago partly in Cambridgeshire, with which it has a far closer physical connection than with its new county. The place has an interesting history. Like Newmarket, at the other end of Cambridgeshire, it is not, as are the villages around, one of the original English settlements dating from the fifth or sixth centuries, but a burgh of mediaeval growth, owing its existence (again like Newmarket) to its position on the line of the Icknield Way, here crossed by another presumably British and certainly Roman road, the Ermine Street, which joined, as it still joins, the two great nerve-centres of Roman Britain, York and London. It is still known as the Old North Road.

Such a junction was necessarily an important spot, and the wonder is that there was not always a town here. It was left however still occupied when, in the eleventh century, the Lady Roesia, wife of Eudo Dapifer, the Norman chieftain to whom the land hereabouts was assigned by William the Conqueror, set up here, at the meeting of the ways, one of those stone wayside crosses by which mediaeval piety so often marked such junctions. A century later the new-born devotion to St. Thomas of Canterbury led the then lord of the manor, Eustace de Mark, to found and dedicate to him a Priory, called, from the neighbouring cross, "_De Cruce Rosae_." This, as so often happened, became the nucleus of a little town, which got to be called Roesia's Town, or Royston.

[Illustration: _Melbourn._]

At the same period Royston was the scene of yet another ecclesiastical development, by the establishment of a famous hermitage in its still celebrated cave. This cave is a curious bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk below the Icknield Way, of prehistoric origin, having been apparently one of those "dene holes" from which the ancient inhabitants of Britain used to procure chalk for marling their fields. It is not so long since this method was discontinued, and numbers of these holes are still to be found in Kent and elsewhere. They were always made on the same plan. A shaft was sunk to the desired depth, and the chalk excavated all round the bottom as far as safety permitted. The hole was then abandoned, and usually filled in. This one at Royston, however, remained open, and in the twelfth century was taken as his abode by a hermit, who employed himself in carving devotional figures and emblems all round the walls.

He must have been a true Solitary, for his shrine was only accessible by a rope ladder twenty-five feet long let down through the narrow opening at the top. It remained, however, a place of devotion till the Reformation, when it not only became disused, but was so effectually filled up that its very existence was forgotten for some two hundred and fifty years. Then curiosity was aroused by a subsidence at the top (under the very centre of the town), and the hole once more cleared out, a more convenient approach being cut from adjacent premises, by which it may still be visited.

The Priory of Royston was, of course, suppressed under Henry the Eighth. But its church was suffered to be bought by the inhabitants of the town, who besought the king to spare it to them on the ground that, though Royston stood in five several parishes, there was "never a parish church within two miles." This was literally true, the parochial boundaries having been already long established before the town grew up. The five parishes were those of Melbourn, Barley, Bassingbourn, Reed, and Therfield. They had therefore attended the Priory church, and been ministered to by its monks. The place was, in answer to this petition, constituted a parish, and the church rededicated to St. John the Baptist instead of to Henry's _bete noire_, Thomas a Becket. But the old connection of Royston with this saint survives to this day in the annual Fair held in July (near the date of his "Translation"), which is still popularly called "Becket Fair."

At Royston the Icknield Way used to be the boundary of Cambridgeshire, as at Newmarket, so that it was convenient for the resident magistrates to be in the Commission for both counties. Thus, by merely crossing the road, they could exercise their authority in whichever might be desired. Beyond the town, the way continues to run south-westwards, along the foot of the East Anglian heights, which here form the watershed between the basin of the Ouse and that of the Thames. Their northern escarpment is, at this point, still in its primaeval condition, a steep slope of virgin turf, known as Royston Heath, the common property of the township. The Heath has a far-reaching view and delicious air, and the Royston folk do well in jealously guarding against any usurpation of their rights in it. That golf links should not exist on such a magnificent stretch of turf would almost be unthinkable, but even over this development many shake their heads as an encroachment.

As we continue our way along the hedgeless road at the foot of this delightful common, the Great Northern Railway, from Cambridge to London, keeps us close company on our right. A mile or so beyond it rises a conspicuous line of poplar trees. These mark the village of Bassingbourn, one of the most interesting in the county to the historian. For here there is preserved in the church a whole library of antique books, and amongst these (in manuscript) the churchwardens' accounts from 1498 to 1534, kept with an accuracy which enables us to picture faithfully the village life of those days. We find that it was a period of high wages, for a labourer got threepence a day if boarded, and fivepence unboarded. His board then was worth a shilling per week. Nowadays it is reckoned at ten shillings at least, so that we must multiply all the items by ten to express them in current value. His wages were thus equivalent to twenty-five shillings per week, double the present rate, while artisans could command nearly twice as much. The times were thus abnormally prosperous, and the parishioners could afford to spend so lavishly in merrymaking at the "Church Ales" that an annual profit equivalent to nearly L50 was usually made on these entertainments, which corresponded to the Parochial Teas and concerts of the present day. These profits went towards the "reparacyon" of the church, and the current church expenses, including such heavy items as refounding the bells, at a cost equal to over L200, and renovating the clock and the organ. Further funds were raised by a great "Miracle Play" of St. George and the Dragon, to which the whole neighbourhood assembled.

All this prosperity (founded, as always, on the high rate of wages) was the result of that fearful catastrophe, the Black Death, which, a few generations back, had all but decimated the population, and shattered the old social system of England, wherein the labourers were "villains," tied to the manor on which they were born, and bound to do for their lord (in lieu of rent) so many "jobs"[178] a year. A "job" meant 100 minutes' work, a strange subdivision of time, implying some fairly accurate means of measuring its flight, though we know not what these may have been. A Cambridgeshire "inquisition" of 1313 values each job at a halfpenny, so that the day's work of a "villain" was worth about threepence.

[Footnote 178: This word is derived from the Latin _Opus_ ("work") which in the Manorial account books was usually written j.op. (_i.e._, one _Opus_).]

But the demand for labour after the "Death" became so great, and so many of the estate owners had died, that villenage came to an end, and the labourers could, as now, go where they would and make the best wages they could get in open market.

The result, after a while, was, as we have seen, a great increase in prosperity, testified to by the abundant Perpendicular work in almost every parish church in England. But the immediate effect was fearful distress, and a chaotic dislocation of the old feudal relationships, giving birth to the socialistic dreams which for a moment so vainly tried to materialise themselves in the anarchical outbreak which we call Wat Tyler's Rebellion. An example of this dislocation of ordinary conditions is furnished by the Papal registers, which tell us that the rectory of this very Bassingbourn (estimated at the equivalent of no less than L1,200 per year) was made over, in 1410, to the Chapel Royal of St. Martin's-le-Grand, London, "considering that the said chapel hath been ruined by the Great Storm, and its lands lie waste for lack of labourers through the pestilence."

The "great storm" here referred to took place on St. Maur's Day (January 15th), 1361. Of both storm and pestilence we shall find a most interesting record in the church of Ashwell, the next and last place which we should see in this corner of the county. To reach it we have, indeed, to cross the border and go some half mile beyond; but though politically in Hertfordshire, Ashwell physically belongs to Cambridgeshire. For here is the source of the Cam, and such a source as few would dream of for the sluggish unclear stream that we see at Cambridge. In the midst of the village the ground sinks into a sort of amphitheatre, some 100 yards in length by thirty in breadth and ten in depth, with abrupt sides covered with brushwood and overshadowed by ancestral ash-trees. All round the floor of this gush forth springs upon springs of the brightest, most sparkling water; so copious that when the infant stream escapes through a breach towards the north it is already nearly thirty feet broad. No prettier river-source is to be found throughout the length and breadth of England. The ash-trees, however, are not, as one is apt to think at first, the origin of the name, but its consequence. The first syllable really embodies that Celtic word for water which, as Axe, Exe, Esk, and Usk, meets us in so many places all over Great Britain; and this syllable, at some far-back date, suggested the planting of ashes around the well.

[Illustration: _Ashwell._]

Not far from these bounteous springs rises the splendid tower of the church, springing high into the air with the same undaunted Early English ambition which raised the spire of Salisbury. And on its wall (inside) is carved, in rude and deeply incised lettering of Old English style, varied by some curiously Greek characteristics, the record already spoken of, dealing with the Black Death and the storm. This consists of four lines, intended for Latin elegiacs, again with a Greek touch, and runs thus:

M . Ct . Xpenta . miseranda . ferox . violenta . M.CCC.L. Supest . plebs . pessima . testis . in . fineque . vents . Validus . oc . anno . maurus . in . orbe . tonat. M.CCC.LXI.

The opening words stand for the date:

Ct = Cter = CCC, and Xpenta = XXXXX = 50

The interpretation therefore is:

1350! Miserable, wild, distracted, 1350! The dregs of the people alone survive to witness. And in the end a wind Full mighty. This year St Maur thunders in the world. 1361.

The year 1349 marked the most fatal stage of the Black Death in these parts. In that year, to judge by the Diocesan records, no less than eighty-five per cent. of the beneficed clergy were swept away, which implies a corresponding mortality amongst other classes. By 1350 the worst was over, but the full wretchedness of the situation was now developing itself. The plague lingered on, constantly growing milder, till 1361, when the great storm was supposed to have cleared the fair of the last remnants of infection. A like popular distich about this later visitation is quoted by Adam of Murimuth:

C ter erant mille decies sex unus, et ille, Luce tua Maure, vehemens fuit impetus aurae. Ecce flat hoc anno Maurus in orbe tonans.

That is, in English:

There were 300 + 1000 + 60 + 1 and that Mighty blast of wind was on thy day, Maurus. Lo! in this year bloweth Maurus thundering in the world.

[Illustration: _Ashwell Church from the N.W._]

St. Maur was a Gallican saint of the sixth century who was the first to introduce monasticism into France. There are several other interesting _graffiti_ on the same wall as the above, one of them representing old St. Paul's with its lofty steeple, the highest in the world (510 feet), and the famous Rose Window of the transept which Chaucer mentions in his Canterbury Tales.

Another, and perhaps prettier, way of reaching Ashwell from Cambridge is by taking the road that runs along the Backs, and following it out of the town in its course to the south-west. Its local designation is the Barton Road, but to antiquarians it has been known, since the seventeenth century, as the Akeman Street. It was at that period that the accepted identification of our Roman roads came into being, mainly through the fearless erudition of Gale. Their names (except that of the Via Devana) are as old at least as the Norman Conquest; but, save only in the case of the Watling Street, the main line of which has never been disputed, the connection between any given name and any given road has been matter for the wildest conjecture. Thus, Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the eleventh century, makes the Ermine Street (which we now, with strong reason, identify with the Old North Road from London to York) run from St. David's to Southampton! Our Akeman Street is supposed to connect Wells on the Wash with Aust on the Severn, passing on its way through Bath (the Ake-man-chester of the Anglo-Saxons, _i.e._, "the stone stronghold of Aquae," Aquae being the Roman name for Bath). But a lot of this is mere conjecture. The "Barton Road," however, is undoubtedly on the line of a Roman road.

In spite of its name, it does not pass through the village of Barton. Indeed, like the other roads leading westwards from Cambridge, it curiously avoids the villages on its line, or rather (for the road is older than they) the villages have curiously avoided being directly upon it, though they lie thick on either side. Possibly the first Anglo-Saxon settlers may have had in this district some superstitious dread of a deserted Roman road, such as they certainly entertained at first for the deserted Roman towns, which they did not occupy for many a year (as at Cambridge), though they located their hamlets all round them.

[Illustration: _Ashwell Church._]

But though the Akeman Street does not actually take us through Barton village, it does lead us past the rare object of interest to be found connected with the place, the ancient Archery Butts of the parish. These are to be seen just opposite the sign-post which points to Haslingfield, and are worth a pause to contemplate, for they give a most impressive idea of what archery meant to our forefathers. Every parish, it must be remembered, was bound by law in mediaeval times to have such a stretch of ground, and every yeoman was bound to constant practice upon it. And what practice! These "butts" are a stretch of greensward, some hundred yards across, and in length no less than three furlongs (660 yards). It looks an almost incredible distance for a bowman, but it was the standard, so far as we can judge by the very few butts of which the memory still survives. The length of the short street in South London, still called Newington Butts, is nearly the same.

Here, then, we can picture the sturdy archers of Plantagenet days stretching themselves; their bows, not the toys of the modern toxophilite with their thirty or forty pounds of pull, but of twice the power (eighty lb. being a common pull in those times), and their "cloth-yard" arrows, over three feet long, whistling to a target not planted forty or fifty yards away, but twelve times the distance--the whole length of these butts. Indeed, for anything under two furlongs light arrows were not allowed, and the heavy regulation war arrow had to be used. Each man was taught, as Bishop Latimer tells us in recording his own youthful training, to draw his bow not by mere strength, but by sleight of hand, "to lay the weight of his body into the bow," and to draw the bowstring not to his breast, like other nations, but to his ear. Small wonder that with eye and sinews so trained our English archers became the wonder and the dread of Europe, or that their shafts decided so many a battlefield--Cressy, Poictiers, Agincourt, Flodden.

A mile further we cross the Bourn Brook, a tiny tributary which joins the Cam near Grantchester, hard by a small station on the Cambridge branch of the London and North Western Railway, called Lord's Bridge, from the Lord Hardwicke who, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, substituted a bridge for the earlier ford here. To our right we see, across the fields, the church tower of Comberton; where, on the little village green, can still be seen the worn remains of a turf-built "maze," first traced out no one knows when, but certainly not later than the sixteenth century. Various mystical reasons are conjectured for the origin of these mazes, of which a fair number still exist in England (especially in the Eastern counties), while many more are known to have been destroyed by the Puritans of the seventeenth century as relics of heathen superstition. Such, indeed, they probably are. Mr. Walter Johnson, in his "Folk Memory," considers them to be exceedingly primitive, begun in connection with "ceremonial dances of painted heathen round a prehistoric camp fire." This Comberton maze is fifty feet in diameter, while the tracks are two feet in width, divided by slight banks of turf, once, it would seem, about a foot in height, but now much worn down.

The next turn (to the left) leads to Harlton, a pretty, shady village, with a fine Perpendicular church, having a stone rood screen, which is rare, and, what is yet rarer, a still surviving stone reredos of the fifteenth century, with a central recess, once closed with a door, and evidently intended as a "Tabernacle" for the Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. The six niches on either side of this recess were as evidently meant for images of the twelve Apostles.

Harlton lies close under White Hill, that chalk spur which we have already met at Haslingfield.[179] Here, too, there is a "clunch-pit" in the hill-side, from which the material for the church was probably dug. It is now disused, except for occasional marling purposes, and some unknown benefactor has planted its slopes with larches and laburnums, forming a most fascinating little dell, the charms of which are free to all.

[Footnote 179: See p. 236.]

Our road now climbs the hill, which it crosses through a cutting, with a fine view from the summit in either direction. In the little clump of trees just to the west of the road there stood, till the 'seventies of the nineteenth century, Orwell Maypole, the last of its class to survive in these parts. In mediaeval times every village had its maypole, round which the lasses and lads hied them to dance on May Day. But, like the mazes, they were called (and actually were) remnants of heathenism, and, as such, were destroyed wholesale in the years of Puritan ascendancy. So it befell with the great maypole which gave name to the church of St. Andrew _Under-shaft_ in the City of London. It was hewn down, and, as it lay along the street, sawn in pieces, each householder taking for firewood the length that lay opposite his own door. The Restoration set a certain number up again, but the continuity of their use had been broken, and its revival (as May Day was connected with no special Festival of the Church, like Easter and Christmas, which were also originally heathen feasts) became a merely artificial reaction, bound to dwindle away. So it befell that Orwell Maypole, after being disused for generations, finally perished by natural decay. It stood almost exactly upon the meridian of Greenwich, so that it was a valuable and far-seen landmark.

Orwell itself lies, as usual, just off the road, on the southern slope of the hill. Half a century ago it was the prettiest of villages, with its eponymous "well," shaded by magnificent trees, gushing from the hill-side, in the midst of a prehistoric earthwork, just below the noble church. But, about 1870, the earthwork, unhappily, was found to contain "coprolites" (worth probably about L100 after the expenses of getting them had been paid). For this paltry sum the whole place was destroyed. Well, trees, earthwork, all are now gone; only the church is left, perched on its slope high above the village street. It has a grand decorated chancel, the roof of which is covered with heraldic devices, and contains an interesting epitaph in Latin verse to one of the seventeenth century rectors of the parish, beginning:

Pastor eram dum pastor eram tunc fistula dulcis Tunc tuba qua torvum sprevit ovile lupum.

("I _was_ a Pastor, while a Pastor I; Sweet then my pipe; loud then my trumpet-call, Whereat my flock defied the wolf so grim.")

In the south aisle is preserved a small crucifix of stone, dating from the thirteenth century. It had been built into the wall to save it from destruction at the Reformation, and was not discovered for three hundred years.

About a mile further we find a village along the road itself, the village of Wimpole. But we notice that the houses are all modern, and that no church is to be seen amongst them. A church there is belonging to them, but it stands a mile to the west, where the village also stood till towards the close of the eighteenth century. At that time the mansion and park of Wimpole Hall were being enlarged to their present magnificence by Philip, the first Earl of Hardwicke (the builder of Lord's Bridge). Plebeian cottages were not to be tolerated "betwixt the wind and his nobility," so he pulled down the entire village and planted it, where it now is, along the Akeman Street. The church, which could not well be moved, he faced with red brick to match his new-built stables, close to which it is situated.

[Illustration: _Great Eversden._]

Wimpole Hall has passed through various hands. The central portion was built, in 1632, by Sir Thomas Chicheley, the wings were added a century later by the Earl of Oxford, from whom it came to the Hardwicke family. It is now the seat of Viscount Clifden. The house is on a splendid scale, and the grounds on a scale yet more splendid, with a double avenue of elms, three miles long, running to the south. Here Queen Victoria stayed when visiting Cambridgeshire shortly after her marriage, and won all hearts by her graciousness. It is still remembered how when, by some blunder, the attendant in charge of her jewels was not forthcoming, she came down to the ball-room with a simple wreath of roses in her hair, "and not all the jewels in the world could have made her look so queenly."

There is, of course, a public road leading from Wimpole village to the church, which is also accessible from the west, where the great iron gates of the park are usually unbarred at the request of respectable visitors. These gates open upon the Ermine Street, which the Akeman Street crosses a mile beyond New Wimpole, after also crossing the great avenue. Close by them is another transplanted village, Arrington, whose church stands on the hill half a mile westward. The traffic of the old North Road is responsible for this move, and also for the delightful old coaching inn here, the Hardwicke Arms, with its old-fashioned rooms and long range of stables.

At the junction our road ceases. To continue our westward course we must go along the Ermine Street for half a mile, either northward or southward, where we shall find lanes, either of which will carry us on. The northern lane here will take us along the line of the hill, to Tadlow, Wrestlingworth, Potton, and, finally, Bedford, and will enable us, if we will, to explore the three Hadleys (East Hadley, Hadley St. George, and Cockayne Hadley), of which the two last have fine halls and parks. The southern, however, is the preferable route. It follows the course of the infant Cam, crossed by a bridge on the Ermine Street, and brings us first to the wholly obliterated Shingay, which, though once the most important parish hereabouts, and still giving its name to the Rural Deanery, has absolutely ceased to exist, church and all; its parishioners being affiliated to the neighbouring village of Wendy.

The cause of this ruin was the suppression, at the Reformation, of the institution which was literally the life of Shingay, a House of the Crusading Order of St. John of Jerusalem, or, as they were commonly called, the Knights Hospitallers. This title was given them because, at their original foundation, they dwelt in a Hospital (or house for the hospitable entertainment of pilgrims) at Jerusalem. We now connect this name only with places where the sick are ministered to; but it originally connoted far wider ministrations, and, indeed, rather corresponded to the other form in which the word has survived into our present speech--hotel. We read it on a leaden seal found here at Wendy, in 1876, which bears on one side a conventional representation of the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by the legend IHERVSALEM, HOSPITALIS. On the other is the name of Guarin de Montaigu, who, from 1232 to 1269, was Grand Master of the Order.

The Hospitallers, as readers of "Ivanhoe" know, were, like the Templars, a military Order, who, for over six centuries, fought unceasingly for Christendom. First at Jerusalem, then at Rhodes, then at Malta, they held out with never-failing devotion against the on-sweeping torrent of Mahommedan aggression; and it is scarcely too much to say that but for their eight-pointed cross Christianity might well have been crushed throughout Europe. Not till the nineteenth century was their last stronghold, Malta, reft from them by Napoleon, to pass finally under the flag of England. The Order still survives, but the modern sodality calling itself by the same name, connected with what we now call hospital work, was set up in quite recent days.

Preceptories of the Order, as their branch Houses were called, were found in every land, and not least in England, where they were so much beloved that, when the rival Order of the Temple was suppressed, in the fourteenth century, its property was made over to them. Here, at Shingay, their establishment was a small one consisting of the preceptor, two knights, and three priests, one of whom acted as Vicar of Wendy. The gross income of the House was, in 1332 (as we know from a Report still existing in the Record Office at Malta), L187 12s. 8d., equivalent to about L3,500 at the present value of money. Of this the land (about 1,000 acres) brought in L71; the mills, houses, etc., L4 13s. 4d.; the work of the villains L38 10s. 0d.; and the Rectories of Wendy and Sawston, which formed part of their endowment, L66 13s. 4d. The rest was derived from the fees paid by visitors; for, by the rule of the Order, the doors of the House were open to all comers. The expenses of the year amounted to less than half the income, for they lived frugally, their keep only coming to about L3 a week (in present value) for the six inmates, besides servants and guests. Men servants were paid at the rate of L12 a year (besides their keep), and each knight was allowed the equivalent of L25 a year for clothing and pocket-money. Thus a large sum was available for the war-chest of the Order, and was annually forwarded to the headquarters at Jerusalem or Rhodes.

One of their sources of income was a special privilege which is still remembered in local tradition. Their House (like those of the Templars) was exempt from every ban, even that of the Pope himself. Thus, in the dismal days of King John, when England was placed under an Interdict, when no rites of religion could be observed, and even burial of the dead was forbidden, so that "you might see human bodies lying everywhere about the fields unsepultured," Shingay shone out as the one spot in the whole district where the consolations of religion were still attainable. Here Mass continued to be said, here the departed could still be laid in hallowed earth. And hither they were brought from all sides. And thus it is that peasants may be found who still tell how, at some far off, unknown period, those who, for some forgotten, inexplicable reason, might not be buried like Christians in their own churchyard, were spirited away by night in a "fairy-cart" to Shingay, there to be committed in peace to the ground. This "fairy-cart" is an echo of the word _feretorium_ (or bier on wheels), in which the conveyance was actually effected.

[Illustration: _Rood Screen, Guilden Morden Church._]

Not a building of any kind now exists at Shingay, and very few at the adjoining Wendy, where, at every turn, we are greeted by a wealth of fresh-springing waters, derived from the artesian wells of the old coprolite diggings. The height in which the water in these wells rises is strangely variable. They are always made on the same system; an ordinary well being dug through the upper strata till the impervious gault is reached, which may be any distance from six to sixty feet below the surface. A four-inch bore is then made through the gault by means of a sort of Brobdingnagian cheese-taster, four or five feet long, screwed to an iron handle three times that length. Again and again the taster is brought up, full of gault, and its contents or "core" thrown aside. As the bore gets deeper more irons are added, till the water-bearing greensand or "rock" is attained, usually in the second hundred feet of the bore. The taster is then removed and a "chisel" substituted for "striking the rock," _i.e._, punching a hole by lifting the entire length of irons a few feet and letting it fall. By and by up comes the water, quite suddenly for the most part, gushing from the bore and filling the well till it finds its level. This, as we have said, is curiously different in different spots; in some it does not reach the surface, and has to be pumped up; in others, as here at Wendy, it will supply a fountain eight or ten feet in height. One of these picturesquely gushes out from the top of an old wooden gate-post, up which some artistically-minded coprolite-digger has engineered its course. It is almost medicinal in the quantity of iron with which it is impregnated, but delicious to drink, and the softest possible.

This gate-post is beside the lane leading on Guilden Morden, the last village before we once more reach Ashwell, and itself standing on an outlying mound of the Ashwell chalk. Round this elevation the Cam takes a wide sweep. We may record that Wendy is the highest point along its course which navigation has ever attained. The breadth at Ashwell at once suggests to visitors that a canoe could reach the spot, and many an attempt has been made by ambitious undergraduates. But the upper reaches are so choked up with reeds and weeds and rushes and bushes that no one has ever penetrated further than this spot, some four miles, by water-way, below the source.

Guilden Morden has a far-seen church, a conspicuous object from White Hill, over Barrington, twelve miles away. It is a fine building, with an unusually spacious tower of Northamptonshire stone, and a Saxon font. But it is chiefly interesting for the remarkable development of the fourteenth century rood-screen, which on either side expands into a small "parclose" or pew, enclosed to the height of twelve feet by rich decorated tracery, ornately painted (the original pattern having survived sufficiently to be restored). On the west panel of the northern parclose may be discerned the figures of St. Erconwald and St. Edmund, both members of the royal line of East Anglia. The former was a brother of St. Etheldreda, the foundress of Ely, and became a much-beloved Bishop of London in the seventh century. The latter was the hero king martyred by the Danes a century later, the chosen friend of our great Alfred, of whom so lovely a picture has been left us by the old chroniclers:--

"From his earliest years the truest of Christians, he showed himself of such promise that, by the unanimous will of all his folk, he was not so much chosen as rushed into the kingship over them. For his very look was worthy of this high estate; so bright was it with the calm beauty of holiness and of a conscience like the sea at rest. Kind was he of speech and courteous to all; the grace of Humility came natural to him; and amongst his comrades he kept his place as their Lord with wondrous meekness and no touch of pride. For already the Saint bare in his face that which he was afterwards, by God's will, to show forth; seeing that as a boy he had pressed with all his might into the Way of Righteousness, which, as God's pity foreknew, would end for him in the Way of Martyrdom.... And walking in the King's Highway, he turned aside neither to the right hand, by being puffed up with his own merits, nor to the left, by yielding to the faults of human weakness. To the needy was he a cheerful giver, to the widows and orphans the kindest of Patrons; ever keeping before his eyes the saying of the Wise Man: "Behold they have made thee Prince; but be thou among them as one of themselves."[180]

[Footnote 180: Chronicle of St. Neots.]

[Illustration: _Cottage at Steeple Morden._]

These parcloses seem to have been made to serve as confessional boxes, devices which were very rare in England before the Reformation. "Shrift," of course, was universal; but neither priest nor penitent were shut from view. The former sat in a chair, usually at the altar rail, while the latter knelt beside and facing him. In these parcloses the priest's head as he sat on the seat would be visible to those in the church, but the kneeling penitent would be hidden. That such was the purpose here would appear from the lines in old English lettering painted upon their sides:--

Ad . mortem . duram . Jhesu . de . me . cape . curam . Vitam . venturam . post . mortem . redde . securam . Fac . me . confessum . rogo . te . Deus . ante . recessum . Et . post . decessum . caelo. mihi . dirige . gressum .

"Jesu, in Death's dark vale, be Thou my stay, Make safe my Life to Come from every foe, Grant me Confession, Lord, ere hence I go, And then to Heaven do thou make straight my way."

From Guilden Morden a lane leads straight to Ashwell, leaving on the left Steeple Morden (which lost its steeple in the great storm of 1703), and Littlington, the cradle of Cambridgeshire Nonconformity, of which hereafter. Here the old parish Lock-up survives; a dismal den of red brick, some ten feet square, with iron-clenched door and closely-barred window.

##