The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway

by Charles G. Harper

INTERIOR OF ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH.

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 Romans established their military post of Camboricum, and where in later ages William the Conqueror built his castle. The great artificial mound, which, like some ancient sepulchral tumulus, is all that remains to tell of William's fortress and to mark where Roman 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 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 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 Grantchester, may be smoothed out by the very reasonable explanation that Grantchester was the first Roman camp over against the British stronghold at Cambridge, 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.

CAMBRIDGE CASTLE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

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 Grantchester 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 Aquæ 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 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, 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.