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 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, Southwark, 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 numbering 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?
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. Landbeach 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 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 Rawley's shade and discreetly pump it.
LANDBEACH.
Beyond Landbeach, close by the fifty-sixth milestone from London, the modern road falls into the Roman Akeman Street, running from Brancaster (the Roman "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 considerably 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 civilisation 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 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 River 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 Romans 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.