"Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut Ching rew therby.
Roweth 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 service, he was enlarged from serfdom to be a free man, and loaded with honours. Indeed, he was probably 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 Ouse to Littleport, and thence by the Old Croft River to the New Bedford River, 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.
A FENLAND ROAD: THE AKEMAN STREET NEAR STRETHAM BRIDGE.
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, trickling 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 Rivers 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.