Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

It was on Wednesday the 12th of October, 1215, that King John, after three days' stay at Lynn, retraced his steps, with his wonted celerity, by way of Wisbech, to Swineshead Abbey near Boston, a distance of over forty miles. Documents signed by him on this day at all three places are to be found in the Patent and Close Rolls. His baggage train, which obviously could not have kept up with this pace, he ordered to follow by the direct route across the sands. We read with some surprise that his flying column was accompanied by such a train at all; but the contemporary historians agree in telling us of "carts, waggons, and sumpter horses," loaded with the King's treasures and properties (including even a portable chapel), and with the spoil amassed during this long raid.

Such a train would cover at least a mile on any road, and could only move quite slowly, three miles an hour at the very outside. How it kept touch with the column at all is a wonder, and we may be sure that it could never have done so during the forced march from Hedingham on the 19th of September. After that date the occupation of Cambridge by the Baronial forces would effectually bar the way against any attempt to follow in the King's track; and it is highly probable that he, knowing that this would be so, had ordered the train and its escort to make their way instead from Hedingham to Lynn, and that he paid his hurried visit to that place with the sole object of once more getting into touch with them.

However that may be, there is no doubt that the train did set out from Lynn, along the road to Cross Keys, after the King and his troops had ridden off towards Wisbech. It was impossible, however, to attempt the passage that same day, for the channel of the Well Stream could only be forded during the hour or so on either side of low-water, which, as calculations show, was on this day about noon. The long line of vehicles had, accordingly, to halt for the night at Cross Keys, for to have attempted the passage in the dark (the moon was nearly at the new), would have been simply suicidal.

Next morning, Thursday, October 13th, they woke to find the tide lapping against the old Roman embankment behind which they lay, for it was a spring tide, and at its highest about 6.30 a.m. Rapidly it receded, and by 9 a.m. the wide expanse of the sands would lie bare before them. The moment these were dry enough for the passage of carts they would start, for their leaders knew well the urgent necessity for speed. To get such a train across the Well Stream channel in the short space of two hours they must be at the ford the very moment it was practicable. Every instant was precious, and every driver did his utmost to press on, regardless of the warnings of the guides (if they had any).

But to drive a loaded cart over wet sand is at the best a slow job. Readers of Sir Walter Scott will remember his vivid description, in Redgauntlet, of the difficulties attending such attempts:

"The vehicle, sinking now on one side, now on the other, sometimes sticking absolutely fast and requiring the utmost exertions of the animal which drew it to put it once more in motion, was subjected to jolts in all directions.... There seemed at least five or six people around the cart, some on foot, others on horseback. The former lent assistance whenever it was in danger of upsetting or sticking fast in the quicksands: the others rode before and acted as guides, often changing the direction of the vehicle as the precarious state of the passage required.... Thus the cart was dragged heavily and wearily on, until the nearer roar of the advancing tide excited apprehension of another danger.... A rider hastily fastened his own horse to the shafts of the cart, in order to assist the exhausted animal which drew it, ... but at length, when, after repeated and hair-breadth escapes, it actually stuck fast in a quicksand, the driver, with an oath, cut the harness, and departed with the horses, splashing over the wet sand and through the shallows as he galloped off."

Multiply all this at least a hundred-fold, throwing in the added turmoil caused by the multitude of carts jamming and impeding one another, and we can picture something of the scene as that fatal morning advanced and the doomed cavalcade ploughed its way on to destruction. For there was no margin of time; and though the leading vehicles seem to have reached the Well Stream channel, they reached it too late. Already it was unfordable, for such traffic at least as theirs. Some of the carts doubtless tried to make a dash across; but their horses, exhausted by the strenuous effort of the last two hours, were unequal to the tremendous strain of negotiating the soft bottom of the stream. A very few such failures would entirely bar the way to those who were eagerly pressing on behind, and almost in a moment the whole column would be in irremediable confusion. In the struggling press, to turn would be as impossible as to proceed, while momentarily the laden carts, for which the only hope was to be kept going, would, at a standstill, sink deeper, inch by inch, into the ever quickening sand. And then in the midst of the welter, up came the tide, sweeping over the level sands, as spring tides in the Wash do sweep;—and, when the waters once more went down, of all that mass of treasure and plunder, of all those horses and drivers and carts and waggons not a trace was to be seen. The sands had swallowed all; and to this day they retain their prey. As Shakespeare makes King John say:

"These Lincoln Washes have devoured them."

The expanse of sands is now an expanse of fields and meadows, through which the River Nene is led by a straight cut from Wisbech to the sea. Where that cut is crossed by the Great Northern Railway (which, as has been said, runs almost along the line of the old crossing-track) is the traditional spot of the disaster, and Mr. St. John Hope believes that excavation might there bring to light some of its relics, even after the lapse of so many years.

Matthew Paris (in his Historia Anglorum), writing in the generation following the catastrophe, tells us that John himself was on the scene and barely escaped from the rising waters. But he, as we have seen, was the previous night (and the next) at Swineshead Abbey. It is just possible that, with his astounding energy, he may have ridden in the morning with a few attendants to Long Sutton (a distance of twenty miles, as before the reclamation of the fens travellers from Boston thither would have to go round by Spalding), and thence across the sands, to overlook in person the passage of the Well Stream. If so, he may well, in the confusion, have been surprised by the tide and have barely escaped by hard riding. Anyhow the catastrophe cost him his life; for this heart-breaking blow, coming on top of his three months' herculean exertions, brought on a feverish attack that very night. Ill as he was, he was on horseback again by dawn, and rode fifteen miles to Sleaford. Next day he struggled on twenty miles to Newark, where "the disease increasing, he received the counsel of Confession and the Eucharist from the Abbot of Croxton," and died that same evening (October 18th), fairly burnt out by his own consuming and tireless energy. If ever King did, he "died standing."