"Foul as Hell is, it is defiled by the fouler presence of John." Such is the uncompromising verdict of the inimical chronicler; and such (in less trenchant phraseology) has been very much the verdict of popular historians even to our own day. But it was a verdict by no means universally accepted by contemporaries. John did not, like William Rufus, receive what Professor Freeman calls "the distinction of a popular excommunication." For Rufus no prayer was said, no psalm was sung, no Mass was offered. All men felt that prayer was hopeless. But John was buried in peace; and it speedily appeared that the cause for which he stood was the cause which (more especially when the weight of his own personal unpopularity was removed) most commended itself to the heart of England. Men had no desire to see the English Crown become an appanage for the heir to the French monarchy. And so Louis rapidly found. Within nine days of his father's death the infant Henry the Third was crowned at Gloucester,—with his mother's bracelet, in default of the proper crown (which, however, is not likely to be amongst the treasures lost in the Wash, as many histories assume); and within six months men were flocking "as to a Holy War," from all parts of the country, to take part in that decisive battle known as "the Fair of Lincoln," which crushed, once and for all, the foreign intrusion, and established irrevocably the claim of the native-born ruler to succeed his father on the throne of England.
And with this stirring story we take our leave of the Highways and Byways of Cambridgeshire, the stage of so many a story, the home of so many a memory; the scene—to those who have eyes to see—of so much quiet loveliness; where the Present is ever brooded over by the Past, and where on the anvils of Thought and Science the Future is ever being shaped. We have explored the County from end to end, we have mounted her uplands, we have traversed her fens, we have clambered her earthworks, we have entered her churches. Her Manor-houses have told us their tale of struggle, her Colleges have borne their witness to the growth of knowledge. We have been able to
"Watch Time's full river as it flows";
and the pathos of all that has come and gone stands out before us, as a record more thrilling than the most daring romance, as a theme more inspiring than the noblest poem. We bid good-bye to the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely feeling that no hue of dulness attaches to them, as is commonly supposed by the unappreciative crowd, but that rather the footprints of the past which abound within their borders give promise of a future that shall not be unworthy of what has gone before.
The Old Court of Corpus.
ADDENDA.
Attention should have been called to two remarkable ecclesiastical inscriptions, on the Eastern and Western borders of our district respectively.
In the upland churchyard of Castle Camps (p. [206]), hard by the Priest's Door into the Chancel, a tombstone has the following epitaph: