Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

The main road here goes on, to pass out of Cambridgeshire into Suffolk, a few miles further, at the upland village of Horseheath, with its picturesque old-world village green on the hillside. The church here has a fine fourteenth century brass to Sir John de Argentine (a name familiar to readers of Sir Walter Scott, in the "Lord of the Isles")[151] and some notable monuments, somewhat knocked about, presumably by Dowsing, who records how he here "brake down four pictures of the prophets Ezekiel, Daniel, Zephaniah, and Malachi," besides other damage.

But a more interesting road from Linton is that which continues along the Bourne Valley, and leads, not into Suffolk, but into Essex, which is here bounded by that stream. A mile beyond the town we pass Barham Hall, now a farm-house, but of old a Priory of the same Order that we found at Isleham,[152] a Cell (or Colony) of the Abbey of St. Jacutus de Insula in Brittany. Another mile brings us to Bartlow, where, hard by the church, stand the three huge tumuli from which the name of the village is said to be derived. How they came to exist is an unsolved problem. Remains found in them, when excavated in 1835, were reported to be Roman, but the science of archæology was then in its infancy, and this report can hardly outweigh the wholly un-Roman appearance of the "Hills," as they are locally called. They look far more like British or Scandinavian work; but, indeed, three such mounds so close together are not found elsewhere, of any age.

The little church has an ancient fresco of St. Christopher, placed, as usual, opposite the entrance. For this Saint, by virtue of the legend which tells how he carried Christ over a river,[153] was in mediæval times regarded as a special example for Christians in their going out and their coming in; to whom, therefore, was due their first and last thought in passing the doorway. More noteworthy is the Saxon tower, with its walls no less than six feet in thickness. For in this it is quite possible that we may have a part of the very "minster of stone and lime" raised by Canute in memory of his crowning victory over Edmund Ironside at Assandun.

The location of that most dramatic of English battles, fought in the year 1016, is hotly disputed amongst historians; but there is much to be said for the early view which identifies Assandun with Ashdon in Essex, hard by Bartlow. For ten miserable years, under Ethelred the Unready, England had been ground in the dust, deeper and ever deeper, beneath the heel of the invading Dane. Year by year the degrading tribute wherewith she strove to buy off the foe had gone up by leaps and bounds. All hope seemed dead, when the accession of a hero to the throne roused the harried and exhausted nation into one last convulsive effort for freedom. Six times in as many months did Edmund of England and Canute of Denmark clash in battle. Five of these fields were indecisive, and then, on St. Luke's Day, 1016, the champions met once more at Assandun, perhaps on the slope still known as Bartlow End.

Treason decided the day against England. The fight began with a brilliant charge by Edmund at the head of his bodyguard, which crashed through the Danish phalanx "like a thunderbolt." But his absence from the English line enabled a traitorous noble, one Edric (who was always playing into Canute's hands, in hope of thereby making his own advantage), to raise a cry that the King was slain. A panic set in at once; and before Edmund could cut his way back, the whole army had broken, and was being fearfully cut up in its flight by the pursuing Danes. "And there the whole nobility of England was utterly destroyed." Edmund died of his exertions the same year; and Canute became King of England, the first monarch so to call himself. The native title had always been "King of the English." In thanksgiving he built a minster on the scene of his victory; and, as he had promised, he lifted up the head of Edric "above all the nobility of England"—upon the highest turret of the Tower of London. The "Roman" theory notwithstanding, the three Bartlow barrows may well be a memorial of this great fight, and so may the names of Castle Camps and Shudy Camps which attach to the furthest villages in this far-away corner of Cambridgeshire. The "Castle," however, of which only the moat now remains, was built later by De Vere, the first Earl of Oxford. Shudy Camps has a far-seen church on its lofty brow, visible even from Barrington Hill, on the other side of the Cam basin, fifteen miles away as the crow flies.

Cherry Hinton Church.

From the Via Devana, where it leaves Cambridge (just after the bridge over the Great Eastern Railway), there branches off to the left another road, which leads us to the scenes of earlier battles between Dane and Englishman. This is the Cherry Hinton Road, named after the first village along its course, some three miles on. Its long straight vista suggests at first sight the idea that it too may be a Roman road. In fact, however, it dates only from the enclosure of the land (about the beginning of last century), when the best ploughman in the village was employed, so the story goes, to drive his straightest furrow across the whole breadth of the Common Field as a guide for the road-makers. The older track between Cherry Hinton and Cambridge was by what used to be, till within the last fifty years, a pretty footpath across the fenny ground to the north of the field. It is fenny no longer, and the path has become for three-fourths of its length a somewhat dreary street through the dingy suburb of "Romsey Town."

Cherry Hinton itself is not yet absorbed by Cambridge, and remains a bright spacious village, with a rarely beautiful church. The exquisite Early English chancel is lighted on either side by four couplets of lancet windows, in ideal proportion, while five equally ideal lancets serve for an East window. Both walls have an arcading of cinque-foil pattern; and the double piscina and the graduated sedilia are of no less merit. All this loveliness is within a fine oaken screen of the fifteenth century, and the rest of the church is not unworthy of it. The great quarry, whence the "clunch" of which the church is mainly built was drawn, is a conspicuous object on the hill-side above the village; and above that again, equally conspicuous, is the reservoir of the Cambridge Water-works, looking like a redoubt, on the summit of the slope. At the foot clear springs break out from the chalk, which are also utilised to supply the town.