The church has also later features of interest. There are some good mediæval seat finials, shaped with the axe and bearing grotesque figures, musical instruments, and symbols; the word ORATE being decipherable upon one of them. The rood-screen is fifteenth century, and is placed across the eastern arch of the tower, with no trace of there having ever been a rood-loft.
The land of Ickleton was almost wholly Terra Ecclesiæ. A priory of Benedictine nuns existed here, founded in the twelfth century by Aubrey de Vere, the first Earl of Oxford; while the Abbeys of East Dereham in Norfolk, Tyltey in Essex, and even Calder (a "cell" of Furness), in far-off Cumberland, each possessed a Manor in the Parish. All alike were given by Henry the Eighth to Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, in exchange for the far more valuable property of Hatfield House. Queen Elizabeth, however, afterwards demanded them all back again, with much other land, as a condition of appointing Bishop Heton, in 1600, to the See, which she had kept vacant to fill her coffers for no less than nineteen years. The Manors were sold by the Crown, and are now in private hands. The benefice is in the gift of the Lord Chancellor.
The name Ickleton, like those of Ickborough in Norfolk, Ickingham in Suffolk, and Ickleford in Hertfordshire, is derived from the position of the village on the line of the Icknield Way. It may indeed be the direct linguistic descendant of the Roman Icianos. We must bear in mind that a prehistoric track, such as the Icknield Way, was not one single-metalled thoroughfare like a Roman road or a modern highway, but a broad line of route along which each traveller made his own "trek," so that the "Way" was a series of roughly parallel ruttings over the breadth of a mile and more. Such, to this day, are the routes across the Siberian steppes, which are often four or five miles across. Thus we found the Icknield Way at Whittlesford, three miles north of Chesterford, and it is probable that all the various "fords" we have been meeting—Shelford, Stapleford, Whittlesford, Duxford—have to do with its various passages of the Granta.
Beyond Chesterford the Granta comes down in tiny streamlets from the Essex chalk near Saffron Walden, with its wide-naved church, which Cromwell's troops used for a drill-shed and council-chamber, and its historic mansion of Audley End, once Walden Abbey, and its memories of the days, scarcely a century by-gone, when great crops of saffron were grown in its fields, leaving their only existing trace in the name. And even that is dying out; few of the inhabitants call their home anything but Walden. But this town is beyond our Cambridgeshire border.
CHAPTER XI
London Road.—Hauxton Bridge, Indulgences, Church, Becket Fresco.—Burnt Mill.—Haslingfield.—White Hill, View, Clunch Pits, Chapel, Papal Bulla.—Barrington, Green, Church, Porch, Seats, Chest, Fountains, Finds, Coprolite Digging, Hall.—Foxton.—Shepreth.—Meldreth, Parish Stocks.—Melbourn, Shipmoney.—Royston, Origin, Cave, Heath.—Bassingbourn, Old Accounts, Villenage.—Black Death.—Ashwell, Source of Cam, Church, Graffiti.—Akeman Street.—Barton, Butts.—Comberton, Maze.—Harlton Church, Old Pit.—Orwell Maypole, Church, Epitaph.—Wimpole Hall, Queen Victoria.—Arrington.—Shingay, Hospitallers, Fairy Cart.—Wendy.—Artesian Wells.—Guilden Morden, Screen, St. Edmund, Confessionals.
The Cam Valley road from Trumpington leads us over a singularly bare mile, edged by sparse thorn-trees, to Hauxton Mill, where we cross the Granta. The repair of the bridge here was, in mediæval days, paid for by the grant to all who aided this good object of a forty days' Indulgence. This does not mean a licence to sin with impunity for that period, as perfervid Protestants imagine, but merely the abrogation of any ordinary ecclesiastical censure incurred. The little church of Hauxton, not far beyond, is one of the few Norman village churches existing in Cambridgeshire, for the county suffered so severely in the Norman Conquest that little church building could be afforded till a century later, when Norman had given place to Early English.
In this church, upon the east wall of the south aisle is a fine fresco of Thomas à Becket, dating from within a few decades of his own lifetime. Representations of this Saint are extremely rare, for, as an ecclesiastic who had braved his king—and that king a Henry,—he was specially detested by Henry the Eighth. His Festivals were all suppressed, his name was erased from every Service Book, and his effigies were destroyed with ruthless diligence, so that this is almost the only one known to exist in all England. It was only saved by the niche in which it is painted being hastily bricked up and plastered over; to be forgotten for upwards of three centuries, till accidentally discovered in 1860 during some restoration work.
Hauxton Church stands a little off the main road, on a by way running from Shelford on the Granta to Haslingfield on the Cam. West of Hauxton this route becomes a mere field track, but quite a pretty one, crossing the Cam at an idyllic nook called Burnt Mill Bridges, where the green banks and clear waters are closed in by ancient elms and thorn bushes. It brings to the mind Milton's lines in Il Penseroso:
There in close covert, by some brook,
Where no profaner eye may look,
Hide me from day's garish eye."