Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

At the same period Royston was the scene of yet another ecclesiastical development, by the establishment of a famous hermitage in its still celebrated cave. This cave is a curious bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk below the Icknield Way, of prehistoric origin, having been apparently one of those "dene holes" from which the ancient inhabitants of Britain used to procure chalk for marling their fields. It is not so long since this method was discontinued, and numbers of these holes are still to be found in Kent and elsewhere. They were always made on the same plan. A shaft was sunk to the desired depth, and the chalk excavated all round the bottom as far as safety permitted. The hole was then abandoned, and usually filled in. This one at Royston, however, remained open, and in the twelfth century was taken as his abode by a hermit, who employed himself in carving devotional figures and emblems all round the walls.

He must have been a true Solitary, for his shrine was only accessible by a rope ladder twenty-five feet long let down through the narrow opening at the top. It remained, however, a place of devotion till the Reformation, when it not only became disused, but was so effectually filled up that its very existence was forgotten for some two hundred and fifty years. Then curiosity was aroused by a subsidence at the top (under the very centre of the town), and the hole once more cleared out, a more convenient approach being cut from adjacent premises, by which it may still be visited.

The Priory of Royston was, of course, suppressed under Henry the Eighth. But its church was suffered to be bought by the inhabitants of the town, who besought the king to spare it to them on the ground that, though Royston stood in five several parishes, there was "never a parish church within two miles." This was literally true, the parochial boundaries having been already long established before the town grew up. The five parishes were those of Melbourn, Barley, Bassingbourn, Reed, and Therfield. They had therefore attended the Priory church, and been ministered to by its monks. The place was, in answer to this petition, constituted a parish, and the church rededicated to St. John the Baptist instead of to Henry's bête noire, Thomas à Becket. But the old connection of Royston with this saint survives to this day in the annual Fair held in July (near the date of his "Translation"), which is still popularly called "Becket Fair."

At Royston the Icknield Way used to be the boundary of Cambridgeshire, as at Newmarket, so that it was convenient for the resident magistrates to be in the Commission for both counties. Thus, by merely crossing the road, they could exercise their authority in whichever might be desired. Beyond the town, the way continues to run south-westwards, along the foot of the East Anglian heights, which here form the watershed between the basin of the Ouse and that of the Thames. Their northern escarpment is, at this point, still in its primæval condition, a steep slope of virgin turf, known as Royston Heath, the common property of the township. The Heath has a far-reaching view and delicious air, and the Royston folk do well in jealously guarding against any usurpation of their rights in it. That golf links should not exist on such a magnificent stretch of turf would almost be unthinkable, but even over this development many shake their heads as an encroachment.

As we continue our way along the hedgeless road at the foot of this delightful common, the Great Northern Railway, from Cambridge to London, keeps us close company on our right. A mile or so beyond it rises a conspicuous line of poplar trees. These mark the village of Bassingbourn, one of the most interesting in the county to the historian. For here there is preserved in the church a whole library of antique books, and amongst these (in manuscript) the churchwardens' accounts from 1498 to 1534, kept with an accuracy which enables us to picture faithfully the village life of those days. We find that it was a period of high wages, for a labourer got threepence a day if boarded, and fivepence unboarded. His board then was worth a shilling per week. Nowadays it is reckoned at ten shillings at least, so that we must multiply all the items by ten to express them in current value. His wages were thus equivalent to twenty-five shillings per week, double the present rate, while artisans could command nearly twice as much. The times were thus abnormally prosperous, and the parishioners could afford to spend so lavishly in merrymaking at the "Church Ales" that an annual profit equivalent to nearly £50 was usually made on these entertainments, which corresponded to the Parochial Teas and concerts of the present day. These profits went towards the "reparacyon" of the church, and the current church expenses, including such heavy items as refounding the bells, at a cost equal to over £200, and renovating the clock and the organ. Further funds were raised by a great "Miracle Play" of St. George and the Dragon, to which the whole neighbourhood assembled.

All this prosperity (founded, as always, on the high rate of wages) was the result of that fearful catastrophe, the Black Death, which, a few generations back, had all but decimated the population, and shattered the old social system of England, wherein the labourers were "villains," tied to the manor on which they were born, and bound to do for their lord (in lieu of rent) so many "jobs"[178] a year. A "job" meant 100 minutes' work, a strange subdivision of time, implying some fairly accurate means of measuring its flight, though we know not what these may have been. A Cambridgeshire "inquisition" of 1313 values each job at a halfpenny, so that the day's work of a "villain" was worth about threepence.

But the demand for labour after the "Death" became so great, and so many of the estate owners had died, that villenage came to an end, and the labourers could, as now, go where they would and make the best wages they could get in open market.

The result, after a while, was, as we have seen, a great increase in prosperity, testified to by the abundant Perpendicular work in almost every parish church in England. But the immediate effect was fearful distress, and a chaotic dislocation of the old feudal relationships, giving birth to the socialistic dreams which for a moment so vainly tried to materialise themselves in the anarchical outbreak which we call Wat Tyler's Rebellion. An example of this dislocation of ordinary conditions is furnished by the Papal registers, which tell us that the rectory of this very Bassingbourn (estimated at the equivalent of no less than £1,200 per year) was made over, in 1410, to the Chapel Royal of St. Martin's-le-Grand, London, "considering that the said chapel hath been ruined by the Great Storm, and its lands lie waste for lack of labourers through the pestilence."

The "great storm" here referred to took place on St. Maur's Day (January 15th), 1361. Of both storm and pestilence we shall find a most interesting record in the church of Ashwell, the next and last place which we should see in this corner of the county. To reach it we have, indeed, to cross the border and go some half mile beyond; but though politically in Hertfordshire, Ashwell physically belongs to Cambridgeshire. For here is the source of the Cam, and such a source as few would dream of for the sluggish unclear stream that we see at Cambridge. In the midst of the village the ground sinks into a sort of amphitheatre, some 100 yards in length by thirty in breadth and ten in depth, with abrupt sides covered with brushwood and overshadowed by ancestral ash-trees. All round the floor of this gush forth springs upon springs of the brightest, most sparkling water; so copious that when the infant stream escapes through a breach towards the north it is already nearly thirty feet broad. No prettier river-source is to be found throughout the length and breadth of England. The ash-trees, however, are not, as one is apt to think at first, the origin of the name, but its consequence. The first syllable really embodies that Celtic word for water which, as Axe, Exe, Esk, and Usk, meets us in so many places all over Great Britain; and this syllable, at some far-back date, suggested the planting of ashes around the well.