Ashwell Church.
But though the Akeman Street does not actually take us through Barton village, it does lead us past the rare object of interest to be found connected with the place, the ancient Archery Butts of the parish. These are to be seen just opposite the sign-post which points to Haslingfield, and are worth a pause to contemplate, for they give a most impressive idea of what archery meant to our forefathers. Every parish, it must be remembered, was bound by law in mediæval times to have such a stretch of ground, and every yeoman was bound to constant practice upon it. And what practice! These "butts" are a stretch of greensward, some hundred yards across, and in length no less than three furlongs (660 yards). It looks an almost incredible distance for a bowman, but it was the standard, so far as we can judge by the very few butts of which the memory still survives. The length of the short street in South London, still called Newington Butts, is nearly the same.
Here, then, we can picture the sturdy archers of Plantagenet days stretching themselves; their bows, not the toys of the modern toxophilite with their thirty or forty pounds of pull, but of twice the power (eighty lb. being a common pull in those times), and their "cloth-yard" arrows, over three feet long, whistling to a target not planted forty or fifty yards away, but twelve times the distance—the whole length of these butts. Indeed, for anything under two furlongs light arrows were not allowed, and the heavy regulation war arrow had to be used. Each man was taught, as Bishop Latimer tells us in recording his own youthful training, to draw his bow not by mere strength, but by sleight of hand, "to lay the weight of his body into the bow," and to draw the bowstring not to his breast, like other nations, but to his ear. Small wonder that with eye and sinews so trained our English archers became the wonder and the dread of Europe, or that their shafts decided so many a battlefield—Cressy, Poictiers, Agincourt, Flodden.
A mile further we cross the Bourn Brook, a tiny tributary which joins the Cam near Grantchester, hard by a small station on the Cambridge branch of the London and North Western Railway, called Lord's Bridge, from the Lord Hardwicke who, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, substituted a bridge for the earlier ford here. To our right we see, across the fields, the church tower of Comberton; where, on the little village green, can still be seen the worn remains of a turf-built "maze," first traced out no one knows when, but certainly not later than the sixteenth century. Various mystical reasons are conjectured for the origin of these mazes, of which a fair number still exist in England (especially in the Eastern counties), while many more are known to have been destroyed by the Puritans of the seventeenth century as relics of heathen superstition. Such, indeed, they probably are. Mr. Walter Johnson, in his "Folk Memory," considers them to be exceedingly primitive, begun in connection with "ceremonial dances of painted heathen round a prehistoric camp fire." This Comberton maze is fifty feet in diameter, while the tracks are two feet in width, divided by slight banks of turf, once, it would seem, about a foot in height, but now much worn down.
The next turn (to the left) leads to Harlton, a pretty, shady village, with a fine Perpendicular church, having a stone rood screen, which is rare, and, what is yet rarer, a still surviving stone reredos of the fifteenth century, with a central recess, once closed with a door, and evidently intended as a "Tabernacle" for the Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. The six niches on either side of this recess were as evidently meant for images of the twelve Apostles.
Harlton lies close under White Hill, that chalk spur which we have already met at Haslingfield.[179] Here, too, there is a "clunch-pit" in the hill-side, from which the material for the church was probably dug. It is now disused, except for occasional marling purposes, and some unknown benefactor has planted its slopes with larches and laburnums, forming a most fascinating little dell, the charms of which are free to all.
Our road now climbs the hill, which it crosses through a cutting, with a fine view from the summit in either direction. In the little clump of trees just to the west of the road there stood, till the 'seventies of the nineteenth century, Orwell Maypole, the last of its class to survive in these parts. In mediæval times every village had its maypole, round which the lasses and lads hied them to dance on May Day. But, like the mazes, they were called (and actually were) remnants of heathenism, and, as such, were destroyed wholesale in the years of Puritan ascendancy. So it befell with the great maypole which gave name to the church of St. Andrew Under-shaft in the City of London. It was hewn down, and, as it lay along the street, sawn in pieces, each householder taking for firewood the length that lay opposite his own door. The Restoration set a certain number up again, but the continuity of their use had been broken, and its revival (as May Day was connected with no special Festival of the Church, like Easter and Christmas, which were also originally heathen feasts) became a merely artificial reaction, bound to dwindle away. So it befell that Orwell Maypole, after being disused for generations, finally perished by natural decay. It stood almost exactly upon the meridian of Greenwich, so that it was a valuable and far-seen landmark.
Orwell itself lies, as usual, just off the road, on the southern slope of the hill. Half a century ago it was the prettiest of villages, with its eponymous "well," shaded by magnificent trees, gushing from the hill-side, in the midst of a prehistoric earthwork, just below the noble church. But, about 1870, the earthwork, unhappily, was found to contain "coprolites" (worth probably about £100 after the expenses of getting them had been paid). For this paltry sum the whole place was destroyed. Well, trees, earthwork, all are now gone; only the church is left, perched on its slope high above the village street. It has a grand decorated chancel, the roof of which is covered with heraldic devices, and contains an interesting epitaph in Latin verse to one of the seventeenth century rectors of the parish, beginning:
Pastor eram dum pastor eram tunc fistula dulcis
Tunc tuba qua torvum sprevit ovile lupum.