[10] 878. It was from the town (Grantebrycge) that the Danes set forth, two years before, and surprised Alfred at Wareham. In the time of Ethelred, just before the Danish invasion, Cambridge was a royal mint; it was so in the time of the Conqueror, and had a Danish ‘moneyer,’ and continued to be so under the Plantagenet kings: even Henry VI. coined money at Cambridge. In Domesday the town is described as a “Hundred,” a description, says Stubbs, belonging to big towns with large surrounding common land—Norwich and Canterbury are similarly described. After the history of the town became merged in that of the university, two parliaments were summoned there; in 1388, and in 1447 (afterwards held at Bury-St.-Edmund’s). For the city, see also p. 36 and v. p. 260.
[11] Fuller, p. 7.
[12] The edict expelling the Jews from England dates from 1290, and the Jews left Cambridge the year following.
[13] The fancy appellations Cam and Isis appear to have both been due to Camden. They are not heard of before his work appeared in 1586.
[14] Cambridge, writes Doctor Jessopp, existed as a town and fortress “a thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots.”
[15] They found a Roman stone coffin, sculptured; one, apparently, of many known to have been left there, for portions of Roman sarcophagi are even now to be seen walled up in the church at Grantchester. Bede, cap. xix.
[16] The pollard willow is the chief denizen of the fens.
[17] The water runs flows and dances through the Cantabrigian’s life. The king’s and the bishop’s mills, Newnham mill just beyond, the Mill street, and the hythes, all courted constant recognition. As at Ely, the hythes were the small trading ports along the river: there was Dame Nichol’s hythe, Cornhythe, Flaxhythe, Salthythe, Clayhythe.
[18] For the vii c. foundation of Ely see chap. vi. p. 311. The see dates from 1107, when the minster became a cathedral. Crowland, in Lincolnshire on the borders of Cambridgeshire, was built over the tomb of Guthlac, a prince and a saint of the house of Mercia, in the vii c. Bury rose after the martyrdom of the East Anglian king Edmund (870) c. 903; it did not become a monastery till 1020. Peterborough was founded by Wulfhere, king of Mercia from 659 to 674: it formed part of the diocese of Lincoln till the xvi c. Ramsey and Thorney were other fen monasteries. Ramsey was on the borders, in Huntingdonshire, but Thorney was in Cambridgeshire. Peterborough and Thorney with Ely and Crowland were sacked by the Danes in 870. All these were ‘black Benedictine’ houses.
[19] Cottenham 7 miles north of Cambridge; the benefice became an advowson of Chatteris abbey in the isle of Ely, and was bestowed by the abbess on Warham in 1500.