The convent messenger, the Danish king, the Norman conqueror, may come up the water, but they make the stir they find, and the river leaves no trace behind them.
So the university town owes nothing to adventitious causes; makes no bid for public favour, and has no tentacles to put forth to obtain it. But the river has, nevertheless, determined its activities as well as its reticences. It will give rise to a fair, and Stourbridge fair will become one of the greatest fairs in the kingdom. The fish market was another source of traffic. Ely and Cambridge fish were celebrated—Bede, indeed, derives “Ely” from the abundance of its eels, although helyg (the willow) seems the more
probable original.[16] The kings of England patronised this market, Henry III. sending for his fish to Cambridge even when he was staying at Oxford; and Chaucer is careful to note that the Cambridge miller was an angler, skilled in mending his nets.[17] The isle of Ely, so-called because cut off by river and mere from the rest of Cambridgeshire, was proverbial for the turbulence of its population, and the men of Ely drew the men of Cambridge into their quarrels, or harried them on their own account. Cambridge Castle was built as an outpost against the English earls who with Hereward resisted the Conqueror at Ely; it was at Ely that another determined stand was made by Simon de Montfort’s followers after Cambridge had been regained for John; and Henry III. had to bring relief to the university town when its neighbours burnt and plundered it during the years 1266-1270. The two centres were inseparable for weal or woe, and the intellectual as well as the political life of Cambridge was coloured for centuries by the activities of its neighbour.
The fen monasteries.
The proximity of the great fen monasteries must be reckoned as the chief factor in the earlier scholastic—the pre-university—history of Cambridge. Ely, Crowland, Bury-St.-Edmund’s and Peterborough were among the most important and the most ancient religious houses in the country. Crowland and Bury both had abbey schools influenced, as we shall see, in the early xii century by the famous school at Orléans; Ely had besides an episcopal school, and as monastery, school, and cathedral, was in constant domestic relations with her neighbour of Cambridge.[18]