For the Table Book.
SAWSTON CROSS.
In the summer of the year 1815, I fulfilled my long standing promise of spending a day with an old schoolfellow at Sawston, a pleasant little village, delightfully situated in a fertile valley about seven miles south of Cambridge, the north of which is encompassed by the Gogmagog hills, which appear Apennines in miniature; the south, east, and west, are beautifully diversified with trees and foliage, truly picturesque and romantic. After partaking of the good things at the hospitable board of my friend, we set out for a ramble among the quiet rural scenery, and suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a group of people, near the road leading to the church. They were holding a conversation on a grass-plot; from the centre of which rose a cross, enclosed in a small covered building, like an amphitheatre, that added not a little to the romantic appearance of the village; towards the bottom of the southern slope of the grass-plot, propped with uncommon care, and guarded by a holy zeal from the ravages of time, stood an ancient sycamore-tree; and on the east side, to the terror of evil-doers, stood the stocks. Alas! unsparing ignorance has, since then, destroyed this fine tree; “the place that knew it knows it no more,” and the stocks are fallen never to rise again.
My friend, taking me aside, informed me the persons assembled were residents of the place, and that the meeting was convened to sell the cross. “This cross,” continued my friend, “is the ornament of the village. It escaped the phrenetic rage of the puritans in the civil wars, and is of such antiquity, that when it was built is not to be traced with certainty in the records of history. It may be supposed, however, to have been erected by the Knights Templars, as the living belonged to them; for, I believe, it was usual for them to erect crosses on their property. Upon the abolition of the Templars, the living came into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, afterwards called the Knights of Rhodes, and lastly, of Malta. So early as the thirteenth century public officers sat on this cross to administer justice; at other times, the bishop’s house, near the Campion-field, was used for that purpose: this house is now in ruins, but the cross,” continued my friend, “we possessed as an inheritance from our forefathers, and at this moment the cupidity and folly of the covetous and ignorant are conspiring to destroy the venerable relic.”
Wishing to preserve a memoranda of the old cross, I took a hasty sketch of it, (too hastily perhaps to be sufficiently accurate for an engraving,) and having reached my home, recorded the adventures of the day in my pocket-book, from whence the above extract is taken. Passing through the village in the following autumn, I found that the inhabitants had sacrilegiously levelled the cross and sold the remnants.
The Jews of old, as we’ve been told—
And Scriptures pure disclose—
With harden’d hearts drew lots for parts
Of our Salvator’s clothes.
The modern Jews—the Sawstonites—
As harden’d as the Israelites—
In ignorance still more gross—
Thinking they could no longer thrive
By Christian means, did means contrive—
Drew lots, and sold the cross!
Cambridge. T. N.