xxviii Principal Works on Cambridgeshire. ON ELY AND THE ISLE : Bentham, J.: "History of Ely" Wells, S.: " History of the Draining of the Bedford Level" See also The Proceedings of the Camden Society and of the Cambridge Archæological Society passim. HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. § 1-8. Creation and dimensions of Cambridgeshire-Natural divisions -The Fenland-Southern region-River system-Geological formations-Flora-Coprolites. § 9-11. Primæval Cambridgeshire-Evidence from fossils-The Fenland forest-Extinct fauna-" River-bed men "-Sawn deer-horns -Palæolithic weapons. §12-19. Great stride to the Neolithic period-No further break in the history of mankind-The Ugrian race-Brownies and pixiesJadite axe-heads-Flint gradually superseded by metal-Brandon flint workings-Royston Cave. § 20-25. Incoming of the Britons-First record of Britain-The Iceni-British coinage-Cunobelin-British earthworks—British villages. § I. HE county of Cambridge is one of those purely artificial divisions which render the boundaries of our Midland shires so much less interesting than those of Northern, Eastern and Southern England. In these last the limits of the modern county mostly correspond, roughly at least, and sometimes very closely indeed, with those of some ancient British or Anglian or Saxon principality. Northumberland and Cumberland, " Norfolk and Suffolk, Essex, Middlesex and Sussex, Kent, Dorset and Devon, all these were formed, not by arbitrary mapping out, like the present departments of France, but by historical development, like her old provinces. Their very names tell the tale of their origin and of their growth. They are the original entities, the gradual accretion of which has issued in the formation of England. Such counties never bear the name of their chief town; for town and county arose independently, and when their names resemble each other (e.g., Dorset and Dorchester), it is the town that is called after the shire rather than the shire after the town. A few exceptions are, indeed, to be found. Lancashire, Yorkshire, and, most remarkably of all, Hampshire-the county of Southampton—are evidently mere administrative divisions, created by the government of an already existing England, not factors in the evolution of England. The original divisions have here been erased, only a few distinct names, such as Furness, Holderness and Craven, lingering on in tradition to tell us what they were. And this is the arrangement which in the Midlands we find general. Save one county only, and that the latest formed of all, Rutland, all are artificial administrative divisions named after a chief town, with here and there a faint traditional remembrance (as in Lindesay, Kesteven, and Elmet in Lincolnshire) of the older state of things still surviving in East Anglia and Wessex. Not that the Midland counties are creations of yesterday-far from it. Rutland itself dates from the Norman Conquest; and the very difference between the nomenclature of the Midland shires and the older districts around them tells us the tale of those fearful Danish invasions which swept away all previous government throughout Central England, and of the glorious energy and statecraft wherewith Central England was reconquered and welded together with the surrounding lands into an integral and indivisible whole by the children of the Great Alfred, Edward the Elder and his sister, the Lady of the Mercians. § 2. These illustrious princes have received scant justice from history; but of the brother in particular it is not too much to say that, with the single exception of his heroic and saintly father, no English king has ever deserved so nobly of his country. If the father, by his unconquerable devotion and patriotism, saved the very existence of the realm, it was the son who brought to harvest the good seed sown by the father's efforts; and without such a son and successor those efforts would have been in vain. Edward succeeded to the desolated and half-ruined heritage of Wessex; at his accession half the English people were groaning beneath an alien and heathen yoke. He left to his heir the throne of a united and Christian England, and the overlordship of the whole Island of Britain. Rightly does Florence of Worcester, the leader of that wonderful choir of national historians which adorned our country in the twelfth century, speak of him as "dignitate potentia pariter et gloria superior" even to Alfred himself, and inferior to him in nothing except those literary labours which were so peculiarly Alfred's own.1 §3. It is to this monarch, then, and to his sister, that we owe the creation of Cambridgeshire: a long strip of territory, bounded on the east by the ancient East Anglian counties, and elsewhere by arbitrary lines, the exact delimitation of which was due, doubtless, to longforgotten local reasons of the tenth century. Its greatest length from north to south is about fifty miles, its greatest breadth about twenty-five, either line of greatest dimension passing through the town of Cambridge. § 4. The county is divided by Nature into two regions of about equal size, but very different in character, the Fenlands in the north, and the low chalk uplands in the south. The latter, strictly speaking, form the actual shire 1 See Freeman's "Norman Conquest," vol. i., p. 56. of Cambridge, the former having to a great extent a legally independent recognition, under the name of the Isle of Ely. This recognition is the last relic of the quasi-palatinate jurisdiction formerly exercised by the Bishops of Ely, against whose "peace" (and not that of the King, as elsewhere in England) evildoers in that district were held to offend, and before whose tribunal they were summoned. The region thus privileged is now a vast alluvial plain, almost treeless, intersected in every direction by a network of ditches, locally called "lodes," from which the water is pumped by steam-power into the sluggish channels along which it makes its way into the sea. The whole district is only kept dry by artificial means, for it is well below sea-level, and even within living memory was one vast morass, tenanted by innumerable wild-fowl. this day it remains sparsely inhabited, the few towns and villages located on the almost imperceptible rises marking what were once islets amid the marsh. The elevated ground on which Ely itself stands formed an island of greater height and of respectable size, giving space for a whole group of villages. It is still surrounded by water, various branches of the Ouse stagnating round it. To § 5. The Southern Region consists of low chalky uplands, through which the Cam, and its sister stream the Granta, with their various tributaries, have eroded marvellously broad valleys for such petty rivers. The former, also called the Rhee, has its source in a lovely group of springs at Ashwell, in Hertfordshire, just across the county boundary; while the latter, in like manner, rises just outside the county, near Saffron Walden, in Essex. The southern boundary of their basin is formed by the escarpment of the great chalk plateau, which sweeps through England from the Yorkshire Wolds to the coast of Devon, and is so conspicuous a feature in the geological map of our island; and which at this part of its 1 See Chapter IV., § 24. |