Campo claimed by inheritance the right to "a gallows, pillory, and ducking-stool, also infang-thief, and the goods of felons and fugitives." Gallows were also to be found at Bassingbourn, Fowlmere, Litlington, Steeple-Morden, and Swavesey, the two last having pillories as well. By the right of "infang-thief," the local authorities of these places could deal summarily with any robbers caught within their bounds.

§ 34. Before the end of the thirteenth century the town of Cambridge had grown to the dimensions which it barely overpassed till the nineteenth. We have seen that in 1285 it already extended as far south as Peterhouse, thus even overleaping the limits assigned to it twenty years earlier by Henry III. In 1265 that monarch made the town his headquarters against the patriot barons at Ely, bringing with him his brother Richard, Duke of Cornwall, the King of the Romans, who was lodged in Barnwell Priory. He did not gain any success against the barons, but provoked great indignation by executing in Cambridge as a traitor a man of noted courage, Walter Cottenham, whom they had knighted at Ely and who fell into his hands. In revenge for this outrage, as soon as his forces were withdrawn, the patriots made a dash upon the place and sacked both the priory and the town, in spite of the famous "King's Ditch" with which Henry had endeavoured to secure it.

§ 35. This ditch (which is marked as still open so late as Lyson's map of 1808) converted the tract of land lying within the bend of the river on its eastern bank, already the main site of the town, into an island. Leaving the river above Queens' Bridge, it passed along Mill Lane and part of Downing Street, bending round between Great St. Andrew's and the Post Office, proceeding along the line of Hobson Street and an extension of that line through Sidney Gardens to Park Street, and thus finally reaching the river again a little below Magdalen Bridge.

36. The site thus enclosed was even then, though there were as yet no colleges, thick with public buildings. Every parish church now within its limits was already in existence, and the ditch, on either side of its course, was fringed with monastic edifices. The Carmelite House stood hard by Queens', that of the Brethren of Penance, "the Friars of the Sack," hard by Peterhouse, those of the Gilbertine Canons and the Augustinian Friars on either side of Pembroke; while the Black Friars occupied the site of Emmanuel, and the Grey Friars that of Sidney, the line being completed by the spacious precincts of the Nunnery of St. Rhadegunde, now Jesus College.

Somewhat further along the Newmarket Road rose the great Priory of Barnwell, with the little "Abbey' Church of St. Andrew the Less, now alone remaining of all its mass of buildings, and originally erected by the monks for the use of the little nest of houses which, as usual, clustered at the abbey gates. The anomalous position of these houses survives in the attachment of many amongst them, even yet, to the distant churches of St. Edward and St. Benet in the town.

Further yet came the Leper Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, still standing, built, as it would seem, by the same architect as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the town, for both edifices show the remarkable feature of a hooded doorway. This was under the charge of the Friars of Bethlehem, and was naturally the outermost building connected with the town of Cambridge. It thus introduces us to the long list of Religious Houses with which the zeal and liberality of benefactors had already enriched our county.

$37. Of the greatest of these, Ely, we have already spoken at length. Within sight of its towers rose another great Benedictine abbey at Thorney, founded, like Ely itself, by Bishop Ethelwold of Winchester, in

972,1 on the site of an earlier eremitical building2 destroyed in the Danish invasion of 870.

William of Malmesbury (A.D. 1135) describes it as "a little paradise, delightsome as heaven itself may be deemed, fen-circled, yet rich in loftiest trees, where water-meadows delight the eye with rich green, where streamlets glide unchecked through each field. Scarce a spot of ground lies there waste; here are orchards, there vineyards. . . . Nature vies with culture, and what is unknown to the one is produced by the other. And what of the glorious buildings, whose very size it is a wonder that the ground can support amid such marshes? A vast solitude is here the monks' lot, that they may the more closely cling to things above. If a woman is there seen, she is counted a monster, but strangers, if men, are greeted as angels unawares. Yet there none speaketh, save for the moment; all is holy silence. . . . Truly I may call that island a hostel of chastity, a tavern of honesty, a gymnasium of divine philosophy. From its dense thickets it is called Thorney."

...

The Abbot of Thorney was "mitred," which gave him authority to confer the four Minor Orders, those of Doorkeeper, Reader, Exorcist, and Acolyte. The value of the house at its dissolution is given as £411 12s. IId.

§ 38. Benedictine monks also established themselves. for a while at Denny, where, however, they were shortly succeeded by the Templars, and these, again, in 1291, by the Minoress Nuns, the ruins of whose buildings (almost the only monastic ruins in the whole county), are still to be seen there. Benedictines had also once been found in the foundations of St. Felix at Soham, and of the Scottish Princess, St. Pandionia, at Eltisley; but these had already been destroyed, the one by the Danes, the other, according to tradition, at the Conquest.

1 See Chapter IV., § 21.

2 See Chapter III., § 24.

3 See Chapter III., § 18.

The Augustinian Canons, besides their great House at Barnwell, had dependent establishments ("cells" in monastic language) at Anglesey and Spinney; while the Gilbertines, or "White Canons," were found, not only at Cambridge, but also at Fordham and Upwell. Their three houses were all cells to the mother Abbey of Sempringham in Lincolnshire, where their founder, St. Gilbert, had originally planted them. It may be noticed that these Canons were the only Religious Order of wholly English origin.

The Hospitallers we have already seen at Shingay; and they also inherited from the Templars, at the dissolution of that Order in 1312, the preceptories of Chippenham and Wilbraham.

At Linton the "Crutched Friars" had a House, and here was also an "alien " Priory, a cell of the Abbey of St. Jacutus de Insula in Brittany. On the suppression of this Priory in 1439, its property was made over to Pembroke College, Cambridge, then newly founded. Another alien Priory at Isleham (a cell of the Abbey of St. Sergius in Normandy) was handed over, in 1393, to the Carthusians. Alien Priories were also found at Swavesey, and at Thirling near Upwell.

Benedictine nuns had their principal abode in the Abbey of Chatteris, founded by the Lady Alwyn, niece of Edgar the Peaceful, besides somewhat smaller houses at Ickleton and at Swaffham.

All these twenty-eight foundations were doing public work, in the relief of the poor, and, almost invariably, in education also. The nunneries, in particular, acted as boarding-schools for girls, thus supplying a need which is only at this day beginning to be once more satisfactorily dealt with.

§ 39. And besides these monastic foundations, the county possessed no fewer than eleven endowed Hospitals, four at Cambridge (including that for the lepers at Stour

bridge), and others at Ely, Leverington, Longstowe, Thorney, Wisbeach, Wicken, and Whittlesford (where the chapel still remains). These Hospitals were institutions not only for the care of the sick, but also for the aged and infirm, thus fulfilling the functions not only of modern hospitals, but of almshouses and convalescent homes as well.

There was also a College at Newton (in the Isle), with a Warden and several chaplains; and the county was dotted with various minor sacred places, such as the hermitages in Royston Cave and on Shelford Bridge, and the far-seen chapel of "Our Lady of White Hill" on the ridge between Barrington and Haslingfield.

40. This chapel must have been one of the most conspicuous objects in the county. Its site, on the eastern extremity of the long ridge terminating in White Hill, commands one of the most extensive views in England, sweeping round from Ely in the north to the Dunstable Downs in the south-west. No fewer than eighty-four churches are visible. We need not wonder that it became a famous place of pilgrimage, and (before the end of the Plantagenet period) full of votive offerings, the most remarkable being the huge dungeon hinges which had once confined Lord Scales, and which he dedicated on his release. The Pilgrims' Way which formerly led to this chapel from the nearest point of the Ermine Street (not far from the Old North Road railwaystation), running along the whole length of the White Hill ridge,3 and still traceable, though in parts disused, is yet known as the "Mare Way," i.e., the Mary Way.*

This hospital was under a Prior appointed by the Bishop of Ely. It was endowed with sixty acres of land and a watermill.

White Hill gained its name from the three great "clunch" pits on the north, south and east of the end of the ridge.

3 So the great Pilgrims' Way, in the South of England, runs along the ridge of the North Downs to Canterbury.

Till 1870 the Orwell Maypole (visible for miles around) marked at once the highest point of this road and the meridian of Greenwich.