by Grant Allen
Under the heathen East English the Icenian Isle once more relapsed into its primitive isolation. A mark or border of waste was indispensable to every Teutonic kingdom; and the East English, not content with the rivers and the fen-land, filled up the breaks in the natural line of meres and cranberry marshes with the great earthwork known as the Giant’s or the Devil’s Dyke, which turns its outer face towards the fen-land. It protected the dry plain at first, no doubt, from the “Welsh robbers” of Ely and the islands, and later still from the Middle English and the Mercians of the interior kingdoms. Whether the division of the people into North Folk and South Folk belongs to this early period or to the later Danish principality may perhaps be doubted. Certainly, we hear only of a single king for the whole of East Anglia during all the purely Anglian era. The heathen English of the principality were converted by Bishop Felix, a Burgundian missionary, and the see for the little kingdom was originally fixed at Sidnacester. When Mercia rose to be the leading state in Britain, the East Anglian kings became subject to the Mercian rulers; and when Wessex, in turn, worked its way to the English hegemony, they acknowledged the supremacy of Winchester. But to the end the native princes remained as immediate governors of their own country. It was not until the Danish invasion that the last East Anglian under-king, Edmund, died a martyr in defence of his dominions; and his tomb at Bury St. Edmunds became in after-days the holiest shrine of England after that of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Under the Danes, East Anglia was the territory of Guthrum, King Alfred’s enemy; and there can be little doubt that a large Scandinavian element was then introduced into the population of the district. Till the recovery of the Danish country by Edmund of Wessex, East Anglia remained the domain of an independent Scandinavian “host,” and even afterwards it was always a stronghold of Danish feeling. Perhaps it was at the reconquest that the divisions for the North and South Folk were first recognised administratively, like the neighbouring shires of Bedford and Huntingdon, then recovered from their Danish earls. But in any case they must even earlier have been in use as a convenient practical subdivision of the kingdom; for the boundaries are formed by two rivers which almost cut asunder the northern and southern halves of the Icenian plain — the Waveney, flowing eastward to the sea at Yarmouth, and a tributary of the Ouse running westward past Thetford to join the main stream below Ely. As to the outlying bit of Norfolk beyond the Ouse, that merely represents the East Anglian half of the debateable mark of fen-land, now drained and reclaimed; the portion as far as the Nen being assigned to Norfolk and the remainder to Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. The origin and growth of the latter county, originally a mere strip of the East Anglian marches, and the last refuge of the independent Britons, demand separate consideration. The history of East Anglia as two modern English shires — the rise of Norwich, with its cathedral and castle; the agricultural and commercial importance of the counties in mediæval times; the export trade in wool from Ipswich and the Orwell to Flanders; the establishment of the Flemish and Huguenot colonies; the ecclesiastical annals of the diocese in exile from the Danes at Dorchester-on-Thames, or restored to Elmham and Norwich; the fishing trade of Yarmouth; the Abbey and the miracles at Bury — these, though all deeply interesting in themselves, must necessarily be left out of consideration in the attempt merely to account for the origin of the two counties as collective administrative units. From this narrower point of view the interest of East Anglia consists in the fact that it lies intermediate between the shires which are old kingdoms, like Kent or Essex, and the shires which are artificial Danish creations, like Derby and Nottingham. Though the principality was conquered by the Danes, its natural geographical unity still preserved its integrity; and when it became once more an integral part of the English kingdom it only suffered subdivision into the two perfectly natural halves of Norfolk and Suffolk, instead of being split up into irregular circles round central fortresses. In the neighbouring Lincolnshire the old lines are so thoroughly swept away that we can now hardly distinguish the original Lindsey, and have wholly lost all knowledge of the Gegnas. In Mercia, too, they are so irretrievably destroyed that we cannot recover a single one of the primitive tribal States. But in East Anglia they still remain plainly fixed by the hand of nature, and even in places clearly demarcated by definite visible human boundaries.
CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND THE ISLE OF ELY
The great undrained fen region of eastern England, a mere desolate waste of water-logged marsh, interspersed by a few low islets of glacial boulder clay, must long have been one of the least habitable districts in all Great Britain. Nevertheless, its outskirts still contain many important traces of early occupation and of considerable primæval monuments. The tract which now composes Cambridgeshire evidently belongs by historical connection to the East Anglian island, as a western march or borderland of that insulated kingdom. As early as the Celtic times, the dry land of the county — that is to say, the low chalk-hill district in the south — was almost certainly included in the territory of the Iceni. The Devil’s Ditch, which crosses Newmarket Racecourse, and three other prehistoric earthworks in the south-west of the county, all have their ramparts turned towards the Icenian territory, while their fosse lies on the outer or western side: thus showing that they were erected to protect the region from the attacks of a nation living farther westward in the interior of England. The old British track known as the Icenhild or Icknield Way [whether or not its name means as has been guessed], the “war-path of the Iceni,” also crosses the shire from end to end, and its course is marked throughout by the tumuli and pit-dwellings of the primitive inhabitants. Many local names still preserve the memory of these earliest historical Cambridge men.
The town of Cambridge itself more probably owes its origin to the Romans, though the great British camp or refuge at Wandlebury, on the summit of the stunted Gogmagogs, no doubt implies the existence of an Icenian village in the valley beneath. Whether Cambridge itself or Grantchester, close by, represents the Roman Camboritum, it is at least certain that Roman stations once occupied both the neighbouring sites. When the English pirates overran Norfolk and Suffolk, they must, in all probability, have conquered the dry southern portion of Cambridgeshire as well, including the two Roman posts, which long after lay waste and uninhabited. But in the northern fen-land it seems likely that numbers of Britons held out for a while against the heathen invaders, among the islets and morasses of Ely or Thorney, as the native English six centuries later held out in the self-same fastnesses against the Norman conqueror. Sir Francis Palgrave has collected a number of interesting passages which imply the existence of isolated independent Celtic bands in the fen country to a comparatively late period; and even Mr. Freeman admits, in an unobtrusive footnote, the probability of his conclusion. Indeed, the rules of the thanes’ guild at Cambridge itself, an Anglo-Saxon document of the eleventh century, make mention of a distinct penalty even then for killing a “Welshman,” whose life was held cheaper than that of an English churl. It seems probable that the dry land in the south formed an integral part of the East Anglian kingdom from the time of its first formation; while the northern islets were more slowly subdued by a separate English tribe, the South Gyrwas — so called in contradistinction to the North Gyrwas of the Lincolnshire fens; and these settlers in the marshes retained their own petty kinglets at least till after the period of the conversion to Christianity.
The early history of the district, not yet a single complete shire, centres rather round the shrine of Ely than round the then ruined Roman station of Cambridge. The great monastery owed its foundation to one Ethelthryth, an old English queen whose name has been conveniently simplified by our Latin chroniclers into Etheldreda, or more colloquially still into Awdrey. She was daughter of Anna, king of the East Anglians, and she was given in marriage to his subject prince, Tondberht, king of the South Gyrwas. After her husband’s death she raised a little mixed house for monks and nuns, almost on the very site now occupied by the cathedral; and from this beginning the wealthy Ben
edictine establishment of later days took its rise. Etheldreda herself was buried within the church in a marble sarcophagus discovered among the ruins of the Roman station, then a “waste chester” on the banks of Cam. We hear nothing more of the Gyrwas or their kings after the death of Bede, dependent as we are for the subsequent period on the scanty annals of the Winchester Chronicle: but there is no reason to doubt that the district was still ruled by its own petty princes, as vassals of the East Anglian overlord, till the date of the Danish irruption. The Scandinavians seized early upon the almost insular region of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, and fell with special fury upon the rich religious houses of the Fens. The monks, protected by custom during internal wars, had turned the islets into the best-tilled land in England; and the Danes found more booty in these remote shrines than even in royal towns like York and Tamworth. Not Ely alone, but Peterborough, Thorney, Crowland, and Soham as well, were all destroyed in the first onslaught of the heathen; and their sites lay desolate for many years, till the monasteries were refounded by West Saxon kings or bishops after the English recovery of East Anglia and the Mercian shires.
It was the Danes, apparently, who resuscitated the importance of Cambridge town, so long neglected, and who gave approximately to Cambridgeshire its present artificial boundaries. Perhaps the earliest mention in an English document of “Grantanbrycge” occurs in the Winchester Chronicle during the reign of Alfred; when three Danish kings, Guthrum, Oscytel, and Anwend, came southward from Repton with “a mickle host,” and “sat there one year.” After the Danes had “horsed themselves” and settled down quietly on the soil, such a host, distinct from that which held East Anglia, though doubtless in dependent alliance with it, took up its permanent quarters in the town of Cambridge. The post was a convenient one for making raids into English Hertfordshire, on the direct line for the rich monastery of St. Albans and the merchant commonwealth of London itself: in fact, it was just the sort of place the Danes loved, and it became accordingly the temporary metropolis of one among the many rude little Scandinavian States which then occupied the whole of the north and the midlands. To judge by analogies elsewhere, we may conclude that the Danes divided out the land among themselves as lords of the manors, and that the territory dependent upon Cambridge was roughly coincident in boundary with the modern shire. For half a century the heathen held sway in Cambridge, and over the patrimony of St. Etheldreda; but when Edward the Elder engaged in his gallant campaign for the recovery of the conquered districts, Cambridgeshire only held out for a very short time. A single victory secured Essex and East Anglia, in both of which the Danish garrison accepted Edward’s supremacy; and then, says the English Chronicle, “the host that belonged to Grantanbrycge chose him separately for lord and protector, and fastened it with oaths.” Seeing that Edward erected the other petty Danish States into shires as soon as they were recovered, we may be pretty sure that he did the same with the territory of the Cambridge host; and indeed as early as the time of Athelred we find “Grantabrycg-scir” distinctly mentioned by name in the Chronicle as a county. The river has always had a double alternative title — either as Cam or Granta — and both forms must be very ancient, since the one is enshrined in Camboritum and the other in Grantchester; but the precise date of the substitution of Cambridge for Grantabrycg, or Grantebridge, is not known with certainty.
The Isle of Ely has a peculiar later county history of its own. The monastery was refounded by Bishop Ethelwold, of Winchester, under King Edgar, and was then endowed afresh with large landed property. Its abbots became chiefs of the King’s Court up to the time of the Norman Conquest, alternately with those of Glastonbury and St. Augustine’s. But after the resistance offered to William by the last English patriots in the Isle, traditionally associated with the exploits of Hereward, though really headed by Edwin and Morkere, the monastery fell into royal disfavour, as a hotbed of anti-Norman insurrectionary feeling. To weaken its influence a new bishopric was erected at Ely, early in the twelfth century, its territory being carved out of the immense diocese of Lincoln, which then stretched from the Humber to the Thames, and the revenues of the see were provided for from those of the monastery. The isle itself became a royal franchise, known as the Liberty of the Bishop of Ely, and was in fact, though not in name, a county palatine. The Bishops ruled as really in this little district as the successors of St. Cuthbert ruled in their larger principality of Durham. The episcopal power was largely curtailed under Henry VIII., but the temporal jurisdiction of the Bishop was not wholly abolished until the year 1837.
CITIES, TOWNS, AND BOROUGHS
INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH TOWNS
In a new country like America or Australia everybody recognises at once that each town owes its existence at the precise and particular point it occupies to some perfectly definite and obvious causes. New York stands at the land-locked mouth of the Hudson, on one of the finest harbours the world can show. Philadelphia commands the open traffic of Delaware Bay. Chicago collects the wheat of the great lake basin. Buffalo has grown up around the elevators which tranship western grain from the lake-going bottoms of Huron and Michigan into the flat barges of the Erie Canal. Montreal represents the spot where the navigation of the St. Lawrence begins to be difficult for ocean-going craft on account of the lowest range of rapids. New Orleans gathers on its quays and levees the cotton of all the lower Mississippi flats. In every case, we can point immediately to the exact advantage of situation which has caused great masses of men to aggregate so rapidly around these special centres. The conditions which gave rise to the towns still subsist in full working order, and for the most part continue to operate as attractors of yet larger population. Even when we meet with a purely artificial town, like Washington or Ottawa, we can nevertheless easily understand the motives which led to its being placed in its present odd situation. The American capital represents a compromise between the North and the South; the Canadian capital represents a compromise between the French and the English province. Everywhere the social, political, or commercial causes which brought the towns into existence either remain unaltered or are matters of such recent date that their memory is still fresh in the minds of the people.
In England, on the other hand, it is not by any means always so. To be sure we have towns, like Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, and Bristol, whose origin and cause is as clear as that of any bran-new American “city.” Nay, we have even a few towns, like Preston, Bolton, Wigan, Bury, and Oldham, which have sprung up almost as rapidly as any mushroom mining centre among the Colorado Pikes. But many of our oldest and most famous places have now so little apparent vitality, and stand apart so thoroughly from the course of modern English industrial life, that we almost forget to think they had once a real and obvious raison d’être, a necessary origin in the fitness of things. The causes which gave them birth have long since passed away, and they now survive in many cases by dint of our pure national conservatism: the town continuing where it is merely because it is a town and has habitable houses which people can occupy. So much is this the case, indeed, and so largely have the conditions altered, that we often look upon the town as existing for the sake of some ancient accessory; whereas at first, of course, the accessory was placed there because of the town. Chichester, and Canterbury, and Lichfield, for example, are now almost purely cathedral cities; and we usually quite forget that the city was there before the cathedral — that each of them was first the capital of a heathen English principality, and only afterwards the bishop-stool of a Christian diocese. Oxford and Cambridge are older than their universities; Lincoln than its minster; Warwick than its castle; Salisbury than its very site. Yet if we inquire into the origin of our oldest towns, we can always discover some real reason why they were first put in the places they occupy; and these reasons generally cast a good deal of interesting side-light on the ancient social history of the country. Some of them took their origin from old agricultural conditions of British and Roman times: they occupied the centre of some wid
e natural clearing in the forest or they lay at the river-edge of some broad alluvial champaign. Others had their first use in the internal wars of early English times: they were strongholds of the Teuton against the Welshman, or border fortresses of the West Saxon against his Mercian foe. Yet others date from the rise of the earliest English commerce, the export wool trade, and represent the old staples of the Plantagenets, among the sheep-feeding chalk downs of the south coast and the eastern shore from Yorkshire to Norfolk. Our oldest ports all looked southward or eastward toward the Continent; our later ones look westward toward the open Atlantic. Another large class of ancient towns, again, grew up around such monasteries as Bury, Ely, and Peterborough, or around Norman castles like Montgomery, Beaumaris, and Alnwick. In every instance the town had once a real meaning and purpose, though it has often gone on existing by mere force of inertia long after the original purpose has utterly died away.
