Part 1

THE CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND KING'S LYNN ROAD

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

=The Brighton Road=: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway.

=The Portsmouth Road=, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.

=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.

=The Holyhead Road=: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

=Cycle Rides Round London.=

=The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road.= [_In the Press._

=THE CAMBRIDGE ELY AND KING'S LYNN ROAD= THE GREAT FENLAND HIGHWAY BY CHARLES G. HARPER

AUTHOR OF "THE BRIGHTON ROAD" "THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD" "THE DOVER ROAD" "THE BATH ROAD" "THE EXETER ROAD" "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD" "THE NORWICH ROAD" "THE HOLYHEAD ROAD" AND "CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON"

_ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR, AND FROM OLD-TIME PRINTS AND PICTURES_

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1902.

(_All Rights Reserved_)

_IN the course of an eloquent passage in an eulogy of the old posting and coaching days, as opposed to railway times, Ruskin regretfully looks back upon "the happiness of the evening hours when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows, beside its valley stream." It is a pretty, backward picture, viewed through the diminishing-glass of time, and possesses a certain specious attractiveness that cloaks much of the very real discomfort attending the old road-faring era. For not always did the traveller behold the quiet village under conditions so ideal. There were such things as tempests, keen frosts, and bitter winds to make his faring highly uncomfortable; to say little of the snowstorms that half smothered him and prevented his reaching his destination until his very vitals were almost frozen. Then there were_ MESSIEURS _the highwaymen, always to be reckoned with, and it cannot too strongly be insisted upon that until the nineteenth century had well dawned they were always to be confidently expected at the next lonely bend of the road. But, assuming good weather and a complete absence of those old pests of society, there can be no doubt that a journey down one of the old coaching highways must have been altogether delightful._

_In the old days of the road, the traveller saw his destination afar off, and--town or city or village--it disclosed itself by degrees to his appreciative or critical eyes. He saw it, seated sheltered in its vale, or, perched on its hilltop, the sport of the elements; and so came, with a continuous panorama of country in his mind's eye, to his inn. By rail the present-day traveller has many comforts denied to his grandfather, but there is no blinking the fact that he is conveyed very much in the manner of a parcel or a bale of goods, and is delivered at his journeys end oppressed with a sense of detachment never felt by one who travelled the road in days of old, or even by the cyclist in the present age. The railway traveller is set down out of the void in a strange place, many leagues from his base; the country between a blank and the place to which he has come an unknown quantity. In so travelling he has missed much._

_The old roads and their romance are the heritage of the modern tourist, by whatever method he likes to explore them. Countless generations of men have built up the highways, the cities, towns, villages and hamlets along their course, and have lived and loved, have laboured, fought and died through the centuries. Will you not halt awhile and listen to their story--fierce, pitiful, lovable, hateful, tender or terrible, just as you may hap upon it; flashing forth as changefully out of the past as do the rays from the facets of a diamond? A battle was fought here, an historic murder wrought there. This way came such an one to seek his fortune and find it; that way went another, to lose life and fortune both. In yon house was born the Man of his Age, for whom that age was ripe; on yonder hillock an olden malefactor, whom modern times would call a reformer, expiated the crime of being born too early--there is no cynic more consistent in his cynicism than Time._

_All these have lived and wrought and thought to this one unpremeditated end--that the tourist travels smoothly and safely along roads once rough and dangerous beyond belief, and that as he goes every place has a story to tell, for him to hear if he will. If he have no ears for such, so much the worse for him, and by so much the poorer his faring._

CHARLES G. HARPER.

PETERSHAM, SURREY, _October 1902_.

SEPARATE PLATES

PAGE THE "CAMBRIDGE TELEGRAPH" STARTING FROM THE WHITE HORSE, FETTER LANE _Frontispiece_ _From a Print after J. Pollard._

THE "STAR OF CAMBRIDGE" STARTING FROM THE BELLE SAUVAGE YARD, LUDGATE HILL, 1816 17 _From a Print after T. Young._

"KNEE-DEEP": THE "LYNN AND WELLS MAIL" IN A SNOWSTORM 23 _From a Print after C. Cooper Henderson._

A LONDON SUBURB IN 1816: TOTTENHAM 39 _From a Drawing by Rowlandson._

WALTHAM CROSS 61

THE "HULL MAIL" AT WALTHAM CROSS 65 _From a Print after J. Pollard._

CHESHUNT GREAT HOUSE 77

HODDESDON 83

WARE 89

BARLEY 105

FOWLMERE: A TYPICAL CAMBRIDGESHIRE VILLAGE 113

MELBOURN 129

TRUMPINGTON MILL 137

TRUMPINGTON STREET, CAMBRIDGE 145

HOBSON, THE CAMBRIDGE CARRIER 159

A WET DAY IN THE FENS 203

ALDRETH CAUSEWAY 219

A FENLAND ROAD: THE AKEMAN STREET NEAR STRETHAM BRIDGE 245

STRETHAM BRIDGE 249

ELY CATHEDRAL 271 _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._

ELY, FROM THE OUSE 277

JOSEPH BEETON IN THE CONDEMNED CELL 311

THE TOWN AND HARBOUR OF LYNN, FROM WEST LYNN 317

"CLIFTON'S HOUSE" 320

THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, LYNN 323

THE FERRY INN, LYNN 327

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

PAGE VIGNETTE: EEL-SPEARING _Title-page_

PREFACE vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS: TAKING TOLL xi

THE CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND KING'S LYNN ROAD 1

THE GREEN DRAGON, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1856 8 _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd._

THE FOUR SWANS, BISHOPSGATE STREET, 1855 9 _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd._

TOTTENHAM CROSS 38

BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ' ALMSHOUSES, TOTTENHAM 41

WALTHAM CROSS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 59

THE ROMAN URN, CHESHUNT 76

CHARLES THE FIRST'S ROCKING-HORSE 79

CLARKSON'S MONUMENT 99

A MONUMENTAL MILESTONE 111

THE CHEQUERS, FOWLMERE 115

WEST MILL 118

A QUAINT CORNER IN ROYSTON 125

CAXTON GIBBET 127

THE FIRST MILESTONE FROM CAMBRIDGE 139

HOBSON'S CONDUIT 141

HOBSON 162 _From a Painting in Cambridge Guildhall._

MARKET HILL, CAMBRIDGE 167

THE FALCON, CAMBRIDGE 168

INTERIOR OF ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH 169

CAMBRIDGE CASTLE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 171

LANDBEACH 181

THE FENS 191 _After Dugdale._

THE ISLE OF ELY AND DISTRICT 215

ALDRETH CAUSEWAY AND THE ISLE OF ELY 218

UPWARE INN 237

WICKEN FEN 241

HODDEN SPADE AND BECKET 248

STRETHAM 254

THE WEST FRONT, ELY CATHEDRAL 265

ELY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE LITTLEPORT ROAD 289

LITTLEPORT 291

THE RIVER ROAD, LITTLEPORT 293

THE OUSE 295

SOUTHERY FERRY 296

KETT'S OAK 300

DENVER HALL 301

THE CROWN, DOWNHAM MARKET 302

THE CASTLE, DOWNHAM MARKET 303

HOGGE'S BRIDGE, STOW BARDOLPH 305

THE LYNN ARMS, SETCHEY 306

THE SOUTH GATES, LYNN 308

THE GUILDHALL, LYNN 314

THE DUKE'S HEAD, LYNN 321

ISLINGTON 329

THE ROAD TO CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND KING'S LYNN

London (Shoreditch Church) to-- MILES Kingsland 1½ Stoke Newington 2½ Stamford Hill 3¼ Tottenham High Cross 4¼ Tottenham 5¼ Upper Edmonton 6 Lower Edmonton 6¾ Ponder's End 8½ Enfield Highway 9¼ Enfield Wash 10 Waltham Cross 11½ Crossbrook Street 12 Turner's Hill 13 Cheshunt 13¼ Cheshunt Wash 13¾ Turnford 14 Wormley (cross New River) 14¾ Broxbourne 15¾ Hoddesdon 17 Great Amwell (cross New River and the Lea) 19¼ Ware 21 Wade's Mill (cross River Rib) 23 High Cross 23½ Collier's End 25 Puckeridge (cross River Rib) 26¾ Braughing 27¾ Quinbury 28¾ Hare Street 30¾ Barkway 35 Barley 36¾ Fowlmere 42 Newton 44¼ Hauxton (cross River Granta) 47¾ Trumpington 48½ Cambridge (Market Hill) 50¾

To Cambridge, through Royston-- Puckeridge (cross River Rib) 26¾ West Mill 29¾ Buntingford 31 Chipping 32½ Buckland 33¾ Royston 37¾ Melbourn 41¼ Shepreth 43¼ Foxton Station and Level Crossing 44 Harston 45½ Hauxton (cross River Granta) 46½ Trumpington 48¾ Cambridge (Market Hill) 51

Milton 54 Landbeach 54¾ Denny Abbey 58 Chittering 58¾ Stretham Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) 61¾ Stretham 63¼ Thetford Level Crossing 64½ Ely 67½ Chettisham Station and Level Crossing 69½ Littleport 72½ Littleport Bridge (cross Great Ouse River) 73½ Brandon Creek (cross Little Ouse River) 76¾ Southery 78¾ Modney Bridge (cross Sams Cut Drain) 80¼ Hilgay (cross Wissey River) 81¾ Fordham 82¾ Denver 84 Downham Market 85¼ Wimbotsham 86½ Stow Bardolph 87¼ South Runcton (cross River Nar) 89¼ Setchey 92¼ West Winch 93¾ Hardwick Bridge 95¼ King's Lynn 97¼

I

"SISTER ANNE, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?" asks Fatima in the story of Bluebeard. Clio, the Muse of History, shall be my Sister Anne. I hereby set her down in the beginnings of the Cambridge Road, bid her be retrospective, and ask her what she sees.

"I see," she says dreamily, like some medium or clairvoyant,--"I see a forest track leading from the marshy valley of the Thames to the still more marshy valley of the Lea. The tribes who inhabit the land are at once fierce and warlike, and greedy for trading with merchants from over the narrow channel that separates Britain from Gaul. They are fair-haired and blue-eyed, they are dressed in the skins of wild animals, and their chieftains wear many ornaments of red gold." Then she is silent, for Clio, like her eight sisters, is a very ancient personage, and like the aged, although she knows much, cannot recall sights and scenes without a deal of mental fumbling.

"And what else do you see?"

"There comes along the forest track a great concourse of soldiers. Never before were such seen in the land. They form the advance-guard of an invading army, and the tribes presently fly from them, for these are the conquering Romans, whose fame has come before them. There are none who can withstand those soldiers."

"Many a tall Roman warrior, doubtless, sleeps where he fell, slain by wounds or disease in that advance?"

Clio is indignant and corrective. "The Romans," she says, "were not a race of tall men. They were undersized, but well built and of a generous chest-development. They are, as I see them, imposing as they march, for they advance in solid phalanx, and their bright armour, their shields and swords, flash like silver in the sun.

"I see next," she says, "these foreign soldiers as conquerors, settled in the land. They have an armed camp in a clearing of the forest, where a company of them keep watch and ward, while many more toil at the work of making the forest track a broad and firm military way. Among them, chained together like beasts, and kept to their work by the whips and blows of taskmasters, are gangs of natives, who perform the roughest and the most unskilled of the labour.

"And after that I see four hundred years of Roman power and civilisation fade like a dream, and then a dim space of anarchy, lit up by the fitful glare of fire, and stained and running red with blood. Many strange and heathen peoples come and go in this period along the road, once so broad and flat and straight, but now grown neglected. The strange peoples call themselves by many names,--Saxons, Vikings, Picts, and Scots and Danes,--but their aim is alike: to plunder and to slay. Six hundred years pass before they bring back something of that civilisation the Romans planted, and the land obtains a settled Christianity and an approach to rest. And then, when things have come to this pass, there comes a stronger race to make the land its own. It is the coming of the Normans.

"I see the Conqueror, lord of all this land but the Isle of Ely, coming to vanquish the English remnant. I see him, his knights and men-at-arms, his standard-bearers and his bowmen, marching where the Romans marched a thousand years before, and in three years I see the shrunken remains of his army return, victorious, but decimated by those conquered English and their allies, the agues and fevers, the mires and mists of the Fens."

"And then--what of the Roman Road, the Saxon 'Ermine Street'? tell me, why does it lie deserted and forgot?"

But Clio is silent. She does not know; it is a question rather for archæology, for which there is no Muse at all. Nor can she tell much of the history of the road, apart from the larger national concerns in which it has a part. She is like a wholesale trader, and deals only in bulk. Let us in these pages seek to recover something from the past to illustrate the description of these many miles.

II

THE coach-road to Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn--the modern highway--follows in general direction, and is in places identical with, two distinct Roman roads. From Shoreditch Church, whence it is measured, to Royston, it is on the line of the Ermine Street, the great direct Roman road to Lincoln and the north of England, which, under the names of the "North Road" and the "Old North Road," goes straight ahead, past Caxton, to Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London, where it becomes identical with our own Great North Road, as far as Stamford and Casterton.

From Royston to Cambridge there would seem never to have been any direct route, and the Romans apparently reached Cambridge either by pursuing the Ermine Street five miles farther, and thence turning to the right at Arrington Bridge; or else by Colchester, Sudbury, and Linton. Those, at anyrate, are the ways obvious enough on modern maps, or in the Antonine Itinerary, that Roman road-book made about A.D. 200-250. We have, however, only to exercise our own observation to find that the Antonine Itinerary is a very inaccurate piece of work, and that the Romans almost certainly journeyed to _Camboricum_, their Cambridge, by way of Epping, Bishop's Stortford, and Great Chesterford, a route taken by several coaches sixty years ago.

From Cambridge to Ely and King's Lynn the coach-road follows with more or less exactness the Akeman Street, a Roman way in the nature of an elevated causeway above the fens.

The Ermine Street between London and Lincoln is not noted by the Antonine Itinerary, which takes the traveller to that city by two very indirect routes: the one along the Watling Street as far as High Cross, in Warwickshire, and thence to the right, along the Fosse Way past Leicester; the other by Colchester. The Ermine Street, leading direct to Lincoln, is therefore generally supposed to be a Roman road of much later date.

We are not to suppose that the Romans knew these roads by the names they now bear; names really given by the Saxons. Ermine Street enshrines the name of Eorman, some forgotten hero or divinity of that people; and the Akeman Street, running from the Norfolk coast, in a south-westerly direction through England, to Cirencester and Bath, is generally said to have obtained its name from invalids making pilgrimage to the Bath waters, there to ease them of their aches and pains. But a more reasonable theory is that which finds the origin of that name in a corruption of _Aquæ Solis_, the name of Bath.

No reasonable explanation has ever been advanced of the abandonment of the Ermine Street between Lower Edmonton and Ware, and the choosing of the present route, running roughly parallel with it at distances ranging from half a mile to a mile, and by a low-lying course much more likely to be flooded than the old Roman highway. The change must have been made at an early period, far beyond the time when history dawns on the road, for it is always by the existing route that travellers are found coming and going.

Few know that the Roman road and the coaching road are distinct; and yet, with the aid of a large-scale Ordnance map, the course of the Ermine Street can be distinctly traced. Not only so, but a day's exploration of it, as far as its present condition, obstructed and diverted in places, will allow, is of absorbing interest.

It makes eleven miles of, in places, rough walking, and often gives only the satisfaction of being close to the actual site, and not actually on it. A straight line drawn from where the modern road swerves slightly to the right at Northumberland Park, Edmonton, to Ware, gives the direction the ancient road pursued.