Part 10

Here lies old Hobson: Death hath broke his girt, And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt; Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one He's here stuck in a slough and overthrown. 'Twas such a shifter that, if truth were known, Death was half glad when he had got him down; For he had any time this ten years full Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and the Bull; And, surely, Death could never have prevailed, Had not his weekly course of carriage failed; But, lately, finding him so long at home, And thinking now his journey's end was come, And that he had taken up his latest inn, In the kind office of a Chamberlain Showed him his room where he must lodge that night, Pulled off his boots, and took away the light: If any ask for him, it shall be said, 'Hobson hath supped, and's newly gone to bed.'"

The subject seems to have been an engrossing one to the youthful poet, for he harked back to it in the following variant:--

"Here lieth one who did most truly prove That he could never die while he could move; So hung his destiny, never to rot While he might still jog on and keep his trot, Made of sphere-metal, never to decay Until his revolution was at stay! Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime 'Gainst old truth) motion numbered out his time; And, like an engine moved with wheel and weight, His principles being ceased, he ended straight. Rest, that gives all men life, gave him his death, And too much breathing put him out of breath; Nor were it contradiction to affirm Too long _vacation_ hastened on his _term_; Merely to drive the time away he sickened, Fainted and died, nor would with ale be quickened. 'Nay,' quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretched, 'If I may not carry, sure I'll ne'er be fetched; But vow' (though the cross Doctors all stood hearers) 'For one _carrier_ put down, to make six _bearers_.' Ease was his chief disease, and, to judge right, He died for heaviness that his cart went light; His leisure told him that his time was come, And lack of load made his life burdensome; That even to his last breath, (there be that say't,) As he were pressed to death, he cried 'More weight!' But, had his doings lasted as they were, He had been an immortal Carrier. Obedient to the moon, he spent his date In course reciprocal, and had his fate Linked to the mutual flowing of the seas; Yet, strange to think, his wain was his increase; His letters are delivered all and gone; Only remains this superscription."

The next example--an anonymous one--makes no bad third--

"Here Hobson lies among his many betters, A man unlearned, yet a man of letters; His carriage was well known, oft hath he gone In Embassy 'twixt father and the son: There's few in Cambridge, to his praise be't spoken, But may remember him by some good Token. From whence he rid to London day by day, Till Death benighting him, he lost his way: His Team was of the best, nor would he have Been mired in any way but in the grave. And there he stycks, indeed, styll like to stand, Untill some Angell lend hys helpyng hand. Nor is't a wonder that he thus is gone, Since all men know, he long was drawing on. Thus rest in peace thou everlasting Swain, And Supream Waggoner, next Charles his wain."

The couplet printed below touches a pretty note of imagination, and is wholly free from that suspicion of affected scholarly superiority to a common carrier, with which all the others, especially Milton's, are super-saturated--

"Hobson's not dead, but Charles the Northerne swaine, Hath sent for him, to draw his lightsome waine."

Charles's Wain, referred to in these two last examples, is, of course, that well-known constellation in the northern heavens usually known as the Great Bear, anciently "Charlemagne's Waggon," and more anciently still, the Greek Hamaxa, "the Waggon."

Coming, as might be expected, a considerable distance after Milton and the others in point of excellence, are the epitaphs printed in a little book of 1640, called the _Witt's Recreations, Selected from the Finest Fancies of the Modern Muses_. Some of them are a little gruesome, and affect the reader as unfavourably as though he saw the authors of these lines dancing a saraband on poor old Hobson's grave--

"Hobson (what's out of sight is out of mind) Is gone, and left his letters here behind. He that with so much paper us'd to meet; Is now, alas! content to take one sheet.

He that such carriage store was wont to have, Is carried now himselfe unto his grave: O strange! he that in life ne're made but one, Six Carriers makes, now he is dead and gone."

XXV

THE Market Hill is, as already hinted, the centre of Cambridge. The University church is there. There, too, the stalls of the Wednesday and Saturday markets still gather thickly, and on them the inquisitive stranger may yet discover butter being sold, as from time immemorial, by the yard. Here a yard of butter is the equivalent of a pound, and the standard gauge of such a yard--the obsolete symbol of a time when the University exercised jurisdiction over the markets as well as over the students--is to this day handed over to the Senior Proctor of the year on his taking office. It is a clumsy cylinder of sheet iron, a yard in length and an inch in diameter. A pound of butter rolled out to this measurement looks remarkably like a very yellow candle of inordinate length.

Hobson's Conduit, as already noted, once stood in the centre of this market-place. When his silent, hook-nosed Majesty, William the Third, visited Cambridge in 1689, the Conduit was made by the enthusiastic citizens to run wine. Not much wine, though, nor very good, we may surely suppose, for the tell-tale account-books record that it cost only thirty shillings!

Few of the old coach-offices or inns stood in this square, but were--and are now--to be found chiefly in the streets leading out of it. The Bull, anciently the Black Bull, still faces Trumpington Street; the Lion flourishes in Petty Cury; the old Three Tuns, Peas Hill, is now the Central Temperance Hotel; and the Blue Boar, in whose archway an unfortunate clergyman, the Reverend Gavin Braithwaite, was killed in 1814 when seated on the roof of the Ipswich coach, still faces Trinity Street. The Sun, however, in Trinity Street, where Byron and his cronies dined and caroused, is no more; and of late years the Woolpack and the Wrestlers, both very ancient buildings, have been demolished. Foster's Bank stands on the site of one and the new Post Office on that of the other. For a while the remains of the galleried, tumbledown Falcon, stand in a court off Petty Cury; the inn in whose yard Cambridge students entertained and shocked Queen Elizabeth with a blasphemous stage travesty of the Mass. In Bridge Street stands the Hoop, notable in its day, and celebrated by Wordsworth--

"Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught, While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam; And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn."

Beyond the Hoop, the quaintly-named Pickerel Inn stands by Magdalen, or Great Bridge, just as it did in days when the carriers dumped down their loads here, to be transferred to the passage-boats for Ely and Kings Lynn. In Benet Street the Eagle, once the Eagle and Child, still discloses a courtyard curiously galleried, and hard by is the old Bath Hotel. This list practically exhausts the old coaching inns, but of queer hostelries of other kinds there are many, with nodding gables and latticed windows, in every other lane and by-way. Churches, too, abound. Oldest among these is St. Sepulchre's, one of the four round churches in England; a dark Norman building that in the blackness of its interior accurately figures the grimness of the Norman mind.

XXVI

CAMBRIDGE, now a town abounding in and surrounded by noble trees, was originally a British settlement, placed on that bold spur of high ground, rising from the surrounding treeless mires, on which in after years the Romans established their military post of Camboricum, and where in later ages William the Conqueror built his castle. The great artificial mound, which, like some ancient sepulchral tumulus, is all that remains to tell of William's fortress and to mark where Roman and Briton had originally seized upon this strategic point, crowns this natural bluff, overlooking the river Cam. Standing on it, with the whole of Cambridge town and a wide panorama of low-lying surrounding country disclosed, it is evident that this must have been the place of places for many miles on either hand where, in those remote days, the river could be crossed. Everywhere else the wide-spreading swamps forbade a passage; and, consequently, those who held this position, and could keep it, could deny the whole country to the passage of a hostile force from either side. Whether one enemy sought to penetrate from London to Ely and Norfolk, or whether another would come out of Norfolk into South Cambridgeshire or Herts, he must first of necessity dispose of those who held the key of this situation. The Romans, before they could subdue the masters of this position, experienced, we may well believe, no little difficulty; and it is probable that the perplexity of antiquaries, confronted by the existence of a Roman camp or station here, and of another three miles higher up the Cam at Grantchester, may be smoothed out by the very reasonable explanation that Grantchester was the first Roman camp over against the British stronghold at Cambridge, and that, when the Romans had made themselves masters of Cambridge, that place remained their military post, while Grantchester became a civil and trading community and a place of residence.

Both place-names derive from this one river, masquerading now as the Granta and again as the Cam, but by what name the Romans knew Grantchester we do not know and never shall.

At Roman Camboricum those ancient roads, the Akeman Street and the Via Devana, crossed at right angles, meeting here on this very Castle hill: the Via Devana on its way from Colchester to the town of _Deva_, now Chester; the Akeman Street going from _Branodunum_, now Brancaster, on the coast of Norfolk, to _Aquæ Solis_, the Bath of our own day.

Cambridge Castle, built in 1068 by William the Conqueror to hold Hereward the Saxon and his East Anglian fellow-patriots in check, has entirely disappeared. It never accumulated any legends of sieges or surprises, and of military history it had none whatever. It was, therefore, a castle of the greatest possible success; for, consider, although the first impulse may be to think little of a fortress that can tell no warlike story, the very lack of anything of the kind is the best proof of its strength and fitness. It is not the purpose of a castle to invite attacks, but by its very menace to overawe and terrify. Torquilstone Castle and the story of its siege and downfall, in the pages of _Ivanhoe_, make romantic and exciting reading; but, inasmuch as it fell, it was a failure. That Cambridge Castle not only never fell, but was not even menaced, is the best proof of its power.

These great fortresses, with their stone keeps and spreading wards and baileys, dotted here and there over the land, rang the knell of English liberties. "New and strong and cruel in their strength--how the Englishman must have loathed the damp smell of the fresh mortar, and the sight of the heaps of rubble, and the chippings of the stone, and the blurring of the lime upon the greensward; and how hopeless he must have felt when the great gates opened and the wains were drawn in, heavily laden with the salted beeves and the sacks of corn and meal furnished by the royal demesnes, the manors which had belonged to Edward the Confessor, now the spoil of the stranger; and when he looked into the castle court, thronged by the soldiers in bright mail, and heard the carpenters working upon the ordnance--every blow and stroke, even of the hammer or mallet, speaking the language of defiance."

William himself occupied his castle of Cambridge on its completion in 1069, and from it he directed the long and weary military operations against Hereward across the fens toward the Isle of Ely, only twelve miles away. From his keep-tower he could see with his own eyes that Isle, rising from the flat, on the skyline, like some Promised Land, but two years were to pass before he and his soldiers were to enter there; admitted even then by treachery.

From the Castle Mound the Cam may be seen, winding away through the flats into the distant haze. Immediately below are Parker's Piece, and Midsummer and Stourbridge Commons; this last from time beyond knowledge the annual scene of Stourbridge Fair. "Sturbitch" Fair, as the country-folk call it, existed, like the University itself, before history came to take note of it. When King John reigned it was already an important mark, and so continued until, at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, its rights and privileges were transferred to the Corporation of Cambridge.

Whether the story of its origin be well founded, or merely a picturesque invention, it cannot be said. It is a story telling how a Kendal clothier, at date unknown, journeying from Westmoreland to London, his pack-horses laden with bales of cloth, found the bridge over the Cam at this point broken down, and, trying to ford the river, fell in, goods and all. Struggling at last to the opposite bank, and fishing out his property, he spread his cloth to dry on Stourbridge Common, where so many of the townsfolk came to see it and to bid that in the end he sold nearly all his stock, and did much better than if he had gone on to London. The next year, therefore, he took care--not to fall into the Cam again--but to make Cambridge his mart. Other trades then became attracted to the place where he found business so brisk, and hence (according to the legend) the growth of a fair in its prime comparable only with that greatest of all fairs--the famous one of Nijni-Novgorod.

To criticise a legend of this kind would be to take it too seriously, else, among many things that might be inquired into would be the appearance at Cambridge of a traveller from Westmoreland bound for London. He must have missed his way very widely indeed!

The Fair still lasts three weeks, from 18th September to 10th October, but it is the merest shadow of its former self. The Horse Fair, on the 25th September, is practically all that remains of serious business. In old times its annual opening was attended with much ceremony. In those days, before the computation of time was altered, and Old Style became changed for New, the dates of opening and closing were 7th and 29th September. On Saint Bartholomew's Day the Mayor and Corporation rode out from the town to set out the ground, then cultivated. By that day all crops had to be cleared, or the stall-holders, ready to set up their stalls and booths, were at liberty to trample them down. On the other hand, they were under obligation to remove everything by St. Michael's Day, or the ploughmen, ready by this time to break ground for ploughing, had the right to carry off any remaining goods. Stourbridge Fair was then a town of booths. In the centre was the Duddery, the street where the mercers, drapers and clothiers sold their wares; and running in different directions were Ironmongers' Row, Cooks' Row, Garlick Row, Booksellers' Row, and many another busy street. In those times the three weeks' turnover of the various trades was calculated at not less than a quarter of a million sterling. The railways that destroyed the position of Lynn, Ely, and Cambridge as distributing places along the Cam and Ouse, have wrought havoc with this old-time Fair.

XXVII

THROUGH Chesterton, overlooked by the Castle and deriving its name from it, the road leaves Cambridge for Ely, passing through the village of Milton, where the Fenland begins, or what is more by usage than true description so-called now the Fens are drained and the land once sodden with water and covered with beds of dense reeds and rushes made to bear corn and to afford rich pasture for cattle. This is the true district of the "Cambridgeshire Camels," as the folk of the shire are proverbially called. The term, a very old one, doubtless took its origin in the methods of traversing the Fens formerly adopted by the rustic folk. They used stilts, or "stetches," as they preferred to call them, and no doubt afforded an amusing spectacle to strangers, as they straddled high above the reeds and stalked from one grassy tussock to another in the quaking bogs.

There is a choice of routes at Milton, the road running in a loop for two miles. The left-hand branch, through Landbeach, selected by the Post Office as the route of its telegraph-poles, might on that account be considered the main road, but the right-hand route has decidedly the better surface. Midway of this course, where the Slap Up Inn stands, is the lane leading to Waterbeach, a scattered village near the Cam, much troubled by the floods from that stream in days gone by.

Something of what Waterbeach was like in the eighteenth century may be gathered from the correspondence of the Rev. William Cole, curate there from 1767 to 1770. Twenty guineas a year was the modest sum he received, but that, fortunately for him, was not the full measure of his resources, for he possessed an estate in the neighbourhood. The value of his land could not have been great, and may be guessed from his letters. Writing in 1769, he says: "A great part of my estate has been drowned these two years: all this part of the country is now covered with water and the poor people of this parish utterly ruined." And again in 1770: "This is the third time within six years that my estate has been drowned, and now worse than ever." Shortly after writing that letter he removed. "Not being a water-rat," he says, "I left Waterbeach," and went to the higher and drier village of Milton, two miles away.

Waterbeach long retained its old-world manners and customs. May Day was its greatest holiday, and was ushered in with elaborate preparations. The young women collected materials for a garland, consisting of ribbons, flowers, and silver spoons, with a silver tankard to suspend in the centre; while the young men, early in the morning, or late at night, went forth into the fields to collect emblems of their esteem or disapproval of the young women aforesaid. "Then," says the old historian of these things, "woe betide the girl of loose habits, the slattern and the scold; for while the young woman who had been foremost in the dance, or whose amiable manners entitled her to esteem, had a large branch or tree of whitethorn planted by her cottage door, the girl of loose manners had a blackthorn at hers." The slattern's emblem was an elder tree, and the scold's a bunch of nettles tied to the latch of the door.

After having thus (under cover of darkness, be it said) left their testimonials to the qualities or defects of the village beauties, the young men, just before the rising of the sun, went for the garland and suspended it in the centre of the street by a rope tied to opposite chimneys. This done, sunrise was ushered in by ringing the village bells. Domestic affairs were attended to until after midday, and then the village gave itself up to merrymaking. Dancing on the village green, sports of every kind, and kiss-in-the-ring were for the virtuous and the industrious; while the recipients of the elders, the blackthorns, and the nettles sat in the cold shade of neglect, wished they had never been born, and made up their minds to be more objectionable than ever. Such was Waterbeach about 1820.

Some thirty years later the village acquired an enduring title to fame as the first charge given to that bright genius among homely preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It was in 1851, while yet only in his seventeenth year, that Spurgeon was made pastor of the Baptist Chapel here. Already his native eloquence had made him famed in Colchester, where, two years before, he had first spoken in public. The old thatched chapel where the youthful preacher ministered, on a stipend of twenty pounds a year, almost identical with that enjoyed by the Reverend William Cole, curate in the parish church eighty years before, has long since disappeared, destroyed by fire in 1861; and on its site stands a large and very ugly "Spurgeon Memorial Chapel" in yellow brick with red facings. Scarce two years and a half passed before the fame of Spurgeon's eloquence spread to London, and he was offered, and accepted, the pastorate of New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, there to fill that conventicle to overflowing, and presently draw all London to Exeter Hall. Even at this early stage of his wonderful career there were those who dilated upon the marvel of "this heretical Calvinist and Baptist" drawing a congregation of ten thousand souls while St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey resounded with the echoing footsteps of infrequent worshippers; but Spurgeon preached shortly afterwards to a congregation numbering twenty-four thousand, and maintained his hold until the day of his death, nearly forty years after. Where shall that curate, vicar, rector, dean, bishop, or archbishop of the Church of England be found who can command such numbers?

That his memory is held in great reverence at Waterbeach need scarce be said. There are still those who tell how the "boy-preacher," when announced to hold a night service in some remote village, not only braved the worst that storms and floods could do, but how, finding the chapel empty and the expected congregation snugly housed at home, out of the howling wind and drenching rain, he explored the place with a borrowed stable-lantern in his hand, and secured a congregation by dint of house-to-house visits!

XXVIII

THE left-hand loop, through Landbeach, if an inferior road, has more wayside interest. Landbeach is in Domesday Book called "Utbech," that is to say Outbeach, or Beach out (of the water). "Beach" in this and other Fenland instances means "bank"; Waterbeach being thus "water bank." Wisbeach, away up in the extreme north of the county, is a more obscure name, but on inquiry is found to mean Ousebank, that town standing on the Ouse in days before the course of that river was changed. Landbeach Church stands by the wayside, and has its interest for the ecclesiologist, as conceivably also for those curious people interested in the stale and futile controversy as to who wrote Shakespeare's plays; for within the building lies the Reverend William Rawley, sometime chaplain to Bacon, and not only so, but the author of a life of him and the publisher of his varied acknowledged works. He, if anyone, would have known it if Bacon had been that self-effacing playwright, so we must needs think it a pity there is so little in spiritualism save idiotic manifestations of horseplay and showers of rappings in the dark; otherwise the obvious thing would be to summon Rawley's shade and discreetly pump it.