Part 14

But whatever may have been the original form of Aldreth's name, the village nowadays has nothing to show of any connection with St. Etheldreda, save the site only of a well dedicated to her, situated half-way up the steeply rising street. It is a curious street, this of Aldreth, plunging down from the uplands of the Isle into the peat and ooze that William so laboriously crossed. Where it descends you may still see the stones with which he, or others at some later time, paved the way. For the rest, Aldreth is one long street of rustic cottages very scattered and much separated by gardens: over all a look of listlessness, as though this were the end of the known world, and nothing mattered very much. When a paling from a garden fence falls into the road, it lies there; when the plaster falls from a cottage wall, no one repairs the damage; when a window is broken, the hole is papered or stuffed with rags: economy of effort is studied at Aldreth.

The curious may still trace William's route through the Isle, to Ely city. It is not a straight course. Geographical conditions forbade it to be so, and I doubt not, that if the road were to make again, they would still forbid; for to rule a straight line across the map from Aldreth to Ely is to plunge into hollows where water still lies, though actual fens be of the past. His way lay along two sides of a square; due north for three miles and almost due east for a like distance, along the track pursued nowadays by the excellent road uphill to where the mile-long and populous village of Haddenham stands on a crest, and down again and turning to the right for Witchford, whence, along a gentle spur, you come presently into Ely.

XXXV

RETURNING to the high road at Cottenham Corner, and passing the junction of the road from Waterbeach, we come presently, at a point six and a half miles from Cambridge, to a place marked "Dismal Hall" on large-scale Ordnance maps. Whatever this may have been in old days, it is now a small white-brick farmhouse, called by the occupier "The Brambles," and by the landlord "Brookside." The name perhaps derived originally from some ruined Roman villa whose walls rose, roofless and desolate, beside the ancient Akeman Street. It is a name belonging, in all probability, to the same order as the "Caldecotes" and "Coldharbours," met frequently beside, or in the neighbourhood of, Roman ways; places generally conceded to have been ruined houses belonging to that period. The modern representative of "Dismal Hall" stands beside a curiously small and oddly-shaped field, itself called "Dismal"; triangular in form and comprising only two acres.

Half a mile beyond this point, a pretty group of cottages marks where the way to Denny Abbey lies to the right across a cow-pasture. A field-gate whose posts are the battered fragments of some Perpendicular Gothic pillars from that ruined monastery, crowned incongruously with a pair of eighteenth-century stone urns, clearly identifies the spot. There has been a religious house of sorts on this spot since eight hundred years ago, and most of the remains are of the Norman period, when a settlement of Black Monks from Ely settled here. In succession to them came the Knights Templars, who made it a preceptory, and when their Order was suppressed and ceased out of the land, in consequence of its corruption and viciousness, the nuns of St. Clare were given a home in these deserted halls. Close upon four hundred years have gone since they, too, were thrust forth, and it has for centuries past been a farmhouse. Indeed, if you regard Denny Abbey, as also many another, in anything else save a conventional light, you will see that it was really always a farm. What else than a farm was the great Abbey of Tintern, and what other than farmers those Cistercian monks who built it and cultivated those lands, the godless, growing fearful and in expiatory mood, had given them? So also with the Benedictines, the Templars, and the Clares who succeeded one another here. You may note the fact in their great barns, and in the fields they reclaimed. To-day, groups of buildings of uncertain age, as regards their outer walls, enclose littered rick-yards, but the dwelling-house, for all the uninteresting look of one side, shows, built into its inner face, the sturdy piers and arches of one of the aisles; and the otherwise commonplace hall and staircase of the interior are informed with a majestic dignity by two columns and a noble arch of the Norman church. A large and striking barn, approached and entered across a pig-haunted yard rich in straw and mud, proves, on entering, to be a beautiful building of the Decorated period, once the refectory.

Leaving Denny Abbey behind, we come to Chittering, a place unknown to guide-books and chartographers. We need blame neither the one nor the other for this omission, for Chittering is remarkable for nothing but its insignificance and lack of anything that makes for interest. It consists, when you have counted everything in its constituent parts, of two lonely public-houses, the Traveller's Rest and the Plough and Horses, a grotesquely unbeautiful Baptist Chapel and a school, five or six scattered cottages, and one new house, entrenched as it were in a defensive manner behind a sedgy and duckweedy drain. It is here, at a right-hand turning, that the exploratory cyclist turns off for Wicken Fen, the last remaining vestige of the natural Fenland that once overspread the greater part of the county. In Wicken Fen, a square mile of peaty bog and quaking morass, where the reeds still grow tall, and strange aquatic plants flourish, the rarer Fenland lepidoptera find their last refuge. Dragon-flies, in glittering panoply of green-and-gold armour and rainbow-hued wings, flash like miniature lightnings over the decaying vegetation, and the sulphur-coloured, white-and-scarlet butterflies find a very paradise in the moist and steamy air. Wicken Fen is jealously preserved in its natural state, and is a place of pilgrimage, not only for the naturalist, with his butterfly-net and his collecting-box, but for all who would obtain some idea of what this country was like in former ages. At the same time it is a place difficult to find, and the route to it a toilsome one. The Fens express flatness to the last degree, it is true, but, even though they be drained, they are not easy to explore. Mountain-ranges are, indeed, not more weariful than these flats, where you can never make a straight course when once off the main roads, but are compelled by dykes and drains to make for any given point by questing hither and thither as though following the outlines of the squares on a chessboard. The distance to Wicken Fen, measured from Chittering in a direct line on the map, is not more than four miles. Actually, the route is nearly eight.

We have already seen what a Fenland drove is like. To such a complexion does this treacherous by-way descend in less than a quarter of a mile, bringing the adventurer into an apparently boundless field of corn. If the weather has recently been wet, he is brought to a despairing pause at this point, for the rugged drove here becomes a sea of a curious kind of black buttery mud, highly tenacious. The pedestrian is to be pitied in this pass, but the cyclist is in worse case, for his wheels refuse to revolve, and he finds, with horror, his brake and his forks clogged with the horrible mess, and his mud-guards become mud-accumulators instead. To shoulder his machine and carry it is the only course. If, on the other hand, the weather be dry, with a furious wind blowing, the mud becomes dust and fills the air with a very respectable imitation of a Soudan sandstorm. In those happy climatic conditions when it is neither wet nor too dry, and when the stormy winds have sunk to sleep, the way to Wicken Fen, though long and circuitous, loses these terrors. At such times the ditchers may be seen almost up to their knees in what looks like dry sand, hard at work clearing out the dykes and drains choked up by this flying dust, and it becomes of interest to examine the nature of this curious soil. A handful, gathered at haphazard, shows a kind of black sand, freely mixed with a fine snuff-coloured mixture of powder and minute fibrous shreds; pulverised peat from the vanished bogs and morasses that once stewed and festered where these fields now yield abundant harvests. This peaty soil it is that gives these fields their fertility, for, as Sir Humphry Davy once said, "A soil covered with peat is a soil covered with manure."

It is a curious commentary on the fame of Wicken Fen as an entomologist's paradise, and on its remoteness, that all the ditchers and farming-folk assume the stranger who inquires his way to it to be a butterfly-hunter.

At last, after crossing the railway to Ely, making hazardous passage over rickety plank-bridges across muddy dykes, and wending an uncertain way through farmyards inhabited by dogs keenly desirous of tearing the infrequent stranger limb from limb, the broad river Cam is approached, at Upware. Upware is just a riverside hamlet, remote from the world, and only in touch with its doings on those occasions when boating-parties from Ely or Cambridge come by on summer days.

On the opposite shore, across the reedy Cam, stands a queer building, partly ferry-house, partly inn, with the whimsical legend, "Five Miles from Anywhere. No Hurry," painted on its gable. The real sign of Upware Inn, as it is generally called, is the "Lord Nelson," but this knowledge is only acquired on particular inquiry, for signboard it has none.

The roystering old days at Upware are done. They came to an end when the railway between Cambridge, Ely, and Kings Lynn was opened, and coals and heavy goods no longer went by barge along the Ouse and Cam. In that unregenerate epoch, before modern culture had reached Cambridge, and undergrads had not begun to decorate their rooms with blue china and to attempt to live up to it, the chief delight of Cambridge men was to walk or scull down to Upware and have it out with the bargees. Homeric battles were fought here by the riverside in those days of beef and beer, and it was not always the University man who got the worst of it in these sets-to with or without the gloves. In the last days of this Philistine era the railway navvy came as a foeman equally well worth the attention of young Cambridge; and thus, in a final orgie of bloody noses and black eyes, the fame of Upware culminated. When the navvy had completed his work and departed, the bargee went also, and peace has reigned ever since along the sluggish reaches of the Cam. There are, it is true, a few of the barging craft and mystery still left along this waterway, but, beyond a singular proficiency in swearing, they have nothing in common with their forebears, and drink tea and discuss social science.

In those old robustious days--famous once, but now forgot--flourished the Republic of Upware, a somewhat blackguardly society composed chiefly of muscular undergrads. Admission to the ranks of this precious association was denied to none who could hit hard and drink deep. In the riverside field that still keeps its name of "Upware Bustle," the Republic held many of its drunken, uproarious carouses, presided over by the singular character who called himself, not President, but "King of Upware." Richard Ramsay Fielder, this pot-house monarch, "flourished," as histories would say, circa 1860. He was an M.A. of Cambridge, a man of good family and of high abilities, but cursed with a gipsy nature, an incurable laziness, and an unquenchable thirst: the kind of man who is generally, for his sake and their own, packed off by his family to the Colonies. Fielder perhaps could not be induced to cross the seas; at anyrate, he enjoyed an allowance from his family, on the degrading condition that he kept himself at a distance. He earned the allowance loyally, and found the society that pleased him most at Upware and in the inns of the surrounding Fenland villages; so that on leaving the University he continued to cling to the neighbourhood for many years, becoming a hero to all the dissolute youngsters at Cambridge. He it was who originally painted the apt inscription, "Five Miles from Anywhere," on the gable-wall of this waterside inn, his favourite haunt, where he lounged and smoked and tippled with the bargees; himself apeing that class in his dress: coatless, with corduroy breeches and red waistcoat. A contemporary sketch of him tells of his thin flowing hair of inordinate length, of his long dirty finger-nails, and of the far from aromatic odour he gave forth; and describes his boating expeditions. "He used to take about with him in his boat an enormous brown-ware jug, capable of holding six gallons or more, which he would at times have filled with punch, ladling it out profusely for his aquatic friends. This vast pitcher or 'gotch,' which was called 'His Majesty's pint' ('His Majesty' in allusion to his self-assumed title), had been made to his own order, and decorated before kilning with incised ornaments by his own hand. Amongst these figured prominently his initials 'R. R. F.' and his crest, actual or assumed, a pheon, or arrow-head." Alluding to his initials, he would often playfully describe himself as "more R. than F.," which means (is it necessary to explain?) "more rogue than fool." Eccentric in every way, he would change his quarters without notice and without reason, and would remain in bed, smoking and drinking, for weeks together.

This odd character lingered here for some years after the bargees had gone, and into the time when even the most rowdy of Cambridge undergraduates began to find it "bad form" to booze and be hail-fellow with the village rapscallions of Fenland. Then Fielder himself "forswore sack and lived cleanly"; or at anyrate deserted his old haunts. Report tells how he died at last at Folkestone, in comfortable circumstances and in a quite respectable and conventional manner.

XXXVI

UPWARE INN has lost a great deal of its old-time look. With something akin to melancholy the sentimental pilgrim sees a corrugated iron roof replacing the old thatch of reeds, characteristic of Fenland. The great poplar, too, has had its curious spreading limb amputated: that noble branch whereon the King of that Republic sat on summer evenings and held his disreputable Court. But not everything is modernised. The Cam is not yet bridged. You still are ferried across in an uncouth flat-bottomed craft, and they even yet burn peat in the domestic grates at Upware, so that links yet bind the present with the past. Peat is the traditional fuel of the Fens, largely supplanted nowadays by coal, but should coal become permanently dear, these Cambridgeshire villages would, for sake of its cheapness, go back to peat and endure its acrid smell and dull smouldering humour in place of the brightness of a coal fire. At Wicken Fen the peat is still forming: perhaps the only place in England where the process is going on. It is still three miles from Upware to this relic of the untamed wilderness, past Spinney Abbey, now a farmhouse with few or no relics of the old foundation to be seen. It was in this farmstead that Henry Cromwell, one of the Protectors sons, lived in retirement. He was visited here one September day in 1671 by Charles the Second, come over from Newmarket for the purpose. What Charles said to him and what Henry Cromwell replied we do not know, and imagination has therefore the freer rein. But we spy drama in it, a "situation" of the most thrilling kind. What would _you_ say to the man who had murdered--judicially murdered, if you like it--your father? Charles, however, was a cynic of an easy-going type, and probably failed to act up to the theatrical requirements of the occasion. At anyrate, Henry Cromwell was not consigned to the nearest, or any, dungeon. Nothing at all was done to him, and he died, two years later, at peace with all men. He lies buried in the little church of Wicken, and was allowed to rest there.

Wicken Fen is just beyond this abbey farmstead. You turn to the right, along a green lane and across a field, and there you are, with the reeds and the sedge growing thick in the stagnant water, water-lilies opening their buds on the surface, and a lazy hum of insects droning in the still and sweltering air. The painted lady, the swallow-tail, the peacock, the scarlet tiger, and many other gaily-hued butterflies float on silent wings; things crawl and creep in the viscous slime, and on warm summer days, after rain, the steam rises from the beds of peat and wild growths as from some natural cookshop. Old windmill pumps here and there dot the banks of the fen, and in the distance are low hills that form, as it were, the rim of the basin in which this relic is set.

Away in one direction rises the tall majestic tower of Soham Church, deceiving the stranger into the belief that he is looking at Ely Cathedral, and overlooking what are now the pastures of Soham Fen; in the days of King Canute that inland sea--that _mare de Soham_--which stretched ten miles wide between Mildenhall and Ely. It was across Soham Mere that Canute came voyaging by Ely, rowed by knights in his galley, when he heard, while yet a long way off, the sound of melody. Bidding his knights draw nearer to the Isle, he found the music to be the monks in the church singing vespers. The story is more than a legend, and is alluded to in the only surviving stanza of an ancient song--

"Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut Ching rew therby. Roweth cnites noer the lant, And here we thes Muneches saeng."

It is a story that well pictures the reality---the actual isolation--of the Isle, just as does that other, telling how that same Canute, coming again to Ely for Christmas, found the waters that encompassed it frost-bound, but so slightly that crossing the ice was perilous in the extreme. He was thus of necessity halted on the shores of the frozen mere, and until they found one Brithmer, a Saxon cheorl of the Fen, skilled in Fen-lore and able to guide the King and his train across the shallow places where the ice lay thick and strong, it seemed as though he and his retinue would be unable to keep the Feast of the Nativity in Ely. Brithmer was a man of prodigious bulk, nicknamed "Budde," or "the Fat," and where he led the way in safety men of ordinary weight could follow without fear. So Canute followed in his sledge, with his Court, and kept Christmas on the Isle. As for Brithmer, who had performed this service, he was enlarged from serfdom to be a free man, and loaded with honours. Indeed, he was probably only known as "the Fat" before this time, and was doubtless called Brithmer, which means "bright mere," after this exploit.

XXXVII

RETURNING to the old coach road from this expedition, and coming to it again with a thankful heart, we presently come to Stretham Bridge, a narrow old hunch-backed brick structure spanning the Great Ouse, or Old West River, and giving entrance to this Isle of Ely, of which already we have heard so much, and will now hear more. The sketch-map that has already shown the Conqueror's line of march indicates also the size and shape of the Isle: the physical Isle. For there are really two, the physical and the political. The last-named comprises the whole of the northern part of Cambridgeshire, from this point along the Ouse to Upware, and thence, following the Cambridgeshire border, round to Littleport and Tydd St. Giles in the north, by the neighbourhood of Crowland and Peterborough, and so down to the Ouse again at Earith, Aldreth, and Stretham Bridge. It is still a political division, and has its own government, under the style of the County Council of the Isle of Ely. The real geographical Isle--the one sketched in the map--is much smaller; only one-third the size of the other; measuring in its greatest length and breadth but some twelve and eight miles, and bounded by the Great Ouse from Earith to Upware, by Cam and Little Ouse to Littleport, and thence by the Old Croft River to the New Bedford River, returning along that cut to Earith.

As you approach Stretham Bridge along this old causeway the Isle is plain to see in front, its gentle hills glimpsed between the fringe of willows and poplars that now begin to line the way. No one has bettered the description Carlyle wrote of the Fen-country seen from this causeway that was once the Akeman Street; and no one _can_ better it. "It has a clammy look," he says, clayey and boggy; the produce of it, whether bushes and trees or grass and crops, gives you the notion of something lazy, dropsical, gross. From the "circumfluent mud," willows, "Nature's signals of distress," spring up by every still slime-covered drain: willows generally polled and, with that process long continued, now presenting a very odd and weird appearance. The polled crown of an ancient willow bears a singularly close resemblance to a knuckly fist, and these, like so many gnarled giant arms of bogged and smothered Goliaths thrust upwards in despair, with clenched and imprecatory hands, give this road the likeness of a highway into fairyland whose ogres, under the spell of some Prince Charming, have been done to death in their own sloughs. Pollards, anathema to Cobbett, are in plenty in these lowlands, but it must not be thought that because of them, or even because Carlyle's description of the country is so apt, it is anything but beautiful. Only, to see its beauties and appreciate them, it is necessary here, more than elsewhere, to have fine weather.

Stretham Bridge, that makes so great a business of crossing the Ouse, seems an instance of much ado about nothing, for that river, "Great Ouse" though it be named, is very much to seek in summer, trickling away as it does between tussocks of rough grass. The Great Ouse is not of the bigness it once boasted, in days before the Old and New Bedford Rivers were cut, two hundred and sixty years ago, to carry its sluggish waters away by a direct route to the sea, and the fair-weather pilgrim marvels at the bridge and at the great banks he sees stretching away along its course to protect the surrounding lands from being flooded. That they are needed is evident enough from the care taken to repair them, and from a sight of the men digging hard by in the greasy gault to obtain the repairing materials. These are the "gaulters" and the "bankers" of Fenland life. It was one of these who, as a witness in some cause at the Cambridge Assizes, appearing in his working clothes, was asked his occupation. "I am a banker, my Lord," he replied. "We cannot have any absurdity," said Baron Alderson testily; to which the man answered as before, "I am a banker"; and things were at cross-purposes until the meaning of the term was explained to the Court.