Part 8

For centuries afterwards Royston was a town and yet not a parish, being situated in portions of the five adjoining parishes of Melbourn, Bassingbourn, Therfield, Barley, and Reed; and for centuries more, after it had attained parochial dignity, its chief cross street, Melbourn Street, divided the place into two Roystons--Royston, Hertfordshire, and Royston, Cambridgeshire. The doings of one with the other afford amusing reading: how a separate workhouse was established and separate assessments made for each parish, and how at length, in 1781, an Act was passed for consolidating the two for local government purposes; all these inconvenient and absurdly conflicting jurisdictions of parishes and counties being eventually swept away in 1895, when the Cambridgeshire portion of Royston was transferred to Hertfordshire, the whole of the town now being in that county.

They still cherish the memory of King James the First at Royston, though the open Heath where he hunted the hare is a thing of the past, and the races and all the ancient jollifications of that time are now merely matters for the antiquary. Where the four roads from the four quarters of the compass still meet in the middle of the town stood the old Palace. Its remains, of no very palatial appearance, are there even yet, and form private residences. Close by is that prime curiosity, Royston Cave. James and his courtiers and all their gay world at this corner never knew of the Cave, which was only discovered in 1742. It is a bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk, situated immediately under the roadway. Its age and original purpose are still matters in dispute. Whether it was excavated to serve the purpose of dust-bin to a Roman villa, or was a flint quarry, we shall never know, but that it certainly was in use by some religious recluse in the twelfth century is assured by the curious rough carvings in the chalk, representing St. Catherine, the Crucifixion, mitred abbots, and a variety of subjects of a devotional character. The hermit whose singular piety led him to take up his abode in this dismal hole must have had great difficulty in entering or leaving, for it was then only to be approached by plunging as it were into the neck of the bottle. The staircase by which visitors enter was only made in modern times.

The old Red Lion at Royston has already been mentioned as having ceased to be. It was kept for many years in the eighteenth century by Mrs. Gatward, a widow, assisted in the posting and coaching business attached to the house by her two sons. One of them came to a terribly tragic end. What induced him to turn highwayman we shall never know; but he took to the road, as many a roving blade in those times did. Perhaps his life lacked excitement. If that were so, he took the readiest means of adding variety to existence, for he waylaid the postboy carrying His Majesty's Mails on the North Road, between Royston and Huntingdon, and robbed the bags. There was in those times no method of courting death with such success as robbing the mails, and accordingly young Gatward presently found himself convicted and cast for execution. They hanged him in due course and gibbeted his body, pursuant to the grim old custom, near the scene of his crime. The story of this unhappy amateur highwayman is told--and, a tale of horror it is--by one Cole, a diligent antiquary on Cambridgeshire affairs, whose manuscript collections are in the British Museum. Hear him: "About 1753-54, the son of Mrs. Gatward, who kept the Red Lion at Royston, being convicted of robbing the mail, was hanged in chains on the Great Road. I saw him hanging, in a scarlet coat, and after he had hung about two or three months it is supposed that the screw was filed which supported him, and that he fell in the first high wind after. Mr. Lord, of Trinity, passed by as he lay on the ground, and, trying to open his breast, to see what state his body was in, not being offensive, but quite dry, a button of brass came off, which he preserves to this day, as he told me at the Vice-Chancellor's, Thursday, June 30th, 1779. I sold this Mr. Gatward, just as I left college in 1752, a pair of coach horses, which was the only time I saw him. It was a great grief to his mother, who bore a good character, and kept the inn for many years after."

This account of how a malefactor's body might lie by the roadside, the sport of any wayfarers idle curiosity, gives no very flattering glimpse of this England of ours a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet these were the "good old times."

The story goes that the agonised mother of the gibbeted man secretly conveyed his body to the inn and gave it decent, if unconsecrated, burial in the cellar. His brother, James Gatward, was for many years afterwards part proprietor of the London, Royston, and St. Ives coach, running past the gibbet.

Caxton Gibbet, where Gatward's body hung in chains, is still marked by a tall post standing on a mound by the wayside, on the North Road, thirteen miles from Royston. It is a singularly lonely spot, even though a public-house with the gruesome name of the Gibbet Inn stands close by. A mile distant is the village of Caxton, with its old coaching-inns converted into farmhouses; the only other places on the twelve miles being the old Hardwicke Arms Posting House and the gates of Wimpole Park at Arrington Bridge, and the solitary "Old North Road" railway station.

Royston's old inns have lost much of their old-time air. Among them, the George possessed one of those old "gallows" signs crossing the road in a fashion similar to that of the Fox and Hounds at Barley, but, somewhere towards the close of the eighteenth century, it fell at the moment when a London-bound waggoner was passing beneath, and killed him. Since then such signs have not been in favour in the town.

XX

ROYSTON has of late years spread out largely to the north, over those grassy heaths where James hunted. Looking back when midway between the town and Melbourn, this modern growth is readily noted, for the houses of it are all of Cambridgeshire white brick. At this distance they give a singularly close imitation of a tented military camp.

Melbourn--why not spelled with a final 'e,' like other Melbournes, is a mystery no inquiry can satisfy--is a large village of much thatch. Especially is the grey-green velvety moss on the thatch of a row of yellow plaster cottages beyond the church a thing of beauty, however rotten the thatch itself may be. Melbourn has a beautiful church and church-tower, seen in the accompanying picture, but its other glory, the Great Elm that for many centuries spread a shade over the road by the church, is now only a memory,--a memory kept green by the sign of the inn opposite. Everyone in Melbourn lives on fruit. In other words, this is a great fruit-growing district. This village and its neighbour, Meldreth, specialise in greengages, and from the railway station that serves the two, many hundreds of tons of that fruit are despatched to London in the season. These terms are perhaps vague, but they are reduced to a more definite idea of the importance of the greengage harvest when some returns are noted. From Melbourn station, then, thirty tons a day is an average consignment. Little wonder, then, that when one has come down from the bleak downs and heaths of Royston to these sheltered levels, the swelling contours of the windy pastures and breezy cornfields give place to long lines of orchards.

Cambridgeshire very soon develops its flat and fenny character along this route, and Melbourn left behind, the road on to Cambridge is a dead level. The low church-tower just visible to a keen eye, away to the left, among some clustered trees, is that of Shepreth. Shepreth hides its modest self from the road: let us take the winding by-way that leads to it and see what a purely agricultural Cambridgeshire village, set down in this level plain, and utterly out of touch with the road, may be like. It needs no great exercise of the deductive faculty to discover, on the way to Shepreth, that it is not a place of great or polite resort, for the lane is a narrow and winding way, half muddy ruts and half loose stones. Beside it crawls imperceptibly in its deep, ditch-like bed, overhung by pollard willows, a stream that takes its rise in the bogs of Fowlmere. By what lazy, snakish windings it ultimately finds its way into the Cam does not concern us. Here and there old mud-walled cottages, brilliantly white-washed and heavily thatched, dot the way; the sum total of the village, saving indeed the church, standing adjoining a farmyard churned into a sea of mud.

The appearance of Shepreth Church is not altogether prepossessing. The south aisle has been rebuilt in white brick, in a style rivalling the worst efforts of the old-time chapel-builder; and the old tower, whose upper stages have long fallen in ruin, shows in the contorted courses of its stonework how the building has sunk and settled in the waterlogged soil.

Beyond this soddened village, coming to the highroad again, the station and level-crossing of Foxton are reached; the situation of Foxton itself clearly fixed by the church-tower, rising from the flat fields on the right, half a mile away. There is something of a story belonging to this line of railway from Royston to Shepreth, Foxton, Shelford, and Cambridge. As far as Shepreth it is a branch of the Great Northern, anxious in the long ago to find a way into Cambridge and so cut up the Great Eastern's trade. The Great Eastern could not defeat the scheme altogether, but stopped it at Shepreth, to which point that line was opened in 1848. This was awkward for the Great Northern, brought to a halt seven miles from Cambridge, at a point which may, without disrespect to Shepreth, well be called "nowhere in particular." But the Great Northern people found a way out of the difficulty. Parliament, in the interests of the Great Eastern, would not permit them to build a railway into Cambridge, but no one could forbid them conveying passengers by coach along these last few miles. And so, for close upon four years, Great Northern passengers left the trains at Shepreth and were conveyed by a forty minutes' coach journey the rest of the way. Thus, along these few miles at anyrate, coaching survived on the Cambridge road until 1851, when the Great Eastern built a short line from Shelford to Foxton and Shepreth, to join the Great Northern branch, allowing running-powers to that Company into Cambridge station.

Harston village succeeds to Foxton. Its present name is a corruption of "Harleston," which itself was a contraction of "Hardeliston." It stands at a bend of the road, with a very small village green and a very large church to the left, and the long village street of small cottages and large gardens following the high road, and bringing the traveller presently to an inn--the Old English Gentleman--where the Barkway route to Cambridge meets this; both thenceforward joining forces for the remaining four miles and a half. Hauxton Church starts up on the right, by the Granta, which comes down from Audley End and is crossed here, over a little bridge, the only striking object in what has now become a very desolate road, so lonely and empty that an occasional thorn-tree, rising from the dwarf hedges of the immense flat fields, becomes quite companionable, and a distant clump of leafy elms a landmark. Those distant trees mark where Trumpington village church lies hid, and, if the horizon ahead be closely scanned, the long line of King's College Chapel will presently be seen. We are coming at last into Cambridge.

XXI

THE entrance to Cambridge town through Trumpington is singularly noble and dignified. This is an age when almost every ancient town or city is approached through a ring of modern suburbs, but Cambridge is one of the few and happy exceptions. You cannot enter Oxford by the old coach road from London without passing through the modern suburb of St. Clements, whose mean street pitifully discounts the approach to the city over Magdalen Bridge; but at first, when nearing Cambridge, nothing breaks the flat landscape save the distant view of King's College Chapel, that gigantic pile of stone whose long flat skyline and four angle-turrets so wrought upon Ruskin's feelings that he compared it with a billiard-table turned upside down. It is not because of the great Chapel that the entrance to Cambridge is noble: it will add nothing to the beauty of the scene until that day--perhaps never to come--when the building shall be completed with a stately belltower after the design contemplated by its founder, Henry the Sixth. No; it is rather by reason, firstly, of the broad quiet rural village street of Trumpington, set humbly, as it were, in the gates of learning, and secondly of the still broad and quiet, but more urban, Trumpington Road that follows it, that Cambridge is so charmingly entered. A line of old gabled cottages with old-fashioned gardens occupies either side of the road; while an ancient mansion or two, together with the village church, are hid, or perhaps glimpsed for a moment, off to the left, where a by-road goes off, past the old toll-house, to Grantchester. This is Trumpington. In that churchyard lies a remarkable man: none other, indeed, than Henry Fawcett--we will not call him by his title of "Professor," for that seems always so blatant a dignity--who died at Cambridge in 1884, thus ending a life that had risen triumphant above, surely, the keenest affliction Fate can inflict. Completely blinded in youth by an accident of the most deplorable kind, he yet lived to fill a career in life and politics apparently denied by loss of sight. The text on his gravestone--a garbled passage from Exodus, chap. xiv. ver. 15--is singularly appropriate: "Speak unto the people, that they go forward."

It is down this leafy by-way, past the church, that one finds Grantchester Mill, a building generally thought to occupy the site of that "Trumpington Mill" made famous in one of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_.

For Trumpington has a certain literary fame, in association with Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale":--

"At Trompington, not fer fro Cantebrigge, Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge, Upon the whiche brook ther stont a melle."

The "Reeve's Tale" is not precisely a part of Chaucer to be discussed in every drawing-room, and is indeed a story well calculated to make a satyr laugh and the judicious grieve. Therefore, it is perhaps no great pity that the mill stands no longer, so that you cannot actually seek it out and say, "Here the proud Simon, the 'insolent Simkin,' ground the people's corn, taking dishonest toll of it, and hereabouts those roystering blades of University scholars, Allen and John, played their pranks." Grantchester Mill is a building wholly modern.

It is a grave and dignified road, tree-shaded and echoing to the drowsy cawing of rooks (like tired professors weary of lecturing to inattentive classes), that conducts along the high road through Trumpington village to the beginnings of the town. Here, by the bridge crossing the little stream called the "Vicar's Brook," one mile from Great St. Mary's Church, the very centre of Cambridge, stands the eight-foot high milestone, the first in the series set up between Cambridge and Barkway in the early years of the eighteenth century, and paid for out of "Dr. Mouse's and Mr. Hare's Causey Money." This initial stone cost £5, 8s. The arms of Dr. Mouse may still be traced, impaling those of Trinity Hall.

Beyond this hoary but little-noticed relic begin the Botanic Gardens, and beside them runs or creeps that old Cambridge water-supply, the "little new river," brought in 1610 from the Nine Wells under yonder gentle hills that break the flatness of the landscape away on the right.

The idea of bringing pure water into Cambridge originated, in 1574, with a certain Dr. Perne, Master of Peterhouse; its object both to cleanse the King's Ditch, "which," says Fuller, "once made to defend Cambridge by its strength, did in his time offend it with its stench," and to provide drinking water for the University and town. This clear-running stream has an interest beyond its local use, for the cutting of its course was designed by Edward Wright, of Gonville and Caius College, who also drew the plans for Sir Hugh Myddleton's "New River," whose course so closely neighbours this old road between Ware and London.

The Conduit--"Hobson's Conduit," as it is called--that once stood on Market Hill, was removed in 1854, and now stands at the very beginning of Cambridge, where Trumpington "Road" becomes "Street," at the head of this open stream.

The Nine Wells are not easy to find. They are situated near the village of Great Shelford, under a shoulder of the Gog Magog Hills, and are approached across two rugged pastures, almost impracticable in wet weather. The term "wells" is misleading. They are springs, found trickling feebly through the white clay in the bed of a deep trench with two branches, cut in the hillside. Above them stands a granite obelisk erected by public subscription in 1861, and setting forth all the circumstances at great length. The term "Nine Wells" is not especially applied to this spot, but is used throughout Cambridgeshire for springs, whatever their number. A similar custom obtained in classic Greece, but the evidence by which our Cambridgeshire practice might possibly be derived from such a respectable source, and so be linked with the Pierian spring and the Muses Nine, is entirely lacking.

The Gog Magogs--"the Gogs," as the country-folk irreverently abbreviate their mysterious name--are the Cambridgeshire mountains. They are not particularly Alpine in character, being, indeed, just a series of gently rising grassy downs, culminating in a height of three hundred feet above sea-level. No one will ever be able to explain how these very mild hills obtained their terrific title; and Gog and Magog themselves, mentioned vaguely in Revelations, where the devil is let loose again after his thousand years' imprisonment in the bottomless pit, are equally inexplicable.

The crowning height of the Gog Magogs was in Roman times the summer camp of a cohort of Vandals, quartered in this district to overawe the conquered British. It was then the policy of Rome, as it is of ourselves in India and elsewhere at the present day, to enrol into her service the strange tribes and alien nations she had conquered, and to bring them from afar to impress her newest subjects with the far-reaching might and glory of the Empire. This Vandalian cohort was formed from the barbarian prisoners defeated on the Danube by Aurelian, and enlisted by the Emperor Probus. The earthworks of their camp are still traceable within the grounds of the mansion and estate of Vandlebury, on the hilltop, once belonging to the Duke of Leeds. From this point of view Cambridge is seen mapped out below, while in other directions the great rolling fields spread downwards in fold upon fold. Immense fields they are, enclosed in the early years of last century, when Cambridgeshire began to change its immemorial aspect of open treeless downs, where the sheep grazed on the short grass and the bustard still lingered, for its present highly cultivated condition. Fields of this comparatively recent origin may generally be recognised by their great size, in striking contrast with the ancient enclosures whose area was determined by the work of hand-ploughing. These often measure over half a mile square, and mark the advent of the steam-plough.

XXII

THE old Cambridge water-supply, meandering down from the hills, has induced a similar discursiveness in these last pages. Onward from Trumpington Road it runs in a direct line to the Conduit, and our course shall, in sympathy, be as straight.

The Fitzwilliam Museum is the first public building to attract notice on entering the town: a huge institution in the classic style, notable for the imposing Corinthian columns that decorate its front; its effect marred by the stone screen that interrupts the view up the noble flights of steps. "The Fitzbilly," as all Cambridge men know it, derives from the noble collections of art objects and antiquities, together with great sums of money, left to the University in 1816 by a Lord Fitzwilliam for the establishment of a museum and art gallery. It was completed some forty years ago, and has since then been the great architectural feature in the first glimpse of Cambridge. The coloured marble decorations and the painting and gilding of the interior are grandiose rather than grand; and although the collections, added to by many later bequests, contain many priceless and beautiful objects, the effect of the whole is a kind of mental and optical indigestion caused by the "fine confused feeding" afforded by the very mixed arrangement of these treasures,--a bad arrangement, like that of an overgrown private collection, and utterly unsuited for public and educational needs. You turn from a manuscript to a picture, from a picture to a case of china, from that to missals, and so all through the varied incarnations of art throughout the centuries.

Just beyond the Fitzwilliam Museum comes Peterhouse College, the oldest of all the colleges in the University. To understand something of the meaning of the colleges and their relation to the supreme teaching and governing body, it will be necessary to recount, as briefly as may be, the circumstances in which both University and Colleges had their origin.

The origin of Cambridge University, as of that of Oxford, is of unknown date, and the manner of its inception problematical. Who was the great teacher that first drew scholars to him at this place? We cannot tell. That he was a Churchman goes without saying, for the Church, in the dark ages when learning began to be, held letters and culture in fee-simple. Nor can we tell why Cambridge was thus honoured, for it was not the home, like Ely, Crowland, or Thorney, of a great monastic establishment, whence learning of sorts radiated. One of the untrustworthy early chroniclers of these things gives, indeed, a specific date to the beginnings of the University, and says that Joffrid, Abbot of Crowland, in 1110 sent monkish lecturers to the town; but the earliest record, beyond which we must not go into the regions of mere surmise, belongs to a hundred and twenty-one years later, when royal regulations respecting the students were issued. Already a Chancellor and a complete governing body appear to have been in existence. It is arguable that a century and more must have been necessary for these to have been evolved from the earliest days of a teaching body; but these affairs are for pundits. Such special pleaders as John Caius and Thomas Key, who fought with great bitterness and amazing pertinacity in the sixteenth century on the question as to whether Oxford or Cambridge were the older of the two, had the hardihood to trace them back to astonishing lengths. According to Caius, arguing for Cambridge, it was one Cantaber, a Spanish prince, who founded the University here in the very remote days when Gurguntius was King of Britain. To this prince he traces the name of the town itself, and I think that fact alone serves to discredit anything else he has to say.