Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely — Reading Notes

They were cultivated upon the three course system; every landholder having the right to pasture a proportionate number of cattle on the fallow of the year, as well as in the Common Meadows. The Common Fields of Cambridge comprised about five square miles, with the inhabited part of the township nearly in the centre, and roughly coincided with the existing Parliamentary Borough, though somewhat more extensive.

This inhabited part, the mediaeval town of Cambridge, was comprised, (at least from the tenth century to the eighteenth,) in the space bounded by the river on the west, and on the east by a ditch, known finally as the "King's Ditch," from having been widened by Henry the Third in the Barons' War. This ditch left the Cam at the "King's Mill," (the modern representative of which still stands just above Silver Street Bridge,) and proceeded along the line of Mill Lane, Pembroke Street, Tibbs Row, Hobson Street, and Park Street, to fall into the river again opposite Magdalene College. Beyond the "Great Bridge," from which the place derived its name, a small cluster of houses climbed the steep bank, on the summit of which stood the Castle. Our earliest records show this area as by no means thickly covered with houses. Not only the inhabitants, but all their cattle lived in it; so there must have been many little farmyards and gardens interspersed amongst the dwellings.

Domesday Book gives the number of these as only 400, and a couple of centuries later, in 1279, when the University was already in full existence, there were scarcely more. By the middle of the eighteenth century this number had trebled. But even in 1801, as may be seen in Lyson's plan of the town, the King's Ditch, which was then still an open watercourse, remained substantially the boundary of inhabited Cambridge. And the vast suburban extensions in the areas of Barnwell, Newnham, Chesterton, and Cherry Hinton are mostly very recent indeed; the bulk in fact belonging to the last half century. Their rise, and the continuous intrusion of ever fresh University and College buildings, has had the effect of once more depleting the area of mediaeval Cambridge, which to-day contains barely 800 houses. The whole of the University buildings, whether ancient or modern, are contained within this area, with the exception of the Colleges of Peterhouse, Pembroke, Christ's and Jesus (which together with a few of the Museums, stand just beyond the Ditch), and the New Court of St. John's College, which is on the other side of the river, in the old Common Field. The ecclesiastical and feminine foundations similarly situated, Selwyn College, Westminster College, Ridley Hall, Newnham College, and Girton College, are not recognised by the University as being strictly "Colleges" at all.

Such was old Cambridge; with its eleven ancient parishes of St. Peter, St. Giles, St. Clement, Holy Trinity, St. Michael, St. Mary (the greater), St. Edward, St. Benet, St. Botolph, All Saints, and St. John (which was destroyed to make room for King's College). Before the twelfth century closed three more churches were added, those of the Holy Sepulchre, of St. Peter (now St. Mary's the less) outside the "Trumpington Gate," of St. Andrew (the greater) outside the Barnwell Gate, and St. Andrew (the less) in the detached suburb which grew up round the great "Abbey" (really an Augustinian Priory) of Barnwell.

Old Cambridge probably owed its constitution--(quite possibly its very existence)--to the genius with which "the Children of Alfred," Edward the Elder and his Sister, the "Lady of the Mercians," reorganised the Midlands after the great cataclysm of the Danish wars, which in the previous generation had swept over the district, obliterating all earlier landmarks and boundaries. One pirate horde, under the most renowned of all their chieftains, Guthrum--the deadliest antagonist, and afterwards the most faithful ally, of our great Alfred,--had for a space settled themselves in Cambridge, and from that strategic position overawed East Anglia on the one hand and Mercia on the other.[2]

[Footnote 2: The kingdom of Mercia comprised the Midlands, and was (roughly) bounded on the north by the Humber and Mersey, on the west by Wales, on the south by the Thames, and on the east by the Cam and the Lea.]