[8] Caius, writing in 1447, says that the town is divided into two parts by the Canta and the Rhee, called earlier le Ee; and by Spenser the Cle. We have _Granta_, _Guant_, and _Cante_: the _r_ dropped out, and _G_ was replaced by _C_ in the name of both town and river (see _supra_). Cante does not seem to have been the name of a river at all. The river bank by Castle Mound is spoken of in the xiv c. as “the common bank called Cante“: one arm at least of the Cambridge river was known simply as “the water” [Prof. Skeat has pointed out that Ee is the xii, xiii, and xiv c. form of the A-S. _éa_, cognate with _aqua_] and for centuries there would appear to have been no need for any other name. In Henry of Huntingdon’s Chronicle (1130) the river is called the _Grenta_; but Lydgate writes And of this noble vniuersitie Sett on this ryver which is called Cante. In the same decade Spenser knows only the Guant (_Faery Queene, Book iv, Canto xi._ 1590) and Camden for the first time tells us that it was called both Granta and Cam (_alii Grantam_, _Camum alii._ 1586) the name used as we have seen by Milton. If there was no river Cante _à fortiori_ there was no river Cam; for the _m_ in the name of the town is only another change in the original first syllable of Cambridge. See _footnote_, p. 6. [9] Trumpington is 2 miles S., Grantchester 2 miles S.S.W. of the town. [10] 878. It was from the town (Grantebrycge) that the Danes set forth, two years before, and surprised Alfred at Wareham. In the time of Ethelred, just before the Danish invasion, Cambridge was a royal mint; it was so in the time of the Conqueror, and had a Danish ‘moneyer,’ and continued to be so under the Plantagenet kings: even Henry VI. coined money at Cambridge. In Domesday the town is described as a “Hundred,” a description, says Stubbs, belonging to big towns with large surrounding common land--Norwich and Canterbury are similarly described. After the history of the town became merged in that of the university, two parliaments were summoned there; in 1388, and in 1447 (afterwards held at Bury-St.-Edmund’s). For the city, see also p. 36 and v. p. 260. [11] Fuller, p. 7. [12] The edict expelling the Jews from England dates from 1290, and the Jews left Cambridge the year following. [13] The fancy appellations Cam and Isis appear to have both been due to Camden. They are not heard of before his work appeared in 1586. [14] Cambridge, writes Doctor Jessopp, existed as a town and fortress “a thousand years before Oxford was anything but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously manufactured earthenware pots.” [15] They found a Roman stone coffin, sculptured; one, apparently, of many known to have been left there, for portions of Roman sarcophagi are even now to be seen walled up in the church at Grantchester. Bede, cap. xix.