Descending then from the misty cloudland of Fable to the hard ground of historic Fact, we are shortly met by a question which, I hope, Fuller would have recognised as businesslike. How did it come about that our forefathers founded a University on the site which we now call Cambridge--"that distant marsh town," as a modern Oxford historian somewhat contemptuously calls it? The question is a natural one, and has not seldom been asked. We shall find, I think, the most reasonable answer to it by asking a prior question. How did the town of Cambridge itself come to be a place of any importance in the early days? The answer is, in the first place, geographical; in the second, commercial. We may fitly occupy the remaining space of this chapter in seeking to formulate that answer. And first, as to the physical features of the district which has Cambridge for its most important centre. "The map of England," it has been strikingly said by Professor Maitland, "is the most wonderful of all palimpsests." Certainly that portion of the map of England which depicts the country surrounding the Fenlands of East Anglia is not the least interesting part of that palimpsest. Let us take such a map and try roughly to decipher it.[2] If we begin with the seaboard line we shall perhaps at first sight be inclined to think that it cannot have changed much in the course of the centuries. And most probably the coast-line of Lincolnshire, from a point northwards near Great Grimsby or Cleethorpes at the mouth of the Humber to a point southwards near Waynefleet at the mouth of the Steeping River, twenty miles or less north of Boston, and again the coast-line of Norfolk and Suffolk from Hunstanton Point at the north-east corner of the Wash round past Brancaster and Wells and Cromer to Yarmouth and then southwards past Southwold and Aldborough to Harwich at the mouth of the Orwell and Stour estuary, has not altered much in ten or even twenty centuries. But that can hardly be said with regard to the coast-line of the Wash itself. For on its western side our palimpsest warns us that there is a considerable district called _Holland_; that on its south side, a dozen miles or more from the present coast-line, is a town called _Wisbech_ (or Ouse-beach); that still farther inland, within a mile or two of Cambridge itself, are to be found the villages of Waterbeach and Landbeach; and that scattered throughout the whole district of the low-lying lands are villages and towns whose place-names have the termination "ey" or "ea," meaning "island"--such, as Thorney, Spinny, Sawtrey, Ramsey, Whittlesea, Horningsea; and that one considerable tract of slightly higher ground, though now undoubtedly surrounded by dry land, is still called the Isle of Ely. These place-names are significant, and tell their own story. And that story, as we try to interpret it, will gradually lead us to the conclusion that the ancient seaboard line of the Wash, instead of being