Cambridge (England) -- History; University of Cambridge -- History
"At this time the fountain of learning in Cambridge was but little,
and that very troubled.... Mars then frighted away the Muses, when
the Mount of Parnassus was turned into a fort, and Helicon derived
into a trench. And at this present, King William the Conqueror,
going to subdue the monks of Ely that resisted him, made
Cambridgeshire the seat of war."--FULLER.
William I. at Cambridge Castle--Cambridge at the Domesday
Survey--Roger Picot the Sheriff--Pythagoras School--Castle and
Borough--S. Benet's Church and its Parish--The King's Ditch--The
Great and the Small Bridges--The King's and the Bishop's Mills--The
River Hithes--S. Peter by the Castle and S. Giles Church--The early
Streets of the City--The Augustinian Priory of Barnwell--The Round
Church of the Holy Sepulchre--The Cambridge Jewry--Debt of early
Scholars to the Philosophers of the Synagogue--Benjamin's
House--Municipal Freedom of the Borough.
On the site of the ancient Roman station of which we have spoken in the
preceding chapter, as guarding the river ford and the pass between
forest and fen into East Anglia, William the Conqueror, returning from
the conquest of York in the year 1068, founded Cambridge Castle, that
"it might be"--to quote Fuller's words--"a check-bit to curb this
country, which otherwise was so hard-mouthed to be ruled." Here, in the
following year, he took up his abode, making the castle the centre of
his operations against the rebel English who had rallied to the
leadership of Hereward the Wake, in his camp of refuge at Ely. But the
castle at Cambridge never became a military centre of importance. No
important deed of arms is recorded in connection with it. It was a mere
outpost, useful only as a base of operations. It was so used by William
the Conqueror. It was so used by Henry III. in his futile contest with
the English baronage. It was so used by the Duke of Northumberland in
his unsuccessful attempt to crush the loyalist rising of East Anglia
against his plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. It was so used
by Oliver Cromwell when he was organising the Eastern Counties
Association, and forming "his lovely company" of Ironsides. But beyond
these episodes Cambridge Castle has no history. In the early part of the
fourteenth century it was used as a prison for common criminals. Edward
III. built his College of King's Hall with some of its materials, and
from that time onwards it appears to have been used as a quarry by the
royal founders of more than one college. Its last remaining outwork, the
Gate House, was demolished in 1842. Now there is nothing left but the
grass-grown mound, still known as Castle Hill, the resort of occasional
American tourists who are wise enough to know how fine a view of the
town may be obtained from that position, and, so it is said, a less
frequent place of pilgrimage also to certain university freshmen who are
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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