Highways and Byways in Cambridge and ElyConybeare, John William Edward
History
Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely
Conybeare, John William Edward
Cambridgeshire (England) -- Description and travel; Isle of Ely (England) -- Description and travel
In close proximity to these ruins is an actually surviving relic of
Barnwell Priory. This is a tiny church of Early English Architecture,
known as the "Abbey Church," or "Little St. Andrew's."[121] Small as
it is, it is the Mother Church of a huge parish (now happily divided
into districts) containing more than half the entire population of
the Borough of Cambridge. It was built by the Canons of Barnwell, when
their Priory was a century old, for the use of the little knot of
hangers-on whom every great abbey attracted to its doors, and whose
secular (and, perhaps, far from cleanly) presence was unwelcome at the
fastidious worship of the Priory Church. And they made it the
representative of the old hermit's Oratory of St. Andrew. For long
ages it sufficed for the adjoining population; but when that
population increased by the hundred-fold, as it did at the opening of
the nineteenth century, things got to a desperate pass, and Barnwell
became practically heathen, with an only too well-deserved reputation
for vice of every kind.
[Footnote 121: So called to distinguish it from "Great St. Andrew's,"
opposite Christ's College.]
So matters stood when, in 1839, Dr. Perry, Fellow of Trinity College,
who was Senior Wrangler in 1828, and whom we have met with as the
devoutest attendant at the College Chapel, and as the builder of Great
St. Andrew's, came forward to stem the evil. Renouncing the comfort of
College life, he took upon himself the charge of this hopeless
district; for which he built, at his own expense, the commodious (if
ugly) red-brick church opposite the Abbey, and a like fabric (St.
Paul's) at the other end of the area, on the way to the railway
station. He laboured devotedly himself, he inspired others to work, he
invoked the help of a band of pious undergraduates who had already
begun a Sunday School on their own account,[122] and when he departed
to become the pioneer Bishop of Australia, he left a well-equipped
Parish organisation which is still in full activity.[123]
[Footnote 122: This School still flourishes, and is still staffed by
undergraduates. It is known as "Jesus Lane Sunday School," its first
quarters having been in that street.]
[Footnote 123: The parish has now been divided into half a dozen
districts. And its earliest houses, immediately round the Abbey
Church, remain (as they have been from the first) outlying fragments
of two small Town parishes, St. Benet's and St. Edward's.]
[Illustration: _The Lepers' Chapel, Barnwell._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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