These birds belong to Chippenham Hall, a mansion built by Admiral Russell, the hero of La Hogue in 1692, our first great naval victory since the rout of the Armada, "and the first great victory that the English had gained over the French since the day of Agincourt."[134] It stands on the site of an earlier house, which, in its day, served as a place of confinement for Charles the First in 1647, after the raid by Cornet Joyce on Holmby House had transferred his custody from the hands of the Parliament to those of the Army. Here he remained for some weeks, while the somewhat sordid game of political intrigue (out of which he still hoped to make his own) was being played around him, "very pleasant and cheerful, taking his recreation daily at tennis, and delighting much in the company of Cornet Joyce," but refusing to listen to the famous Puritan stalwart, Hugh Peters, who was accustomed to hold forth "with the Bible in the one hand and a great pistol in the other," and who here "moved His Majesty to hear him preach. Which His Majesty did the rather decline." [Footnote 134: Macaulay.] Within sight of Soham, across the fen to the east, and only three miles away, stood for awhile another House of Religion, the Priory of Isleham. But to get from one to the other it was (and is) needful to go round by Fordham, making the distance at least double. A more out of the way place than Isleham cannot well be found, but it is worth a visit. All that remains of the Priory is an oblong structure of stone buttressed with red brick, looking on the outside like a barn, and, indeed, used as such. But it is, in fact, the hulk of the Priory Church; and, inside, the pillars and capitals are in very fair condition. The work is all Norman. This short-lived establishment was built in the eleventh century, as a "cell" (or outlying colony), of the Abbey of St. Jacutus de Insula, near Dol in Brittany. Within two centuries the monks abandoned it in favour of their sister house at Linton.[135] [Footnote 135: After the suppression of the alien Priories this property went to the Crown, and was granted by Henry the Sixth to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in whose hands it still remains.] They may have found Isleham too sequestered. It stands, like Soham, on the verge of the Isle of Ely, and also on the verge of Suffolk, to which county it seems actually to have belonged throughout great part of the Middle Ages. But it was in the Bishopric neither of Ely nor of Norwich, but of far away Rochester, to which it had been annexed, as tradition went, by Alfred the Great. The Church, dedicated to St. Andrew, has an exceptionally fine hammer-beam roof, bearing the inscription: CRYSTOFER PEYTON DID MAK THYS ROFE IN THE YERE OF OURE LORD MCCCCLXXXXV BEING THE X YERE OF KINGE HENRY THE VII.