Treason decided the day against England. The fight began with a brilliant charge by Edmund at the head of his bodyguard, which crashed through the Danish phalanx "like a thunderbolt." But his absence from the English line enabled a traitorous noble, one Edric (who was always playing into Canute's hands, in hope of thereby making his own advantage), to raise a cry that the King was slain. A panic set in at once; and before Edmund could cut his way back, the whole army had broken, and was being fearfully cut up in its flight by the pursuing Danes. "And there the whole nobility of England was utterly destroyed." Edmund died of his exertions the same year; and Canute became King of England, the first monarch so to call himself. The native title had always been "King of the English." In thanksgiving he built a minster on the scene of his victory; and, as he had promised, he lifted up the head of Edric "above all the nobility of England"--upon the highest turret of the Tower of London. The "Roman" theory notwithstanding, the three Bartlow barrows may well be a memorial of this great fight, and so may the names of Castle Camps and Shudy Camps which attach to the furthest villages in this far-away corner of Cambridgeshire. The "Castle," however, of which only the moat now remains, was built later by De Vere, the first Earl of Oxford. Shudy Camps has a far-seen church on its lofty brow, visible even from Barrington Hill, on the other side of the Cam basin, fifteen miles away as the crow flies. [Illustration: _Cherry Hinton Church._] From the Via Devana, where it leaves Cambridge (just after the bridge over the Great Eastern Railway), there branches off to the left another road, which leads us to the scenes of earlier battles between Dane and Englishman. This is the Cherry Hinton Road, named after the first village along its course, some three miles on. Its long straight vista suggests at first sight the idea that it too may be a Roman road. In fact, however, it dates only from the enclosure of the land (about the beginning of last century), when the best ploughman in the village was employed, so the story goes, to drive his straightest furrow across the whole breadth of the Common Field as a guide for the road-makers. The older track between Cherry Hinton and Cambridge was by what used to be, till within the last fifty years, a pretty footpath across the fenny ground to the north of the field. It is fenny no longer, and the path has become for three-fourths of its length a somewhat dreary street through the dingy suburb of "Romsey Town."