The knee-holm, or butchers' broom, used in the Sawston leather work, grows at Whittlesford, on the other side of the Granta, a pretty, shady village with an interesting church; the development of which, from a Saxon nucleus, is a nice (and not yet satisfactorily solved) problem for lovers of mediaeval architecture. There is a wooden porch (oak) of the fourteenth century. At Whittlesford Bridge, where the Granta is crossed by the Icknield Street, close to the railway station, one sees, hard by the road, a decayed stone edifice, with a high pitched roof thatched with reeds, now used as a barn. [Illustration: _Whittlesford._] This is the chapel of the ancient Hospital of St. John, founded in the thirteenth century. There were several such institutions in Cambridgeshire, started, not specially for the care of the sick, but for "hospitality" in the widest sense of the word. Here travellers were entertained, the hungry were fed, the needy were ministered to, according to their several necessities. The Hospitals were rarely large institutions, and this one, as the size of its chapel shows, was quite a small affair, only endowed with some sixty acres of meadow land and a water-mill, equivalent, probably, to some L200 a year in all. But having been under the direction of a prior (appointed by the Bishop of Ely), it is sometimes known by the high-sounding title of Whittlesford Priory. The interior of the building still retains some beautiful early English work. A specially pleasant roadside hostelry next door (the Red Lion), with deliciously quaint carvings on mantel and ceiling, may be held, in some sense, its modern representative; and, indeed, is thought by many authorities to have actually formed part of it. Though, for some reason, always associated with the name of Whittlesford, this Hospital is actually in the adjoining parish of Duxford, or rather in one of the two (now consolidated) parishes of St. John and St. Peter, between which this little village is divided. Both churches still exist (though St. John's is now only used for burials in its churchyard), and both are very much of the same build, mainly Early English, with a little Norman, of which St. John's steeple is the most noteworthy example. St. Peter's has a beautiful "low-side" window in the northern wall of the chancel. To the west of Duxford the Icknield Street traverses a wide bleak expanse of treeless fields which, until the nineteenth century, were the unenclosed turf-land forming the famous Triplow Heath, the scene of the first breach between the Long Parliament and its army. In the view of the Parliament that force had now done its work. The Cavalier levies had been stamped out, the king had been "bought" from the Scots, and was in Parliamentary custody at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, the Scots themselves had withdrawn to their own country; why then should not this costly, and rather dangerous, army be disbanded?