It was the indiscriminate almsgiving of the religious houses--the Abbeys and the Priories of old--that fostered this race of vagrom men and women, the ancestors of the tramps of to-day. Like the Salvation Army in our times,--either better or worse, whichever way you regard it,--they fed, and sometimes sheltered, the outcast and the hungry. Only the hungry are not fed for nothing, nor without payment sheltered by the Salvationists. They purchase food and lodging off the Army for a trifle in coin or by a job of work: the monks exacted nothing in return for the dole or the straw pallet that any hungry wretch was welcome to. Thus, throughout the land a great army of the lazy, the unfortunate, and the afflicted were in mediæval times continually tramping from one Abbey to another. Sometimes they stole, oftener they begged, and they found the many pilgrims who were always making pilgrimage from one shrine to another handy to prey upon. Ill fared the straggler from the pilgrim train that wound its length along the ancient ways; for there were those among the vagrom gang who would not scruple to rob or murder him, and that is one among many reasons why pilgrimage was made in company. Stretham village, it is scarce necessary in these parts to say, is set on a hill, or what in the Fens is by courtesy so-called. No village here has any other site than some prehistoric knob of clay that by strange chance raised itself above the ooze. The site of Stretham, being in the Isle of Ely, was an isle within an isle. Still one goes up to and down from it. Still you see ancient houses there with flights of steps up to the front doors, so hard put to it were the old inhabitants to keep out of the way of the water; and even yet, when you are come to the levels again, the houses cease and no more are seen until the next rise is reached, insignificant enough to the eye, but to the mind stored with the old lore of the Fens significant of much. Stretham is a large village. It does not run to length, as do places in other parts of the country situated, like it, on a great road. _They_ commonly consist of one long street: Stretham, built on the crown of a hill, has odd turns and twists, and streets unexpectedly opening on either hand as the explorer advances, and is, so to speak, built round and round itself. In its midst, where the road broadens into as wide a space as a village squeezed on to the crown of an island hilltop could anciently afford, stands a market cross. You may seek far and wide for information about this cross, but you will not find. All we know is that, by its look, it belongs to the fifteenth century, and we may shrewdly suspect that the nondescript plinth it stands upon replaces a broad approach of steps. When the steps were taken away is a matter as unknown as the history of the cross itself; but if we do not know the when, we at least, in the light of Stretham's circumstances, know the why. The street was inconveniently narrowed by them.