The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland HighwayHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; Fens, The (England) -- Description and travel
Hobson's Conduit, as already noted, once stood in the centre of this
market-place. When his silent, hook-nosed Majesty, William the Third,
visited Cambridge in 1689, the Conduit was made by the enthusiastic
citizens to run wine. Not much wine, though, nor very good, we may
surely suppose, for the tell-tale account-books record that it cost
only thirty shillings!
[Illustration: THE FALCON, CAMBRIDGE.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. SEPULCHRE'S CHURCH.]
Few of the old coach-offices or inns stood in this square, but
were--and are now--to be found chiefly in the streets leading out
of it. The Bull, anciently the Black Bull, still faces Trumpington
Street; the Lion flourishes in Petty Cury; the old Three Tuns, Peas
Hill, is now the Central Temperance Hotel; and the Blue Boar, in whose
archway an unfortunate clergyman, the Reverend Gavin Braithwaite, was
killed in 1814 when seated on the roof of the Ipswich coach, still
faces Trinity Street. The Sun, however, in Trinity Street, where Byron
and his cronies dined and caroused, is no more; and of late years the
Woolpack and the Wrestlers, both very ancient buildings, have been
demolished. Foster's Bank stands on the site of one and the new Post
Office on that of the other. For a while the remains of the galleried,
tumbledown Falcon, stand in a court off Petty Cury; the inn in whose
yard Cambridge students entertained and shocked Queen Elizabeth with a
blasphemous stage travesty of the Mass. In Bridge Street stands the
Hoop, notable in its day, and celebrated by Wordsworth--
"Onward we drove beneath the Castle; caught,
While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam;
And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn."
Beyond the Hoop, the quaintly-named Pickerel Inn stands by Magdalen,
or Great Bridge, just as it did in days when the carriers dumped down
their loads here, to be transferred to the passage-boats for Ely and
Kings Lynn. In Benet Street the Eagle, once the Eagle and Child, still
discloses a courtyard curiously galleried, and hard by is the old Bath
Hotel. This list practically exhausts the old coaching inns, but of
queer hostelries of other kinds there are many, with nodding gables
and latticed windows, in every other lane and by-way. Churches, too,
abound. Oldest among these is St. Sepulchre's, one of the four round
churches in England; a dark Norman building that in the blackness of
its interior accurately figures the grimness of the Norman mind.
XXVI
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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