Cambridge c. 1020: The Setting of St Bene’t’s

By Rory Naismith

Alison Taylor, 'Cambridge: the Hidden History' (Stroud,1999)

Cambridge and its Region

Known in Old English as Grantabrycg, ‘bridge over the river Granta’, Cambridge in the years around 1020 was already a well-established town, the centre of its shire, and reckoned in its own right as a ‘hundred’, or major administrative division of that shire. Within East Anglia it ranked as the equal of Ipswich, Norwich and Thetford in prestige. All four of these towns lay within what is now known as the Danelaw: a region of eastern England marked by Scandinavian settlement and culture, reflected in the personal names of some Cambridge locals in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as in the terminology and institutions of local government: Cambridge had, for example, ‘lawmen’ like Lincoln and other towns in the Danelaw, who would act as witnesses to important business in the town. Three such men – Eadric the Red, Leofric of Berle and Sigeferth the Mad – prevented a local landowner called Leofric of Brandon from reneging on a deal with St Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester (963–84) when he was busily buying up property to endow his refounded monastery at Ely. This was one of many occasions when business relating to land and legal matters in Cambridgeshire was done at the town, under the watchful eyes of powerful individuals from roundabout.

Gild statutes in Cotton Tiberius B. V f.74r-v

In its capacity as a focal point for local society, Cambridge hosted one of the first known gilds in England. Describing itself as ‘the gild of thegns in Cambridge’, it consisted of individuals holding the rank of thegn, which stemmed from landholding or trading success and entailed service to the king in both military and civil contexts. Members probably came from the land surrounding Cambridge as well as the town, and the statutes of the gild were written into a book that belonged to the abbey of Ely, suggesting a relationship with the wealthy monastery fifteen miles away. The gild regulations reveal a strong interest in group solidarity, especially in relation to the possibility of legally sanctioned violence. If a gild member killed someone for valid reasons, co-members would chip in to help them pay compensation to the family of the victim. And if a member were killed, co-members were expected to help exact compensation, or revenge in kind. Gild members also had to help bring their fellows to their chosen place of burial. The gild also recognised the possibility of tension and violence within its ranks, and made provision for members insulting, wounding or even killing one another. The impression one gets is of a boisterous yet versatile group that provided a way of asserting as well as protecting status.

These thegns may have been among the men that Cambridge and its shire sent to join an army of East Anglians that faced the vikings at Ringmere (Norfolk) in May 1010. Only the contingent from Cambridgeshire is said to have held firm against the enemy. The city was an active participant in the long and costly fighting against the vikings in the early years of the eleventh century, and at times found itself on or dangerously near the front line. After the invaders were victorious at Ringmere they ravaged East Anglia and burned Cambridge and Thetford to the ground. A few years later, in October 1016, the climactic clash between the English and viking armies took place at a location named Assandun, which may be Ashdon, 13 miles south of Cambridge.

Cambridge the Town

In relative terms Cambridge was undoubtedly an important place, though small by modern standards. The Domesday Book survey, undertaken in 1086 but reporting conditions in 1066, records that it then contained ten custodiae or wards, in which at least 372 tenements existed, implying a population of around 1,500 or more. It is not known exactly how many churches served the early town: St Bene’t’s is the only one with significant architectural remains from this period, but the dedications of and archaeological finds from ten others (including St Giles, St Clement, St Edward King and Martyr, Little St Mary and St Botolph) suggest a possible pre-Conquest foundation.

In the eleventh century, settlement straddled both sides of the river Cam (or, as it was then known, the Granta). On the north bank it overlay, extending up Castle Hill, the remains of the small Romano-British town of Durolipons, where in the seventh century St Æthelthryth had found among the Roman ruins a sarcophagus to reuse for herself at Ely. This part of Cambridge was the early focus of Anglo-Saxon settlement, with a so-called ‘execution cemetery’ at Chesterton Lane Corner in the eighth century, and it continued into the later Anglo-Saxon period. Beneath part of the castle erected in 1068 (on the site of the current Shire Hall car park) was once a rich cemetery from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, where a number of carved stone monuments (some now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) were found in 1810.

To the south of the Cam, most of the town lay within the King’s Ditch, first recorded in the twelfth century but probably of earlier, pre-Conquest date. It ran south from the river roughly along the line of New Park Street and Hobson Street, then curved west to meet up with the line of what is now Pembroke Street and Mill Lane, ending in the Mill Pond. Finds of pottery and other objects from within this area reveal that it was already densely built up by the eleventh century.

It was probably within this area that Cambridge’s market could be found, though whether it lay in the same spot as the current market square remains a matter of speculation. But there is no doubt that the town was, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a significant centre of trade by both road and river. Among visitors to Cambridge were Irish merchants who came to sell cloaks. Probably based in the vicinity of the market were also a number of men charged with making and exchanging coin, known as moneyers. Moneyers were well-connected men of influence and resources whose name provided a guarantee for their coins. They existed to mediate between local people and their commerce, and the requirements of the state, including taxes and tributes. Cambridge had probably witnessed minting since the mid-tenth century, and generally housed between one and ten moneyers. It was one of over a hundred locations where coins were made in England in the century before the Norman Conquest.

Dr Rory Naismith is a lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.