The great undrained fen region of eastern England, a mere desolate waste of water-logged marsh, interspersed by a few low islets of glacial boulder clay, must long have been one of the least habitable districts in all Great Britain. Nevertheless, its outskirts still contain many important traces of early occupation and of considerable primæval monuments. The tract which now composes Cambridgeshire evidently belongs by historical connection to the East Anglian island, as a western march or borderland of that insulated kingdom. As early as the Celtic times, the dry land of the county — that is to say, the low chalk-hill district in the south — was almost certainly included in the territory of the Iceni. The Devil’s Ditch, which crosses Newmarket Racecourse, and three other prehistoric earthworks in the south-west of the county, all have their ramparts turned towards the Icenian territory, while their fosse lies on the outer or western side: thus showing that they were erected to protect the region from the attacks of a nation living farther westward in the interior of England. The old British track known as the Icenhild or Icknield Way [whether or not its name means as has been guessed], the “war-path of the Iceni,” also crosses the shire from end to end, and its course is marked throughout by the tumuli and pit-dwellings of the primitive inhabitants. Many local names still preserve the memory of these earliest historical Cambridge men.
The town of Cambridge itself more probably owes its origin to the Romans, though the great British camp or refuge at Wandlebury, on the summit of the stunted Gogmagogs, no doubt implies the existence of an Icenian village in the valley beneath. Whether Cambridge itself or Grantchester, close by, represents the Roman Camboritum, it is at least certain that Roman stations once occupied both the neighbouring sites. When the English pirates overran Norfolk and Suffolk, they must, in all probability, have conquered the dry southern portion of Cambridgeshire as well, including the two Roman posts, which long after lay waste and uninhabited. But in the northern fen-land it seems likely that numbers of Britons held out for a while against the heathen invaders, among the islets and morasses of Ely or Thorney, as the native English six centuries later held out in the self-same fastnesses against the Norman conqueror. Sir Francis Palgrave has collected a number of interesting passages which imply the existence of isolated independent Celtic bands in the fen country to a comparatively late period; and even Mr. Freeman admits, in an unobtrusive footnote, the probability of his conclusion. Indeed, the rules of the thanes’ guild at Cambridge itself, an Anglo-Saxon document of the eleventh century, make mention of a distinct penalty even then for killing a “Welshman,” whose life was held cheaper than that of an English churl. It seems probable that the dry land in the south formed an integral part of the East Anglian kingdom from the time of its first formation; while the northern islets were more slowly subdued by a separate English tribe, the South Gyrwas — so called in contradistinction to the North Gyrwas of the Lincolnshire fens; and these settlers in the marshes retained their own petty kinglets at least till after the period of the conversion to Christianity.
The early history of the district, not yet a single complete shire, centres rather round the shrine of Ely than round the then ruined Roman station of Cambridge. The great monastery owed its foundation to one Ethelthryth, an old English queen whose name has been conveniently simplified by our Latin chroniclers into Etheldreda, or more colloquially still into Awdrey. She was daughter of Anna, king of the East Anglians, and she was given in marriage to his subject prince, Tondberht, king of the South Gyrwas. After her husband’s death she raised a little mixed house for monks and nuns, almost on the very site now occupied by the cathedral; and from this beginning the wealthy Benedictine establishment of later days took its rise. Etheldreda herself was buried within the church in a marble sarcophagus discovered among the ruins of the Roman station, then a “waste chester” on the banks of Cam. We hear nothing more of the Gyrwas or their kings after the death of Bede, dependent as we are for the subsequent period on the scanty annals of the Winchester Chronicle: but there is no reason to doubt that the district was still ruled by its own petty princes, as vassals of the East Anglian overlord, till the date of the Danish irruption. The Scandinavians seized early upon the almost insular region of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, and fell with special fury upon the rich religious houses of the Fens. The monks, protected by custom during internal wars, had turned the islets into the best-tilled land in England; and the Danes found more booty in these remote shrines than even in royal towns like York and Tamworth. Not Ely alone, but Peterborough, Thorney, Crowland, and Soham as well, were all destroyed in the first onslaught of the heathen; and their sites lay desolate for many years, till the monasteries were refounded by West Saxon kings or bishops after the English recovery of East Anglia and the Mercian shires.
It was the Danes, apparently, who resuscitated the importance of Cambridge town, so long neglected, and who gave approximately to Cambridgeshire its present artificial boundaries. Perhaps the earliest mention in an English document of “Grantanbrycge” occurs in the Winchester Chronicle during the reign of Alfred; when three Danish kings, Guthrum, Oscytel, and Anwend, came southward from Repton with “a mickle host,” and “sat there one year.” After the Danes had “horsed themselves” and settled down quietly on the soil, such a host, distinct from that which held East Anglia, though doubtless in dependent alliance with it, took up its permanent quarters in the town of Cambridge. The post was a convenient one for making raids into English Hertfordshire, on the direct line for the rich monastery of St. Albans and the merchant commonwealth of London itself: in fact, it was just the sort of place the Danes loved, and it became accordingly the temporary metropolis of one among the many rude little Scandinavian States which then occupied the whole of the north and the midlands. To judge by analogies elsewhere, we may conclude that the Danes divided out the land among themselves as lords of the manors, and that the territory dependent upon Cambridge was roughly coincident in boundary with the modern shire. For half a century the heathen held sway in Cambridge, and over the patrimony of St. Etheldreda; but when Edward the Elder engaged in his gallant campaign for the recovery of the conquered districts, Cambridgeshire only held out for a very short time. A single victory secured Essex and East Anglia, in both of which the Danish garrison accepted Edward’s supremacy; and then, says the English Chronicle, “the host that belonged to Grantanbrycge chose him separately for lord and protector, and fastened it with oaths.” Seeing that Edward erected the other petty Danish States into shires as soon as they were recovered, we may be pretty sure that he did the same with the territory of the Cambridge host; and indeed as early as the time of Athelred we find “Grantabrycg-scir” distinctly mentioned by name in the Chronicle as a county. The river has always had a double alternative title — either as Cam or Granta — and both forms must be very ancient, since the one is enshrined in Camboritum and the other in Grantchester; but the precise date of the substitution of Cambridge for Grantabrycg, or Grantebridge, is not known with certainty.
The Isle of Ely has a peculiar later county history of its own. The monastery was refounded by Bishop Ethelwold, of Winchester, under King Edgar, and was then endowed afresh with large landed property. Its abbots became chiefs of the King’s Court up to the time of the Norman Conquest, alternately with those of Glastonbury and St. Augustine’s. But after the resistance offered to William by the last English patriots in the Isle, traditionally associated with the exploits of Hereward, though really headed by Edwin and Morkere, the monastery fell into royal disfavour, as a hotbed of anti-Norman insurrectionary feeling. To weaken its influence a new bishopric was erected at Ely, early in the twelfth century, its territory being carved out of the immense diocese of Lincoln, which then stretched from the Humber to the Thames, and the revenues of the see were provided for from those of the monastery. The isle itself became a royal franchise, known as the Liberty of the Bishop of Ely, and was in fact, though not in name, a county palatine. The Bishops ruled as really in this little district as the successors of St. Cuthbert ruled in their larger principality of Durham. The episcopal power was largely curtailed under Henry VIII., but the temporal jurisdiction of the Bishop was not wholly abolished until the year 1837.