itself, can outdo them in proportion to the climate they lived in.
I had still the county of Cambridge to visit to complete this tour
of the eastern part of England, and of that I come now to speak.
We enter Cambridgeshire out of Suffolk, with all the advantage in
the world; the county beginning upon those pleasant and agreeable
plains called Newmarket Heath, where passing the Devil’s Ditch,
which has nothing worth notice but its name, and that but fabulous
too, from the hills called Gogmagog, we see a rich and pleasant
vale westward, covered with corn-fields, gentlemen’s seats,
villages, and at a distance, to crown all the rest, that ancient
and truly famous town and university of Cambridge, capital of the
county, and receiving its name from, if not, as some say, giving
name to it; for if it be true that the town takes its name of
Cambridge from its bridge over the river Cam, then certainly the
shire or county, upon the division of England into counties, had
its name from the town, and Cambridgeshire signifies no more or
less than the county of which Cambridge is the capital town.
As my business is not to lay out the geographical situation of
places, I say nothing of the buttings and boundings of this county.
It lies on the edge of the great level, called by the people here
the Fen Country; and great part, if not all, the Isle of Ely lies
in this county and Norfolk. The rest of Cambridgeshire is almost
wholly a corn country, and of that corn five parts in six of all
they sow is barley, which is generally sold to Ware and Royston,
and other great malting towns in Hertfordshire, and is the fund
from whence that vast quantity of malt, called Hertfordshire malt,
is made, which is esteemed the best in England. As Essex, Suffolk,
and Norfolk are taken up in manufactures, and famed for industry,
this county has no manufacture at all; nor are the poor, except the
husbandmen, famed for anything so much as idleness and sloth, to
their scandal be it spoken. What the reason of it is I know not.
It is scarce possible to talk of anything in Cambridgeshire but
Cambridge itself; whether it be that the county has so little worth
speaking of in it, or, that the town has so much, that I leave to
others; however, as I am making modern observations, not writing
history, I shall look into the county, as well as into the
colleges, for what I have to say.
As I said, I first had a view of Cambridge from Gogmagog hills; I
am to add that there appears on the mountain that goes by this
name, an ancient camp or fortification, that lies on the top of the
hill, with a double, or rather treble, rampart and ditch, which
most of our writers say was neither Roman nor Saxon, but British.
I am to add that King James II. caused a spacious stable to be
built in the area of this camp for his running homes, and made old
Mr. Frampton, whom I mentioned above, master or inspector of them.
The stables remain still there, though they are not often made use
of. As we descended westward we saw the Fen country on our right,
almost all covered with water like a sea, the Michaelmas rains
having been very great that year, they had sent down great floods
of water from the upland countries, and those fens being, as may be
very properly said, the sink of no less than thirteen counties –
that is to say, that all the water, or most part of the water, of
thirteen counties falls into them; they are often thus overflowed.
The rivers which thus empty themselves into these fens, and which
thus carry off the water, are the Cam or Grant, the Great Ouse and
Little Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, and the river which runs from
Bury to Milden Hall. The counties which these rivers drain, as
above, are as follows:-
Lincoln, Warwick, Norfolk,
* Cambridge, Oxford, Suffolk,
* Huntingdon, Leicester, Essex,
* Bedford, * Northampton
Buckingham, * Rutland.