Villages in 



(4) To the north, and outside the map, come the fen-Une villages — 

 Cottenham, Rampton, WiUingham, Over, Swavesey. These lie much 

 lower than the corresponding villages in the east of the County, where 

 the chalk escarpment borders the peat and brings the 50-ft. contour 

 near to it. 



Northern Cambridgeshire. In the undrained Fenland the islands were the 

 critical sites determining settlements. An eighth-century monk, Felix, 

 records that: 



There is in Britain a fen of immense size, which begins from the river Granta 

 [Gra/Jte] not far from the city, which is named Grantchester [Granteceaster]. There 

 are immense marshes, now a black pool of water, now foul running streams, and 

 also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks and thickets, and with manifold windings 

 wide and long it continues to the north sea — ^ 



By the eleventh century, however, as the Domesday map shows (Fig. 22), 

 the Fenland was not without villages. But settlement was prohibited upon 

 the peatlands because the soil provided no stable foundations on which to 

 build. Judged by the analogy of later times, even those portions that 

 escaped winter flooding were subject to an annual heaving motion as the 

 swollen peat absorbed more and more water. Consequently, not one 

 Domesday village was located in all the peat area, with the sole exception of 

 Benwick, and there only because a local gravel substratum approached 

 within a few inches of the surface.^ The open unoccupied area to the north 

 of the County, shown on Fig. 23, is an expanse of peat. So is the east-west 

 strip of country south of the Ely cluster of villages ; here, in pre-drainage 

 days, the Old West River carried part of the Ouse around the island of Ely 

 and hence to the Wash.^ The villages were all upon the islands. But the 

 silt area, to the north, was composed of a substance more solid than fen 

 peat, and offered better opportunities for continuous settlement. It is true 

 that, in Domesday times, Wisbech alone stood here, but on the modern 

 map, the silt area bears a number of additional villages. 



PARISH BOUNDARIES 



Not only the sites of villages, but also the size, shape, and boundaries of 

 parishes, are related to the geographical circumstances of a country. Fig. 26 

 shows the modern parish boundaries in Cambridgeshire. The parishes vary 

 considerably in size. There are eleven parishes each containing less than 



' Felix, Life of St Gtithlac (Anglo-Saxon version), edited by C. W. Goodwin 

 (1848), p. 21. Grantchester here refers to Cambridge itself. 

 ■ S. B.J. Skertchly, The Geology of the Fenland (1877), p. 4. 

 3 See footnote i, p. 183 below. 



