126 The Nineteenth Century 



Fires 'were "of almost nightly occurrence". "A few bad fellows in a 

 district are believed to do all the mischief, and bring discredit on the whole 

 rural population." But this does not imply that the rural population 

 had no grievance; although employment was available, wages were low, 

 "ys. to 8s. a week being the current rate".' Taken together, these two 

 pictures, by Jonas and Caird respectively, of technical improvement and 

 social discontent, may give some idea of conditions in Cambridgeshire 

 during the middle of the century. 



However conflicting the evidence, nothing can gainsay the fact that 

 many parts of rural Cambridgeshire had a special boom of their own, after 

 about 1850, through the setting up of the "coprolite" industry for the 

 manufacture of manures. By origin, the word "coprohte" signifies 

 petrified dung, presumably of enormous reptiles, but the term came to 

 include phosphatised casts of vertebrate remains in general. CoproHtes 

 were to be found in the Cambridge Greensand^ that marked the base of 

 the Chalk, and that ran north-east — south-west tlirough Soham, Burwell, 

 Swaffham, Homingsea, Cambridge, Grantchester, Barrington, and so 

 westward into Bedfordshire.3 The deposits were described by O. Fisher in 

 1873: 



The Cambridgeshire phosphatic nodules, as is well known, are extracted by 

 washing from a stratum (seldom much exceeding a foot in thickness) lying at the 

 base of the lower chalk, and resting immediately, without any passage-bed, upon 

 the Gault. There is, however, a gradual passage upwards from the nodule-bed into 

 the lower chalk or clunch. The average yield is about 300 tons per acre; and the 

 nodules are worth about 50 shillings a ton. The diggers usually pay about ;^I40 per 

 acre for the privilege of digging, and return the land at the end of two years properly 

 leveUed and re-soiled. They follow the nodules to a depth of about 20 feet; but it 

 scarcely pays to extract them to that depth.'* 



Generally speaking, the years between 1850 and about 1870 were pros- 

 perous ones for much of the Coimty. A foomote in the Census Returns 

 attributes an mcrease of population at Orwell, between 1861 and 1871, to 

 the "demand for labour in the coprolite diggings". The same cause, too, 

 was responsible for growth at Barton, Great Eversden, Harston, HasUng- 

 field and Trumpington; and at Wicken the increase was likewise "attri- 

 buted to the extensive coprohte digging having attracted numbers of 

 labour". By the end of the century, however, the coprolite beds had 



' J. Caird, op. cit. p. 468. » See p. 13 above. 



3 The Lower Greensand phosphatic deposits were also being worked about the 

 years 1866-68, chiefly near Wicken. W. Keeping, Fossils of the Neocomian Deposits 

 of Upware and Brickhill (1883), pp. 1-2. See p. 11 above. 



■* O. Fisher, " On the Phosphatic Nodules of the Cretaceous Rocks of Cambridge- 

 shire", Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc. xxix, 52 (1873). A detailed account of coprolite digging, 

 based upon direct observation at Burwell, is given by C. Lucas, The Fenrnan's World 

 (1930), p. 25. 



