̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - local history

Saffron: a Cambridge spice

sjr81 — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:08:30 +0000

An investigation into the local histories of saffron in Cambridgeshire.

Criminals, miscreants and misdemeanours

sjr81 — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 23:57:42 +0000

Two centuries of Isle of Ely court records illuminate the darkest corners of the region's past.

Revealed: face of ‘ordinary poor’ man from medieval Cambridge

fpjl2 — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:23:59 +0000

̽��ֱ��audience of an event at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival found themselves face-to-face with a fellow Cambridge resident – one who had spent the last 700 years buried beneath the venue in which they sat.

̽��ֱ��13th-century man, called Context 958 by researchers, was among some 400 burials for which complete skeletal remains were uncovered when one of the largest medieval hospital graveyards in Britain was discovered underneath the Old Divinity School of St John’s College, and excavated between 2010 and 2012.

̽��ֱ��bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which the College takes its name. ̽��ֱ��hospital was an Augustinian charitable establishment in Cambridge dedicated to providing care to members of the public.

“Context 958 was probably an inmate of the Hospital of St John, a charitable institution which provided food and a place to live for a dozen or so indigent townspeople – some of whom were probably ill, some of whom were aged or poor and couldn't live alone,” said Professor John Robb, from the ̽��ֱ��’s Division of Archaeology.

In collaboration with Dr Chris Rynn from the ̽��ֱ�� of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, Robb and Cambridge colleagues have reconstructed the man’s face and pieced together the rudiments of his life story by analysing his bones and teeth.

̽��ֱ��work is one of the first outputs from the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘After the plague: health and history in medieval Cambridge’ for which Robb is principal investigator. ̽��ֱ��project is analysing the St John's burials not just statistically, but also biographically.

“Context 958 was over 40 when he died, and had quite a robust skeleton with a lot of wear and tear from a hard working life. We can't say what job specifically he did, but he was a working class person, perhaps with a specialised trade of some kind,” said Robb.

“One interesting feature is that he had a diet relatively rich in meat or fish, which may suggest that he was in a trade or job which gave him more access to these foods than a poor person might have normally had. He had fallen on hard times, perhaps through illness, limiting his ability to continue working or through not having a family network to take care of him in his poverty.”

There are hints beyond his interment in the hospital’s graveyard that Context 958’s life was one of adversity. His tooth enamel had stopped growing on two occasions during his youth, suggesting he had suffered bouts of sickness or famine early on. Archaeologists also found evidence of a blunt-force trauma on the back of his skull that had healed over prior to his death.

Click on images below to enlarge:

“He has a few unusual features, notably being buried face down which is a small irregularity for medieval burial. But, we are interested in him and in people like him more for ways in which they are not unusual, as they represent a sector of the medieval population which is quite hard to learn about: ordinary poor people,” said Robb.

“Most historical records are about well-off people and especially their financial and legal transactions – the less money and property you had, the less likely anybody was to ever write down anything about you. So skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived.”

̽��ֱ��focal point of the ‘After the Plague’ project will be the large sample of urban poor people from the graveyard of the Hospital of St John, which researchers will compare with other medieval collections to build up a picture of the lives, health and day-to-day activities of people living in Cambridge, and urban England as a whole, at this time.

“ ̽��ֱ��After the Plague project is also about humanising people in the past, getting beyond the scientific facts to see them as individuals with life stories and experiences,” said Robb.

“This helps us communicate our work to the public, but it also helps us imagine them ourselves as leading complex lives like we do today. That's why putting all the data together into biographies and giving them faces is so important.”

̽��ֱ��Old Divinity School of St John’s College was built in 1877-1879 and was recently refurbished, now housing a 180-seat lecture theatre used for College activities and public events, including last week’s Science Festival lecture given by Robb on the life of Context 958 and the research project.

̽��ֱ��School was formerly the burial ground of the Hospital, instituted around 1195 by the townspeople of Cambridge to care for the poor and sick in the community. Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the Hospital grew with Church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both ̽��ֱ�� scholars and local people.

New facial reconstruction of a man buried in a medieval hospital graveyard discovered underneath a Cambridge college sheds light on how ordinary poor people lived in 13th century England.

Skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived

John Robb

Chris Rynn, ̽��ֱ�� of Dundee

̽��ֱ��facial reconstruction of Context 958

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Stirbitch: mapping the unmappable

amb206 — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��traffic pouring into Cambridge from the east along Newmarket Road passes a tiny flint and stone building that squats on a scrap of meadow. Built around 1125, the Leper Chapel was part of a hospital which took in those afflicted by a disfiguring disease that resulted in stigma and rejection. In his 1954 guide to the historic buildings of Cambridgeshire, Nikolaus Pevsner described the chapel – St Mary Magdalene – as standing “desperately alone”.

This gem of a building, once given to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge but now owned by a trust, sits in the centre of an area known as Barnwell. With its sprawling retail park, poor air quality and scattering of sandwich shops, it has an aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the carefully conserved city centre just half a mile away. But it was precisely this mishmash of unplanned cityscape that prompted Dr Michael Hrebeniak to stop his car one day and walk towards the chapel.

At a seminar on Monday 19 January, Hrebeniak will talk about his journey into the historic and modern narratives that exist on the edge of the city, an in-between place with a rich but largely unrecorded working class past. In what promises to be a presentation full of surprises, he will move from a description of the smells and sights of mediaeval life to a discourse on ‘culture without archive’ and the ‘ontological terminality of neo-liberalism’ – the way in which late-capitalism commodifies space and experience.

In particular, Hrebeniak will explain how his investigation of a liminal zone inspired him to create what he calls ‘a deep map’ that dramatises the immense variety of human transactions within the social and ecological realms. ̽��ֱ��points of reference for this metaphorical map are the human impulses to create and consume, expend and express. Its contours are created by the layered exploitation of the landscape to forge channels of communication – both actual (road, rail and river) and imagined (myth and memory).

His research takes place within broader concerns about the loss of vulnerable culture worldwide. In 2003, UNESCO adopted a series of points agreed at the Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage which drew attention to the importance of this strand of heritage "as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development".

Hrebeniak is a lecturer in English at Wolfson College, and a former jazz musician and journalist. He’s been interested in places and atmospheres ever since he was a boy. “I grew up in an area of suburban north-west London striking for its lack of character – a nowhere kind of place where 20th century development wiped out the past,” he says. “I suppose I’ve always been attentive to traces of cultural memory. As a child, I lacked the language to frame it as such but I'm interested in the habitat and signatures of place and how they’re encoded within the material forms of the commonplace. I remain inveterately curious – a kind of urban Thoreau.”

In 2014 Hrebeniak wrote several papers in which he explored – using Barnwell as his case study – the readability of landscape as a ‘palimpsest’ of surfaces that has been repeatedly created and erased over time. His arguments reference work by other authors and artists exploring themes of transience – including performance artist Bruce Lacey, film-maker Patrick Keiller and social anthropologist Tim Ingold. Hrebeniak's first book, Action Writing, concerned the American writer Jack Kerouac, who was similarly preoccupied with registering how the past mediates the present within his experimental prose.

To capture the permeability of layers of human and ecological stories, Hrebeniak has also used film as a way of expressing the ways in which people and places intersect in a ritualistic cycle of loss and renewal. Filmed over a two-year period, Hrebeniak’s Stirbitch will be screened sometime in the summer, possibly at St Peter’s, a Norman church even smaller than the Leper Chapel, standing on a rise just above Kettle’s Yard.

At Monday’s seminar, Hrebeniak will show brief clips of the film and talk about his creative collaboration with friends at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��: Robin Kirkpatrick (Modern and Medieval Languages) is narrator and Jeremy Thurlow (Music Faculty) has written the music. Together they have produced what Hrebeniak describes as a cinematic interpretation of a prose poem, written to celebrate the vegetable, animal and mineral connections locked into a messy patch on the fringes of a historic city.

Stirbitch is a variant of the older name Steersbrigge, a place where steers (cattle) could cross the river north of Barnwell. Today the name Stourbridge is confined to Stourbridge Common, a fragment of what was once a much larger parcel of common land. Here, for several centuries, an annual fair played a central role in the economic and cultural history of the east of England. ̽��ֱ��story of Stourbridge Fair is embedded with that of the Leper Chapel which, along with a small number of street names (Oyster Row, Garlic Row, Mercers Row, Cheddars Lane), represents the only surviving evidence of the physicality of an event that attracted people from all over the country.

In 1199, the monks who ran the leper hospital were given permission from King John to hold an annual three-day fair to raise funds. ̽��ֱ��fair flourished and soon outgrew its original purpose. By the turn of the 14th century, Stourbridge Fair had established itself as one of medieval England’s most important marketplaces – a trading post linked by road and river where all kinds of goods and services changed hands.

It was at Stourbridge Fair that Isaac Newton bought the glass prisms he needed to prove that light splits into a spectrum of colours. ̽��ֱ��bear that Lord Byron kept as a pet at Trinity College (students were not allowed dogs) is likely to have been purchased there too. An 18th century map of the fair, which took place on land that stretches down to the River Cam, shows it divided into a series of smaller fairs, selling horses, coal, hops and oysters.

In his Tour Throughout the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), Daniel Defoe wrote that “Sturbridge Fair is not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world”. He described it as “a well-fortified city [with] the least disorder and confusion … that can be seen anywhere … with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating houses, innumerable”. But the gathering had a darker side too: prostitutes, peep shows, menageries of exotic animals and displays of ‘freaks’ (giants, dwarves, ‘faeries’) drew the crowds.

̽��ֱ��allure of the fair lies in its fleeting nature which creates a transgressive space on the margins of everyday life where rules are temporarily suspended – a zone of earthy Saturnalia connecting people, place and performance. Cambridge Corporation and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge asserted their control on activities at Stourbridge, prohibiting ‘idle games and diversions’. But ̽��ֱ�� men – most famously Dr Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel – flouted the rules and cavorted with the other revellers.

Hrebeniak’s encounters with Barnwell led him to research the (frustratingly slim) archival material, explore the wildlife of Stourbridge Common (the hops that ramble over the hedgerows are thought to have been introduced by traders) and engage in conversations with the groundsmen at Cambridge United football club (where the bones of lepers are said to lie under the pitch).

In 2009, Hrebeniak became a Cambridge United fan, after receiving a free ticket to an Oxford and Cambridge game held to mark the 800th anniversary of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. He’s a member of a supporters’ group, the 100 Years of Coconuts, that runs a virtual museum and collates oral histories, and takes its name from the Billy Cotton hit. It was the first piece of music played when the club’s public address system went live in the 1950s and it’s played as the final whistle blows every time that Cambridge United has a home win.

“ ̽��ֱ��club really got under my skin and last summer my eldest son Louis trained as a goal-keeper with the club’s youth scheme. ̽��ֱ��stadium is named after Barnwell Abbey. It’s what the French theorist Michel Foucault would call a ‘heterotopia’ – a contested space, surrounded by the ruins of a lemonade bottling plant and cows grazing on the common,” he says.

“Northern soul and ska are played over the terrible sound system. Decades of suffering and ecstasy are etched on the subsiding terraces. It’s a proper working-class football club, a place of generational continuity, and nothing to do with the corporate mercenaries that have corrupted the game higher up the pyramid. Our retired players drive taxis, put out fires, and deliver the post. And the ground really gets rocking. There's a hell of a racket. I haven't enjoyed myself this much in 20 years.”

̽��ֱ��development of permanent shops brought an end to fairs as trading places. Stourbridge Fair took place for the last time in 1933. Money now changes hands in the giant stores that cluster on Newmarket Road, built on the site of a quarry that supplied the gault clay used in Cambridgeshire brick. With its car parks and loud signage, it’s a retail park like many others up and down the country. Yet something of the fairground persists in the defiant spontaneity of people and places.

Each time a new retail unit is constructed, items of debris from the past turn up. While Hrebeniak was filming one day, a workman involved in a recent project explained that one of his colleagues had found a pair of nylon stockings. They dated from the 1940s and, still in their packaging, had almost certainly been brought over by American GIs in the Second World War. “Did he keep them?” asked Hrebeniak. “No,” replied the builder. “He put them on over his overalls and danced.”

Michael Hrebeniak will talk about Stourbridge Fair: Performance, Memory and the Vanished Polis for 15 minutes at a work-in-progress seminar at CRASSH on 19 January 2015, 12.30pm to 2pm. Anyone wishing to attend should email Michelle Maciejewska mm405@cam.ac.uk

Inset images: Leper Chapel (James Myatt via Flickr Creative Commons), map of Stourbridge Fair (Cambridgeshire Collection), murals in Newmarket Road underpass (Martin Pettit via Flickr Creative Commons), Abbey Stadium (stadiumbd.com) Further reading: Cambridge and Stourbridge Fair by Honor Ridout is published by Blue Ocean Publishing.

Dr Michael Hrebeniak describes himself as inveterately curious about people and places. His fascination for a messy patch of Cambridge, best known for its traffic jams and retail park, has led him to create with words and film ‘a deep map’ of the layers of human experience on the fringes of the city.

I’ve always been attentive to traces of cultural memory. I'm interested in the habitat and signatures of place and how they’re encoded within the material forms of the commonplace.

Michael Hrebeniak

AO'D (Flickr Creative Commons)

Stourbridge Common

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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