Township and Borough Author:Frederic William Maitland Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX OF NOTES AND EVIDENCE RELATING CHIEFLY TO CAMBRIDGE. § I. At Cambridge, as at Oxford, a supposed Roman town has been retiring before the modern i... more »nvestigator1. The Cam- boritum, Roman Station of our ordnance map is a disputed conjecture. With this we need not meddle. ' Chaque jour 1'idee d'une survie des institutions municipales romaines a perdu plus de terrain.' What perished in Germany, Gaul, Spain, Italy did not persist in abandoned Britain. It has, however, been a common belief that the Grentebrige of Domesday Book lay wholly to the north of the river, and this theory of a little transpontine Cambridge we must not allow to pass unquestioned. § 2. In the first place, the tower of St Benet's Church raises its protest. The houses which that church implies were a part of Grentebrige or they are riot accounted for in the Conqueror's geld-book. The Survey of Cambridgeshire has no name to spare for the vanished village. § 3. But further, the Grentebrige of the Confessor's time had, so it seems to me, too many houses to be packed into the transpontine area. It was a town of 400 houses divided into ten wards. In 1086, when William made the inquest, 27 houses (but no more) had been destroyed in order that the castle might be reared, and two of the ten wards had been thrown together. This double ward had 54 houses. We add the 27 and thus obtain 81. The other eight wards contained 48,41,45, 50, 37, 37, 32, and 29 houses respectively. Altogether there had been 400 houses, and these were distributed with some approach to equality among the ten wards. We know that the second of these wardswas called the Bridgeware!. We know also that the fourth ward contained a church which belonged to the abbey of Ely1. 1 For Oxford, Parker, Early History of Oxford, 62; for Cambridge...« less