es one of
the three finest Perpendicular chapels in the country--a feature
Oxford cannot match, and in the church of the Holy Sepulchre Cambridge
boasts the earliest of the four round churches of the Order of the
Knights Templars which survive at this day.

But comparisons tend to become odious, and sufficient has been said to
vindicate the exquisite charm that Cambridge so lavishly displays.

CHAPTER II

EARLY CAMBRIDGE

Roman Cambridge was probably called Camboritum, but this, like the
majority of Roman place names in England, fell into disuse, and the
earliest definite reference to the town in post-Roman times gives the
name as Grantacaestir. This occurs in Bede's great _Ecclesiastical
History_, concluded in A.D. 731, and the incident alluded to in
connection with the Roman town throws a clear ray of light upon the
ancient site in those unsettled times. It tells how Sexburgh, the
abbess of Ely, needing a more permanent coffin for the remains of
AEtheldryth, her predecessor in office, sent some of the brothers from
the monastery to find such a coffin. Ely being without stone, and
surrounded by waterways and marshes, they took a vessel and came in
time to an abandoned city, "which, in the language of the English, is
called Grantacaestir; and presently, near the city walls, they found a
white marble coffin, most beautifully wrought, and neatly covered with
a lid of the same sort of stone." That this carved marble sarcophagus
was of Roman workmanship there seems no room to doubt, and Professor
Skeat regards it as clear that this ruined town, with its walls and
its Roman remains, was the same place as the Caer-grant mentioned by
the historian, Nennius.

In course of time the Anglo-Saxon people of the district must have
overcome their prejudices against living in what had been a Roman
city, and Grantacaestir arose out of the ruins of its former
greatness. In the ninth century a permanent bridge was built, and the
town began to be known as Grantabrycg, or, as the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle gives it, Grantebrycge. Domesday toned this down to
Grentebrige, and that was the name of Cambridge when a Norman castle
stood beside the grass-grown mound which is all that remains to-day of
the Saxon fortress. What caused the change from G to C is hard to
discover, but when King John was on the throne the name was written
Cantebrige, and the "m" put in its appearance in the earlier half of
the fifteenth century, the "t" being di