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