VCH Cambridgeshire Publications

This volume was edited by L.F. Salzman and was published in 1938.

It contains the following entries:

• Natural History
• Early Man
• Anglo-Saxon Remains
• Introduction to the Cambridgeshire Domesday
• Translation of the Text of the Cambridgeshire Domesday
• Translation of the Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis
• Index to Domesday and the Inquisitio.

This volume is not currently available online.

This volume was edited by L.F. Salzman and was published in 1948.

In addition to an account of the county's medieval religious houses, it contains the following entries:

• Ancient Earthworks
• Social and Economic History
• Ecclesiastical History.

Schools

• Introduction
• Grammar Schools:
  • Ely
  • The Perse, Cambridge
  • Wisbech
  • Leys School, Cambridge
• Semi-classical schools:
  • Cheveley
  • Soham
  • Dullingham
  • March
  • Haddenham
• Choir Schools:
  • Ely
  • King's College, Cambridge
  • St John's and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge
• Elementary Education:
  • Before 1660
  • Charity and Endowed Elementary Schools, 1660-1800
• The Sunday School Movement
• Elementary Education, 1800-33
• Modern Developments
  • Village Colleges
  • Training Colleges
• Industries
• Political History

The account of the county's medieval religious houses is on British History Online.

Edited by J.P.C. Roach, this volume was published in 1959 and consists of a thematic and topographical account of the City, and a history of the University and its colleges and halls.

The full text is available on British History Online.

Edited by R.B. Pugh, with contributions from T.D. Atkinson, Ethel M. Hampson, E.T. Long, C.A.F. Meekings, Edward Miller, H.B. Wells and G.M.G. Woodgate, the volume was published in 1953.

It covers the city and liberty of Ely, the Hundreds of North and South Witchford and the port of Wisbech.

The full text is available on British History Online.

Edited by Christopher Elrington with contributions from Diane K. Bolton, G.R. Duncombe, R.W. Dunning, Jennifer I. Kermode, A. M. Rowland, W.B. Stephens and A.P.M. Wright, this volume was published in 1973.

This volume contains the histories of 25 parishes in west Cambridgeshire and eight articles on sport. The parishes form the hundreds of Longstowe and Wetherley. On the west they lie along the Old North Road, which has affected the changing shape and fortunes of some of the villages, while on the east the closeness of Cambridge has been influential through the ownership of land and livings by the colleges and, in modern times, through the spread of satellite housing.

The soil is mostly a heavy clay that was not easily drained, and the existence in Wetherley hundred of five deserted village sites may attest the difficulties of cultivation. One site, however, was that of Wimpole, moved to make apark around what became the county's finest country house, once the seat of the Chicheleys and later of Edward Harley, earl of Oxford, and of the earls of Hardwicke. A few other places stand out from their neighbours, Bourn with its Norman castle-site, Caxton as a small market town and coaching centre which prospered until the decline of the Old North Road, and Rupert Brooke's Grantchester. The parishes tend to be small, with nucleated settlements.

Much land remained in open fields until the eighth century, and several villages retain extensive greens. During periods of agricultural depression the inhabitants suffered acute poverty; coprolite-digging between 1855 and 1885 brought some prosperity. Modern agriculture includes large-scale arable farming, fruit-growing, and market-gardening. Light industry, cement-works, and radio-telescopes vary the rural scene. Of the sports whose history is told in the volume, racing takes pride of place since Cambridgeshire includes Newmarket Heath. The presence of the university underlay the development of rowing, football, and cricket, while the county's geographical characteristics have given peculiar importance to wildfowling and skating.

Edited by A.P.M. Wright with contributions from Adrienne B. Rosen, Susan M. Keeling and C.A.F. Meekings, this volume was published in 1978.

This volume contains the histories of 24 parishes in south-east Cambridgeshire, forming the hundreds of Chilford, Radfield, and Whittlesford. Traversed, and in part bounded, by the Icknield Way and the ancient Wool Street, they stretch from the neighbourhood of Cambridge to the Suffolk border. In the valley of the Cam or Granta the arable was cultivated in open fields until the early- rgth-century inclosures.

On the south-eastern upland the medieval clearance of ancient woodland in the heavy clays produced much early inclosure, while the heathland lying along the Icknield Way encouraged sheep-farming, and nearer Newmarket is used for stud-farms. Babraham was notable for 17th-century irrigated meadows, and as the home of the Victorian sheep-breeder, Jones Webb. The villages in the river valleys are mostly nucleated; in the less populous eastern part settlement has been more scattered.

The former market town of Linton, near the centre of the area, had once two small religious houses, and Castle Camps a motte-and-bailey castle, held by the Veres. Among later mansions, the Tudor Babraham Hall, and Horseheath Hall, a grand classical house, destroyed through its owner's extravagance, have gone. Sawston Hall, the seat of the Catholic Huddlestons during four centuries, survives. The village of Sawston and its neighbours have grown since the 19th-century through the presence of such industries as tanning, paper-making, and the production of fertilizers, and more recently of adhesives, besides light engineering. Further east the land is still devoted mainly to farming.

This volume was edited by J.J. Wilkes and was published in 1978.

This volume is devoted to an account of Roman Cambridgeshire. It completes the `general' articles on the county for the Victoria History, while the topography, on which four volumes have already been published, remains to be completed in three or four further volumes. Although in Roman times the county in no way formed a unit, and may indeed have been divided between the provinces of Britannia Superior and Inferior along the line of the Fen Causeway, and although only a relatively small part of the area looked towards the Roman settlement of Cambridge as its centre while the rest looked towards urban centres tying beyond the later county boundary, it has been possible to piece together the story of Roman Cambridgeshire. To a considerable extent it has been possible because of the pioneering groundwork done by the late Sir Cyril Fox on the Cambridge region, extending beyond the county but including all its southern part, and more recently by the Fenland Research Committee, taking in the Isle of Ely along with the rest of the Fens.

The author of the present volume, Mr. David Browne, has devoted a long time to the study of Roman Cambridgeshire and has built on the work of his predecessors. Following a discussion of the landscape, which has changed greatly since the 1st century A.D., and of the roads, he unravels the story of settlement in the Roman period, in which the town of Cambridge, the Duroliponte of the Antonine Itinerary, provides contrasts with the villages of the Fens and the villas of the southern uplands. An analysis of the recorded items of material culture, together with shorter sections on agriculture, currency, religion, and burial, is linked with the settlement history to provide a comprehensive survey which may be used also as a selective gazetteer.

Edited by A.P.M. Wright, with contributions from A.P. Baggs, S.M. Keeling and C.A.F. Meekings this volume was published in 1982.

The volume details the twenty-three parishes of Armingford and Thriplow hundreds, south and west of Cambridge.

The full text is available on British History Online.

Edited by A.P.M. Wright and C.P. Lewis, the volume was published in 1989 and covers the suburban and rural areas to the north and north-west of Cambridge.

The full text is available on British History Online.

Edited by Andrew Wareham and A.P.M. Wright, this volume, the final volume in the Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely series, was published in 2002.

The contributions of ordinary men and women, as well as gentry, clergy, farming dynasties, merchants and manufacturers, to the history of the towns, village, hamlets and streets of East Cambridgeshire, and to theworking of fens, fields and farms, are clearly revealed in the histories of the twenty-three parishes which make up the four hundreds of Staploe, Staine, Flendish and Cheveley.

The region is diverse in character: fenland dominates the north of the region; to the south lies open field arable and heathland, and in Cheveley hundred in the south-west there are hills, a continuation of the East Anglian heights. Major themes include the economy and drainage of the fens, the development of horse breeding around Newmarket, and the growth of industry and communications around Cambridge. The comprehensive history of each parish is fully referenced, illustrated with at least one map, which is complemented by four hundredal articles and an introduction setting out general themes and issues.

The full text is available via British History Online.