scarded at the same period. It
seems that the name of the river was arrived at by the same process.
Perhaps the oddest feature of the whole of these vicissitudes in
nomenclature is the similarity between the Roman Camboritum and
Cambridge, for the two names have, as has been shown, no connection
whatsoever.

A map of Cambridgeshire, compiled by the Rev. F.G. Walker, showing the
Roman and British roads reveals instantly that the university town has
a Roman origin, for it stands at the junction of four roads, or rather
where Akeman Street crossed Via Devana, the great Roman way connecting
Huntingdon and Colchester. Two or three miles to the south, however,
the eye falls on the name of a village called Grantchester, and if we
had no archaeology to help us, we would leap to the conclusion that
here, and not at Cambridge, was the ancient site mentioned by the
earlier chroniclers. And this is precisely what happened. Even recent
writers have fallen into the same old mistake in spite of the
discovery of Roman remains on the site of the real Roman town, and
notwithstanding the fact that the two roads mentioned intersect there.
The trouble arose through the alterations in spelling in the name of
the village of Granteceta, or, as it often appears in early writings,
Gransete, but now that Professor Skeat has given us the results of his
careful tracking of the name back to 1080, when it first appears in
any record, we see plainly that this village has never had a past of
any importance, and that the original name means nothing more than
"settlers by the Granta." There is a Roman camp near this village, and
a few other discoveries of that period have been made there, but such
finds have been made in dozens of places near Cambridge.

It is therefore an established fact that modern Cambridge has been
successively British, Roman, Saxon, and Norman, and the original town,
situated on the north-western side of the river, has extended across
the water and filled the space bounded on three sides by the Cam.

Being on the edge of the Fen Country, where the Conqueror found the
toughest opposition to his completed sovereignty in England, the patch
of raised ground just outside modern Cambridge was a suitable spot for
the erection of a castle, and from here he conducted his operations
against the English, who held out under Hereward the Wake on the Isle
of Ely. In the hurried operations preceding the taking of the "Camp of
Refuge" in 1071,