Cambridge – Cambridge Military History

On 15 July 1099, Jerusalem fell to the armies of the First Crusade. Their stated goal, as the soldiers poured into the city set on murder, rape, and pillage was to wrest the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other holy places from the Armies of Islam and establish a Christian Kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. These Crusader States would stumble on but effectively ended in 1291 when the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell after the siege of Acre. The last stronghold of Outremer (the term used by the Frankish knights, simply French for overseas), Acre fell to the Mamluks and despite numerous additional Crusades, the Levant would remain in the control of a succession of Islamic States until seized by the British and French from the Ottoman Turks in the Great War.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built in the early 4^th Century during the reign of Constantine the Great. According to tradition, it contains both Golgotha, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, and the tomb in which he was buried and rose from the dead. It underwent both Byzantine and Crusader modifications and changes, but its round design was established and known by the Middle Ages across Europe.

After the First Crusade, newly established religious orders such as the Knights Templar (Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon) and the Knights Hospitaller (Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem), along with pilgrims who had visited Jerusalem, returned to Europe and built churches which emulated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Mimicking the circular shape seen in Jerusalem, a handful of Round Churches were built across England recalling the site in Jerusalem of Christ’s passion and resurrection.

Between 1114 and 1131, only 15 years after the fall of Jerusalem, the Round Church in Cambridge was founded by an obscure group which we know little about which called itself The Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre. In fact, there is no other record of this group except from this one project, and it was likely formed for the sole purpose of building the Round Church in Cambridge. The Fraternity claimed that the construction was “in honour of God and the Holy Sepulchre”. Consecrated as “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre”, it has been commonly called “St. Sepulchre’s” or simply, “The Round Church” since the 13^th Century. This predates Cambridge University by almost a hundred years.

The first vicar of the Round Church was recorded as Geoffrey of Alderhethe in 1272. He was the Master of the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, a religious hospital which resided across Bridge Street from the Round Church. (Bridge Street today is the old Roman Road, the via Devana, which ran from Huntingdon to Cambridge, crossed the Cam, and passed the Roman Fort of Duroliponte which is now Castle Hill.) The medieval Hospital is now St. John’s College, part of the University of Cambridge.

Expansions and extensions occurred over the next centuries, including a crenelated, multi-story tower which was added to the centre of the church in the 15^th Century. At the same time, the Norman windows were replaced with larger, arched gothic windows. The church remained mostly undisturbed until 3 January 1644, when the Puritan officer and notorious iconoclast William Dowsing, known as “Smasher Dowsing”, arrived. Following the Parliamentary Ordinance of 28 August 1643 that “all monuments of Superstition and idolatry should be removed and abolished”, he and his soldiers destroyed fourteen pictures in the Round Church during the Civil War.

In August 1841, the 15^th Century tower collapsed, damaging the original structure and threatening the entire church’s existence. A subscription for public support occurred and money raised for the church to be returned to its former glory. In October 1843, with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in attendance, the church was reopened after its reconstruction, returning it much to its original form. The upper portions of the church were returned to their Romanesque origins, the Georgian box pews were removed, and the gothic windows were restored to their original design. However, the reconstruction was not without controversy. The Camden Society, which coordinated the reconstruction, had a stone Altar and Credence Table placed in the nave, which was seen as too High Church, popish and Catholic. A general outcry led to a well-publicized court case and in January 1845 the altar and table were ordered removed and replaced by more humble, wooden tables which can still be seen today.

One would have thought there would be no more war damage to the Round Church after the iconoclasm of 1644, but on 28 July 1942 a single German bomber dropped its ordnance of high explosives and incendiaries on Cambridge. The bombs did extensive damage along Bridge and Sidney Streets, killing three people and wounding seven. One bomb struck the Cambridge Union Society Building, which had been built on the Church’s former graveyard, causing the medieval stained glass in the East Window to be blown out and destroyed. After the war, the window was beautifully replaced with new stained glass showing Christ’s Resurrection, which occurred on the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Inside, the church strikes a visitor as both beautiful and small, focused more on the center of the Round Church than the altar which rests in the nave, surrounded by the raised ambulatory. Eight thick Norman columns with round arches break the ambulatory and the nave and hold up an upper floor. Much of the stained glass is from the Victorian era restoration and from the 1946 window which repaired the German war damage. The tiled floor, which includes Queen Victoria’s coat of arms, dates from the 1841 restoration.

The Round Church Cambridge is one of four remaining medieval round churches in England. The others are the Temple Church in London, The Holy Sepulchre Church in Northhampton, and the Church of St. John the Baptist in Little Maplestead – all beautiful with a fascinating history and worth a visit.

To find out more about the Round Church’s visiting times, walking tours, and events see https://roundchurchcambridge.org/

To learn about its architecture and its evolution over the years, visit: https://drawingmatter.org/the-future-of-the-past/

To learn more about the church’s restoration, see Chris Miele’s “The Restoration of the Round Church, Cambridge”, English Heritage, Historical Analysis & Research Team Reports and Papers (First Series, 5), 1996.

To learn more about the bombing raids on Cambridge during World War II, visit Cambridge Historian: https://cambridgehistorian.blogspot.com/2012/07/world-war-2-air-attacks-on-cambridge.html

Halloween (or Hallowe’en, a shortening of Hallowed Evening, or the night before All Hallows’ Day) is now celebrated across Cambridgeshire to some extent – much depends on the village or the town’s desire to embrace a commercialized, but fun for the children, evening. In my local village, a anecdotal guess would be one out of four homes are open for trick-or-treaters – the wonderfully dressed children heading around in the dark looking for candy. In many ways Halloween is an English invention, born out of our pagan past in the Romanticism of the 19^th Century, adopted and commercialized by the United States in the 20^th Century, and now celebrated in England. This is an echo of an echo, for what we now see across the shires reflects more of America’s influence than our own English past. Where did Halloween come from?

Samhain was a Gaelic festival celebrating the end of the harvest and the beginning of the “darker” half of the year, traditionally celebrated across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany. A Celtic day began at sundown and Samhain would begin at sunset on 31 October and continue into the first of November. This date is midway between the winter solstice and the autumnal equinox, and the importance of it to the Celts can be seen in many Neolithic monuments oriented so that the rising sun on Samhain would shine on an opening or portal to a burial mound during the festival.

Many of our Halloween customs have come down from this event – it was a Celtic leminal time, where spirits and faeries from other worlds could cross over into our own, when bonfires were lit , and food and drink where left outside to satiate the spirits so that people and livestock would be left alone and survive the oncoming winter. There are echoes of our own customs here, but the Samhain festival would be Christianized in the Middle Ages and developed across the British Isles.

Soulcakes, the traditional treat given to children in England on Halloween, these are a descendent of Samhain gifts left outdoors for spirits. Notice the traditional Christian iconography of the cross. From Samantha, Haarlem, the Netherlands, in Wikimedia commons.

The Catholic Church celebrated All Saints Day on 1 November, followed by All Souls Day on 2 November. These two festivals of the church were blended into All Hallows’ Tide, the three day feast celebrating the dead saints, martyrs, and faithful which began on 1 November. It wasn’t a wild leap for the church to build on the Celtic customs observed across northern France and the British Isles, incorporating Samhain into a more Christianized feast. Interestingly, it was the descendants of Celts, the Scottish and Irish immigrants to the United States in the 19^th Century that brought the celebration of Halloween to the New World – with many of its more pagan aspects expanded and grew. In England, “souling” or “guising”, dressing up and seeking out sweet cakes from the wealthy in exchange for praying for the dead, had existed from the Middle Ages.

Souling_on_Halloween — A postcard from 1882 showing dressed up or “souling” children seeking sweetcakes from wealthy townsmen in an English village. Titled “Souling on Halloween” by Mary Mapes Dodge, originally published in: “St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks”, Scribner & Company, December 1882. In the public domain.

During the Romanticism of the 19^th Century, Halloween was expanded and discussed across England, as fascination with Celtic mythology and druidism increased and a general rejection of Catholic feasts permeated British life. It was in the 20^th Century that jack-o’-lanterns appeared, an effort to scare off evil spirits roaming through the night, building on carved gourds and vegetables seen in Ireland and Scotland.

In recent decades, the commercialization of this ancient holiday has spread across Cambridgeshire, brought back to England from a more enveloping American culture. The history of Halloween; however, reaches back into a pagan, pre-Christian Britain, when fear of spirits, faeries, and the dark, hungry times of winter were ubiquitous in our daily lives.