WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

Summary

1068.

The Conqueror on his return from the reduction of York erected a castle here: twenty-seven houses were destroyed to make room for this structure.

1069.

At the close of this year Cambridge appears to have been the seat of extensive military operations. A number of Saxon prelates, nobles, and clergy (goaded to resistance by the arbitrary measures of King William), retired with their forces to the morasses of the isle of Ely, where they formed an encampment, which received the name of the Camp of Refuge. The King subsequently came to Cambridge Castle with a powerful army, for the purpose of reducing the insurgents; but after a prodigious waste of men and money, he was only enabled to obtain possession of the isle in the year 1072, through the treachery of the monks of Ely, whom he alarmed by the seizure of their landed possessions without the isle.

1073.

The Conqueror brought Jews from Normandy into England. Some of them are said to have been settled in Cambridge during his reign. The Jews for the most part dwelt in the parishes of All Saints and the Holy Sepulchre, in a place for many years afterwards called the Jewry. They quitted Cambridge in 1291.

1074.

Raulf de Gael, Earl of Norfolk, having rebelled against the Conqueror, encamped with his army in the neighbourhood of Cambridge.