Chap. II - The Office of High Steward of the Borough of Cambridge

Summary

WHEN Cambridge, in March 1943, elected a new High Steward of the Borough, many questions were asked about the duties, if any, of this officer and the origin and history of the office, questions to which no ready answers could be given. The following notes have been put together with the object of providing a sketch of the medieval background of the office which does not itself appear in English municipal life until the close of the Middle Ages. To this has been added a brief account of the holders of the office in Cambridge to the present day.

The development of the story involves a tentative inquiry into the constitution of the medieval borough in some of its aspects, an inquiry which to be successful would call for ‘a very perspicacious Person who hath an intuitive Soul’—to quote the words of an anonymous writer of the seventeenth century. ‘We shall have to think away distinctions that seem to us as clear as the sunshine; we must think ourselves back into a twilight.’ ‘Each town has its history, and makes its independent contribution to Municipal History as a whole’—a challenge to every municipality to trace its own history before the trail is lost.