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People have lived in the place we now call St Ives for 300,000
years. The Norris Museum houses finds from the Stone Age through
to Roman times, but the history of the town really begins with the
Saxon settlers who came here in the years after the collapse of
the Roman Empire, about A.D. 500. They built a small village on
the riverbank, on the site of the present parish church. Perhaps
because it was so close to the river the village was called by the
rather unfortunate name of “Slepe” which is a Saxon
word meaning “slippery” or “muddy”!
The name changed as a result of events that took place 500 years
later. It was said to be on 24th April 1001 that a ploughman working
in the fields east of Slepe unearthed a stone coffin containing
a human skeleton. He called in the monks of nearby Ramsey Abbey,
who owned the village. They declared that the bones were those of
“Saint Ivo”, who they said was a Persian bishop who
had come here as a missionary and had died at Slepe many years before.
The monks took the bones away to a shrine at Ramsey Abbey and a
small monastery, called Saint Ivo's Priory, was built on the spot
where they were found.
After all this time it is impossible to know how the monks thought
of this story and why the idea of a Persian bishop came into their
heads. It was nearly a thousand years before the true story of St
Ivo's bones was discovered. In 1981 archaeologists digging on the
site of St Ivo's Priory discovered the remains of a Roman villa
underneath it - and the Romans often buried their dead in stone
coffins! The bones honoured in the shrine at Ramsey Abbey were probably
those of an ordinary Roman farmer.
But by then it was too late. A thriving town had grown up between
the old Saxon village of Slepe and the new Priory, half a mile to
the east, and the town took its name from the mysterious Persian
saint.
 The
monks at Ramsey took other steps to develop their new town. About
the year 1100 a bridge was built across the Ouse, replacing the
ford that was here before, and in 1110 King Henry I granted a charter
for a fair to be held in St Ives every Easter. At the same time
the monks circulated stories of healing miracles being worked by
St Ivo, and pilgrims began to flock to St Ives in the hope of cures.
The bridge, the fair and the pilgrims set St Ives on the road to
riches. In the 13th century St Ives fair was one of the four biggest
fairs in England. Its main business was selling woollen cloth. Kings
of England were among the customers and merchants travelled here
from many parts of Europe, bringing exotic wines and spices to sell
at the same time as they bought the cloth produced by the local
weavers. Traces of the fair can still be seen in the layout of the
town centre. The wide streets of the present-day Broadway and Market
Hill are where the fair was held, while leading off them are the
little alleyways through which the merchants carried their woolsacks
and bales of goods from their ships moored at the Quay.
In the 14th century a slump in the English wool trade and the effects
of the Hundred Years' War led to the collapse of the fair. But its
place was taken by the weekly market, held in those same wide streets
every Monday and still carried on today - as it has been with hardly
a break for the last 800 years.
In the 1420s the monks of Ramsey Abbey replaced the old wooden bridge
with the stone bridge that still stands today. A very unusual feature
is the chapel built in midstream, used as a toll house as well as
for church services. The parish church was rebuilt in the late 15th
century. With its lofty steeple and its peaceful riverside churchyard,
All Saints' Church is a superb example of the Perpendicular style
of architecture. The inside of the church contains some beautiful
carvings and an organ screen by the great Victorian architect Ninian
Comper. The parish church has had its share of setbacks over the
centuries. The spire has been rebuilt a number of times, the first
time after a violent storm blew it down in 1741 and the most recent
occasion after a Royal Flying Corps aeroplane crashed into it in
1918.
In 1539 Henry VIII closed down the monasteries, including St Ives
Priory and Ramsey Abbey. He was careful to make himself popular
by sharing out the wealth and lands of the Huntingdonshire monks
among the local people. Those who received a share of this lavish
bribe included a Welsh family named Williams. They were relatives
of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell and they changed their
own name to Cromwell to mark the connection. The Huntingdonshire
Cromwells then proceeded to spend their new wealth at a fantastic
speed and it was as a quite poor farmer that one of them - Oliver
Cromwell - came to live at St Ives in the 1630s. He may have been
embittered by his family's fall from riches. Certainly he became
involved in the opposition to King Charles I and the Church of England.
A letter he wrote from St Ives in 1636 - the earliest significant
piece of his writing that has survived - refers to his part in the
religious controversies of the time. St Ives traces its long Nonconformist
tradition back to Oliver Cromwell and it is because of this that
the town today boasts a statue of Huntingdonshire's greatest son,
erected here in 1901 because Huntingdon - where he was born - was
unwilling to commemorate the man who played a part in the execution
of King Charles.
One of Cromwell's fellow townsmen is also remembered in St Ives.
Dr Robert Wilde died in 1679 and left money in his will for a number
of bibles to be bought every year, to be awarded to children who
threw dice for them in the parish church. The puritan Dr Wilde ordered
that the dice should be thrown actually on the Communion Table,
to emphasize his view that it was just a table and not a priestly
altar, but nowadays the ceremony takes place on an ordinary table
in another part of the church. So it is because of the religious
controversies of the 17th century that “Bible Dicing”
still takes place in St Ives parish church every Whitsun.
St Ives escaped serious harm in the Civil War, although part of
the old bridge was pulled down and replaced with a drawbridge in
1645, to prevent a possible Royalist attack. To this day the two
southernmost arches of the bridge are a different shape from the
others because of this episode. But disaster struck after the war
was over. On 30th April 1689 a fire swept through the town, destroying
122 houses and doing £13,000-worth of damage - a colossal
sum in those days. The town was rebuilt, and the Monday market restored
its prosperity. The market was mainly for livestock, particularly
cattle. Because the Ouse is the nearest big river to the north of
London, its water meadows were the ideal place to fatten cattle
after they had been brought south from their breeding grounds in
the north of England. There were no cattle lorries then, and the
cattle walked hundreds of miles along the “drove roads”
to get here, becoming slim and fit in the process. The lush grass
of the Ouse meadows fattened them up again and in the 18th and 19th
centuries St Ives market was said to be second only to Smithfield.
The four bulls' heads on the crest of the Town Council are a reminder
of those days.
19th-century St Ives was a lively, bustling place. In 1822 the old
bridge was joined by the “New Bridges”, the magnificent
causeway to the south of the town which takes the road from the
old bridge across the water meadows on a line of 55 brick-built
arches, 700 feet long. When the railways came later in the century
such viaducts became commonplace, but at the time this was the longest
such structure anywhere in the country, and it still dominates the
landscape on the southern approach to the town.
The religious nonconformity of Cromwell's day gave rise to a rich
variety of sects, with chapels and meeting houses built by Quakers,
Presbyterians and Baptists. John Wesley preached here in 1774 and
a Methodist church was erected. Later on there were splits and factions,
with “Primitive Methodists” and “Strict and Particular
Baptists” building their own chapels. Rising over them all
was the lofty spire of the Free Church, a mock-gothic cathedral
of nonconformity built on a prominent town centre site in 1863-4,
with a steeple deliberately made to rival that of the parish church!
There was more to St Ives than just chapels. The cattle market supplied
customers for no less than 70 pubs and there were six breweries
in the town. The magnificent steam-powered flour mill built beside
the river in 1854 still dominates the skyline. (In the 20th century
it was used as a factory by Clive Sinclair's pioneering electronics
firm, and nowadays it has been converted into flats). The engineering
firm of Fowell’s built traction engines in the town. In 1874
St Ives elected its first Borough Council, and the civic traditions
of the mace, the robes and the chains of office are maintained to
this day.
The 20th century has brought grimmer events. Quite apart from two
world wars, 1912, 1947 and 1998 brought severe floods to the Ouse
Valley and the post-war period saw the closure of the cattle market
and the railway station. But recent years have seen prosperity renewed.
The 1951 census showed the population of St Ives was about 3000,
smaller than in 1851. But the last 50 years have seen a five-fold
increase, to more than 16,000 residents in 2001. Such a fast expansion
could have been disastrous, but the increased population has been
skilfully accommodated in spacious new housing estates laid out
over the old open fields north of the town. The historic town centre
has been left largely untouched and so have the water meadows that
give St Ives its attractive southern outlook. To the east of the
town the meadows have been dug for gravel and the flooded pits have
been sensitively landscaped to provide both nature reserves and
opportunities for water sports.
The loss of the railways has been more than made up for by the town's
new road links. And as well as its connections with Cambridge and
London, St Ives looks abroad to its German twin town of Stadtallendorf.
The combination of its rich past with its exciting future makes
21st-century St Ives a wonderful place to live, or just to visit,
and you will find a warm welcome in the thousand-year-old streets.
Travellers and traders, merchants and pilgrims have been coming
here for as long as people have been asked the riddle:
As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every sack had seven kits;
Kits, cats, sacks and wives -
How many were going to St Ives?
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