People have lived in the place we now call St Ives for hundreds of thousands of years. Finds from the Stone Age through to Roman times can be seen in the Norris Museum, but the history of the town really began with the Saxons who came here in the years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, about AD 500. They built a small village on the riverbank, where the parish church still stands today. Perhaps because it was so close to the river the village was called by the rather unfortunate name of “Slepe” which is probably a Saxon word meaning “slippery” or “muddy”!

500 years later the name changed in dramatic circumstances. On 24th April 1001 a ploughman working in the fields east of Slepe unearthed a stone coffin containing a 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 took us a thousand years to discover the truth about St Ivo’s bones. In 1981 archaeologists digging on the site of the Priory discovered the remains of a Roman villa - and the Romans buried their dead in stone coffins! The bones the ploughman found were probably those of an ordinary Romano-British farmer.

By then it was too late. A thriving town had grown up between the village of Slepe and the 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 there 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, with kings of England among the customers, sending their servants here to buy cloth for the royal household. Merchants travelled to St Ives 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 alleyways through which the merchants carried woolsacks and bales of goods from their boats moored at the Quay.

In the 14th century a slump in the 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 since it was first chartered in AD 1200, 90 years after the fair.

In the 1420s the monks of Ramsey Abbey replaced their 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. Inside are beautiful carvings and an organ screen by the famous church restorer Sir 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 their wealth and lands among the local people. Among those benefiting from this lavish bribe were 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 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 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 still remembered. 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, rebuilt when the war was over, are a different shape from the others.

But disaster struck later in the 17th century. On 30th April 1689 fire swept through St Ives, 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 fertile water meadows were the ideal place to fatten cattle after they had been brought south from their breeding grounds in the north of England. Cattle had to walk to market in those days, travelling hundreds of miles along the “drove roads” to get here and 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 cattle 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.

In 1822 the “New Bridges” were built to the south of the old bridge. This magnificent causeway carries the London road across the water meadows on a line of 55 arches, 700 feet long. When the railways came later in the century such structures became commonplace, but at the time this was the longest brick-built viaduct in the country. It still dominates the landscape on the southern approach to the town.

19th-century St Ives was a lively, bustling place. 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 designed to rival the parish church!

There was more to St Ives than just chapels. The cattle market supplied customers for no fewer than 70 pubs and there were six breweries in the town. The seven-storey 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 brought grimmer events. Quite apart from two world wars, 1912, 1947 and 1998 saw severe floods in the town and in the 1970s the cattle market and the railway station both closed. But recent years have seen prosperity renewed. At the 1951 census the population of St Ives was about 3000, smaller than in 1851. But the last 50 years have seen a six-fold increase, to more than 18,000 residents.

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 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 spectre of flooding has been laid to rest by the building of major new flood defences. The loss of the railways has been made up for by new road links and the building of the guided busway. The combination of its fascinating 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 900-year-old streets. Travellers and traders, merchants and pilgrims have been coming here for as long as people have been asked the riddle: