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People have lived in the place we now call St Ives for at
least 50,000 years. Finds from the Stone Age through to Roman times
can be seen in the town’s Norris Museum, but the history  of
St Ives 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,”
a Saxon word which probably means “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 grew 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 the Easter fair at St Ives was one of the four
biggest 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 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
the place of the annual fair was taken by the weekly market, held
in those same wide streets every Monday and still carried on today.
The Monday market has taken place every week with few breaks since
it was granted its first charter by King John in AD 1200, 90 years
after the first 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. Later in the 15th century the parish church
was rebuilt. 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 at that time Huntingdon - where he was born - was unwilling
to commemorate him.
One of Cromwell’s fellow townsmen is also still remembered
today. 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 a 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 then, 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 in 2006-07. The loss of the railways has
been made up for by new road links and the building of the world’s
longest guided busway, linking St Ives to Cambridge. 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:
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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