CAMBRIDGESHIRE v. THE ISLE OF ELY

The necessity for grouping parishes into larger areas was even more urgent in the case of sparsely populated country districts than of towns. In Cambridgeshire peculiar geographical difficulties were unfortunately added to those common to the rest of the country, and militated against all attempts to amal-gamate, whether for Poor Law, for education, or for any other purpose of local government. The fenland character of much of the county was mainly responsible for the execrable condition of the roads and for the paucity of towns or major villages suitably situated as centres for united districts. Small villages lay scattered over the shire rather than clustered together in groups. No Hundred Houses were in consequence ever established in Cambridgeshire. Linton, one of the few market towns of the county, was exceptionally well placed as “the emporium of local trade”, yet even here endeavours to unite the surrounding parishes, with Linton as a centre, repeatedly failed, and, as will be seen, later schemes within the county proved abortive till the final compulsory formation of unions in 1834.

Though it was mainly in the Isle of Ely that the workhouse movement spread, here and there in the larger villages of the county proper workhouses were established in the period between 1735 and 1745. Of twenty-five rural parishes for which the surviving records for this period are fairly complete, four erected a workhouse and fourteen others built or extended their poorhouses.