CHAPTER II
The Starting - Peterborough Cathedral - Anglo-Saxon Names - Kaempe
Viser - Steam - Norman Barons - Chester Ale - Sion Tudor - Pretty
Welsh Tongue.
SO our little family, consisting of myself, my wife Mary, and my
daughter Henrietta, for daughter I shall persist in calling her,
started for Wales in the afternoon of the 27th July, 1854. We flew
through part of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire in a train which we left
at Ely, and getting into another, which did not fly quite so fast
as the one we had quieted, reached the Peterborough station at
about six o'clock of a delightful evening. We proceeded no farther
on our journey that day, in order that we might have an opportunity
of seeing the cathedral.
Sallying arm in arm from the Station Hotel, where we had determined
to take up our quarters for the night, we crossed a bridge over the
deep quiet Nen, on the southern bank of which stands the station,
and soon arrived at the cathedral - unfortunately we were too late
to procure admission into the interior, and had to content
ourselves with walking round it and surveying its outside.
It is named after, and occupies the site, or part of the site of an
immense monastery, founded by the Mercian King Peda, in the year
665, and destroyed by fire in the year 1116, which monastery,
though originally termed Medeshamsted, or the homestead on the
meads, was subsequently termed Peterborough, from the circumstance
of its having been reared by the old Saxon monarch for the love of
God and the honour of Saint Peter, as the Saxon Chronicle says, a
book which I went through carefully in my younger days, when I
studied Saxon, for, as I have already told the reader, I was in
those days a bit of a philologist.
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