An advanced level student, Inmi Heo, wrote this summary of a English Language lecture she attended recently as part of the Academic Year programme here at EC CAMBRIDGE. The English Language Class she was attending was about Cambridge.
Cambridge: Town and Gown
(Lecturer: Angela Brown)
Two thousand years ago, the River Cam, was very deep. At that time, the North of Cambridge was very wild and water covered the land, making it quite dangerous. Some areas, such as Ely, were slightly higher than others.
About 1,000 years ago, a girl was murdered in Oxford. A man had five students hanged, so other students ran away and came to Cambridge. They started to come to the church and this formed the beginning of Cambridge University.
A market has been here for 1,000 years. In 1575 Queen Elizabeth I gave the town an official Coat of Arms. If you stand on the Market Square, you will see this emblem on the front of The Guildhall. The blue part at the bottom represents Cambridge, the yellow part a bridge, and the red a castle: the silver roses stand for education and learning.
If you walk along beside The Guildhall you come to EC school, which is above ‘The Cow’. In the ‘Cow’ people sold cows and in the Corn Exchange (next door to EC school) they killed cows. The scenes carved in stone on the Corn Exchange represent what life was like on a farm. Most children spent each day scaring birds away from the food that was growing in the fields. In Fen-edge towns, people grew plants.
After Clare college was burnt, it was rebuilt like a queen’s palace. Believe it or not, one Christmas recently, students secretly climbed up to the top of the Zoology Museum during the night and put a Christmas hat on the top!
The first business was paper-making and in the past punting was for fishing (not leisure as it is today). ‘Peas hill’ meant fish hill, so there were fish. Cambridge became bigger, finally it was created as a city in 1951.
Inmi Heo: August 2010