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210 April Notes and Documents ' Shire-Rouse ' and Castle Yard In his Ford lectures on * Township and Borough ' (1898) the late Professor Maitland dealt, under ' castle and borough ', with the connexion at Cambridge between the ' shire-house ' and the castle, and with the fact that the castle ' is not in Cam- bridge ; it is in Chesterton, a vill whose nucleus lies a mile or so away *} His argument appears to me to be somewhat affected by his conviction that the castle mound, which is still to be seen, was ' the old burh of Cambridge ' and that Oliver Cromwell '"timbered" the old burh once more'. 2 The belief that a castle of the Norman period represented an old English burh of the tenth century was, no doubt, then general, on the authority of Mr. G. T. Clark, who was responsible for it ; but since I first called it in question, this belief has been gradually abandoned, and the evidence collected by Mrs. Armitage 3 must have finally disposed of it. My reason for holding that Maitland's argument is affected by this change of view among archaeologists is that he held a castle mound to be an indication of the place where the shire-moot was held even before the Conquest. His words are : Legally it may be outside the borough, but for economic purposes within the borough we should often find the spot where in century after century the great people of the shire met month by month, and where the king's justices sometimes sat for a month at a time with ' the whole county ' before them. In Cambridge (or rather, as a matter of law, just outside Cambridge) there stood an old wooden ' shire-house ' at the foot of the castle mound. 4 He held, therefore, that ' Cambridge is the right and proper moot-stow for the thegns of the shire, and has been so ever since those thegns formed a famous gild '. 5 Now, if Cambridge Castle ' was entirely new ' at the Conquest and was wholly the work 1 pp. 37-40, 119. 2 pp. 37-8, 94. 3 Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (1912). I would refer the reader to p. xiii of the preface. 4 p, 38. 5 p. 39.