Families of Cambridgeshire & the Fens
Ely's isle, Cambridge's colleges, Peterborough and the great Fenland drainage, the surname pool of the Lincolnshire-Norfolk hinge.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Cambridgeshire & the Fens
- GreenThe green, the common before it was a party colour.
- MasonThe operative mason.
- WebbThe weaver.
- WestThe west.
- LongThe long one.
- MartinThe saint's name, English and Norman registers alike.
- BakerThe baker, oven smoke in every market town.
- MillsBy the mill, wheels on every river.
- StoneThe stone, boundary-mark name.
- ReedThe marsh edge, or ruddy jest.
- ColemanColumban saint-name or Nicholas' man.
- MarshallThe stable office, court rank, surname for thousands.
- HarveyBreton battle-name, English orchard now.
- PalmerThe palm-bearer, pilgrimage turned patronymic.
- DayDavid, dairy, or daylight jest.
- CurtisThe courteous one, Norman manners joke.
- CromwellThe chief minister of the Reformation, and the Lord Protector.
Historic ties to Cambridgeshire & the Fens
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Cambridgeshire & the Fens.
- E. M. ForsterThe Edwardian novelist whose six books defined the English liberal humanist imagination and gave the language the phrase Only connect.
- Matthew ParkerThe Norwich worsted-finisher's son who became Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury, drafted the Thirty-Nine Articles that became the doctrinal spine of the Church of England, and saved the Anglo-Saxon manuscript inheritance by collecting it.
- Alfred MarshallThe Bermondsey bank cashier's son who wrote Principles of Economics in 1890, founded the Cambridge economics tripos, and turned political economy into the technical discipline it has been since.
- Sir Jonathan MillerThe St John's Wood psychiatrist's son who qualified as a doctor, walked into Beyond the Fringe at twenty-six, and directed Shakespeare and Mozart across the British theatre and opera houses for forty years.
- M. R. JamesThe Kent vicarage child elected a King's College Cambridge scholar at thirteen who became Provost of both King's and Eton, catalogued the medieval manuscript collections of the Cambridge college libraries, and wrote the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary that founded the modern English ghost-story tradition.
- Isaac NewtonThe Lincolnshire farmer's son whose plague-year notebooks at Woolsthorpe became the calculus, the theory of colour and the law of universal gravitation, and whose Principia of 1687 set the frame of modern science.
- Frederick Gowland HopkinsThe Sussex chemist who proved that diet alone was not enough, that the body needs minute accessory substances to live, and who in 1929 took the Nobel Prize for the work that gave the world the vitamins.
- George GreenThe Nottingham miller's son who taught himself the mathematics of his age in the loft of his father's windmill, and in 1828 published the essay from which Green's theorem, Green's functions and a quarter of modern mathematical physics descend.
Stories told here
Legends set in Cambridgeshire & the Fens, from any family that carries them.