Bottisham Second Millennium
Page 18 of 69
roughmasons, who lived and worked near the building in
shelters of rough poles and mud, thatched with heather.
Perhaps a Bottisham family was represented among the
apprentices indentured for a period of five to seven years. The
building work was seasonal, in that it ceased from Michaelmas
to Easter. Somewhere in Bottisham were baths used by the
masons when, every fourteen days, work finished at three
o’clock in the afternoon to allow them to take a bath: normally
work was from sunrise to sunset. Perhaps the baths were
across the green
lane within the outbuildings of ‘Bendish’,
which was a fine large house of red brick, enclosed by a moat
and with
its own chapel and fish ponds. The new nave of the
church with its five-arch, lofty arcade of the Decorated period,
with fine moulding to the piers and arches, was the result of
much planning and dedicated workmanship at Bottisham. It is
tempting to imagine Knights Templars, in their white mantle
with a red cross, walking over from Little Wilbraham to view
the progress of the new building. Soon the Templars were to
be suppressed by Edward in 1312. Across the horizon a
splendid new choir roof was being constructed at Ely cathedral.
What an inheritance and what responsibility for future
generations!
The rising population put pressure on the land at a time
when one crop, wheat, was particularly important in the total
agricultural resource. With climate changes bringing
excessive rain and lower temperatures there were crop and
livestock failures with consequent famine. The stress of living
placed on the people and the abundance of fleas on the free-
living rodents resulted in the Black Death reaching England in
1348; this was a decade or so after the completion of Holy
Trinity, Bottisham. The effect of the plague was general
throughout society but the poor and the artisans suffered
proportionately greater losses with the onset of the pneumonic