Сомершем: История и современность английской деревни.

the village in Cambridgeshire

Somersham is a village and civil parish in Cambridgeshire, England. Somersham lies approximately 9 mile (14 km) east of Huntingdon and 4 mile (6 km) north of St Ives. Somersham is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England. There has been a settlement in this corner of the country for at least 2,500 years and probably much longer than that. The village may not be full of ancient buildings, but it possesses a rich heritage of recorded history. Somersham lies on the Greenwich meridian line. There is a marker on the pavement in the High Street denoting the location of the October 1884 Greenwich Prime Zero meridian line. There was once a railway station at Somersham connecting it to the towns of March and St Ives, as well as a short branch to Ramsey.

The manor of Somersham was held by the Abbots (later Bishops) of Ely who obtained it from the Anglo Saxon Ealdorman Byrhtnoth following his death at the Battle of Maldon in Essex in 991 AD. Somersham was listed as Summersham in the Domesday Book in the Hundred of Hurstingstone in Huntingdonshire. In 1086 there was one manor at Somersham and 41 households. There were eleven ploughlands with the capacity for a further one, of meadows, of woodland, and three fisheries. Following the Restoration, the manor was returned to the Crown. There was a substantial manor house at Somersham with formal gardens dating to the 12th century and possibly earlier. A Tudor palace was constructed over the mediaeval building by Bishop James Stanley, of Ely, under Henry VII but by the time the Hammond family came into possession in the late 17th century the buildings were in a poor state of repair. They were pulled down in the middle of the 18th century. In the latter part of the 14th century, the church in Somersham was a living in possession of the English Cardinal and papal courtier Adam Easton and he relied on its wealth until his death in 1397. During the 18th century there was a Spa just outside the town that was actively promoted by one of the royal surgeons. James Hammond, an elegiac poet who died in 1742, was born and brought up in Somersham; his work remained popular throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, being reprinted several times, but is no longer well known today.

From 1848 to 1967 the village was served by Somersham railway station, which was part of the Great Eastern Railway between St Ives and March. The village is currently served by bus services that run from St Ives to Ramsey, as well as from St Ives to Cambridge as part of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.