Qualla: Huntingdon

Huntingdon: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The market town of Huntingdon has been quietly producing English history for a thousand years. A Saxon prince called David, born here around 1144, grew up to be a Scottish royal; an anchoress called Christina of Markyate fled an arranged marriage from these streets in the early 12th century to live walled into a cell. The diarist Samuel Pepys learned his sums in the local grammar school. So did Oliver Cromwell - born in this town in 1599, the son of a minor gentleman, who would one day execute a king and rule England. Today Huntingdon is a town of around 24,000 in the gentle valley of the River Great Ouse, ringed by the A14, the East Coast Main Line, and a particularly secretive Royal Air Force station. Walk its high street and almost nothing announces what this place has produced.

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Huntingdon: Saxons, Norsemen, Norman Earls

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Huntingdon was important enough in the late Saxon period to have its own mint and to feature in the Domesday Book. The Danes raided and settled. The Normans built a castle on the rise above the river; today only earthworks remain. Through the 12th and 13th centuries the Earls of ...

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Huntingdon: The Boy Who Would Behead a King

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Oliver Cromwell was born here on 25 April 1599. His family were comfortable but not grand - the Hinchingbrooke Cromwells, the wealthy branch, were his uncle's people. Young Oliver attended the local grammar school in the High Street, the same building that now houses the Cromwell...

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Huntingdon: Coaches, Trains, and the View From the Bridge

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the 18th century Huntingdon was a coaching town, its inns servicing the London-to-York run. The Old Bridge over the Great Ouse, a 14th-century stone span that connects Huntingdon to Godmanchester, carried the only road across the river until 1975. During the Civil War, Cromwel...

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Huntingdon: Famous Names and a Quieter Modern Life

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Beyond the Cromwells, Huntingdon has been generous with its native talent. Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century historian, wrote the Historia Anglorum here. Samuel Pepys attended the grammar school in about 1644 and went on to keep England's most famous diary. The wood engraver ...

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