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Ramsey is a small market town and parish, north of Huntingdon and St Ives within the historic County of Huntingdonshire. For local government purposes it lies in the district of Huntingdonshire within the non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire. The parish includes the settlements of Ramsey Forty Foot, Ramsey Heights, Ramsey Mereside, Ramsey Hollow and Ramsey St Mary's. The town grew up around Ramsey Abbey, a Benedictine monastery. The town manor is built on the site of (and using materials from) the ancient Abbey and is the seat of the Lords de Ramsey, major landowners in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. The remains of the Abbey are now home to part of the town's secondary school. Abbey College, Ramsey resulted from the amalgamation of the previous two secondary schools, Ailwyn School and Ramsey Abbey School. Ramsey Rural Museum, on Wood Lane, is housed in 17th-century farm buildings and is a small museum dedicated to the history of rural Fenland life.〔(Ramsey Rural Museum website )〕 Every year, over the August Bank Holiday weekend, the town is home to (1940s Weekend ), one of Britain's biggest living history events. The event was held at RAF Upwood until 2011 and is now held at The Camp, Wood Lane. It is held in aid of several local charities and is dedicated to recreating the sights and sounds of the 1940s. It features living history re-enactors, period dancing, food, exhibitions and trade stands. Original historical documents relating to Ramsey, including the original church parish registers, local government records, maps, photographs, and records of Ramsey manor (held by the Fellowes family, Lords de Ramsey), are held by Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office Huntingdon. There is a Post Office in Ramsey. ==History== Besides a Palaeolithic axe discovered in Victoria Road and seen as a chance glacial find, there is no record of prehistoric finds from the town. Roman remains are limited to stray finds of pottery. Early and Middle Saxon Ramsey remains elusive. For the later Anglo-Saxon period, documentary evidence for the foundation of the tenth century Benedictine abbey at Ramsey has been recently substantiated by archaeological evidence for activity associated with the pre-Conquest monastery. Tradition has it that Ailwyn, foster brother of King Edgar, founded a hermitage at Ramsey. It received a series of substantial grants of land by King Edgar who confirmed all the privileges in 975, including the banlieu. The abbey experienced the transition to Norman rule without difficulty and in the eleventh century it witnessed a period of rebuilding. In the civil war between Stephen and Matilda the monastery was badly damaged and impoverished. Geoffrey de Mandeville expelled the monks in 1143 and used the buildings as a fortress. However, during the thirteenth and fourteenth century the house had a succession of wealthy abbots who embarked on a series of costly building programmes. The Black Death brought prosperity to a temporary halt, and by the end of the fourteenth century the house was financially decayed. The abbey soon recovered and continued to thrive until its dissolution in 1539. At the Dissolution the site of the monastery, its land and associated granges at Bodsey and Biggin were given to Richard Williams (alias Cromwell) who dismantled the buildings and sold off the material. The properties remained with the Williams/Cromwell family until 1676. The early history of the town is obscure. Ramsey is not mentioned in the Domesday Survey, either because it was part of Bury or because it belonged to the abbey that, at that time, enjoyed royal privileges. Throughout the medieval period Ramsey remained a small market town serving the abbey and never developed into a borough. The original settlement probably developed outside the abbey, along Hollow Lane. By 1200 the town had grown sufficiently to obtain a weekly market held at the junction of High Street with the Great Whyte and, later, an annual fair held at the green by the church. During the medieval period the Great Whyte was a navigable canal that ran through the present road. It was culverted by 1854 with a brick tunnel, giving the town its characteristic wide main street. Properties along the Great Whyte appear to represent secondary (post-medieval) development of the settlement. Archaeological excavations have shown that this area was wet during the medieval period due to the presence of the fen. A fire occurred at Little Whyte in 1636 which destroyed some 15 tenements. A second fire in 1731 destroyed a great part of the High Street. By the time of the estate map, the village had expanded along the Great Whyte and along the western end of the High Street by progressive infilling of plots. Later editions of the OS Maps up to the 1970s present a similar picture. Since the 1970s progressive increase in the size of the population has prompted development around the town and along Bury Road. The limits of the town of Ramsey and the village of Bury to the south are not clearly defined, with modern housing estates spreading across the urban boundary. The bulk of the medieval economy was dominated by garden produce, cloth trade and alehouse keeping. Fisheries also played an important part in the fen economy, together with livestock. Throughout the Middle Ages the waterways of the fenland formed commercial and transport avenues that ran through the hearth of the region. Enclosure was piecemeal and prompted by the abbey. Following the dispersal of the estates of the abbey into lay hands in the second half of the sixteenth century, enclosure at Ramsey and neighbouring parishes gathered momentum. Systematic drainage of the Great Level from the seventeenth century increased the area for hay and pasture which was progressively divided and allotted. The parish was finally enclosed by official Act of Parliament in 1801. On the evening of 31 January 1941, a German spy Josef Jakobs parachuted into the Ramsey area, near Dovehouse Farm. Jakobs broke his ankle during his descent and was unable to move from his landing site. The next morning at around 8:30 a.m. Jakobs fired his pistol into the air to attract attention. Two local farmers (Charles Baldock and Harry Coulson) were passing by, heard the shots, and found Jakobs lying on the ground under his camouflage parachute. The farmers summoned the local Home Guard, who took charge of Jakobs. The German spy was caught wearing his flying suit and carrying British currency, forged papers, a radio, and a German sausage. Jakobs became the last person to be executed at the Tower of London.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Details of Jakobs trial and execution )〕 In 2011 Ramsey became the first town council in the UK to be controlled by the UK Independence Party, although overall control was lost in the 2015 election to independent councillors. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ramsey, Cambridgeshire」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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