an inland county of England, bounded on the east by Norfolk and Suffolk, on the south by Essex and Hertfordshire, on the west by Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, and on the north by Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire. Prior to the arrival of the Romans it was included in the ancient division of the Iceni; and after their conquest, in the third province of Flavia Caesariensis, which reached from the Thames to the Humber. During the Heptarchy it belonged to the kingdom of East Angles, the fifth kingdom, which began in 575, and ended in 792, having had 14 kings; and it is now included in the Norfolk circuit, the diocese of Ely, and province of Canterbury, except a small part which is in the diocese of Norwich. It is about 40 miles in length from north to south, and 25 in breadth from east to west, and is 130 miles in circumference, containing near 570,000 acres. It has about 17,400 houses, 143,000 inhabitants; is divided into 17 hundreds, in which are one city, Ely; 8 market towns, viz. Cambridge which is the shire town and a celebrated university, Caxton, Linton, Merch, Newmarket, Soham, Wilbeach, Thorney, and part of Royton; 220 villages, 64 parishes: sends 2 members to parliament (exclusive of 2 for the town and 2 for the university), pays one part of the land tax, and provides 480 men in the militia. Its only rivers are the Cam, the Nene, and the Ouse. A considerable tract of land in this county is distinguished by the name of the Isle of Ely. It consists of fenny ground, divided by innumerable channels and drains: and is part of a very spacious level, containing 300,000 acres of land, extending into Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdonshire, and Lincolnshire. The Isle of Ely is the north division of the county, and extends south almost as far as Cambridge. The whole level of which this is part, is bounded on one side by the sea, and on the others by uplands: which taken together form a rude kind of semicircle resembling a horse shoe. The air is very different in different parts of the country. In the fens it is moist and foggy, and therefore not wholesome; but in the south and east parts it is very good, these being much drier than the other: but both, by late improvements, have been rendered very fruitful, the former by draining, and the latter by cinquefoil: so that it produces plenty of corn, especially barley, saffron, and hemp, and affords the richest pastures. The rivers abound with fish, and the fens with wild fowl. The principal manufactures of the county are malt, paper, and baskets. As the above tract appears to have been dry land formerly, the great change it has undergone must have been owing either to a violent breach and inundation of the sea or to earthquakes. As the towns in and about the fens were great sufferers by the stagnation of the waters in summer, and want of provisions in winter, many attempts were made to drain them, but without success, until the time of Charles I. in which, and that of his son, the work was happily completed, and an act of parliament passed, by which a corporation was established for its preservation and government. By the same act, 83,000 acres were vested in the corporation and 10,000 in the king. In these fens are a great many decoys, in which incredible numbers of ducks, and other wild fowl, are caught during the season. The population of the county of Cambridge, as it was taken in 1801, amounted to 89,349 persons.

New CAMBRIDGE, a town of New England about three Cambridge, three miles from Boston, remarkable for an university consisting of three colleges. W. Long, 70. 4. N. Lat. 42. 0.

Cambridge Manuscript, a copy of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin. Beza found it in the monastery of Irenaeus at Lyons in the year 1562, and gave it to the university of Cambridge in 1582. It is a quarto size, and written on vellum; 66 leaves of it are much torn and mutilated, ten of which are supplied by a later transcriber. Beza conjectures, that this manuscript might have existed so early as the time of Irenaeus: Wetstein apprehends that it either returned or was first brought from Egypt into France; that it is the same copy which Druthmar, an ancient expositor who lived about the year 840, had seen, and which he observes, was ascribed to St Hilary; and that R. Stephens had given a particular account of it in his edition of the New Testament in 1550. It is usually called Stephens's second manuscript. Mill agrees with F. Simon in opinion, that it was written in the western part of the world by a Latin scribe, and that it is to a great degree interpolated and corrupted: he observes that it agrees so much with the Latin Vulgate, as to afford reason for concluding, that it was corrected or formed upon a corrupt and faulty copy of that translation. From this and the Clermont copy of St Paul's Epistles, Beza published his larger Annotations in 1582.

Cambyse. See (History of) Persia.

Camden, William, the great antiquarian, was born in London in the year 1551. His father was a native of Litchfield in Staffordshire, who settling in London, became a member of the company of paper-stainers, and lived in the Old Bailey. His mother was of the ancient family of Curwen, of Workington, in Cumberland. He was educated first at Christ's hospital, and afterwards at St Paul's school: from thence he was sent, in 1566, to Oxford, and entered servitor of Magdalen college; but being disappointed of a deacon's place, he removed to Broadgate hall, and somewhat more than two years after, to Christ-church, where he was supported by his kind friend and patron Dr Thornton. About this time he was a candidate for a fellowship of All-souls college, but lost it by the intrigues of the Popish party. In 1570, he supplicated the regents of the university to be admitted bachelor of arts; but in this also he miscarried. The following year Mr Camden came to London, where he prosecuted his favourite study of antiquity, under the patronage of Dr Goodman, dean of Westminster, by whose interest he was made second master of Westminster school in 1575. From the time of his leaving the university to this period, he took several journeys to different parts of England, with a view to make observations and collect materials for his Britannia, in which he was now deeply engaged. In 1581 he became intimately acquainted with the learned President Brifton, who was then in England; and in 1586 he published the first edition of his Britannia; a work which, though much enlarged and improved in future editions, was even then esteemed an honour to its author, and the glory of its country. In 1593 he succeeded to the head mastership of Westminster school on the resignation of Dr Grant. In this office he continued till 1597, when he was promoted to be Clarencieux king at arms. In the year 1600 Mr Camden made a tour to the north, as far as Carlisle, accompanied by his friend Mr (afterwards Sir Robert) Cotton. In 1606 he began his correspondence with the celebrated President de Thou, which continued to the death of that faithful historian. In the following year he published his last edition of the Britannia, which is that from which the several English translations have been made; and in 1608, he began to digest his materials for a history of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In 1609, after recovering from a dangerous illness, he retired to Chislehurst in Kent, where he continued to spend the summer months during the remainder of his life. The first part of his annals of the queen did not appear till the year 1615, and he determined that the second volume should not appear till after his death (a). The work was entirely finished in 1617; and from that time he was principally employed in collecting more materials for the further improvement of his Britannia. In 1622, being now upwards of 70, and finding his health decline apace, he determined to lose no time in executing his design of founding a history lecture in the university of Oxford. His deed of gift was accordingly transmitted by his friend Mr Heather to Mr Gregory Wheare, who was, by himself, appointed his first professor. He died at Chislehurst in 1623, in the 73rd year of his age; and was buried with great solemnity in Westminster abbey in the south aisle, where a monument of white marble was erected to his memory. Camden was a man of singular modesty and integrity; profoundly learned in the history and antiquities of this kingdom, and a judicious and conscientious historian. He was reverenced and esteemed by the literati of all nations, and will be ever remembered as an honour to the age and country wherein he lived. Besides the works already mentioned, he was author of an excellent Greek grammar, and of several tracts in Hearne's collection. But his great and most useful work, the Britannia, is that upon which his fame chiefly built. The edition above mentioned, to which he put his last hand, was correctly printed in folio, much augmented, amended where it was necessary, and adorned with maps. It was first translated into English, and published in folio at London, in 1611, by the laborious Dr Philemon Holland, a physician of Coventry, who is thought to have consulted our author himself; and therefore great respect has been paid to the additions and explanations that occur.

(a) The reign of Queen Elizabeth was so recent when the first volume of the Annals was published, that many of the persons concerned, or their dependents, were still living. It is no wonder, therefore, that the honest historian should offend those whose actions would not bear inquiry. Some of his enemies were clamorous and troublesome; which determined him not to publish the second volume during his life; but that poverty might be in no danger of disappointment, he deposited one copy in the Cotton library, and transmitted another to his friend Dupuy at Paris. It was first printed at Leyden in 1625.