BURWELL (ST-MARY), a parish in the hundred
of STAPLOE, county of CAMBRIDGE, 4 miles (N. W. by W.)
from Newmarket, containing 1518 inhabitants. The
living is a discharged vicarage, with which the rectory of
Burwell St. Andrew is consolidated, in the archdeaconry
of Sudbury, and diocese of Norwich, rated jointly in the
king's books at £ 50.14. 2., endowed with £ 200 royal
bounty, arid in the patronage of the Earl of Guilford,
on the nomination of the University of Cambridge.
The church is a beautiful edifice, in the decorated style
of English architecture: the rental of one hundred acres
of arable land is appropriated for preserving it in repair.
The church of St. Andrew has long been demolished,
and the cemetery converted into pasture ground. The
village consists principally of one irregular street, about
three quarters of a mile long, the houses in which are
built with a peculiar kind of stone obtained in quarries
in the vicinity, in which pyrites and sharks' teeth;
in good preservation, have been found. A great fair for
horses is held, annually on Rogation-Monday, at Reach,
once a market-town, now an insignificant hamlet, partly
in this parish. A navigable cut extends from this place.
Here are the ruins of a castle, surrounded by a moat;
which was besieged in the war between Stephen and the
Empress Matilda, by Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of
Essex, who was shot by an arrow from the walls. The
parish register contains the record of a melancholy event
arising from a fire that broke out in a barn, in the
evening of the 8th of September, 1727, whereby seventyeight
persons, who had assembled to witness a puppetshow,
lost their lives,- the mangled and half-consumed
bodies of the sufferers were promiscuously interred in
two pits, dug for them in the churchyard.