St Ives
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St Ives, formerly known as 'Slepe', was built by the Saxons beside the Great Ouse in about AD500. Its name subsequently changed to St Ives, in honour of St Ivo, the Persian bishop, whose bones were discovered in a stone coffin in the fields east of Slepe. The bones were identified by the Ramsey Abbey monks who then built a monastery, St Ivo Prior, on the site where the bishop was found. They then began to develop the area, building a bridge across the river and obtaining a royal charter to hold a fair between Slepe village and the Priory. The annual St Ives fair became one of the biggest in Europe, until the time of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War in the 13th century. Since then there has been a weekly market held at St Ives with very few breaks.
The fairs, the markets and the river have moulded St Ives. A major expansion of the town took place between 1950 and 1990, but the historic centre is still recognisably the market town and river port that the Ramsey monks created 900 years ago.
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