High Constable Adam Fenne

High Constable of Cambridge, commanding the town constables who hold everything within the liberty that the yard officers do not: streets, wells, fire rules, public houses and the ordinary watch.

Beside the white institutions of the Collegium, Cambridge keeps an older civic council that controls streets, wells, fire rules, public houses and the ordinary watch, under Senior Alderman Thomas Keld and High Constable Adam Fenne. Unlike London and Sarrum, Cambridge has no quarter where the town’s authority stops. The wall runs round the whole liberty, the yard officers may enter any licensed premises at any working hour, and Fenne’s constables hold everything else.

The arrangement has a consequence the town prefers not to dwell on: whatever shadow Cambridge has lies outside the wall, by design, and the town can be very confident about its materials while remaining blind to where they end up. Fenne is known as a field officer rather than a desk one, and he takes the fire rules more seriously than any other part of his charge; in a town of furnaces and kilns, he is said to walk the fire rounds himself.

Companies meet his constables as soon as they lodge in Cambridge, drink in its public houses or quarrel in its streets. The High Constable himself appears when a matter becomes a fire, a crowd, or a question of where the town’s writ ends and the Collegium’s begins.

In person

Fenne is a solid, athletic man in his late forties, weathered rather than old, with short, practically cut sandy hair greying at the temples. He is clean-shaven, with a broad, slightly crooked nose, grey-blue eyes and an old scar across his upper lip. He wears a practical dark civic-watch coat, plainer than any gentleman’s, and is usually found with ward-lanterns and fire gear rather than papers.