Balsham traditions center on the parish church of Holy Trinity and its churchyard. The tower with its huge buttresses is early Gothic but appears to be of Saxon origin. Today it is famous for two magnificent 15th century brasses in its chancel floor; when the medieval chronicler Henry of Huntingdon was writing his Historia Anglorum (vi.6), however, it was associated with the take of ‘The Brave Man of Balsham.’
Under the year 101, the last year of resistance to the conquest of England by Sweyn Fork-Beard, Henry relates that The Danes plundered the land of East Anglia for three months. They destroyed Thetford and then torched Cambridge, afterwards withdrawing through the Gogmagog Hills to ‘a most pleasant and delightful place called Balsham’. There, they:
…put to death everyone they found…and tossing the children into the air caught them on the points of their spears. A certain man, however, worth of far-flung fame, mounted the steps of the church tower, which to this day stands there; and fortified as much by his position as by his courage, defending himself alone against the whole host.
Historians judge the story to be a genuinely old tradition, which reached Henry in much more detailed form, perhaps as an Anglo-Saxon saga which has since been lost.
Whether it is true or not is another matter. Single-handed defenses were much admired by the heroic societies on both sides of the North Sea.