RAMSEY

town (parish), Huntingdonshire district, administrative county of Cambridgeshire, historic county of Huntingdonshire, England. The town serves an intensively cultivated hinterland on the southwest border of the Fens, a reclaimed region adjoining the North Sea. Ramsey developed around a 10th-century Benedictine abbey, which was granted freedom from ecclesiastical and secular control before the Norman Conquest (1066). The abbey was an early English seat of learning, with a library of Hebrew books. After the dissolution of the monasteries (153639), its demesnes were granted to Sir Richard Cromwell, ancestor of Oliver Cromwell. A grammar school now occupies part of the site of the abbey. Pop. (1991) 7,577.