Chapter I: HAVE never been able to see Bury St. Edmunds in the favourable light

of Carlyle’s description of the town. Listen to what he says of it: “The _Burg_, Bury, or ‘Berry’ as they call it, of St. Edmund is still a prosperous brisk Town; beautifully diversifying, with its clear brick houses, ancient clean streets, and 20,000 or 15,000 busy souls, the general grassy face of Suffolk; looking out right pleasantly from its hill-slope towards the rising sun: and on the eastern edge of it still runs, long, black, and massive, a range of monastic ruins.... Here stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure amid these vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself that an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury did once exist; nay, there is no doubt of it: see here the ancient massive Gateway, of architecture interesting to the eye of Dilettantism; and farther on, that other ancient Gateway, now about to tumble, unless Dilettantism, in these very months, can subscribe money to cramp it and prop it.”

That is the Carlylean picture of the place, and a very desirable habitation of picturesqueness and all the joys he paints it. But that is not quite the real Bury. How it managed so to impress him is a mystery, for the town itself is commonplace, and the great churches and the ruins of its still greater Abbey are quite distinct from it. Even those Gothic remains are sad and grim, and have not the usual inspiring quality of such vestiges of the past. In fact, nothing in the present condition of Bury in timber, brick, and stone can serve to envisage its ancient story. This is the tragedy of Bury, for that story is one of the most gorgeous of romances.

We first hear of the place, as “Beodric’s Weorth,” at the very remote period of A.D. 631. Of Beodric we known nothing, and the spot is mentioned thus early only because Sigebert, King of East Anglia at that time, founded a monastery here, a monastery in which he became a monk, and whose cloisters he only forsook to wage war with the heathen Penda. Fighting for the Cross he died, and thus early did the town secure the chance of honouring a martyr.

But not to the earliest or most deserving of those who have laid down their lives in the cause did the highest honours accrue, and we can scarce blink the fact that to St. Edmund, King and Martyr, who suffered a hundred and sixty years later, fell a great deal more than his just share.

Edmund, who was crowned King of East Anglia on Christmas Day, 856, reigned thirteen years before the great invasion of the Danes in 869 broke up his kingdom and brought him to a tragical end at Eglesdene, near Hoxne. Oakley Park is supposed to be the site of “Eglesdene.” Near by is a bridge over the Dove, known as “Gold Bridge,” the successor of the one under whose arch the fugitive King was hiding, according to the legend, when a newly-married couple, crossing the bridge by moonlight, caught the glint of his golden spurs in the water and revealed his lurking-place to the Danes.

If you consider it at all closely, the legend is not at this point very convincing, for, in the terrible wars of extermination then waged, when not only the actual combatants, but the entire people, went in fear, it is not very likely that honeymooning couples would be wandering about in the moonlight; but that is a detail. St. Edmund was, after all, very human, as well as very saintly, for he did what many an unregenerate would have done—he cursed that couple who revealed his presence. Nay, he did more; and perpetrated a wickedness of which no mere son of Belial or everyday child of ungodliness would have been guilty. He cursed every couple who in the future should cross that bridge to be married. ’Twas not well done, St. Edmund!

The legend goes on to tell how the Danes bound him to a tree and shot him to death with arrows until he was stuck full of them, like St. Sebastian. The very tree—an ancient oak—was for ages pointed out, and it is a marvellous fact that in 1849, when it fell, and was cut up, an arrow-head was found in the heart of that hoary trunk. This is not the place to tell of the many marvels that followed; but in the year 903, after the body had lain for thirty-three years in a wooden chapel at Hoxne, it was removed to Beodric’s Weorth, where it was placed in the Church of St. Mary, and became the bone of contention between the regular and the secular canons, until the time came, in 1010, when the Danes again overran the country, when they sank their differences, and conveyed the precious body of the Saint to London, for safety. It was escorted back in 1013, working many incredible miracles on the way, and replaced in the church, where it remained until Aylwin’s great monastic church, begun under Canute, in 1020, was completed.

Already the sainted King had become more powerful than any other miracle-monger, but his name had not yet been given to the town, which retained its old style until the time of Edward the Confessor, when it first became known as St. Edmund’s Bury.

As everywhere else, the Norman Conquest meant a great increase of ecclesiastical wealth and power at Bury. The Monastery was rebuilt, and its Abbot, mitred and all-powerful within the wide-spreading Limits of St. Edmund, was little less than a Bishop. The sanctity and potency of St. Edmund were not less than those of St. Thomas in after-years became. Pilgrims of every estate in the realm flocked to his shrine. Even kings entered into his courts with humility. Edward the Confessor walked the last mile bare-foot. Henry I., Henry II., and Richard I. were frequently here. King John, however, was in different sort. Jocelin of Brakelond, the old monkish chronicler, who was born in that very street of “Short Brakland” we may see in Bury to this day, tells us how, in 1203, that King stayed with the Abbot a whole fortnight, the said Abbot and Monastery being at that time only by way of recovering from much domestic mismanagement of former Abbots, and ill-prepared for the costs and charges of such entertaining. Carlyle, with picturesque efforts at recovering something of that visit beyond the mere dry and innutritious bones of dates, pictures that monarch “a blustering, dissipated human figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing; amid numerous other noisy figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks; talking noisy nonsense; tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent (its larders, namely, and cellars) in the most ruinous way.”

And when at last he went his ways, and the Abbot expected something kingly, he merely left a handsome silk cloak for St. Edmund, or rather, pretended to leave it, for one of his retinue borrowed it, “and _we_,” says Jocelin, or Carlyle for him, “never got sight of it again.” And all else the King gave was “one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed—like a shabby Lackland as he was! Thirteen pence sterling! this was what the Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had made away with. We, of course, said our mass for him, having covenanted to do it—but let impartial posterity judge with what degree of fervour!”

The memory of King John’s hungry hordes and his shabby thirteen pence lingered at Bury, and it must have been with a peculiar satisfaction that the Abbot saw assembled at the high altar of his church the representative concourse of Barons who, on St. Edmund’s Day, 1214, swore to obtain from the King that Magna Charta which they did actually wring unwillingly from him in the following year.

Royal visits continued until the time of Henry VI., who held a Parliament here, but all the glories of the place are gone, and are only dimly perceived amid the mouldering ruins and damp churchyard walks that alone are left. The spot where the liberties of the English people were sworn to be upheld is accurst by the memory of how, three hundred years later, in the Marian persecution, twelve martyrs suffered at the stake for liberty of religious thought

XXIX

A GREAT open space stretches outside the boundary walls of the old Abbey precincts. Here, on “Angel Hill,” as it is called, Bury fair was held in days of old. It was no mere rustic saturnalia, but a fashionable institution, and lasted a fortnight. A one-day fair still held annually, on September 21st, is the sole relic of this once important event, famous not only for the business, but also for the matrimonial matches concluded there.

The “Angel,” a dyspeptic and gloomy-looking house of huge proportions and sad-coloured brick, faces this wide, empty space, and adds a quite unnecessary emphasis to its dulness. There was an inn of the same name here so early as 1452, neighboured by others, but in 1779 the whole of the buildings on this side were removed and the present row erected. No one would suspect from the commonplace exterior of the “Angel” that its great cellars are of mediæval date, and comprised of groined crypts; but they do not redeem the general aspect of the building, and we do not look upon the “Angel” with interest because it figures in the _Pickwick Papers_, but only in surprise that Dickens should have thought it worth mention. He did so mention it because the “Angel” was the principal coaching-inn of the town. There was—indeed, there still is—the “Suffolk” hotel, but to and from the “Angel” came and went the Norwich Mail and the best of the post-chaise traffic. In the days when “every gentleman visited London at least once in his lifetime,” the house may by dint of much business have worn a cheery look; but now that almost every one comes up to town by rail many times a year, the place has the air of a public institution of the hospital or infirmary order. Looking upon this scene, the proverbial slowness of the Bury coaches recurs to the stranger, who remembers that old story of a pedestrian walking from Newmarket and overtaking—not being overtaken by—the stage. The coachman offered him a lift. “No, thank you,” said he; “I’m in a hurry to-day,” and soon disappeared in advance of the lumbering conveyance.

One never thoroughly realises the full meaning of the word “respectable” until the acquaintance of Bury St. Edmunds is made. Respectability squats heavily upon the place and is incarnated on every flat-faced house-front, twinkles from every matutinally polished brass door-knocker, is seen down every dull street vista, and dogs your footsteps into the Abbey grounds, where the respectable burgesses lie in their respectable graves, in hopes of a Heaven planned on respectable and exclusive lines. Even the old abbots and monks are robbed of their historic glamour and are respectable likewise—and by that same token commonplace. It is a respectable landscape, too, upon whose flat suave fields you look from the higher streets of the town; flat and featureless, good for the husbandman, but, lacking even the dropsical, water-logged interest of the Fens, the very negation of the picturesque. In Defoe’s time it was equally respectable, as he naïvely tells us. “The beauty of this town,” he says, “consists in the number of gentry who dwell in and near it, the polite conversation among them, the affluence and plenty they live in, and the pleasant country they have to go abroad in.” How exquisitely fragrant of snobbishness!

XXX

THE ditchwater-dull town of Bury comes to an end with Northgate Street and its continuation of “Out-Northgate”; past the curious railway station built in the Jacobean style, and presenting an odd likeness to some ancient mansion of the Hatfield House type, through whose centre a railway has been driven, leaving only the wings standing. Everything is on the largest scale: broad roads, with few people in them; great brick railway bridge over them; tall cupola’d towers of the station looking down upon them, and roomy houses facing them. Resultant emptiness and chilly vastness, infinitely uncomfortable and unhomely.

At the end of Out-Northgate, looking upon the footpath, are the shattered remains of St. Saviour’s Hospital, very small and unobtrusive. It is possible to stand here the livelong day and challenge the passers-by with questions about this old ruin, and to find when day is done that a monumental ignorance prevails upon the subject. Yet it is an historic place, for it was here that, according to tradition, the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester was found strangled in 1446.

At the “Toll-house” inn the road forks, continuing on the right to Fornham St. Martin and Thetford along the dullest of roads. Away to the left hand is Fornham St. Geneviève, the scene of the obscure Battle of Fornham, fought in 1173. That was a short-lived rebellion crushed here in that year at the passage of the little river Lark. The aggrieved Earl of Leicester, striving against Henry II. and flying the country, had returned with an army of Flamand mercenaries, and, marching across country, made for St. Edmundsbury. He had come thus far when he was met by a strong force opposing any further advance, and completely routed near the church. It remained for modern times to discover the bodies of the many slain on this occasion. A hoary and decayed ash-tree that from time immemorial had grown at the crest of a great mound was being demolished, when at its roots the awe-struck countrymen uncovered a number of skeletons neatly arranged in a circle, one above the other; and somewhere about the same time a gold ring of antique design, thought to have belonged to the Countess of Leicester, was fished up from the river-bed, together with relics of the pots and pans of that overwhelmed host, and some Henry II. pennies that those slaughtered men-at-arms had doubtless hoped to expend in long drinks at Bury, after the hoped-for victory was won. The ancient church of Fornham St. Geneviève was burned down, June 24th, 1782, through the extraordinary accident of a man shooting at jackdaws and firing into the thatched roof. The ruins stand in Fornham Park, and fill the humble office of helping to support a water-tank.

Ingham church, beside the road on to Thetford, is highly uninteresting, and the few wayside cottages commonplace. Away to the left, out of sight, is Culford Park, seat of Earl Cadogan, exploiter of Chelsea in these days and recipient of fabulous sums of “unearned increment” in the shape of ground-rents. Two miles onward from Ingham, the dozen cottages of the hamlet called Seven Hills dot the lonely road at short intervals, and behind them is the long line of the seven prehistoric sepulchral mounds that stand sponsors for this modern settlement. At Rymer Point, a little distance onward, we touch upon the broad acres of the Duke of Grafton’s estate of Euston, and presently come into the village of Barnham. Beyond the village the battered remains of the old “Franchise Cross,” which once marked the boundary of the Liberty of St. Edmund, stand by the way, and still mark the limits of Thetford and Barnham parishes. None is sufficiently humble to do that cross reverence nowadays, but in the old times, when it was protected by a specific proclamation by the Abbot of Bury, that all who injured it would be anathematised and cursed with the fires of Hell, this old landmark was dealt gently with.

It is from here at Barnham that the Icknield Way can with little difficulty be reached and traced into Thetford. To find it, we must turn to the left in Barnham Street, and, passing the little railway station, pursue the cross-road that leads for a mile along open commons to where the boundary of the Elveden estate is marked by one of Lord Iveagh’s new lodges. Just short of this lodge is the Icknield Way, a green track crossing the road at right angles on the skirts of a dark wood of fir-trees. Here the boundaries of the two parishes of Barnham and Elveden march together, the Way itself the dividing line. It is still a very noticeable grassy track, but has for centuries been disused as a public road. It was used by the cattle-drovers, who to the last favoured the prehistoric tracks of the country, and thus avoided the payment of tolls levied along the turnpikes. Their flocks and herds were great features of old wayside life, until the cattle-trucks of quick railway transport in modern times destroyed the drovers’ business.

Very few of the country folk know this as the Icknield Way, and not a great number have ever heard of it as the drove-road, but the cross-roads are known in all the neighbourhood by the little turfy mound called “Marman’s Grave,” traditionally the burial-place of a suicide in those uncharitable old times when the midnight burial without Christian rites, and with a stake driven through the body, was the world’s last act of injustice towards those poor despairing souls whom cruel circumstance had tortured beyond endurance. Who the unhappy “Marman” was, and when or why he gladly left an existence so hateful to him that he could even contemplate with equanimity that _post-mortem_ indignity of a stake through his vitals, we shall never know, and the little stone post cresting his grave tells us nothing, for although it looks like some simple memorial of him, its sole inscription, the letters “B” and “E,” give no clue in his direction, for they only mark the respective bounds of Barnham and Elveden.

The Way reaches Thetford in another two miles, across the heath. Its course lay athwart the present road from Barnham, into the town, just where the gasworks stand, in the outskirts. But not only those far-off Icenians came this way, where those unromantic gasometers scent the heath and stop up the immemorial track: for this portion of the Way remained the chief, if, indeed, not the only, entrance into Thetford until the close of the seventeenth century, when the river Ouse was first bridged along the line of the main road from Elveden.

XXXI

HAVING now disposed of the loop road to Thetford through Bury, we are free to take the main route from Newmarket, by Barton Mills and Elveden. It is a wilder and a lonelier, but yet not a dull road, like that just traversed.

Once beyond the long line of trainers’ houses and stables, fringing the road as far as the entrance to Chippenham Park, the heaths that surround Newmarket begin again and plunge the explorer once more into unsheltered wilds. It is after a sun-stricken, wind-swept, or rain-beaten course of these that the mile-long elm avenue leading to the Kennett stream, and the Red Lodge beyond it, comes so welcome. There is surely no more beautiful avenue in the kingdom than this, whose trees interlace their branches overhead in the shape of a true Gothic arch, and really form that similitude to a cathedral nave of which we often hear but in avenues so very, very rarely see.

At the crossing of the little Kennett we finally leave Cambridgeshire and come into Suffolk. On the Suffolk side stands the “Red Lodge” inn, a solitary old house on the heaths that again resume, and continue until the chalk is changed for a gravelly soil at the summit of the rise called Chalk Hill. It is a lonelier road now than ever it had been in all the centuries between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the railway era. Railways at one blow took not only the passenger traffic, but the carriage of goods and minerals; and the cattle and sheep once driven in hundreds of thousands along the highways and byways began to be despatched in cattle-trucks.

We cannot fully realise this olden state of the roads, but we can make an effort towards it: can project ourselves into the seventeenth century, and see and hear the droves of turkeys, five hundred in each, come gobbling and bubbling, in the manner peculiar to turkeys, all the way from the farmyards to the London markets. Can also watch in imagination the waddling march of the thousands of geese bred on these commons, and sent hissing and snapping down this long course of a hundred miles to celebrate the September feast of St. Michael on many a metropolitan dinner-table. Alas, poor Michaelmas geese! Alas, too, for the Christmas geese! but _they_ went more gloriously to martyrdom, being carried all the way instead of driven. The reason for this was that the muddy roads of late autumn and early winter were too soft and sticky for their feet, and so they rode to town in the “goose-cart,” a four-storeyed conveyance as Defoe tells us, “with two horses abreast, like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that thus ride.”

A neglected item of information, from a local newspaper of the time, helps the imagination in later, but still forgotten, things. Thus we read of a village on the Ipswich route from London to Norwich: “In the last droving season, 1845, the landlord of the ‘Bird in Hand,’ Tasburgh, housed 9,300 beasts. He purchased for their consumption and for horses, etc., fifty tons of hay; but in the following year, owing to the opening of the Norfolk Railway, only twelve beasts were taken in, and only 8½ cwt. of hay was wanted.”

Flat lands, under cultivation, bring us from this point to the river Lark, at Barton Mills, whose church tower, with that of Mildenhall, a mile away, now begins to puzzle the stranger. The village of Barton Mills, lying directly on the road, is a kind of preface to, or outpost of, Mildenhall, a town placed on an out-of-the-way loop road, and never seen by those who make straight for Thetford. But we, at any rate, will see it, coming to this backwater of life along a flat road that doubles on itself and winds artfully amid a maze of lazy rills and brimming ditches, covered with an unbroken surface of duckweed. The name of Mildenhall suggests mildew, and although there be nothing in its origin to indicate anything of the kind, it is indeed set down in a fine damp situation, on the very edge of the sodden Fens. Mildenhall’s characteristic trees are the black poplar and the willow, both water-loving species. Mildenhall suffices to itself, and it is well it can so compass a full-orbed life, for if this solitary little town were dependent in any way upon outside existence for protection against _ennui_, that would be a maimed existence its burgesses would lead. It stands at the end of a branch line from Cambridge, and on the Lark Navigation, and has an air of enduring the railway as an interloping enterprise, while regarding the canal with a benevolent interest. The busy flour-mills, the gas-works, and the oil-cake stores that cluster round the canal wharf support this self-sufficing aspect, and the grave majesty of the old houses in and near the market place, overlooked by the noble tower of the cathedral-like parish church, supply the last touch of satisfied independence. But the town takes a kindly interest in the chance stranger whom good roads and a bicycle do occasionally bring, in summer-time; and the artist who sits down on the pavement to sketch the picturesque grouping of the curious old wooden market cross with the church tower is sure of the courteous offer of a chair from some polite shopkeeper.

Hard by is the old manor-house. The church, whose great size has already been remarked, has the tombs of Norths and Bunburys, who have lived and died there, with that of a fifteenth-century Lord Mayor of London, a native of Barton Mills, and named from his birthplace, Henry de Barton, who was the first to see that London was lighted by night.

Mildenhall church is kindred in spirit with the town. One of the finest Perpendicular buildings in the county, it has a metropolitan aspect, an air of over-lordship above the villages far and near that is not a little striking.

Even here, at Mildenhall, the shadow of the second Boer War has rested, for a brass tablet on a wall in the church records simply how natives of the town laid down their lives for England on that alien soil. Thus on the bones of the English is the Empire reared, and there be few among the rural churches of this mother-land of ours that do not record some such sacrifice, for the army of 250,000 men came from the highways and byways, and few were the families, rich or poor, that had not the keenest personal interest in the struggle which newspaper lies and contradictions, and the grossest political jealousies conspired to render inglorious in report and speech. Those soldiers were, perhaps, commonplace enough in their everyday lives, but these simple records, and the many other such throughout the country, elevate them to the status of martyrs in a cause, beside whom the little peddlers in votes seem mean and sordid indeed. But we must return to Barton and make for Thetford, and since we cannot reform the politicians, may e’en leave them alone

XXXII

THE sinuous road out of Barton Mills is one of the chief beauty-spots of all these one hundred and thirty miles to Cromer. Nowhere is a more curving and undecided main road than this, at the crossing of the little river Lark, and few have so great a charm. Here, close by that old roadside inn, the “Bull,” stand the flour-mills that continue to give a meaning to the old place-name, and past them flows that fishful river, along a reach densely shaded by poplars and willows. Graceful plantations line the road and stud the marshy ground that presently gives place again to mile upon mile of heath.

Over seven miles of heather and bracken lead to Elveden, said by Fox, more than a century ago, to have been the best-stocked sporting estate, for its size, in the kingdom. The wayfarer of the present day can honestly re-echo the opinion of that statesman, for the pheasants swarm. Even upon the highway, as the cyclist passes, instead of scurrying away, they come out of the hedges and stare after him, impudently, as though they alone have a right here. To the pedestrian they are rather embarrassing, following to heel like dogs. They are so used to being handled that they take every man-person for a keeper or food-distributer, and with the inducement of a pocketful of maize, judiciously distributed, they could no doubt be induced to follow one into Thetford.

Those whose business it is to look after the game at Elveden—or “Elden,” as the country people call it—are legion. Elveden is, in fact, maintained by Lord Iveagh, just as it has always been, but now still more strictly, for sport, and here along the white ribbon of the road, or across the purple heaths, you may, in due season, see the “sportsmen” and the beaters setting forth in the morning to slay by wholesale, or in the evening returning, their lust for death and destruction sated for the day. It is undoubtedly a large question, but to the present writer it seems that the real sporting era was when the gunner spent a long day tramping the coverts, the turnip-fields, or the stubble, and sought his quarry with the hunter’s skill, rather than waiting for it to be driven to him.

Elveden has seen a good many changes in the last hundred years or so. Admiral Viscount Keppel, who purchased the property in 1768, and died in 1786, left it to the fourth Earl of Albemarle, and here was born in 1799, in the old Hall, rebuilt, or rather, remodelled, in 1870, that tough one of that tough and long-lived race of Keppels, George Thomas, the sixth Earl, who as a boy of sixteen fought at Waterloo, and succeeding his elder brother in the title in 1851, died in 1891. It was somewhere about the year of Waterloo that difficulties of sorts befell the Keppels, and Elveden then passed out of their hands into those of the Newtons, an undistinguished family, who held the estate until 1863, when it was purchased by the Maharajah Duleep Singh, and thus became associated with the romance of that dispossessed ruler of Lahore.

Imperial interests in India, and in greater measure the fears of the statesmen of that time, dealt harshly with that Oriental prince; excluded him from his ancestral honours, and made him a life-long stranger to his own people, and to the land of his birth. In exchange for his native rule and glorious sunshine, he was to have an annuity of “not less than £40,000 and not more than £50,000,” for “himself, his family, and dependents,” with domicile in our isle of fogs and mists. How ill the Government kept faith with him may be judged when it is stated that he never at any time received more than £25,000 a year.

Strange to say, he took kindly to our ways, and settled down here as a country gentleman. With the general reduction of rents, and the heavy outlays he had made upon the reconstruction of Elveden Hall, he eventually found it necessary to have recourse to the India Office, for immediate financial aid. As a result, his income was reduced to an annual £12,000.

The Maharajah had early embraced Christianity, and in 1864, in Egypt, had married Miss Bamba Müller. In 1882, after he had vainly striven to bring the Government to a performance of the original compact, and had fruitlessly petitioned Parliament to that end, he sailed for India, but was refused permission to enter. At Aden, from political motives, and also, we may suppose, from indignation at the breach of faith he had experienced, he abjured Christianity, and flung himself into the arms of Russia. Thence he retired to Paris. A few years later he re-embraced the Christian religion, and made his peace personally with Queen Victoria, at Grasse. He died at Paris, in 1893, in his fifty-sixth year.

With that event, the Elveden estate again changed hands, being purchased by Lord Iveagh, then newly raised to the Peerage. He had been disappointed in his earlier purchase of Savernake from the Marquis of Ailesbury, the Courts setting the bargain aside and refusing sanction for the property being alienated from the Bruce family.

Since then, the village of Elveden has been transformed. It is still a village, placed like a settlement in a wild, uncultivated country, with the primeval heath visible from every cottage door, but the black flint cottages have given place everywhere to red brick, and it now lives in the memory of the passing motorist fleeting the lonely road at an illegal thirty miles an hour as a red streak on a brown plain of moorland. The red brick is, no doubt, very smart, but it is distinctly an alien material here, and altogether out of place. It would, indeed, in any earlier period than this of cheap transport facilities, have been impossible, for red bricks are not a local manufacture and the cost of bringing them here would in other times have been altogether prohibitive. The vanished black-flint buildings, constructed of the material found locally, were instinct with the spirit of the place, and looked as though they had grown out of the soil, and were a part of the land.

To a less hurried passenger than a motorist there is much food for reflection in the changed aspect of the village; but reflection is all that will be fed here, for to find a wayside hostelry is a difficult quest, and the traveller who comes, hungry and thirsty, perhaps wet through, from the many miles of wild, inhospitable heath on either side, is like to go on until he reaches Barton Mills or Thetford before he obtains shelter and refreshment, unless, indeed, he would be content with an obscure beerhouse off the road. To suggest a bottle of Guinness’s genuine Dublin brew may, for all one knows, be _petit treason_ at Elveden, and the villagers must, possibly, see to it, lest they grow stout—and allusive!

It is a handsome, although inhospitable village that has grown up at the bidding of the master of millions whose coroneted “I” stares you out of countenance from every red-brick cottage. Architectural taste is evident in the schools, the beautiful estate office, the village hall, the post office, and the village in general. All around, on the warrens, the waterless hills are dotted with wells, and the whole estate provided with the most exquisitely steam-rolled roads, and cared for as no one ever could have cared for it before. Yet it is not unpleasing to one who has experienced the courtesy of the Maharajah in years bygone to find that the memory of the “Black Prince,” as he was here affectionately known, is still cherished at Elveden, even though it is now owned by the, as far as mere lucre goes, more princely prince of black beer.

Elveden Park forms one side of the village street, and through the trees the golden glitter of pinnacles can be seen, leading the stranger to think his eyes have rested on the Hall. But those are merely the stables, where the horses are housed in a manner that might almost have contented Heliogabalus. The stables at Sandringham are not so lavish, but then, of course, they belong merely to the King. The Hall itself is not externally so flamboyant, and is in essentials the staid Italian Renaissance of some years ago. But once within, it is a gorgeous display of wealth rejoicing in itself and attempting feats resembling the painting of the lily and the gilding of refined gold. You pass from an oak-panelled entrance hall, with doors barbarically sheathed in glittering patterned metal and flanked by passages whose coved ceilings are covered with Renaissance designs in raised plaster, into a domed central hall of pure white marble, designed in the Indian style and most elaborately carved and fretted in that extravagant Oriental taste. It is like coming from the Hotel Metropole into a first-class mausoleum, and when you enter you cannot help thinking you are dead and buried and laid to rest in an inferior copy of the Taj Mahal. This extravagant feature, newly completed, is said to have cost £10,000.

As one leaves the Park the lions of Lahore are noticed, still decorating the stone gateways. Near by is Elveden church, the only remaining vestige of the old village: a humble little place, with mural monument and medallion portrait of Admiral Keppel and an east window to the memory of the Maharajah Duleep Singh and Bamba, his wife.

So we will leave Elveden, cut adrift, save in this sole respect, from old times. Useless to look for the “Hare and Hounds” posting-house, where the post-chaises changed horses, and equally fruitless to seek the old toll-house, the scene on October 25th, 1825, of an accident to the “Magnet” coach, on its way from London to Norwich, when the leaders shied as they were passing through the gate and the coach was upset, with the result that an outside passenger, a widow from Hargham, was killed.

XXXIII

THE 3¾ miles onwards to Thetford were known and dreaded in the old days as “Thetford Heath.” Elveden Gap, passed on the way, is the name of a clump of firs, marking where the boundaries of estates and parishes run. Beyond it stretches the lonely heath. Pollard, in his terrifying print of the “Norwich Mail in a Thunderstorm,” makes this the scene of a very dramatic picture, with the lightning horribly forky and the rain very slanty and penetrating. Thetford Heath was an ill place on such an occasion; but the elements were not the chiefest of its dangers, which in any year from mediæval times until modern were rather to be expected at the hands of man.

There still exists in the old church of St. George Colegate, Norwich, a tragical epitaph to the memory of a traveller slain on these wild wastes in those dangerous times. It is engraved on a ledger-stone forming a part of the flooring at the west end of the nave, and is hidden from the gaze of the casual visitor only by the matting. A skull and cross-bones are placed above the inscription, which runs:—

“Here Lyeth y^e Body of Mr. Bryant Lewis, who
was Barbarously Murdered upon y^e Heath,
near Thetford, Sep. y^e 13th, 1698.

Fifteen wide wounds this stone veils from thine eyes,
But Reader, Hark! their voice doth pierce the skyes.
Vengeance! cried Abel’s blood, ’gainst cursed Cain,
But better things spake CHRIST when He was Slayn
Both, both, cries Lewis ’gainst his bar’brous foe,
Blood, Lord, for Blood, but save his soul from woe.

THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER (Exodus xx. 13).

Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
For in y^e image of God made He man (Genesis ix. 6).”

The register of St. George’s, which records the burial of the unfortunate Bryant Lewis on September 19th, six days following the murder, is at curious variance with the epitaph, for it makes the date 1697.

We do not hear anything of the circumstances under which Bryant Lewis was killed, nor does it appear that his murderers were ever caught.

Thetford must have been a welcome sight to the timorous travellers of old, and surely no place of pilgrimage was hailed with more delight than that with which they first glimpsed the tower of St. Mary’s and the outlying houses of the Suffolk suburb of the town.

One comes downhill into Thetford: down into the valley of the Thet and Lesser Ouse, which divide the county of Suffolk and the land of the Norfolk Dumplings. The flint-towered church that thus heralds the town is the oldest of the remaining three, and was severely handled in Cromwellian times, when it was converted for a while into a stable. It had, until 1850, a thatched roof. Here the road from Bury St. Edmunds falls in, a junction of roads still known by some of the older generation as “Cockpit Corner,” a name that marks the site of the cockpit which stood here in those brutal days of yore and moved a letter-writer of 1785 to say, “I believe most of the young Thetford people are dissipated, simple, ignorant young men (what a nice ‘derangement of epitaphs’!) that mind nothing but the low and insipid sport of cock-fighting.” From this point, into the town across the Town Bridge, the road narrows amazingly, and, arrived at the “Bell” inn, and St. Peter’s Church, it wears almost the appearance of a lane

XXXIV

THE situation of Thetford and the history of the roads by which it is approached make an interesting subject of enquiry. All ancient accounts of Thetford agree in describing it as from the earliest times a place of great importance—a strongly fortified post and a seat of government.

The first mention of Thetford takes us back to the year 575, when Uffa, first King of the East Angles, made this his capital city, and called it “Theotford,” by that name describing the situation of the place, lying secure against approach from the Suffolk side, behind a network of difficult fords across the marshes and many branches of the confluent rivers we now call the Ouse and Thet. Others had been here before him, but all that earlier story of Thetford is purely speculative. That it had an earlier history and was from very remote times a fortified post, the great prehistoric earthworks which guard the passage of the river amply prove. By whom, or by what race they were reared, who shall tell? But certainly Uffa and his Saxons found them here. The Romans, still earlier, had been astonished by them, but made haste to adapt the huge mounds to their own purposes. For the Romans were everywhere, and to acknowledge their presence here it is not necessary to identify this as the _Sitomagus_ of the “Itineraries.” Camden considered Thetford to be identical with that Roman station, and thought the name derived from _Sit_ or _Thet_, and _magus_, a great city; and many have been content to follow him, “the common sun whereat our modern writers have all lighted their little torches.” Thus Bishop Nicholson, strong in satire upon Camden’s copyists; but more modern writers have made flambeaux of their very own, and by the light of them have groped about to some sort of inconclusive opinion that _Sitomagus_ was probably at Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast.

Thetford was at the very centre of the East Anglian realm, and therefore a place of great security. Thus it was that the Royal Mint was early established here and so continued, through the history of this one of the seven kingdoms.

For two hundred and sixty-three years East Anglia and England in general remained under Saxon rule. The kinglets were always at war with one another, and their boundaries, and even the numbers of their kingdoms, were ever changing, but it was not until 838 that an alien danger threatened them. It was in this year that the Danes first invaded the country, and were defeated at Rushford Heath. With that decisive result the land was left in peace for twenty-seven years.

In the meanwhile that most famous and most legendary East Anglian Christian king, the sainted Edmund, had succeeded to the throne, and had reigned ten years when the terrible invasion of 866 befell. Then was fought the battle of Snarehill, which lasted for several days, and whose bloody memories were so vivid, even a hundred and fifty-four years later, that the Abbot of St. Edmundsbury founded a monastery on the spot, in honour of the thousands who fell on both sides. This, the Battle Abbey of its era, was in Henry VIII.’s time granted to Sir Richard Fulmerstone. The “Place” farm, an ecclesiastical building now used as a barn, and a training-stable for horses now occupy the site of what is locally called “The Nunnery.”

The Battle of Snarehill was not conclusive. The invading Danes certainly occupied the town for the winter, but they would appear to have afterwards retired, and it was not until 870 that the crowning disaster came. In the spring of that year the Danes again returned, destroyed Thetford, and utterly defeated the army Edmund had drawn from every nook and corner of his kingdom. Edmund himself did not fall in that tremendous slaughter, but met with his martyrdom, as we have already seen, at Hoxne, some twenty miles away.

All over England the Danish invasion then spread. In Wessex even, where the reign of Alfred then began, that heroic king was for a time overborne by the heathen hordes; while Eastern England, with but few intervals, was for many years subject to fire and sword. Only the payment of a heavy tribute kept these pirates away. When at length a number of Danish settlements had been made and the two races at last had begun to forget the bygone years, the mad folly of that King of All England, whom men called Ethelred “the Unready,” devised in 1002, on November 14th, the feast of St. Brice, a general massacre of those Danish settlers. It was no worse measure than, time and again, those Northern foes had meted out to the Saxon people; but the folly was criminal, if the deed was not, for from those shores of Denmark came avenging hosts with Sweyn at their head. It was almost two years before he came, but with his advent the old miseries began to be re-enacted. Norwich was burnt, and Thetford felt the full force of his onslaught. But for the military genius of one Ulfcytel, himself the owner of a Danish name, but acting as the bulwark of East Anglia, Sweyn would at once have marched through the land. Ulfcytel, however, drove him back to his ships, and it was not until 1010 that he returned, and, defeating the still active Ulfcytel at the battle of Ringmere, burnt Thetford again to the ground. Elsewhere in England Sweyn was even more successful, and penetrating to Winchester and Bath, was proclaimed King in London in 1013. That same year he died and was succeeded by that Canute, who in the moral story of the flattering courtiers and the advancing tide has been made hateful in every elementary schoolroom. It was in battle with Canute in 1016, at Ashingdon, in South Essex, the valiant Ulfcytel at last fell.

With Canute’s accession, however, the early blood-dyed history of Thetford reached its last page, and when the Saxon line of kings was restored with Edward the Confessor in 1041, the oft-burned town numbered 944 burgesses.

From that time, with but one short period in the reign of William the Conqueror, the town rapidly grew in importance. It became the site of the East Anglian bishopric in 1075, when the see was removed from Elmham, and although that much-moved Bishop’s chair was again removed, to Norwich, nineteen years later, Thetford suffered little from that circumstance. If it ceased to be technically a city, it was a great town and a very stronghold of the Church. Although it has now but three churches, it owned twenty, so late as the time of Edward III., and the ruins of many of them can still be traced, proving the truth of those old records that tell of them. Seven were on the Suffolk side. These we might call suburban, but of them only that of St. Mary-the-Less is now extant. Its big sister, St. Mary-the-Great, stood adjoining the Grammar School, but only fragmentary walls remain. This was converted by Bishop Arfast into the cathedral of those nineteen years. Elsewhere in and around the town the shattered and shapeless walls of old-time ecclesiastical buildings abound, and the ploughman who drives his furrow across fields that were once streets, turns up mediæval tiles with the lack of interest that comes of constant use, or fervently damns the occasional abbot’s sarcophagus that dints his ploughshare.

With the Crusades Thetford declined in population and fortune. Why, we do not know. It is not reasonable to suppose that the people went off in a body to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.

But the monasteries remained in being. Like the clinging ivy that flourishes even when the tree it has ruined is dead, they continued until Henry swept them away. They were four: that monastery, founded to commemorate the battle of Snarehill, which afterwards became a Benedictine nunnery; the Abbey, or Priory, founded by Roger Bigod in 1104; the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre, Earl Warren’s foundation of five years later; and the Friary of St. Augustine, established by John o’ Gaunt in 1387. Besides these were numerous hospitals, together with the Manor House and the King’s Palace, used by sovereigns from Henry I. to James I.

The only approach to Thetford in very distant times was doubtless by the Icknield Way, and for many centuries later that ancient track continued to be the chief road into and through the town on to Larlingford, where the existing highway from Thetford to Norwich falls into it. If we take up the line of the Icknield Way where, on page 189, we left it, we shall find it pointing straight through the Gasworks to the three bridges that now span the parallel stream of the Thet, a nameless intermediate rivulet, and the Little Ouse. These are (doubtless from the immediate neighbourhood of what is even now called “the Nunnery”) known as the “Nuns’ Bridges,” but one of them was formerly known as “Incelland” Bridge, and in that name we may perhaps find a distorted echo of “Icknield.”

It is a pretty spot, and made romantic by its ancient story. You find it by tacking round the Gasworks, for which we need not claim any romance, and thence by a group of melancholy pines, where—at a point which was a junction of roads before this short two hundred yards’ stretch of the Way was stopped up—a mound marks the site of “Chunk Harvey’s Grave.” One cannot look upon this more or less tragical spot with reverence, for Harvey’s grotesque name and the discarded boots and battered tin cans of the town that decorate his legendary resting-place forbid. “Legendary” is written advisedly, for not the most diligent of delvers into the past shall succeed in reducing Chunk Harvey to cold dates and exact records. But his story has a distinctly moral tone, and may be recounted as a warning to any would-be pirates now trembling on the brink of a lawless life under the Jolly Roger. According, then, to the received legend, Chunk Harvey was a sea-rover who, by strict attention to his piratical profession and by a prudent and saving disposition, managed early in life to secure a large fortune. He retired to Thetford, and might have become a churchwarden and died in every circumstance of comfortable piety had it not been for a former acquaintance who had cut many a throat with him in bygone days on the high seas, but now, reduced to his last stiver, came tramping through Thetford. By a cursed (or fortunate) chance, just according to how your sympathies lie, this broken-down bandit met his old comrade, and in the result blackmailed him long and successfully until his victim could endure it no more. When at last he refused to be bled any longer, the man betrayed him, and—to cut the story short—Chunk Harvey was convicted and hanged. He was buried here, amid the rejoicings of a virtuous populace, who—if you like to share the children’s belief—were granted a Bank holiday and wound up the festivities with a display of fireworks.

A little stretch of common land leads on to the “Nuns’ Bridges.” Thetford town is hidden as you approach, by the dense trees of the Spring Walk and by others on either side, growing luxuriant by favour of the water, and thus forming the strongest and the most grateful of contrasts with Thetford’s situation amid wild heaths, bare and treeless, or planted only with the melancholy pine, and dotted here and there with gnarled hawthorns.

When this, now a side route into Thetford, was supplemented by that of the present main road over the “St. Christopher’s,” or Town Bridge, must be a matter of conjecture. We must not suppose, because that bridge was built only in 1697, there was no bridge or road up to the river and into the town before that time. Morden’s map of Norfolk in 1695 does not mark one; but it is incredible that there should have been no direct communication across a not very broad stream between these Suffolk suburbs and the chief part of the town. On the other hand, the fact that a ducking-stool was erected on the “Nuns’ Bridge” in 1578 would seem to prove that this was certainly then the chief approach, for the practice was to make the head-over-ears ducking of the scolds and shrews as public an exhibition of their shame as possible.

XXXV

THE most prominent hostelry at Thetford in coaching days was the “Bell,” and it still occupies that geographical pre-eminence, even though its commercial importance has decayed. The “Bell,” in fact, has never recovered from the blow dealt it in 1846, when the coaches ceased to run, and overhangs the narrow street, its great courtyard a world too large for the diminished traffic.

Lord Albemarle has a good deal to say of the “Bell” in his book of reminiscences. As a young man, travelling about 1810 between London and Elveden Hall, then in the possession of his family, he sometimes, in common with the sporting youngsters of that age, had the opportunity of driving the Mail for a stage or two. It was not always, indeed, an opportunity desired by the passenger who shared the box-seat with the coachman, for those who sought that glorious elevation, paying rather heavily for the privilege in the form of a tip to the yard-porter who reserved the seat and in a series of drinks to the successive Jehus who drove, were, much more often than is generally supposed, quite content to let the coachman do the driving. Comparatively few were ever to be found skilled in the difficult art of guiding four horses, and not every box-seat passenger was eager to “take the ribbons.” The coachmen, on any quiet stretch of road, were generally more keen to make the offer of “taking ’em for a bit” than their passengers to accept, for those professional occupants of the box were, in the well-known etiquette of coaching, always sure of half a sovereign as a tip from the sportsman who “took ’em,” and when, from sheer timidity, their offer was not accepted, they were indignant, especially if some one who _would_ have “taken ’em,” and tipped accordingly, was elsewhere on the coach. Under such harrowing circumstances a coachman generally felt himself to be defrauded. “What are you ’ere for, then?” asked such an one of his box-seat passenger who had declined the honour and glory—and the danger; and when, after a halt for refreshment, the passengers resumed their places, this one who would not have distinction thrust upon him found his place taken by a dashing fellow who, a few miles down the road, landed them all into a ditch and most of them into hospital.

But to return to the youthful Keppel. “At the ‘Bell,’” he says, “I used to sit down to a most sumptuous breakfast of eggs, buttered toast, fried ham, etc., and all for love, and not money. I was a prime favourite with the landlady, Betty Radcliffe, so much so that for the many years that, as man and boy, I frequented her hostelry, she would never accept a sixpence from me. Betty wore a high cap, like that in which Mrs. Gamp is seen in Dickens’s novel, and a flaxen wig which she appeared to have outgrown, for it ill-concealed her grey hairs. Being the sole proprietress of post-horses into Norfolk, she assumed an independent demeanour and language, to which every one was compelled to submit.”

Betty Radcliffe is still a Thetford legend, and the tale is yet told how, when the Duke of York was paying for his post-horses, on one of his visits to a neighbouring squire, she jingled the coins in her hand with a humorous air of satisfaction, and said, “I may as well take a little of your money, for I have been paying your father’s taxes for many a long day.”

The church of St. Peter, adjoining the “Bell,” is locally known as the “Black Church,” from the more than usually dark colour of the flints of which its tower is built. It is not so old a tower as it looks, for it was built so lately as 1789, in imitation of the then almost forgotten Gothic style. The imitation, making due allowances, is not so bad. The footpath here is so narrow that a projecting buttress has been cut back to give room to pass.

The older one grows, and the nearer to occupancy of the churchyard, the less does one care to frequent such places; and besides, those of Thetford are of no great interest. But the historian’s duty compels a search for the farcical rhymed epitaph stated, in many collections, to be “at Thetford.” It is—but read it for yourself:—

My grandfather was buried here,
My cousin Jane, and two uncles dear;
My father perished with a mortification in his thighs,
My sister dropped down dead in the Minories.
But the reason why I am here, according to my thinking,
Is owing to my good living and hard drinking;
Therefore, good Christians, if you’d wish to live long,
Beware of drinking brandy, gin, or anything strong.

Many a pilgrim in search of such mortuary extravagances has sought this; all of them sent on a fool’s errand by the original wag who invented it, and by the copyists of other people’s collections who have performed the easy task of copying without verifying. Thetfordians disclaim it altogether.

Every traveller come to Thetford has dwelt at length upon its mazy streets, and how infallibly those who are not Thetford born lose themselves in them and walk in circles. It is indeed difficult to find one’s way about Thetford. A far-off echo of the desperate old times, sounding across the void of a thousand years, was the old name of what is now called Guildhall Street. Until fifty years ago it was still, as it had always been, “Heathenman Street,” a title alluding to the march of the pagan Danes; and I would the name were restored, for romance is evident in that old name.

It is down Guildhall Street, behind the recently rebuilt Guildhall, that the old Friends’ Meeting House stands, in Cage Lane. That name marks where the old lock-up, or “cage,” once stood. The Meeting House, now threatened with destruction, was in use by the Quaker community of the town until about 1865. It was built in 1696, seven years after the time of persecution had been brought to a close by the Toleration Act of 1689. Those were humble days, and, newly freed from persecution and imprisonment for the mere act of meeting together, those early Dissenters were probably thankful enough even for this little cottage of one room. It is built of a mixture of flint, brick, and chalk, and heavily thatched. In common with almost every other building of any considerable age in Thetford, there may be found among those varied materials large pieces of freestone, the spoils of the ancient religious houses of the town. The Quakers are a hard-headed, rather than a sentimental, body; else they would not have abandoned this historic cottage, which has since 1865 been used successively by the Plymouth Brethren and the Salvation Army, and is now ruinous.

Past the Guildhall, a street leads directly to what was the gaol in those days, still regretted in the town, when the Assizes were held alternately at Thetford and Norwich. The gaol is now merely a police-station. Thetford lost its Assizes in 1833, its Parliamentary representation in 1868, and all its old fairs have decayed; so that the only excitement in the lives of the worthy burgesses is when an itinerant circus pitches its tents in the neighbourhood. The road-life between Thetford and Norwich had its own picturesqueness before 1833, for prisoners were conveyed in waggons to be tried here or at Norwich, and Attleborough March Fair, from being generally held while the Assizes were in progress, was popularly known as “Rogues’ Fair.” There were sometimes in those days “maiden” Assizes at Thetford, but the term had a different signification from that it now bears. In those times a “maiden” Assize was one of those exceptional occasions when no one was condemned to death. Things were not at the last so bad as in earlier times, when the Manor Courts, the Ecclesiastical Courts, and the Mayor’s Court were competent to inflict the death penalty, but it was still a barbaric age in 1824, when twenty-six prisoners were condemned to death, some for sheep-stealing.

Thetford Gaol still remains, an appropriately grim building of black flint, with representations of fetters over the doors, together with the town arms and an inscription stating that “This Gaol was enlarg’d in the Year 1816.” Opposite is a great brewery of old standing. It would be pleasing to the teetotal interest to establish a connection between the building of the brewery and the enlarging of the gaol as cause and effect, but it cannot be done.

This is the quaintest corner of old Thetford, and abounds with inns. Among these is the sign of the “Good Woman.” It is at the rear of the row of houses of which the “Good Woman” forms part that the most interesting thing in Thetford is to be seen. This is the giant earthwork, to which a passing reference has already been made, the earthwork known as “Castle Mound,” or, in a manner better befitting the dignity of it, “Castle Hill.” It is not the tallest of the mysterious tumps England has to show, for it is but 100 feet in height, and its bigger brother, “Silbury Hill,” on the Bath Road, is 70 feet taller, but it rises more abruptly from the level, and looks all its height, while Silbury Hill is spread over a wider base and ascends more gently. No one knows what race of men raised this tremendous heap of chalk. They heaped it up, undoubtedly, for purposes of defence, and as the pilgrim painfully climbs its steep and now grassy sides, principally on hands and knees, he is fain to acknowledge that an ancient enemy seeking to storm this stronghold would have had an almost impossible task.

The Castle Hill stands on a considerable space, its circumference measuring 984 feet. Three deep grassy trenches and two steep ramparts guard the foot of it, and the defenders at the summit found shelter in the deep cup-like depression, resembling the crater of a volcano. A bygone generation planted a clump of trees in this hollow, and they have now grown to noble and striking proportions. There was never at any time any building on this defensible earthwork, which was itself the “Castle.”

The place stands in a beautiful spot on the eastern outskirts of the town, in the midst of noble trees and luxuriant turf. Unlike the great majority of the prehistoric earthworks noticed in guide-books and in the learned papers of archæological societies, it is generally interesting, and appeals to the eyes even of those uninstructed in archæology.

That the Castle Hill was built for defence there can be no doubt, and its height, its steep sides, and the defensive earthworks that describe a rude half-circle around it give the measure of the fear its unknown builders had of their unknown enemy. They who reared these works were terribly scared. That enemy was evidently expected to come out of the south, for the great mound stands on the northern side of the rivers and marshes which then spread over all the neighbouring flat meadows; and the horns of the semicircular ditches and ramparts at that time touched those kindly frontier waters. The Icknield Way, already traced to the “Nuns’ Bridges,” came across that watery waste and pursued its course into Norfolk under the shoulder of the mysterious mound.

XXXVI