Chapter I: AM quite sure that if any old Thetfordian were permitted to return to (1)

his native town, he would find it, by contrast with other times, astonishingly dull. No badgering of Quakers, no cock-fighting, no scold-ducking, and no more bribery and corruption at Parliamentary elections—or at least it is not done in the old approved style, when at every inn you could call for what you liked, get riotously, hilariously, and finally dead, drunk, and have the cost of the debauch chalked up to the Duke of Grafton down at Euston, whose pocket-borough Thetford was. Alas! the borough representation went, a whole generation ago, and the town is merged into a mere county division. Dull, sir! Why, damme, yes. Not even an Assize and the spectacle of a hanging in these days, and the coaches and the post-chaises that used to awaken the echoes of the streets at night are all resolved into firewood. As for Thetford ever having been a fashionable resort, the world certainly has forgotten all about it, and when you hint it was so, looks incredulous. But the Spring Walk remains as a voucher for that short-lived fashionable patronage. Most delightful of all the roads and paths in and near Thetford, the Spring Walk owes its existence to that hope of erecting the town into an East Anglian rival of Tunbridge Wells, Bath, or Cheltenham, which was a feature of local history from the early part of the eighteenth century until the first quarter of the nineteenth had almost run its course. That was a time when every locality fortunate enough to possess waters impregnated with iron or sulphur to the requisite degree of nastiness strove desperately to attain the position of a Spa. Relics of that old-time eagerness to secure a share of the fortunes of Bath and other well-established resorts of this kind are plentiful all over England, and at most places where, owing to subterranean complications, with horrible chemical results, the water is not fit to drink, you shall now find the neglected and decaying Pump Houses and Spa Rooms then hastily built, with the hope of attracting the fashionable invalids and hypochondriacs of the day. It was in most cases a hope doomed to disappointment, for invalided fashion is gregarious, and then, even more than now, loved to herd together, to discuss symptoms and exchange scandal. Even had it been of other mood, there was not, a century ago, sufficient fashion to fully furnish a tithe of those forlorn hopes; so that many Spas of even supreme nastiness which should otherwise have secured success, failed to attract visitors in sufficient numbers to make the enterprise remunerative.

The chalybeate waters of Thetford were known so early as 1714, and were slightly tinged with iron and moderately tonic. Arising from springs on the north bank of the Upper Ouse, they were in local repute long before the necessity arose for every medical man to have his pet curative resort, and might have remained obscure had it not been for one Professor Accum, who, as an early nineteenth-century boomster, began to send patients to Thetford, long before that century was out of its teens.

Thetford rose to the occasion. In 1818 the Mayor at his own expense constructed a river-side path leading to the “Spring House,” and planted it with those plane-trees which have grown into the delightful avenue that now forms his best monument. In August of that year the spring was opened to the “free and unrestricted use of the poor,” and the sick, and large numbers of all classes flocked to it. Still larger numbers were attracted in 1819, when Professor Accum published a work on the virtues of the Thetford waters. Success seemed assured. The water was even bottled and sent, carefully packed, to all parts, as a panacea for dyspepsia; but it was when these springs failed to cure ophthalmia, rheumatism and broken bones, and to work other impossibilities, that failure came and fond hopes withered and decayed. The public expected miracles, but there has been nothing of a miraculous nature in East Anglia since the marvellous times of Edmund, King, Martyr, and Saint, when credulity, faith, and the imagination of the monks went hand in hand, and produced astounding results; and so the Thetford Spa presently ceased to be. Even those dyspeptic patients who derived, or thought they derived, benefit from the bottled waters fell away when they found they had long been humbugged by a number of practical humorists, who, combining a hateful cynicism with an abominable laziness, bottled off their healing draughts from other and handier, but quite ineffective, places.

Thetford at this day shows no prominent signs of its old Spa. The “Bath,” or “Spring,” house remains, but it is now a private residence, and few know or care to enquire, the origin of that beautiful plane-tree avenue leading beside the river to the “Nuns’ Bridges.”

Thetford in these times of ours is a very sober place indeed, has given up all attempts to attract the fashionables, and relies for its prosperity upon Burrell’s engineering works, where you can buy a beautiful traction-engine any day, and upon the Pulp Mills, which turn out unbreakable domestic articles in a wholesale manner calculated to make all interested in the manufacture of china and glass wish they had chosen some other trade.

There have been Thetfordians in the past to do wonderful things and make some little stir in their day. Let us begin with the smallest of them. In 1782, “Robert Bartley, of Thetford,” then in his sixty-third year, is recorded to have walked the eighty-one miles to London in twenty-four hours, and to have walked back the following day. He died, aged sixty-six, in 1785.

There were some excellent walkers at that time, for in 1813 the Thetford Volunteers performed a remarkable feat of endurance. They marched the fifty miles to Yarmouth in one day. Fortunately, no enemy was there, else those exhausted pedestrians might have fared ill.

But this is trifling with biography. Thetford’s most famous—or at least most notorious—son is Tom Paine

XXXVII

THEY still show you—if you are persistent enough to at length find those who know or care anything at all about it—the birthplace of Tom Paine, in White Hart Street, but it must be confessed, gladly or with regret—one is not quite sure which emotion is pre-eminent—that Paine, that stormy petrel of late eighteenth-century politics, has quite faded out of popular recollection in this his native town. Who, anywhere, knows nowadays much more about Tom Paine than that he was the author of a work, “The Rights of Man” which no one ever reads nowadays and therefore is generally thought to be much worse than it really is? For the rest, there remains a vague impression that he was a “wicked” person, and, above all, not “respectable,” which last consideration, of course, sufficiently deters the mass of people from seeking to learn anything about him. Yet in his day he was a most remarkable person, and exercised an enormous influence.

Tom Paine—no one ever seems to have called him “Thomas”—was born in 1737, the son of a Quaker staymaker. They were quite humble people, the Paines, and their household so dull and cramped that Tom, early a rebel against authority, ran away from home in his nineteenth year and went for a sailor. He fought on board the man-o’-war _Terrible_ in 1756, but authority, stalking rampant, so to speak, on the quarter-deck, was, of course, not at all to his mind, and he left the Navy. Turning then to his handicraft of staymaking, he is found, a fleeting figure of unrest, in London, Dover, and Sandwich. He married in 1759, and his wife died in the following year.

Staymaking seems then to have lost all attractions for him, for in 1761 he succeeded in obtaining the modest appointment of supernumerary officer in the Excise, and was stationed in this his native town. How _very_ modest that post really was may be sufficiently explained when it is said that the pay was £50 a year, and find your own horse! If that was an advance upon his earlier employment—why, then, staymaking must have been a poor thing. Paine does not seem to have taken his duties very seriously. Could any one, at the price? So, after he had been transferred to stations at Grantham and Alford, he was at length, in 1765, dismissed for neglect. The neglect was rather serious, consisting as it did in filling up returns of examinations he had not made.

Two years of wandering followed. Staymaking at Diss and ushering in London filled in the time until 1767, when by some strange chance he secured another appointment in the Excise. This billet would have taken him to Grampound, in Cornwall, but that was too far West, and so he held off until the following year, when a similar post offered at Lewes. There he lodged with a tobacconist, who died the following year, and two years later Paine married his late landlord’s daughter. She and her mother opened a small grocery business, and Paine contributed his small share towards keeping up the establishment. But it was not in the scheme of life laid down by the Fates for Paine that he should be allowed to jog comfortably on through an obscure provincial existence of this humdrum nature. He became a noted figure in local political debates, and in 1772 the excisemen, who had long chafed under a combination of arduous work and small pay, found in Paine a champion who could display their grievances to advantage. He wrote and issued a pamphlet, setting forth their circumstances and demands, and eventually found himself dismissed from the service. He petitioned the Board of Excise for reinstatement, but they had no use for firebrands, and his appeals were disregarded.

Meanwhile, domestic differences had been at work, and that lack of conjugal agreement it has been left for modern times to gracefully term “incompatability of temperament” had caused a more or less amicable separation.

This general upheaval and ruination of Paine’s little world sent him drifting to London, where he met Dr. Franklin, who found him eager to try his luck in what were then the North American Colonies, and so gave him introductions to Philadelphia folks who might be of use. At Philadelphia he landed, accordingly, in 1774, and presently found his way into an editorial chair, at a salary of £50 a year, which we may perhaps look upon as an advance, because he certainly had not to support a horse, as well as himself, out of it, as in old Excise days.

He had reached America at a critical juncture of affairs. The Home Government had exasperated the colonists to the last degree by seeking to tax them in support of an Exchequer depleted by the world-wide warfares not long before brought to a conclusion. It mattered nothing that those wars had been fought for the very existence of England and her colonies alike: the New Englanders were not patriotic when their pockets were touched, and would not pay, and the Home authorities tactlessly insisted that they should. The result was armed rebellion, an inglorious war, and the independence of the United States. In all the many and involved political intrigues of the rebellion and the setting up of the new nation Paine had a part, and even did some service for the revolted colonists in the field. But it was as a negotiator, wire-puller, and general go-between he shone. From his trivial editorial throne he raised himself into the status of a personage by pamphleteering, and conducted himself as an equal with Washington and the other leaders. Nay, more; it was he who, seeing how eager France was to aid the colonies against England with men, munitions of war, and in diplomatic ways, suggested and did actually in most skilful manner, negotiate a loan from the French Government to the States. For these services he was granted a salary of $800, equivalent to £160. Clearly negotiators were cheap in America in those days! But although he wrought such yeoman service to the cause, his fellow-revolutionaries did not love their Paine. He stood for negation in everything. Kingdoms, principalities, and powers, aristocracies and religion were as naught to him; while, for the most part, the successful colonists had no quarrel with anything but the British Government. They were pious and God-fearing: he was an atheist. Washington and his lieutenants were essentially of the aristocratic class, and with the prejudices of their order: Paine was—as modern slang would put it—“no class,” and it is clear that although his associates were glad of his lucid and pungent pen, they were not desirous of close association with him.

Paine returned to England, in 1787, and made acquaintance with Fox and others of those who, had they not been blinded by political animosities, must needs have looked upon him as what he really was, a traitor to the land of his birth. By this it will be seen that the “Pro-Boers” of modern times are no novel phenomena: they have always existed as “pro” something or other likely to be injurious to their own country. It is rather a pity, when you consider it, that Paine was not properly hanged when he set foot again on these shores; but he was not molested until the second part of his atheistical book, “The Rights of Man,” was published, in 1793. _Then_ he had to flee the country, a fugitive from the wrath of a nation that could endure a traitor, but found it impossible to forgive one who denied his God.

Where should such an one seek refuge but in Paris? There he became “Citizen Paine,” and consorted with Marat, Robespierre, and others; publishing his “Age of Reason” in midst of that hurly-burly of revolutionary jealousies. The victory of one party and the downfall of another brought him in that land of liberty an unexpected introduction to a Parisian dungeon, where he lay for ten months, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. It was only through the strong attitude taken up by his American friends, and by the false claim of his being an American citizen, that he became again a free man. The year 1798 found him still in France, and hoping much from that rising star, Bonaparte, in whose mind it is not at all improbable he planted the first thought of invading England. Bonaparte then stood for freedom, and Paine looked forward to “proclaiming liberty at Thetford” under his protection; but, alas for that beautiful dream! Bonaparte, the Republican general, became Napoleon the Emperor and autocrat, and it grew evident at last, even to Paine, that it was not by his aid this land of slaves and helots was to be set free.

And what did Thetford think of it all? It is rather grievous to acknowledge Thetford was so sunk in slavery that it did not recognise the fact, and desired to be let alone. It sat in chains and misery, all unconscious! Thrice unhappy Thetford!! Folk in the taverns and in the streets even expressed a contempt and dislike of “Tum Paine,” and loudly proclaimed their earnest desire to duck him in the river that runs so handy, through the town. But Tom never came back, and so the community lost its projected sport. He returned to America in 1802, and did not linger to watch the fortunes of that flotilla Napoleon was at last fitting out for the conquest of England. Seven years later, in 1809, he died in New York, and was buried at New Rochelle, but the unrest of his life followed him beyond the grave; for Cobbett, himself a reforming Radical, but on slightly more suave lines than Paine, in 1819, as a hero-worshipper, exhumed his bones and brought them to Liverpool. Cobbett, twenty-three years earlier, had denounced him as “base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous.” There his stock of adjectives ran out, and he brought the indictment to a conclusion. How the satirical shade of Paine must have chuckled at this right-about-face!

When the available property of Cobbett’s son was seized for debt, in 1836, these poor relics formed a part of his belongings. Thence they passed into the hands of a Mr. Tilly, but since 1844 have not been heard of.

So much for Paine. The street of his birth, the street that leads out of the town on the way to Norwich, is still old-fashioned. There stands yet the old “White Hart,” and a handsome house of two pointed gables, once said to have been the “Fleece.” Lower down, opposite the “Bell,” a house now occupied by an ironmonger was once the “George”; and midway is a pre-eminently ancient building whose age is tacitly recognised as transcendent, in the name of “the old house,” given it locally. Its timbered frontage probably belongs to the fourteenth century. Traces of an old watchman’s box remain, and dark traditions survive of a chain being stretched across the street at night, from this to the opposite house. Something more, perhaps, than tradition, for the staples from which the chain hung are still pointed out. No records remain to tell the why or wherefore of that chain, but we have only to recall the misty past again to find in the solitary position of Thetford, surrounded by heaths—and those heaths frequented, to put it mildly, by undesirables—much virtue in chains, and comfort unspeakable to the listening midnight ears of nightcapped burgesses in the watchman’s resonant “Twelve o’clock, and a starlight night! All’s well.”

XXXVIII

WHEN the modern tourist leaves Thetford, he does so without a thrill on the threshold, and the only thing to give him pause is the rather bewildering choice of roads on the barren-looking rise where the town ends. Every way leads to open heath, even now, but every turning does not, as of yore, bring you butt against a highwayman. I, for one, do not regret the disappearance of _that_ feature of the old days, and am content to forego all such thrillful encounters.

Two miles out of Thetford one came in those old days to the toll-house. The old relic stood until 1902, and was something of a curiosity to the instructed in local lore, for it stood on the boundary of the parishes of Croxton and Kilverstone, on those of the Hundreds of Grimshoe and Shropham and the South-West and Mid Parliamentary Divisions of Norfolk. In virtue of that last distinction the occupier had a vote in both divisions, and was a man greatly cherished and cultivated by parties when election-time drew nigh.

In another two miles, nearing the fourth mile from Thetford, there stands, prominent by reason of its height and isolation on Roudham Heath, the tall black poplar known as “Bridgeham High Tree.” The village of Bridgeham lies far away to the right, and nothing comes in view to distract the attention from this landmark. For a landmark it is, planted, according to the received local traditions, by the packmen who fared this lonely road in days before railways, and often lost their way on these heaths in the trackless snows of winter, when every road in these wind-swept uplands disappeared and lay buried in that white winding-sheet. The High Tree is of noble proportions, and placed at the crest of an incline slightly raised above the general level of the heath. A number of scattered thorn-trees grow near.

A little distance beyond it, a scarcely noticeable track crossing the road and leading on the left hand athwart Wretham Heath to a level crossing, stands for that disused prehistoric road, the Peddar’s Way. A woman who unlocks the gates for the passing stranger dimly remembers to have heard it spoken of as the “Pedlar’s Way.”

From here the rough and stumbly track leads for half a mile to the crest of the ridge, where a deep hole, known as the “Thieves’ Pit,” is the subject of a legend telling how, at some period unspecified, Illington Hall was plundered by a mounted gang who hid their booty here. Looking backwards from this commanding view-point, this is seen to be the most solitary of all the many heaths surrounding Thetford, and that despite the railway running through, with Roudham Junction in its midst. The usual picture of a junction is of a busy station, with bustling porters and crowds of passengers, but that of Roudham is a very different place. You will not find it in the railway guides, because, in fact, tickets are not issued to or from it, and it is a little difficult to understand the existence of a station, as well as the actual junction of lines, in the heathland, off the road and away from sight of houses. But there it stands, and its signal-posts and station buildings are the only alien features of this hoary heath, where the relics of prehistoric man are found, where the curlews whistle down the wind, and that coastwise branch of the plover family, the ring-plovers, breed.

For Wretham Heath is one of the seven heaths in the neighbourhood, and in the only district of England, where the ring-plovers visit inland. They come here in spring, and are doubtless in sympathy with the place. In common with them, the black-headed gull loves the heath, and students of natural history tell us its sands, plants, beetles, and butterflies—and, in fact, the whole of its flora and fauna—are those of the coast. Away beyond that lonely junction is Ringmere, the identical “Hringmar” of the Heimskringla-saga, where the Battle of Ringmere, the last of those many bloodthirsty fights between Saxon and Dane, was fought, in 1010. Ringmere is a singular, nay mystic, pool, sometimes measuring seven acres, at others reduced to a puddle, and again in full flood and stocked with fish. It is now again absolutely dry. Other curious meres of this immediate district, with similarly strange vicissitudes, are those of Langmere, Fowlmere, and the “Devil’s Punchbowl,” a smaller but deeper lake, whose white evening coronal of mist the fearful folklore of the rural folk has styled the “Devil’s Nightcap.”

There were yet others before Wretham West Mere, and Great Mere were drained, in 1851 and 1856.

The Padder’s, or Peddar’s Way, here plunges through a long avenue of pines, on its way to Watton. It is a solitary, and at times even an eerie place, for great livid fungi grow in its shade and curious tall toadstool things, shaped like half-furled Japanese umbrellas, dot the grass; while fairy rings are there for the beguilement of mortal man rash enough to stand within any one of their magic circles what time the clock strikes the hour of midnight. Then—well, then I don’t know what might happen, and really am not courageous enough to make the essay. Whether the little folk merely fool you with fairy gold that, when the illusory moonshine kingdom of Queen Mab is replaced by matter-of-fact sunshine, turns to the sere and sorry leaves of autumn past; whether they addle your brains, or give you a tricksy wisdom that is not of this world, I do not know; but if the fairy rings were only potent enough to recall the past, bid yesterday return, make unsaid the lamentable word, undo the irrevocable deed—why then, who would not brave the mystic hour, and chance what might hap? Ah! then, what a place of resort this would be, and what crowds of clients the fairies would have! But if all these things were possible, they would still be beyond our reach, for I am quite sure the company-promoters would get an option on the fairies and float them as a company, under the style of “Oblivion, Ltd.” Puck would, of course, join the board after allotment. No one under the financial status of a multi-millionaire would be able to purchase the fairy boons vended under these auspices, for such people have much they would only too dearly like revoked, and would outbid all others.

XXXIX

HERE the murmurous twilight course of the Peddar’s Way through the avenue of pine-trees known as Dale Row marks the boundaries of the parishes of Roudham and East Wretham. By the elder among the peasantry it is still spoken of as “the Scutes”—_i.e._, the Skirts; but it is quite certain they are ignorant why they so call it. It is interesting to recall the fact that feminine skirts are pronounced “skutes” in New York and other towns of the New England States of America, doubtless in a survival of the old East Anglian speech taken overseas in the early settlement of the North American colonies.

This East Wretham is the parish of that William Cratfield, “Rector of Wrotham, in Norfolk,” who, as “a common and notorious thief and lurker on the roads, and murderer and slayer,” in unholy alliance with one “Thomas Tapyrtone, farryer,” had in 1416 plied the trade of highwayman on Newmarket Heath, and being charged with robbing a Londoner of £12, was, with his concubine, flung into Newgate, where he died. What became of his improper companion, or even of Tapperton, is unknown.

But the clergy around Thetford in times of old included several queer characters. There was Lowe, the curate of Rockland, who on January 12th, 1608, aided by the rector’s wife, murdered the Rev. Mr. James, the rector of that place. Lowe was hanged at Thetford and Mrs. James burnt at the stake. Again, in 1635, the rector of Santon Downham was charged with being “an alehouse haunter and swearer, being distempered with liquor, keeping malignant company, and calling the Puritans hypocrites.”

Nay, not merely the clergy of this district, but of broad Norfolk, might be made to figure in a _chronique scandaleuse_; and if we had a mind to it, we could end in modern times with that thirsty clerk who was found, very drunken, beside the river at Stratton Strawless, declaring he would drink that up before he left. He must have been like to that wondrous toper created by one of the loveliest slips ever made by a reporter; who would strain at a gnat and swallow a canal; which we must allow to be a more heroic feat than swallowing the more usual camel.

Roudham Heath owes its name to the parish and village of Roudham. The village stood less than half a mile to the right of the road, but has in these latter days wholly disappeared, save for fewer than half a dozen cottages and the gaunt ruins of the great church. Roudham church owes its ruinated condition to the fire that burnt it in 1736, a disaster caused by carelessness on the part of plumbers at work on the leads of the tower. Tradition says funds were collected for the repair of the building, but the treasurer made off with them. Roudham’s local industry was that of malting; but the place is a scene of desolation, punctuated and italicised by the two inhabited cottages that neighbour the ruins and look on to the almost impassable road. The place has now no church, no chapel, no charities, no shop, no pub, no anything; but it was formerly a large and populous village, with two inns—the “Dolphin” and “Three Hoops.” Foundations of vanished buildings are still visible in some of the fields

XL

LARLINGFORD, a tiny hamlet on the Thet, in a dip of the road, long since became a misnamed place, for the ford is replaced by a bridge, itself of a respectable age. Two miles beyond the old ford there existed in Ogilby’s time, in the second half of the seventeenth century, a beacon on the right-hand side of the road, duly pictured on his road map as a cresset, or fire-basket, mounted on a post and reached by ladders; a contrivance eloquently witnessing to the wild state of the road in those times.

A little way beyond the site of the old beacon, at Hargham—or, as the country folk have it, “Harfham”—cross-roads, stands a time-worn stone shaft, reared on equally shapeless steps. The country folk call this shattered stump of an ancient wayside cross “Cockcrow Stone.”

It is only when exploring to right and left of the road, along the byways, that the stranger comes in touch with rural life. The great highway goes lonely, for mile after mile the country seems deserted; but, unknown to him who does not turn aside from the beaten track, villages cluster, like beads upon a string, continuously along the lesser roads. A little way back from these cross-roads of Hargham comes Hargham village, and then the village of Wilby, in whose church, recently restored, has been discovered, under one of the old floor-boards, a lady’s hawking gauntlet some three centuries old. Framed and exhibited on the wall, it forms a trivial yet intimate link with the past.

But to reach the church and village one must pass Wilby Old Hall, a romantic building of red brick, with corbie-stepped gables, that peer darkly across the meadows. One cannot resist a closer glance, and the old place well repays that attention. It is now, and long has been, a farmhouse, but was built as a mansion somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was when Elizabeth reigned, or in the first years of James I., that the hall first rose within the girdle of its moat: that moat only in part now remaining, but still plentifully stocked with fish. A family of Lovells probably built it; but the place soon passed from them into the hands of the Wiltons, of whom Robert Wilton, a Royalist colonel, had it at the time of the Civil War. Scratched with a diamond on a pane of one of the old casement windows of an upstairs bedroom is the name “Elizabeth,” with the date 1649. The surname is included, but is illegible. Perhaps it was this Elizabeth who inscribed the Latin lines on another window—lines that seemed to hint at some heavy sorrow. “Alas!” they said, when translated, “Alas! how can I tune my lute to a broken heart!” We may seek in vain for the personal sorrow that prompted this record; or was it the outpouring of a loyal soul? for the year 1649, when the unknown Elizabeth inscribed her name on the other casement, was the date of the execution of Charles I.

Those lines, we say, _seemed_ to hint, and they are thus spoken of because quite recently, when the house was the scene of a sale at auction and pervaded by strangers, some unknown person prized the inscribed pane out of its leaden setting and made off with it. Invoking a murrain on all such, we come into the ancient market-town of Attleborough.

XLI

ATTLEBOROUGH, quiet enough on all other days of the week, wakes up and does a considerable business on market-day, although even that weekly fixture does not command the trade of sixty years ago, before the railway brought the better marketing of Norwich within reach. But the trade of the town is still large enough to support several large inns, a Corn Hall, and a long street of shops. It would be unprofitable to argue the origin of the “Attle” in the place-name, for it has already been discussed by Norfolk antiquaries without any light being thrown on it, excepting the fact that the name is shared with Attlebridge on the river Wensum, fifteen miles away. Some topographers, mindful of the fact that the youthful Etheling, or Saxon noble, afterwards Edmund, King of East Anglia, spent a year at this place in A.D. 856 in pious preparation for his kingly and saintly career, have thought the place to be named after him, Etheling-borough; while others are of opinion it enshrines the name of some otherwise unrecorded chieftain whose stronghold was the burh or mound that gives the “borough” termination. However that may be, Attleborough is a place of greater age than might be thought from a casual glance. Nothing in it, except the great church, is of any high antiquity, for the College of the Holy Cross, founded by Sir Robert Mortimer late in the fourteenth century, has disappeared, and the church itself, a part of that religious establishment, although still very large, has been reduced from its original size. All this destruction took place in the time of Henry VIII., when such things were repeated at every monastery and religious college in the land. At that time the Mortimers, the ancient lords of the manor, had given place to the Radcliffes, then newly created Earls of Sussex, and Robert, the first Earl, who ruled at that period, lent a willing hand. One might almost suppose him to have been animated by a personal hatred of his forbears, for it is still recorded in the parish register how he busied himself in the work of demolition and tore up many “fair marble gravestones of his ancestors, with monuments of brass upon them, and carried them, with other fair good pavement, and laid them for floors in his hall, kitchen, and larder-house.” He died in 1542, and was buried in the City church of St. Lawrence Pountney, London. In later years the bodies of himself and his son, with those of their wives, were removed to the church of Boreham, in Essex. With the grandson, the line of Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, ended; and in that church their three marble effigies lie side by side, on one elaborate altar-tomb, fulfilling the threat, or prophecy, that in the third generation of that spoiler of the Church his race should become extinct.

These records of old time explain how it comes that Attleborough church tower is so oddly situated at the east end of the building. It was once at the centre of the cruciform church, but the choir being destroyed in that time of trouble, it is now, of course, immediately over what is now the chancel.

Standing beside the high road, the church is, of course, a very prominent object. It has a singularly beautiful north porch, containing an ancient wooden poor’s-box. Under a slab in the nave rests that Captain John Gibbs of Charles II.’s time, who earned a kind of fame by his foolhardy feat of driving his chaise and four horses over the deepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, on Newmarket Heath, for a wager of £500. The chancel is Norman architecture, the nave and aisles Decorated and Perpendicular. The pulpit is part of the spoil of one of the City of London churches, demolished in modern times, and the magnificent rood-screen is now at the west end, painted white, decorated with the arms of thirty dioceses, and black-lettered with moral maxims from the Proverbs, the work of the Rev. John Forbie, vicar in the first half of the seventeenth century, commentator in the parish registers upon national and local events, and censor, in the safe seclusion of those pages, of his parishioners’ characters. His favourable opinion of James I. is seen in the entry made when that monarch died: “It might be truly said of him, as in the Gospell, ‘Never man spake as this man speaketh.’” John Forbie evidently did not dislike Scots pawkiness.

His _post-mortem_, testimonial in 1625 to the landlady of the “Cock” inn—a hostelry still standing by the roadside at the entrance to the town—is hearty. “August 11th,” he says, “there was buried Mary, the wife of Gilbert Greene, hostess of the ‘Cock,’ who knew how to gaine more by her trade than any other, and a woman free and kind for any one in sickness ... and for answering (_i.e._, standing godmother) to any one’s child, and readie to give to any one’s marriage.” Surely, one thinks, it was ill sojourning at the house of one so accomplished in gaining more by her trade than any other. Did she accomplish it by overcharging her guests or diluting their drinks?

He records the death of one John Dowe, “an unprofitable tradesman of great estate.” This, he says severely, and moved to verse by indignation, should have been his epitaph:—

Here lyeth the Dowe who ne’er in life did good,
Nor would have done, tho’ longer he had stood.
A wife he had, bothe beautiful and Wise,
But he ne’er would such goodness exercise.
Death was his friend, to bring him to his grave,
For he in Life _Commendam_ none could have.

The situation of Attleborough, isolated on the lonely flats, surrounded by commons, must have been singularly aloof from the world in days of old. Up to the very doors of the townsfolk came the dangers of those far-off times, as we may perceive in the road that now leads to the railway station, but is marked on old maps as “Thieves’ Lane.” Where those thieves lurked, there now stand the respectable red-brick villas of modern times, with a “Peace Monument” of 1856 at the cross-roads, celebrating the close of the Crimean War, and at one and the same time recording the victories of that strife and acting as lamp-post, general gazetteer, and compendious milestone

XLII

To Wymondham is our next stage, a flat six miles.

In midst of this level tract of country, where villages, and houses even, are few and far between, the wayfarer’s eye lights upon a stone pillar on the grassy selvedge of the road, a dilapidated object that looks like a milestone. But as it occurs only three-quarters of a mile after passing the sixteenth stone from Thetford, it is clearly something else, and inspection is rewarded by the discovery of this inscription:—

“THIS PILLAR | was erected by | the order of the sessions of the | Peace of Norfolk | as a gratefull | remembrance of | the Charity of | Sir Edwin Rich Knt | who freely gave | y^e sume of Two hundred | povnds towards y^e | repaire of y^e highway betweene Wymondham | and Attleborough | A.D. 1675.”

Who, then, was this Sir Edwin Rich, whose charity was so necessary to the upkeep of these six miles of road between Attleborough and Wymondham? He was a distinguished lawyer, a native of Thetford, born in 1594. His monument in the church of Mulbarton, three miles from Wymondham, rich in moral reflections, surmounted by a large hour-glass, and further adorned with eulogistic verse written by himself on himself, quaintly tells us the circumstances of his birth and breeding:—

Our Lyef is like an Hower Glasse, and our Riches are like Sand
in it, which runs with us but the time of our Continuance here,
and then must be turned up by another.

To speak to God, as if men heard you talk,
To live with men, as if God saw you walk.
When thou art young, to live well thou must strive;
When thou art old, to dye well then contryve;
Thetford gave me breath, and Norwich Breeding,
Trinity College in Cambridge Learning.
Lincoln’s Inne did teach me Law and Equity.
Reports I have made in the Courts of Chancery,
And though I cannot skill in Rhymes, yet know it,
In my Life I was my own Death’s Poet;
For he who leaves his work to other’s Trust
May be deceived when he lies in the Dust.
And, now I have travell’d thro’ all these ways,
Here I conclude the Story of my Days;
And here my Rhymes I end, then ask no more,
Here lies Sir Edwin Rich, who lov’d the poor.

He died in 1675, at the advanced age of eighty-one, and not only left those £200 towards the repair of the road, but made the curious bequest to the poor of Thetford of the annual sum of £20, to be distributed for five hundred years, on every 24th of December, in bread or clothing. Why he should have limited his charity to a mere five centuries does not appear, nor does it seem to be clearly understood what is then to become of the property of Rose Hill Farm, Beccles, whence the income is derived. Perhaps he thought the end of the world will have come by that time.

It will be observed that Sir Edwin was a prudent as well as a pious man. Desiring some recognition of his excellent traits and achievements, he judged it best to write the epitaph himself: and a very curious mixture of humility and pride it is. There were sufficient reasons for his leaving a bequest for the maintenance of this road, which was in his time an open track, going unfenced the whole twenty-nine miles between Thetford and Norwich, and plunged in the fourteen miles between Larlingford and Wymondham into successive bogs and water-logged flats. If we consult a large map of Norfolk and scan this district well, it will be seen that on descending from the uplands of Thetford Heath to the Thet at Larlingford the road traverses a considerable district, veined like the leaf of a tree with the aimless wanderings of many streams, and dotted here and there with such meres, or marshy lakes, as those of Scoulton and Hingham. It is even now an oozy plain, but was then a veritable piece of fenland, where the bitterns boomed among the reeds, the corncrakes creaked, the great horned owls hooted, and the gulls screamed in unstudied orchestration. The last bittern—“bog-bumpers” the country-folks called them—long years ago was gathered into the natural history collections of rare birds, and the bass-viol bellowings of his voice are no longer heard after sundown. The great horned owls, too, are no more; but lesser owls still tu-whoo in the woods, and the screaming gulls of Scoulton yet startle the stranger as they rise, voiceful, in their many thousands from the mere.

In 1675, when Ogilby’s “Britannia,” that first, and most magnificent, survey of the roads, was published, this spot was pictured on his sketch-plan of this road as “Attleburgh Meer,” and was apparently something between a bog and a lake. It stretched across the road, and to a considerable distance on either side. This was in the very year of Sir Edwin Rich’s death, when his bequest became available, and we may suppose that this hindrance to travellers was abolished very shortly afterwards and the monument to his liberality erected here, on the very spot where that slough had once been.

From its old name of the “Portway,” it is obvious this road must have been in existence in very ancient times, but it is equally obvious it was early discarded for other routes, for Ogilby is the earliest map-maker to mark it, and Will Kemp, who seventy-five years earlier danced his nine days’ dance from London to Norwich, went the less direct road to Norwich from Thetford by way of Rockland, Hingham, and Barford Bridge, which he would not have done had the way through Attleborough and Wymondham been passable.

Kemp, who was a low comedian, and, according to his own showing, spent his life in “mad Igges and merry iestes,” wagered he would dance down all the way, and did so perform the distance in nine days jigging, with intervals for rest and entertainment in between: not a very difficult performance, even for that time, and even though it was winter when he did it. He tells us fully in his “Nine Days’ Wonder” how, accompanied by his tabourer, or drummer, he skipped and joked the miles away, and gives the route he took, over Bow Bridge to Romford, Ingatestone, Widford, Braintree, Sudbury, Long Melford, and Clare, to Bury St. Edmunds. It was on a Saturday, at the close of his sixth day’s dancing, that he entered Bury, and there, “by reason of the great snow that then fell,” he stayed until the following Friday morning, February 29th. The distance between Bury and Thetford is really twelve miles, and so Kemp does not take full credit for this day’s performance when he tells us that “Dauncing that tenne mile in three houres,” and leaving Bury shortly after seven in the morning, he was at Thetford soon after ten o’clock: “So light was my heeles that I counted the tenne mile no better than a leape.”

Master Kemp jigged to some profitable purpose, for as many people came to see him as are attracted by the modern pedestrians who wear out so much shoe-leather on the classic miles of the Brighton Road; nor were the county magnates above patronising this Merry Andrew. Thus he reports, “At my entrance into Thetford the people came in great numbers to see mee, for there were many there, being Size time. The noble gentleman, Sir Edwin Rich,[1] gaue mee entertainment in such beautiful and liberal sort, during my continuance there, Satterday & Sunday, that I want fitte words to express the least part of his worthy vsage of my unworthines; and to conclude liberally as hee had begun and continued, at my departure on Munday his worship gaue mee fiue pound.”

On that Monday Kemp danced to Rockland and Hingham. At Rockland his host at the inn was a boon companion, but stood a little upon his dignity, for he would not appear until he had shifted from his working day’s suit; when, valiantly arrayed, he entered, hat in hand, with “Dear Master Kemp, you are even as welcome as—as—as—” and so stammering until he found a comparison—“as the Queen’s best greyhound.”

Footnote 1:

Father of the Sir Edwin, the benefactor.

“After this dogged, yet well-meant salutation,” says Kemp, weakly punning, “the Carrowses were called in, and they drank long and deep.” So merry did this convivial interlude make him that, although he was an extravagantly fat man, he insisted upon dancing off with Kemp; but two fields sufficed him, and then, breathless, bade his visitor “go—go, in God’s name.” So they parted. From Thetford to Rockland, Kemp had found “a foul way,” and onwards to Hingham it was not only foul, but deep, and no one knew the road. There were twenties and forties, nay, sometimes a hundred people, in groups, come to see him pass, but of the way to Norwich they could tell him nothing. “One cried, ‘The fayrest way was thorow their Village,’ another, ‘This is the nearest and fayrest way, when you have passed but a myle and a half.’ Another sorte crie, ‘Turn on the left hand,’ some, ‘On the right hand’”; but with it all he did at last reach Hingham, and on the next day through Barford Bridge reached Norwich.

It was a roundabout way, and Kemp would have found more publicity had he gone through the towns of Attleborough and Wymondham. But the people of Thetford had probably warned him of the bad way through those places.

Sir Edwin Rich’s £200 probably did not suffice for anything beyond filling up that ambiguous stretch of watery mud called Attleborough Mere, and thus we find, twenty-one years later, an early Turnpike Act, the Act of 1696, 7th and 8th of William and Mary, passed for the repair of the highways between Wymondham and Attleborough. This road is thus claimed by Norfolk antiquaries as the first turnpike road to be constructed in the kingdom, but that is a slight error, for the Act was passed merely for repair, and was antedated by thirty-three years, in the first of Turnpike Acts, that of 1663, which provided for the repair and turnpiking of the road from London to Stilton—the “Old North” and the “Great North” roads of modern parlance. If, however, we somewhat limit that claim, and declare this to be the first turnpike road in Norfolk, we shall probably be correct

XLIII

WYMONDHAM town, to which we now come, stands at the junction of many roads, and was long a centre, both of religious and trade activity. Strangers, uninstructed in Norfolk usage, pronounce the name as spelled, and thereby earn the contempt of those to the manner born, who smile superior; but when the East Anglian travels into Leicestershire and, arriving at _that_ Wymondham, calls it, after his own use and wont, “Windham,” he in turn is made to feel outside the pale, for Leicestershire folk take full value out of every letter in the name of their Wymondham. The Windham family, of Felbrigg, near Cromer, who settled at that place in 1461, came from Wymondham and were possibly descendants of the Saxon Wymund after whom the town was named.

Wymondham is said to stand higher than the surrounding country, but such a statement, unilluminated by comparison, might be misleading. You do not climb exhaustedly up into it, nor in leaving drop sheer down into a corresponding vale: the difference, in fact, between the levels through which we have come and the heights we now reach is merely one of inches, and so slight that only a robust faith can believe in it.

Wymondham was the child of that great Benedictine Priory founded here in 1107, by William d’Albini, chief butler to Henry I., whose son became first Earl of Arundel, and was the hero of that very tall story which tells how the Queen Dowager of France fell in love with him when he was in Paris and offered him marriage. He refused that very flattering offer, because as a matter of fact he was engaged already to another distinguished lady; no less an one, indeed, than the widow of Henry I. “Earth hath no rage like love to hatred turned,” says the poet, and the rage of the rejected Queen was really a right royal, consuming, and devastating rage, quite worthy of the second line in that poetic couplet, which says, “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” She planned a visit to a lion’s den, conveniently handy to the palace, and, when there, pretended to be frightened of that fierce beast. D’Albini said it was nothing, only women would be afraid; whereupon she pushed him into the den and came away, happy in the thought that if she could not have him, at least the other woman should not. But she mistook, for D’Albini, wrapping up his hand in his cloak, put his hand in the lion’s mouth and—pulled its tongue out! He left it at the palace as a present for the Queen, and then returned to England, became known as William of the Strong Hand, married the Dowager Queen of England, and lived happy ever after. That breed of lion must early have become extinct, for the exploit has never since been repeated.

Wymondham Priory, or Abbey, was, of course, brought to an end in the Eighth Harry’s time, and is now a mass of ruins. The existing noble church was even in early days parochial and built on to the west end of the monastic church, whose only important surviving fragment is the great eastern tower, whose two octagonal upper stages, with shattered windows, look so weird and unaccountable beside the even greater western tower. The “two towers to one church” have indeed a gloomy and heavy nightmare-like effect in certain lights, and it was not without a grim sense of impressiveness that the revengeful Government of 1549, at the close of the peasants’ rebellion, hanged one of its leaders, William Kett, higher than Haman, from the summit of the western tower.

The nave of the great church, incomparably the finest example of Norman architecture in Norfolk, after the nave of Norwich Cathedral, has a Perpendicular clerestory, is flanked by Perpendicular aisles, and roofed with a noble open-timbered roof of East Anglian character, decorated with the usual serried ranks of angels with outstretched wings.

But it is not of architecture, even though ranking with the noblest, that we must talk here, but rather of that strenuous flesh and blood which, although long resolved into dust, gives to Wymondham the interest of living, breathing—aye, and hating and fighting—men, who fought and failed and died the death for their fellow-men in this fair land of East Anglia, more than three hundred and fifty years ago.

That rebellion for which William Kett suffered here, and his brother Robert from the battlements of Norwich Castle, was the very natural revolt of the Norfolk peasantry from the rapacity and selfishness of the landowning class, who sought to enclose the wide-spreading commons where the peasants’ cattle and geese freely pastured. There were other rural grievances, but of a minor kind. No one of them was new when the trouble broke out, but they had at length, after the smouldering discontent of years past, come to such a pass that but very slight excuse was needed to set Norfolk in a blaze. Already, nine years earlier, a certain John Walker, of Griston, had said, “It would be a good thing if there were only as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls,” and this remarkable expression of opinion was rendered the more impressive by the favour it found among the country folk, who passed it from mouth to mouth with every sign of approval. Some rhymester, too, had been at work, and produced this prophetic verse:—

The country gnoffes, Hob, Dick, and Hick,
With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill the vale of Dussin’s Dale
With slaughtered bodies soon.

Dussin’s Dale was, and is, outside Norwich, and the picture of a rural revenge was thus presented to the rustics, who had long suffered from manorial encroachments.