From Beccles to Lowestoft is any easy run which we have taken before. This

time we saw the eastern end of Oulton Broad more plainly than the last. It

seemed tripper-haunted and bar-tainted, and it had the effect of rather

setting us against the Broads. The preliminary prejudice was strengthened

somewhat by reference to Mr. Walter Rye. "It is painful for one who has

known and loved the Broads as long as I have, in common honesty, to say

that their charms have been grossly exaggerated of late. To read some of

the word-painting about them you would think that you had only to leave

Yarmouth and sail up the North River to get at once into a paradise of

ferns, flowers and fish, where you could not fail to fill your basket or

bag; or to see, at all events, myriads of wild birds of the rarest sorts in

the air, shoals of fishes in the water, and any quantity of rare water

plants on the bank. The first few miles will effectually disillusionize any

stranger who has been taking in the _Swiss Family Robinson_ sort of rubbish

referred to above, for he will be disgusted with the very muddy flint walls

of a tediously winding river dragging itself along through a flat

uninteresting marshy country, varied only by drainage mills in various

stages of dilapidation, and by telegraph poles. Even when at last Yarmouth

Church finally disappears, after having come into view about a dozen times

through the windings, and the river wall with its rats and dirt changes

into the regular river scenery, he will see nothing particularly pretty."

Now Mr. Rye is a Norfolk man _pur sang_. The name has been known in East

Anglia since Eudo de Rye came over with the Conqueror--he was the same Eudo

Dapifer, or high steward, whom we met at Colchester. Mr. Rye has Norfolk

lore and antiquities at his fingers' ends; he is most clearly and

unquestionably a true lover of his native county. This douche of cold water

coming so unexpectedly from him, quenched effectually for the moment the

flickering flame of a desire to stretch a point by including a run or two

on the Broads in a motor-boat among the little adventures legitimately

within the scope of my title. But the flame of desire rose again later,

especially when the car hove in sight of a better Broad than at Oulton, and

with the view of that sheet of water came the thought that, luckily, the

tastes of men are not identical--else every pleasure would be so crowded as

to be deprived of most of its joy, and that many men have waxed exceeding

rapturous over the very Broads of which Mr. Rye has not a good word to say.

So later a little--not so much as I could wish--is said about this strange

and peculiar district.

Now we were in Lowestoft a second time, in beautiful weather too, and we

went slowly up all sorts of streets and a parade, and even on to some sand

hills in order to see Lowestoft from a good many points of view. The

result, it must be confessed, was the very opposite to a desire to revisit

Lowestoft, especially South Lowestoft. True it was before the season, and

Lowestoft, which lives on herrings and holiday-keepers, exporting the first

and importing the second, doubtless presents a scene more gay when the

esplanade is crowded with girls in pretty frocks and men in clean

flannels, when the really splendid sands are thronged with happy children.

Still most of the houses are so painfully modern and, so to speak, raw,

most of them also built for so manifest a purpose that the legends

"Furnished Lodgings," or "Apartments," or "Board and Residence," are surely

superfluous, that it fails to attract a person of only moderately

fastidious taste.

There were scores of houses there recalling my one and only experience of a

boarding-house. In each of these houses I could conjure up the replica of

that terrible evening meal of many years ago; could see the housewife,

obese but anxious, cringing to the guests, but with the eye of a dragon for

the delinquencies of the harassed handmaid; the daughters, in crushed white

frocks and cheap bangles, pertly and persistently garrulous; the all too

affable and white-bearded father of the family, assuming the airs of an

open-handed host when all the time his wife was wondering secretly whether

the flabby fish would "go round," and I, equally secretly, was trying to

guess whether the white-bearded old loafer with the generous air, but the

niggardly carving-knife, had ever tried to do any honest work in his life.

Leaving Lowestoft for Yarmouth by the same road as before, we felt a sense

of relief and with it a glorious consciousness of well-being. An hour or

two of daylight still remained; we had been so long without stopping,

otherwise than by our own will, that we felt as if we could go on for ever;

the sky was clear, and we had not had enough, nor half enough, of

travelling. A moon was due early that evening. It was even visible in the

sky already, giving faint white promise of silvern glory to come. We had

not ordered beds for the night anywhere. How would it be to skip afternoon

tea, push on through Yarmouth for Norwich, dine there at the "Maid's

Head," and consult our inclination as to proceeding by moonlight, perhaps

to Wells, perhaps even to Lynn? It would, indeed, be very well, and in this

mood we glided easily on to Yarmouth. This ancient capital of the

herring-trade pleased us more, as we poked our noses and the bonnet of our

car into various byways, than we had been pleased at Lowestoft. (These

"we's," by the way, represent no editorial assumption, no false modesty

about speaking in the first person, but simply a fourfold consensus of

opinion.) Yarmouth pleased the more because it was and is manifestly a

port. The smell of the herring is there, of course; the serried rows of

steam-trawlers along the quay suggest that this herring fishery is a long

way from being so picturesque a business as it was. Still Yarmouth strikes

one as an honest, workaday place doing a good trade, and not at all ashamed

of it. Yarmouth combined with "Leistocke"--Lowestoft probably--to

contribute "1 shippe and one pinnace" to the fleet which defeated the

Armada; and surely there is something of an Elizabethan ring about an early

acrostic of unknown date, addressed by somebody--the Nymph of Yarmouth,

perhaps--to its people:

Y-ou, the inhabitants of Mee, [faire towne]

A-dorned with riches both from sea and land,

R-eason you have on knees for to fall downe

M-agnifying God, for all comes from his hand,

O-ver you all his works and mercies are,

U-nto his children doth he give to eate

T-he fyshe in sea, whatever the land doth beare,

H-ym therefore do yee praise as is right meete.

This is culled from the invaluable _Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries_,

as is the following string of verses by Taylor, "the Water Poet"--the

description is given just shortly like this, as one might say "Shakespere,

the dramatist"--who visited the town in 1622 and found it:

A towne well fortifide

Well-governed, with all nature's wants supplied;

The situation in a wholesome ayre,

The building (for the most part) sumptuous and fayre,

The people content, and industrious, and

With labour makes the sea enrich the land.

A sound account of Yarmouth this is, and, by the quality of the

versification, an ample justification for those persons who hear now for

the first time of "Taylor, the Water Poet," and feel no inclination to

ransack the British Museum for further examples of his poesy.

Hard by is Caister-by-Yarmouth, formerly supposed to have been a Roman

fortress, but on quite insufficient evidence. At best, according to Mr.

Haverfield, it was never more than a Roman village; and Mr. Haverfield

knows. That red-brick tower of Caister Castle, however, reminds us of the

_Paston Letters_, already mentioned and one of the most ancient collections

of private letters ever given to the public to be a mirror of life in the

days of long ago. The castle was built by "that renowned knight and valiant

soldier" Sir John Falstolf, who died in 1459. Sir John was not only a hard

fighter, but also clearly a man of extended property. He had land so far

off as Dedham, close to the Suffolk boundary of Essex, the Dedham that

Constable painted, and we find him complaining once, "_Item_, Sir John Buck

parson of Stratford fished my stanks at Dedham and helped to break my dam,

destroyed my new mill and was always against me at Dedham." This complaint

was made to John Paston, afterwards Sir John Paston, then Sir John

Falstolf's steward, agent as we should say now, and residing in his

employer's castle. The employer died; the agent, upon what title the

letters do not make it quite clear, continued to hold the castle, on which

his wife Dame Paston lived while he followed the practice of the law in

London even to the judicial bench. Something has been said of these letters

before, but there are points to be added.

[Illustration: YARMOUTH FROM BREYDON]

The early-printed volumes, stately and calf-bound, are a luxury to read,

and in spite of Sir John Fenn's omissions they contain all manner of

curiosities, the best of them perhaps being a letter written by one of the

young Pastons in 1467, from Eton, where he was at school. In it he shows

anxiety about a consignment of figs and raisins, promised but not arrived,

discusses the fortune of a young lady recently met whom he thinks of

marrying, and says to his brother: "And as for hyr bewte juge you that when

ye see hyr yf so be that ye take y'e laubore and specialy beolde hyr

handys for and if it be as is tolde me sche is dysposyd to be thyke."

(Here, by the way, is an example of Sir John Fenn's weakness as an editor,

since, the original sentence being innocent of stops save at the end, he

places a comma after "hands," and after "be" and another after "me," thus

making his own unnecessary translation far more obscure than the original.)

It is worth while to remember that Eton College had at this time been open

for twenty-five years only, was in fact quite a new school, and that the

headmaster was William Barber.

It was during this run by a circuitous route from Caister-by-Yarmouth to

Acle and Norwich, and when the wide sheet of Filby Broad smiled on either

hand, that the feeling of opposition to Mr. Rye's view of the Broads grew

strong. That magnificent stretch of water appealed with a strength almost

irresistible to one for whom sailing was, before motoring came into

existence, the most perfect of pleasures; and although circumstances, and

circumstances only, tendered resistance possible, it seems but right to

glance at the Broads, to say what they and the country around them are

like, and how, in the opinion of one fairly well versed in watermanship,

they might best be enjoyed. There is a stock delimitation of the Broad

District. Draw a line from Happisburgh to Norwich, another line from

Lowestoft to Norwich, and the rough triangle formed by those lines and the

sea shall be the Broads District. Really the southern side of the triangle

is drawn much too low on the map. Except Oulton Broad and Lake Lothing,

which are close to Lowestoft, and also a long way from the other Broads,

all the Broads, including Breydon Water, would be included in a triangle

having a line from Norwich to Gorleston for its southern boundary. They are

Filby, Ormsby, Burgh, and Rollesby, all connected and covering no less than

six hundred acres between them; Hickling, Heigham, Horsey, and Marlham

Broads, Hickling the finest of them all; and Irstead and Barton; and each

group is approached by its own river. Now, travel by motor-car is not

recommended in this district, for it is much too flat to be enjoyable.

Since that is not recommended, nothing is said about the churches, although

they are of some interest; for so long as men and women remain what they

are, they will not stop to study relics of antiquity, unless they are very

exceptional indeed, when travelling by boat. Nor are they in the least more

likely to linger in this way when voyaging by motor-boat than when using a

sailing-boat. But shall we, voyaging in the spirit, use either sailing-boat

or motor-boat, in the ordinary acceptation of the latter term. In truth,

neither is suggested, but rather a compromise. Candour compels the

admission that, knowing by sight, and in some cases from personal

experience, most of the types of motor-boat built in Great Britain, I

cannot recall one of them which, being roomy enough for comfort, would not

draw too much water to be serviceable. In fact, if one could rely on the

wind, a sailing vessel of one of the types which have been evolved in the

district to meet its needs would really be preferable. Elsewhere than in

these pages I should certainly take it, and enjoy it vastly. But what I

might take in these pages, and what would be much better than either, would

be one of those big flat-bottomed sailing craft with auxiliary

motor-engines, of which one may see some at English exhibitions, but many

more at the annual exhibition in Paris. With them you can really sail, when

there is a wind; and, without a breeze, you are independent. As for the joy

of it, so long as there is wind to fill the sails, the mere act of dashing

through the water and gliding over it, the very sound of the water, the

sense of absolute control that comes to him who holds the tiller and trims

the sails to meet every need, are enough, without worrying over scenery.

Moreover, the wide flatness of the Broads District, the rare buildings

rising as from a lake, have a special charm of their own. As for the sport,

from all that I can learn it is largely a thing of the past so far as duck

and wildfowl are concerned. All the same, it is a bad mistake to omit the

Broads, and one which, _experto crede_, the tourist in East Anglia regrets

deeply when it is irretrievable. However, there is no doubt I made it, but

happily hardly less doubt that, if I had not made it, the results could

hardly have been relevant.

On, then, we went to Norwich by way of Caister, not as before through Acle,

and dined at the "Maid's Head," as on our last visit, and admired the

ancient hotel and the red waistcoat of the head waiter as much as ever; but

afterwards, instead of seeing something of the famous city by night, we

pushed on towards Cromer on the high road by moonlight. That is not the

best way to see the country of course, and it would be sheer hypocrisy

(which happens to be unnecessary) to say anything in detail of the normal

aspect of the places passed, or of their associations if they had any.

Still, of all kinds of travelling yet tried by me, it was emphatically the

most delightful. The air was very transparent and not too cool, the moon

bathed the landscape, which was fairly free from hills, there was little

traffic on the roads save here and there a farmer jogging home in his

dog-cart from Norwich market, the acetylene lamps were doing their duty

nobly (which is by no means always their custom), we felt as if we should

like to go on all night. At Cromer certainly we would not stop. We would

make the coast there and skirt the sea by moonlight, certainly so far as

Wells-next-Sea, possibly so far as Hunstanton. All things went merrily as

marriage bells, the car sped smoothly as a soaring albatross, silently as

death itself. But stay, what was that? A sharp little report, like the

crack of a miniature rifle, was heard from below. It was not a tire again;

that was sure; we knew by heart every noise that a failing tire could make.

A little farther the car went quite well--Cromer was now some five miles

distant--and then the noises began again in quick and _staccato_

succession. In another environment they might have reminded us of a _feu de

joie_; to our present predicament no words could have been more completely

inappropriate. What was the trouble? Was it something wrong with the

ignition? "No," said our philosophic friend at the wheel, "it is not

ignition. There is one of the blessings of experience. A little time ago I

should have wasted time in fiddling with the ignition; now I know it is

not that; and I know there is nothing to be done to-night. There is no

strainer fixed to the tank in this car; the good man who refilled for us at

Norwich used no strainer; and some grit has got into the petrol. To find it

I must first put out all lights and then go right back, piece by piece,

from the carburettor backwards, until I can discover the obstacle. That is

impossible in the dark. We must bear the noise and push on, if we can, to

the hotel at Cromer. Possibly the foreign matter, whatever it is, may have

dissolved by the morning." So, seeing from excellent example, that

misfortune faced with a smile loses three-quarters of its annoyance, we

went on, at quite a good pace too, sometimes silently for a hundred yards,

sometimes with loud reports as of a gun at the covert side, sometimes with

spluttering as of boys' crackers on the 5th of November. But we laughed at

them all and won our way to Cromer, won our way too up the steep and

sinuous hill that leads to the Links Hotel. There we had good fortune

indeed. The hotel had been opened that day only after the winter of sleep

and desolation; a huge fire roared in the ample hall; belated guests were

none the less welcome in that, so far as we could see, there were but two

other guests, golfers both, in that vast hotel. Had we come a night earlier

our fate had been bad indeed. The hotel, judged by bed and breakfast,

seemed to me of the first order of merit. The charges, compared with those

of the "Angel" at Bury, seemed high. Still, it was more "replete with every

modern luxury" than the "Angel"; it possessed bathrooms, for example, which

are indispensable to the motorist, and it was a very present help in

trouble. Such was our view the next morning, when the inevitable bill, not

a very big one after all, having regard to the class of the hotel, was

presented.

Other things also came to mind that following morning, a morning of gauzy

mist not obscuring the view, even lending enchantment to some of it, and

promising a fine day. Some of them were obvious. The position of the hotel,

looking down from a commanding height on town and sea, was perfect for

prospect and for bracing air; the golf-links, close by, were an undeniable

attraction to the large army of men and women who have yielded to the

seductions of that most fascinating game. It would have been unreasonable

to expect low charges; but all the same, the contrast between this bill and

that paid at Bury was a little stronger than it ought to be in a

well-regulated country. Other things were not so immediately obvious, since

for some it was the wrong season, and others were hidden in pleasant and

well-remembered books. We were in the heart of Poppyland, concerning which

Mr. Clement Scott and others raved, but it was too soon for the

poppies--poor Dan Leno's "Red, Red, Poppies," now to be heard only on the

gramophone--to be on view. It was, however, not difficult to conjure them

up in imagination, having seen them before all over those sandy uplands in

the Runton direction. They are very pretty beyond doubt; they add glorious

lakes of colour to a rather monotonous landscape, but they mean poor and

sandy land, and that (although it does not matter to the motorist, unless

he happens to own some of it, and to be unable to let it for building)

spells dust in dry weather, and lots of it too.

[Illustration: CHURCH STREET, CROMER]

Is Cromer a choiceworthy place in which to spend a summer holiday? The

answer, not perhaps the answer which appears at first to be given, lies in

or under this extract from _The Gurneys of Earlham_. Mr. Hare began by

saying, "A picture of the summer family life at Cromer, much like that of

the present day, is given in the following letter." It is one from Richenda

Gurney to Elizabeth Fry--the Elizabeth Fry, good angel of gloomy Newgate

Prison, of course.

"_Cromer, September 8, 1803._--Our party is now complete, as John continues

with us, and the Buxtons arrived yesterday; it was extremely pleasant to

us, seeing them both again, particularly Fowell; their being here will add

very much to our pleasure, as there is a suitability between us and the

Buxtons which always makes it pleasant for us to be together. Our time here

is spent in a way that exactly suits the place and the people. All are left

in perfect liberty to do as they like all day, or to form any engagement.

Yet the party is so connected that hardly a day passes but some plan is

fixed for us all to meet. When all are met it is an uncommonly pretty

sight, such a number of young women, and so many, if not pretty, very

nice-looking. I wish thee could have seen us the other afternoon. Sally

gave a grand entertainment at the Hall, where everybody met--the ladies

almost all dressed in white gowns and blue sashes, with nothing on their

heads. After dinner we all stood on a wall, eighteen of us, and it was

really one of the prettiest sights I ever saw.

"To give thee an idea how we are going on, I will tell thee how we

generally pass the day. The weather since we came has on the whole been

very fine; so imagine us before breakfast, with our troutbecks [hats] on

and coloured gowns, running in all directions on the sands, jetty, etc.

After breakfast we receive callers from the other houses, and fix with them

the plans for the day; after this, we now and then get an hour's quiet for

reading and writing, though my mind has been so much taken up with other

things, that I have found it almost impossible to apply to anything

seriously. At eleven we go down in numbers to bathe and enjoy the sands,

which about that time look beautiful: most of our party and the rest of the

Cromer party come down, and bring a number of different carriages, which

have a very pretty effect. After bathing, we either ride on horseback or

take some pleasant excursion or other. I never remember enjoying the sea so

much, and never liked Cromer a quarter so well. Some of us continually dine

out, whilst the others receive company at home.... John has been a great

addition to our party. I hope he has enjoyed himself; we have had two or

three most merry days since he came. The day before yesterday we spent at

Sherringham, wandering about the woods and sketching all the morning. Every

one met at a beautiful spot for dinner, with three knives and forks and two

or three plates between twenty-six people. All manner of games took place

after dinner, which John completely entered into and seemed to enjoy as

much as any of the party. We completed our day by a delightful musical

evening. Miss Gordon, our old Cromer friend, came to tea: she played and

sang to us all the evening in a wonderful style. John goes away on Sunday;

he stays over to-night to be at a dance which some very agreeable people

who are at Cromer--Mr. and Mrs. Windham--are going to give, and which, I

think, must be very pleasant."

"Could anything be more simply delightful? What can the man mean by hinting

that the answer to the question whether Cromer is a choiceworthy place for

a summer holiday is not plainly to be read on the face of this artless

letter?" Such, it is easy to imagine, would be the question asked if the

early Victorian practice continued, if somebody read these pages aloud,

with pauses for comment and criticism, while ladies of various ages

embroidered or contrived trousers for unwilling heathens to wear as a cover

for their natural nakedness and as a testimony of recently acquired

Christianity. My dear Madam, as Thackeray might have said, pause for a

moment and reflect. Are you a Gurney, a Fry, a Buxton? Do you bear any of

the other names, perfectly well known, which are a password to this most

admirable and worthy society? Read also what Mr. Walter Rye has to say on

the same topic. Pray note that the letter is of 1803, but that Mr. Hare's

book, published in 1895, says that the picture of 1803 would serve very

well for a picture of the present day. Have you ever tried, as a stranger,

a summer holiday at a seaside place which has been frequented by the same

families for a few years, let alone a place to which the same families have

resorted for generations, as is the case at Cromer and in its vicinity? Or,

again, have you ever, being a member of such a society, known what it is to

see new families discover the oasis which seemed your very own, and what

have been your feelings towards those new families? Have you not in the

first case felt uncomfortable, a goat among sheep, in the second case

perceived at once that the new-comers were of goat-like nature? In all this

vivid letter there are but two allusions to persons outside the charmed

circle, Miss Gordon and the Windhams. Miss Gordon was clearly a Cromer

institution, and it is probable to the verge of certainty, if only from the

name, that the Windhams were a Norfolk family. Less than ten years before

"William Windham, the statesman and darling of the county" had

distinguished himself, when stoned during an election at Norwich, by

jumping out of his carriage and collaring his assailant. He was the same

William Windham who quelled a mutiny in the local militia by "seizing the

leader and thrashing two of his followers." Such conduct was not, perhaps,

entirely to the mind of the Gurneys and their friends, but, for all that,

the chances are that this Mr. and Mrs. Windham were kinsfolk of one who was

no man of peace at any price.

Cromer seems to me on a priori grounds and, if the truth may be told, "from

information received" also, to be entirely the place for the members of a

justly respected circle, whose title to it is clear and not to be

begrudged, but a place in which a stranger to that circle is, as the common

saying goes, "out of it." It is emphatically a good place for a golfer; but

otherwise, all along this piece of the coast, there is precious little for

the ordinary man or woman to do. There is the sea of course, but the

coastline is too regular and the sea too open to provide that variety of

scenery which gives to little pleasure cruises their chief pleasure. Also,

of course, there are the roads, upon which the motorist may take his

pleasure, and some of them pass through or near places attractive in the

present as they were in the past, nay, even more attractive, since to see

them stir up the memories of the past. But two things must be said. A

seaside place, as a centre for motoring, walking or bicycling, is by its

very essence one-sided or even less. Lay a pen across the map horizontally

at Cromer, and it is plain that there is no way for the motorist towards

more than half the points of the compass. As for the coast scenery, of

which we shall shortly take a considerable sample, it is full of individual

character, the kind of scenery one may visit with pleasure once or twice or

even three times, but, to a man not of Norfolk blood, it seems no more than

that. Such, certainly, is the final impression left by the coast drive to

the west of Cromer, and in Cromer itself are far too many new houses. To

the eastward, especially if the coast be left behind, the scenery is

better, possessed of, if it may be so put, more abiding charm. To the

westward it is more strange, weird and individual than beautiful, and its

weirdness is of the kind inspiring to melancholy, not to awe. This summary

of opinion, however, is in the nature of an anticipation. It shall be

justified piecemeal so soon as we are fairly under way so that a new

chapter can be begun.

Let this chapter close with the last unhappy episode in a supremely happy

tour, with which episode it would be discordant to mix the undiluted

pleasure of the next chapter. We started, for us, rather early; that is to

say we breakfasted at half-past seven and left the hotel door slightly

after eight. All down the zigzag hill into the town the machinery said

nothing at all. There was no reason why it should make any demonstration,

since it had no work to do. Once called upon to work, however, the car soon

began to crackle and to splutter again. There was no room for doubt what

was the matter. Foreign matter had found its way into the petrol tank and

beyond; and it was hard stuff, genuine grit, undissolved by a night's

soaking. Whether the ostler at the "Maid's Head" or he of Bury St. Edmunds

was to blame, and in justice to the former it must be said that it might

have been either, the nuisance was beyond question. It was Sunday morning,

too; it was hardly likely that the repair shops would be of any assistance,

at any rate so early in the morning, and, empty as the streets were then,

it would not have been seemly to begin in them, at about the hour of the

earliest service, an operation which might very likely consume an hour or

more. So up the hill on the far side of the town we crawled--for Cromer

lies in the hollow of a cup--snorting and grunting not a little, in sickly

fashion and with much trouble, as the Latin exercises used to put it, and

out on to the sandy road, leading between sandy and wind-swept fields,

towards Runton.

There, thanking our stars that few wayfarers were astir, we stopped, and

Mr. Johnson, cheerfully remarking that those who could be of no help,

because there is only room for one big man face upwards under a car, had

better go for a little walk and see some of the country, addressed himself

with a smile and a half-groan to his odious task with its infinite

possibilities in the way of black and viscous lubricant dropping into his

hair or on to his face. In this posture I left him, his legs alone visible,

for a little tour of inspection; but there was no temptation to prolong it.

A walk of a hundred yards or two along a bank, covered sparsely with harsh

and wiry grass, and dividing two fields, both equally poverty-stricken,

brought me to the crumbling edge of a sandy cliff, not high enough to

impose by its grandeur, not rugged enough to please by its outline. Below

was a beach of sand, beyond that the smooth, grey, hazy sea with not a

vessel of any kind visible on its sluggish surface. To the westward was

Runton, a conglomeration of commonplace brick houses, glaringly new,

obviously intended for lodgings. A windmill and its house were the only

buildings in any way calculated to give satisfaction to the eye. From there

it roved on to undulating hills, probably of sand, as indeed was everything

else except the raw houses of Runton. Rambling, in this Poppy Land _sans_

poppies, seemed weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. A return to the car

revealed Mr. Johnson still in the back position, as riflemen say, and

sundry stray bits of the car and tools lying on the road by his side. A

glance at him, obtained by crouching, showed him to be much hotter, much

dirtier than before, more smilingly determined than ever, if possible, to

make nothing of his personal trouble. He was not so much a good man

fighting against adversity as a master of science wrestling with a problem

he knew that he could solve in time: and solve it with triumph he did. A

few minutes more and he half wriggled half rolled into the open road,

dusty, but jubilant, holding a little piece of pipe some five inches long

and of infinitesimal bore in his hand. "Here is the little brute," he said,

with a gentle smile--and then made his one mistake of the day, and it cost

him dear. Just touching one end of the pipe with his lips, and holding his

hollowed palm by the other end, he blew one breath. Out came the

obstruction, hardly bigger than a snapdragon seed, surely the tiniest

little imp of a particle that ever hampered the circulation of a mighty

machine. The mechanical trouble was over for ever, or at any rate for that

expedition. A very few minutes sufficed to prepare the car for the road

again, and she accomplished over two hundred miles more that day without,

so to speak, turning a hair. So did the man who cured her, because he knew

her complaint to a nicety; but he was in my company all that day until

seven or eight in the evening and the thoroughly abominable taste of petrol

was in his mouth to the end. In fact

You may rinse with raw brandy your mouth if you will,

But the reek of the petrol will cling to it still.

Such is a valuable little piece of experience gained by proxy. The morals

are three and obvious. First, every tank or funnel should be fitted with an

irremovable strainer. Secondly, if this be not so, superintend refilling

yourself and see that a temporary strainer is used. Thirdly, if grit does

get into the petrol through omission of these precautions, and blowing a

pipe becomes necessary, wrap up the mouth of that pipe with care, or

preferably get somebody else, and best of all an idle bystander, to do the

blowing for you. For this service, if rendered by a boy, a shilling is a

sufficient recompense, and you may depart at your leisure; but if it be

done by a man, especially if he be large and rough, give him half a crown,

and stand not on the order of your going.

[Illustration: BLAKENEY--A CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE]

CHAPTER XII

A PRIORY--GREAT HOUSES AND THE FENS

Troubles over--Road via Lower Sheringham, Salthouse,

Cley-next-Sea, Blakeney, Stiffkey and

Wells-next-Sea--Impressive

desolation--Wells--Binham--The building and making of

Holkham--"Coke of Norfolk"--The

Cokes--Walsingham--Remains and history--The

Shrine--Ecclesiastical trickery and temporal

gain--Froude quoted--Ceremonial at the shrine--Its

miraculous transportation--Houghton--The Walpoles--Sir

Robert's pictures--Horace Walpole and Strawberry

Hill--The mad Lord Orford--His ruling passion--Stag

"four-in-hand"--The hounds pursue--Motor-cars many in

these parts--Fakenham--Lynn--Glanced at in the

rain--The Fens--Kinship of the Useful and the

Romantic--The beauty of the Fens actually, and enhanced

by imagination--The great reclaimers--Resistance of the

old Fenmen--Charles Kingsley quoted--"The inspiration

of God"--To Ely and Cambridge--The "Bull"

unready--Homeward bound and a narrow

escape--Motor-cyclist towing a girl on a bicycle--A

wicked practice--Value of care in motorist.

From this point we never looked back, as the saying goes, mechanically. Our

troubles were over, and we looked forward to our drive along the north

coast of Norfolk with intense eagerness. It is a pleasure in retrospect

now, but it was not quite the same sort of pleasure as had been anticipated

in previous topographical innocence. The road we had taken designedly on

leaving Cromer, when it was determined to follow the sea as closely as

possible, left Felbrigg and Sheringham, justly beloved of artists, on one

side, passed through Lower Sheringham, Weybourne, Salthouse, Cley-next-Sea,

Blakeney, and Stiffkey to Wells-next-Sea. They were not in themselves

particularly interesting villages, although I remember that at one of

them--I think it was Weybourne--to which the road winds inwards from the

sea a little, and where there is some shelter of a hill from the salt

winds, there were fine trees about the church, and another little church,

on the left-hand side of the road at Blakeney, had one full-sized tower at

the west end and another funny little tower at the east end. The prevailing

impression left by the whole drive is of impressive desolation. The road,

dead flat for the most part, but not half bad in point of surface, runs as

close to the sea as its makers dared to lay it. On the right, as one

journeys westward, are wide stretches, half sea and half marsh; on the left

is a range of low hills. Sometimes it is close at hand, at others it

recedes a little, and the space between the road and the hills is again a

species of half marsh. The streams, running parallel to the road often,

have a look of being partly tidal. The sides of the road are guarded by a

fence, the bottom part of which clearly shows that at spring tides,

especially if they be aggravated by the wind, the sea must flow over the

road also; else whence came that fringe of withered seaweed hanging round

the bottom of the fence? Small wonder that the folk in these parts have

preserved, in Cley-next-Sea and in Wells-next-Sea, the reminder that the

sea is close at hand. It is with them always, threatening them, devouring

their land, strewing their flat shore with wreckage. From Cley for some

miles to the westward extends a bill of sandy land, not very high,

enclosing a long lagoon, apparently very shallow, and the outlook over this

lagoon, with the dreary ridge of land broken, if memory serves correctly,

only by a lighthouse, is intensely and absolutely characteristic. One feels

no sort of desire to see it again unless indeed it is, as by its appearance

it well might be, a haunt of wildfowl worth shooting; but at the same time

it is good to have seen it once in order to know what this scenery of the

most remote and northerly district of Norfolk is like, and to realize the

kind of life which its scanty population must lead. They live face to face

with Nature in her sourest mood, Nature never majestic, except when the

storms come from the northward, smiling but a hard smile when the sun

shines. In fact, this is a stretch of land, when it is worthy of the name,

dismal as the mind of man can conceive.

When you get to Wells-next-Sea, where the houses are plain but of some age,

and there is a little port on a winding creek, the aspect of the country

changes for the better; or rather it so changed for us, because we

determined to give the coast up and to take the inland road via Fakenham

and Flitcham for King's Lynn. For this route there was ample reason close

at hand, in Holkham Hall, Walsingham, Binham Abbey, and Houghton, about all

of which a good deal must needs be said with as little tedium, be it hoped,

as possible. Before saying it, however, it may be as well to state that in

another chapter, and that the last, King's Lynn will be treated as an

imaginary centre for many little drives. Imagination, since it has happened

to me often to stay at Lynn for many days together and to explore the

surrounding country and roads, will not be severely taxed, and the method

is adopted for the convenience of writer and reader. In this chapter we

have before us the historic houses just named and, after them, the Fens

from Lynn to Cambridge. These last we drive through in the early afternoon,

taking in the character of them better than on any previous occasion. So

the material for this chapter is at least ample. If we added to it Castle

Rising, the birthplace of Nelson, the Sandringham country, divine in its

kind, Hunstanton, Brancaster, and King's Lynn last of all, the chapter

must run to unwieldly and intolerable length.

At Binham we have part of the Benedictine abbey, enveloped in ivy and part

still used as a church, a very fine piece of unspoiled Norman work. For

Holkham, _Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls_, by Mr. John Timbs and Mr.

Alexander Gunn, is a treasure-house of information. Holkham is Hoeligham,

"Holy Home," and it was the work of the famous Kent under the direction of

Thomas Coke, Lord Leicester, who himself spent many years in Italy studying

the works of Palladio. "Coke of Norfolk," as the Lord Leicester of George

II's time was called, was emphatically a landowner who deserved to be

magnificently housed. An inscription over the entrance to the Great Hall

records the fact that "this seat, on an open, barren estate, was planned,

planted, built, decorated and inhabited in the middle of the eighteenth

century by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester." It naturally does not record

the fact that the barren estate, for such it was, is now, mainly by virtue

of Coke of Norfolk's sagacity in planting, one of the most nobly timbered

to be found anywhere in the kingdom and a perfect paradise for game first

and for those who shoot game later. In one respect the great Lord Coke's

plans were changed, one might almost write providentially. It had been

intended to build the outside of the Hall of Bath stone, but an earth was

found in a neighbouring parish which produced bricks of much the same

colour as Bath stone, but heavier and closer in texture. That was as it

should be. Coke of Norfolk had bought much of the land and, by enclosing,

cultivating and planting, had practically made it. It was part of the

fitness of things that a "mansion of almost peerless magnificence, as far

as its noble proportions, its gorgeous decorations, and its art and

literary treasures" were concerned, should be built out of bricks baked

out of Norfolk earth. The Hall stands in a spacious but level park, and a

glimpse of it may be had from the road. In the middle is a great

quadrangular block having, at each angle, a wing, 70 ft. by 60 ft.,

connected with the central block by a corridor. The wings are: the

stranger's wing, the family wing, the chapel wing, and the kitchen wing.

The library and the MSS. rooms are in the family wing; the gallery of

statues and the state apartments are in the central block. This is 114 ft.

by 62 ft., its most noble feature being the hall, suggested to Lord

Leicester by Palladio's plan for a Court of Justice, and having a gallery

round three sides of it. Of the pictures the most notable are Claude's

Apollo and Marsyas in a landscape, and other landscapes, Vandykes,

Poussins, a Raphael, and a Rubens. There is also a group of nineteen

figures by Michael Angelo. The manuscripts are of great value and

curiosity, and contain, amongst other things, the papers of the great Chief

Justice. In fact, Holkham is, in itself, for its contents, and for the

story of its creation, one of the most wonderful places in this marvellous

England of ours; and that is why so much is here written concerning it in a

book whose author is not at all eager to pry into the houses of other and

greater men.

Who were these Cokes who attained so much magnificence? That is a natural

question. The name is first traceable in a deed of 1206, referring to a

Coke of Didlington. From him descended Edward Coke, the commentator on

Littleton, who was Attorney-General, Speaker of the House of Commons, and

Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1613. Oddly enough, from our modern

point of view, it was after this that he was elected member for

Buckinghamshire, and drafted and moved the Petition of Rights. No doubt he

made a great deal of money himself; he acquired more by marrying first one

of the Pastons, and after her death, the Lady Elizabeth Cecil, daughter of

the first Earl of Exeter. Such was the real founder of the family, who

bought, or acquired by inheritance, much of the existing Holkham estate.

His grandson died unmarried, and the estate fell to a kinsman, Henry Coke,

of Thorington. From him sprung Sir Thomas Coke, the first Earl of

Leicester, whose son died in 1739, when the peerage became extinct. But the

estate went to Sir Thomas Coke's nephew, Wenham Roberts, who naturally took

the name of Coke, and also naturally called his son Thomas; and this son

was "Coke of Norfolk," "the handsome Englishman," as he was called at Rome,

in whose favour the peerage was most justly revived. It was due not so much

to his magnificence as to his service to agriculture. "All the country from

_Holkham_ to _Houghton_ was a wild sheep-walk," writes Arthur Young,

"before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants; and this spirit

has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds and

uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarcely anything but sheep, the country

is all cut up into enclosures, cultivated in a most husbandlike manner,

richly manured, well-peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce

that it did in its former state. What has wrought these great works is the

marling; for under the whole country run veins of a very rich kind, which

they dig up, and spread upon the old sheep-walks, and then by means of

inclosing they throw their farms into a regular course of crops, and gain

immensely by the improvement." For this Coke of Norfolk was principally

responsible, and for this his name deserves all honour.

At Walsingham the remains of the Priory are interesting: a magnificent

door, a gateway, the walls, windows and arches of the refectory, a Norman

arch with zigzag mouldings--the rest of the remains are later, Decorated

and Perpendicular. But the record of the foundation and of the pilgrimages

to the shrine, which was second only to Canterbury in importance, is much

more entertaining. First the Chapel of the Virgin was founded by the widow

of Richoldie, the mother of Geoffrey de Favraches. (Of course everybody

knows all about them!) Then Geoffrey himself started on a pilgrimage to the

Holy Sepulchre, having previously executed a deed in which granted "to God

and St. Mary, and to Edwy, his clerk," the chapel which his mother

Richoldie had built at Walsingham, and other real property, to the intent

that Edwy should establish a priory there. The supreme treasure was a

relic, the alleged milk of the Virgin, purchased, as an inscription seen by

Erasmus high upon a wall stated, from an old woman at Constantinople with

an assurance that it was far superior to any other relic of the same kind,

as it alone had been taken from the breast, the other having fallen to the

ground first. It was enclosed in crystal and set in a crucifix. This, says

the matter-of-fact Erasmus, occasionally looked like chalk, mixed with the

white of eggs, and was quite solid. That the more pilgrims, the richer the

better, might be attracted to visit this relic and to lay down their

offerings, often very costly, it was stated by the monks that the Milky Way

in the firmament pointed to Walsingham. So it did no doubt, so it does on

occasion now, and to a lot of other places besides. "The Virgin and her

Son, as they made their salute, also appeared to Erasmus and his friend, to

give them a nod of approbation."

The sentence last quoted, wherein the meaning is a great deal clearer than

the construction, comes from Messrs. Timbs and Gunn. Let me place side by

side with it another quotation from Froude's lecture on "Times of Erasmus

and Luther." "The rule of the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel

in Saxony there was an image of a Virgin and Child. If a worshipper came in

with a good handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious; if the

present was unsatisfactory it turned away its head, and withheld its

favours till the purse-strings were untied again. There was a great rood or

crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent, where the pilgrims went in

thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when it was pleased; and a good

sum of money was sure to secure its good will. When the Reformation came,

and the police looked into the matter, the images were found to be worked

with wires and pulleys. The German lady was kept as a curiosity in the

cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our Boxley Rood was brought up and

exhibited in Cheapside, and was afterwards torn to pieces by the people."

No sort of disrespect towards the Roman Catholic religion is involved in

recording this absolutely true statement of historical fact. The trick

described was undoubtedly played upon pilgrims in Saxony and in Kent;

whether it was justifiable from some points of view matters not at all. The

Roman Catholic religion is a great truth, may conceivably be the most exact

and precise truth, behind all this kind of thing. It is considerably more

than likely that similar devices were employed at Walsingham. They may even

have been employed by ecclesiastics otherwise blameless, for the rules of

professional practice still occasionally justify strange conduct, or seem

to justify it. But the evidence, if there was any, was destroyed at the

Dissolution, when Thomas Cromwell took the sacred image away to Chelsea,

and burned it. Henry VIII on this occasion, by the way, got some of his own

back. He, too, like other kings and queens, native and foreign, had made

the pilgrimage to Walsingham before his quarrel with Rome, and had walked

the last four miles or so, from Barsham, barefooted. _Quaere_, whether, when

a king was on pilgrimage bent, the roads were spread with soft sand as they

are now, with sand and gravel, when King Edward is going to make a progress

in London. Henry gave an offering in the shape of a priceless necklace; but

he secured it again in later life, and may even have given it to one of the

wives, of whom, it may be remembered, he had several.

[Illustration: WALSINGHAM PRIORY]

An account of the ceremonies used, quoted again from Messrs. Timbs and

Gunn, is not without interest. "The pilgrim who arrived at Walsingham

entered the sacred precinct by a narrow wicket. It was purposely made

difficult to pass, as a precaution against the robberies which were

frequently committed at the shrine. On the gate in which the wicket opened

was nailed a copper image of a knight on horseback, whose miraculous

preservation by the Virgin formed the subject of one of the numerous

legendary stories with which the place abounded. To the east of the gate,

within, stood a small chapel, where the pilgrim was allowed, for money, to

kiss a gigantic bone, said to have been the finger-bone of St. Peter. After

this he was conducted to a building thatched with reeds and straw,

inclosing two wells in high repute for indigestion and headaches; and also

for the rare virtue of ensuring to the votary, within certain limits,

whatever he might wish for at the time of drinking their water. The

building itself was said to have been transported through the air many

centuries before, in a deep snow; and as a proof of it, the visitor's

attention was gravely pointed to an old bearskin attached to one of the

beams. The 'Tweyne Wells,' called also 'the Wishing Wells,' an anonymous

ballad speaks of:--

A chappel of Saynt Laurence standeth now there

Fast by, tweyne wallys, experience do thus and lore;

There she (the widow) thought to have sette this chappel,

Which was begun by our Ladie's Counsel.

All night the wedowe permayning in this prayer,

Our blessed Ladie with blessed minystrys,

Herself being her chief artificer,

Arrered this sayde house with Angells handys,

And not only rered it but sette in there it is,

That is twyne hundred feet more in distance

From the first place folk make remembraince."

Of a very truth, as Froude said, "The world is so changed that we can

hardly recognize it as the same." Imagination retires baffled from the

effort to picture kings and queens walking barefoot over primitive Norfolk

roads, passing through a wild waste too, for Coke of Norfolk was not yet

born, to go through these ceremonies and to present their gifts. Erasmus,

with his tongue in his cheek, is easily conjured up; so are the robbers

whom the shrine attracted. But why were there not any number of pilgrims in

the sceptical mood of Erasmus? There seem to have been plenty of robbers.

We pass (the roads hereabout are flat as the sands of the sea, the land

about them richly timbered, and there is nothing else to be said of them)

from the ruins of a religious house to one indissolubly associated with the

names of two men, each exceptionally worldly, each in his own singular way,

and with that of one remarkably eccentric. Houghton Hall was built by Sir

Robert Walpole from the designs of Colin Campbell, while the former was

Prime Minister, and Ripley, say Messrs. Timbs and Gunn (who speak with

authority), undoubtedly improved on Colin Campbell. Pope, it is true,

wrote:--

Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool,

And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule.

*...*...*...*

So Ripley, till his destined space is filled,

Heaps bricks on bricks and fancies 'tis to build.

Pope, always bitter and not a little of a snob, was hardly likely to have a

good word to say for an architect who had been a working carpenter. It is

true, too, that Lady Hervey wrote in 1765: "I saw Houghton, which is the

most triste, melancholy, fine place I ever beheld. 'Tis a heavy, ugly,

black building, with an ugly black stone. The Hall, saloon, and gallery

very fine; the rest not in the least so." Time, it may be, has given the

stone mellowness; certain it is that Houghton now, in spite of a certain

pretentiousness of Ionic columns, is really pleasing.

Of Houghton's most noted masters, the Walpoles, a few words must be said,

but of two of them not many, for they are well known to all. The first Lord

Orford was Sir Robert Walpole, the great Prime Minister who believed in

letting well alone, in corruption as a method of Government, in the

venality of all men, and in the collection of pictures. It is curious, but

true, that this most sagacious statesman was, in a scholarly age, no

scholar, and that this fastidious connoisseur of Art was, in a coarse age,

exceptionally plain spoken and free-living. When the then Lord Townshend

heard that Lord Orford was at Houghton he made a rule of leaving Rainham

and Norfolk himself. The second Lord Orford was of no account. Of the third

I shall write a little more here than of the fourth, because the

eccentricities of the third are not so well known as are many of the

details, whimsical rather than eccentric, of Horace Walpole, the fourth and

last Lord Orford.

Sir Robert Walpole collected pictures by Guido, Vandyke, Claude, Rubens,

Rembrandt, Salvator Rosa, Teniers, Paul Veronese, Wouvermans, Titian,

Poussin, Snyders--in a word, by most of the best of the old masters, and

housed them in his majestic Norfolk home, girt by a park whose trees

testify to this day to his skill in planting. Horace Walpole, who had loved

Houghton in his youth, himself wrote in after life a catalogue of these

pictures and a description of the apartments in which they hung. The first

Lord Orford slept with his fathers--they had been Walpoles of Walpole in

Marshland since the time of Richard I--and his son reigned in his stead.

Meanwhile his youngest son Horace, of whom it has been suspected on good

grounds that he was not truly the son of the Prime Minister, lived that

curious life in that curious house, Strawberry Hill, details of which are

known to many because they have passed into English literature. He was the

best letter-writer of modern times, or of nearly modern times, and his

eccentricities are easily forgiven. He could afford them by virtue of two

sinecures for life which his all-powerful father had secured for him; and

he appears to have been perfectly happy building and altering his toy

palace, collecting all sorts of curios, writing the most charming letters

to his lady friends, writing for the press also (and childishly vain of his

work), and hardly dreaming that he might succeed to the estate and the

title. Even when, after the death of the second earl, the property fell to

his eccentric son, Horace Walpole hardly seems to me to have realized that

he might some day succeed to the title and the estate. He was growing to be

an old man. His grief over the sale of the celebrated gallery was not that

of an expectant heir.

What of the third earl, who died without issue, and so left Horace Walpole

to be the fourth and last Lord Orford? The world at large knows him as the

madman who sold the first Lord Orford's unparalleled collection of pictures

to Catherine of Russia. But he did many madder things than that for,

commercially speaking, he did not make a bad bargain over the sale of the

pictures, for which he received more than his father had given. In him the

English love of sport ran to insane excess. Indeed it even brought him to

his death. At a time when he was under restraint the date came when his

greyhound Czarina was matched to run a course. Devoted to coursing as he

had always been, he determined to be present and, with the cunning of a

madman, he jumped out of a window while his attendant was out of the room,

ran to the stable, saddled his favourite pony, a piebald, galloped to the

scene of the match, refused to go home in spite of all entreaties, saw

Czarina win, fell from his saddle, and died there and then. George, third

earl, could not have died more appropriately, nor, from his own point of

view, more happily. He was mad, of course, very mad indeed; but he was a

thorough sportsman. Perhaps the maddest and at the same time most sporting

thing he did was to train four stags to go four-in-hand. "He had reduced

the deer to perfect discipline and, as he sat in his phaeton and drove the

handsome animals, he, no doubt, fancied he was performing no inconsiderable

achievement." If the writer of that pompous sentence tried to break four

stags, or even a pair, to harness with his own hands, he would not have

much doubt of the quality of the achievement; that is assuming he survived

the effort. But the stag four-in-hand almost brought Lord Orford to a

sporting death before his time. He was driving his strange team to

Newmarket, where he was a familiar figure, when a pack of hounds came

across the scent and gave chase in full cry. The sequel, except for Lord

Orford, must have been simply paralysingly funny. Picture it for a moment.

Think of the stags, thoroughly panic-stricken, no longer trotting, but

tearing along the road with huge bounds; of Lord Orford helpless on the box

as the phaeton leapt and swayed; of the hounds racing behind and of the

savage music of their cry. It was, it must have been, a sight for gods and

men; and many men saw it; for the run ended in the yard of the "Ram" at

Newmarket, where phaeton, stags, and noble driver disappeared into a barn

and the doors were shut in the face of the clamouring pack. Surely this is

the maddest, funniest true story that ever was told, and the oddest part

about it is that Lord Orford was not then and there clapped into a

madhouse. Yet one cannot help feeling a lurking regard for this mad

sportsman. His foibles are more to the taste of some of us than the

affectations of Horace Walpole.

By the road over which the mad Earl of Orford used to career with his

extraordinary team, over which Horace Walpole doubtless drove when he left

his beloved London and "Strawberry"--for so he called it "all short"--to

fight an election at Lynn, we also drove in a chariot which, to the

eighteenth-century Norfolkian, would have seemed just as strange as the

phaeton and four stags would appear to us in the twentieth. The motor-car,

however, attracts less attention in north-western Norfolk, perhaps, than in

any other part of the kingdom; for at Sandringham are many motor-cars of

many makes, and some there are at the Cottage also. This part of the

country learned before others did the elementary truth that there is no

essential connection between speed and peril, and it was good for

automobolism that an object-lesson should have been given in this respect

by the magnificent cars, Daimlers for the most part, of him whom the law

regards as incapable of offence, because he is the spring and source of the

law itself. Of this country of heather, bracken, fir and oak, of glorious

gorse and of glowing rhododendrons, of the numerous acclivities and

declivities, sufficient to give variety to the scene without trying the

powers of any competent car, of its air, an incomparably sweet mixture of

the breaths of the sea and of the moorland, little will be said at this

moment, for the simple reason that, in the next and final chapter, I hope

to be able to give an impression of its beauties at many times of the year,

from the point of view of a frequent eye-witness.

The whole distance from Wells to King's Lynn, by way of Fakenham, which was

our way, is a generous thirty miles; but the going was so good and the

roads were so clear that we entered the great square of the old-fashioned

Lynn a little too early for luncheon, having regard to the fact that

engagements in the world which we had put out of sight began to bulk rather

large in the near future. The single town of any interest we passed through

before reaching Lynn was Fakenham; and we agreed with Mr. Rye that it is "a

particularly clean and pleasant market town, with several good

old-fashioned inns, especially the 'Crown.'" That is to say the first

statement is endorsed from experience; as to the second the responsibility

rests with Mr. Rye. Here also, for those who care to halt, is a singularly

fine church showing many a crowned "L" in stone to testify that Fakenham

was once the head-quarters in Norfolk of the Duchy of Lancaster. As for

Lynn, some of us had visited it before, one had sojourned in it long (but

his tale is postponed), and time, as has been mentioned, began to press a

little. Drifting on the roads, careless of where you shall eat or where

sleep, is delightful, but for most of us it cannot go on indefinitely, and

therein, probably, consists its chief charm. It is of the essence of a

"treat," to use the good old word of childhood, that it should be more or

less exceptional. So, at King's Lynn, we did but halt for a space at the

"Globe" in the corner of the wide and cobbled square and, although a little

rain began to fall, compel the new-comers to walk about a little, and look

at the narrow streets, the estuary of the Ouse, and the Custom-house. The

compulsion had better have been omitted, for Lynn with its streets empty of

people, with the rain falling, and with the tide out, assuredly does not

allure, and that was the state of things on this Sunday morning in April.

In other circumstances, as it is hoped to prove ere long, Lynn and its

people are much more attractive.

So the halt was not prolonged and, the rain abating, we started on the

drive of forty-five miles roughly for Ely and Cambridge. It took us through

the heart of the East Anglian Fens, and the day was one in which the spirit

of them entered into me, or perhaps I, having set my mind thereto, entered

into their spirit. Of a truth the task was one presenting little

difficulty, so far as the general mood was concerned. For me, at any rate,

there has never been any real gulf between the useful and the romantic. To

one nurtured at the foot of the mighty amphitheatre of the Penrhyn Slate

Quarries, scooped out from the heart of a mountain, rising in purple tiers

of Cyclopean scale, the work of man, so long as it be grand in outline and

in purpose, has always seemed to possess an entrancing beauty of its own.

Men live who find the Fens flat and uninteresting. They demand our

compassion, by no means our censure or our scorn. One does not despise a

blind man because he cannot see; and these men simply suffer from partial

blindness, physical and mental. There is, beyond all question, a beauty of

the Fens as they are, appealing to the eye alone; they had another beauty

for the eye in their original state, original that is to say so far as

human history reaches, and of the nature of that original beauty a

miniature presentment may be seen still at Wicken Fen, which lies between

the Isle of Ely and Newmarket Heath. Happy is the man or woman who can

rejoice in both of these aspects of the Fenland. Happier still, because

more intelligently charmed, are those who, while they travel through the

rich cornland, following the banks of rivers whose waters run at a level

higher than those of the surrounding fields, can picture to themselves the

scene as it was before the skill and the courage of man made the good wheat

grow where the reeds once waved, made firm pasture for sleek cattle out of

the quagmire, caused domestic fowls to thrive in the sometime domain of the

bittern and the heron. Men never tire of singing the praises of the Dutch

who, by dogged courage and centuries of unrelaxing effort, made a country

for themselves, a country to which they cling with a love passing the love

of women. The conquest of the Fens, begun, so far as we know, by the

Romans, was, in its way, an enterprise of equal nobility and courage, and

Vermuyden, Francis, Duke of Bedford, and Rennie deserve credit great as any

given to any Dutch engineer. The details are perhaps dull; they would

certainly be out of place here; the result is grand, a colossal gain for

humanity which can best be realized and valued, be admired most cordially

and warmly, as one rolls along solid roads where the Fenman of old stalked

gingerly on stilts.

Who will not remember the last words of Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_,

when they are quoted?

"Let us send over to Normandy for a fair white stone of Caen, and let us

carve a tomb worthy of thy grand-parents."

"And what shall we write thereon?"

"What but that which is there already? 'Here lies the last of the

English.'"

"Not so. We will write, 'Here lies the last of the old English.' But upon

thy tomb, when thy time comes, the monks of Crowland shall write, 'Here

lies the first of the new English; who, by the inspiration of God, began to

drain the Fens.'"

Here is absolute truth of sentiment, and to say this is by no means to deny

sympathetic appreciation of the dogged resistance offered by the Fenmen of

many generations to those who rescued the Fens from the condition of a

watery wilderness. Of course the Fenmen hated the very idea of the

subjugation of the Marshland. Their feeling towards those who began the

long and arduous work differed only in degree from that with which the

savage inhabitants of a new country--new to us, that is to say--regard the

advance of civilization. They were not savages, but they were hard men and

hardy, for only the fittest survived the agues and the fevers, accustomed

to a free out-door life, having its pleasures no less than its trials. Let

me quote Kingsley:--

"Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the

open sea; and that vastness gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such

sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles.

They might well have been star worshippers, those Gervii, had their sky

been clear as that of the East; but they were like to have worshipped the

clouds rather than the stars, according to the too universal law, that

mankind worship the powers which do them harm, rather than the powers

which do them good. Their priestly teachers, too, had darkened still

further their notion of the world around, as accursed by sin and swarming

with evil spirits. The gods and fairies of their old mythology had been

transformed by the Church into fiends, alluring or loathsome, but all alike

destructive to man, against whom the soldier of God, the celibate monk,

fought day and night with relics, Agnus Dei, and sign of Holy Cross. And

therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword or axe, feared

witches, ghosts, Pucks, Wills-o'-the-Wisp, Werewolves, spirits of the wells

and the trees, and all dark, capricious and harmful beings whom their fancy

called up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark,

wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its

dark aspect. The foul exhalations of the autumn called up fever and ague,

crippling and enervating, and tempting, almost compelling, to that wild and

desperate drinking which was the Scandinavian's special sin. Dark and sad

were those short autumn days, when all the distances were shut off, and the

air reeked with foul brown fog and drenching rains from the eastern sea;

and pleasant the bursting forth of the keen north-east wind, with all its

whirling snowstorms. For though it sent men hurrying into the storm, to

drive the cattle in from the fen, and lift the sheep out of the

snow-wreaths, and now and then never to return, lost in mist and mire, in

ice and snow; yet all knew that after the snow would come the keen frost

and bright sun and cloudless blue sky, and the Fenman's yearly holiday,

when, work being impossible, all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed

upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against

township, or visit old friends forty miles away; and met everywhere faces

as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wind of that dry and

bracing frost."

Tumultuously eloquent Kingsley gives here an impression which, as an

overture to the stirring story of _Hereward the Wake_ may not have been

guiltless of anachronism; but it suits our purpose the better. He is too

severe, in this case as in others, on the Roman Catholic clergy. Most

likely the Gervii were not immigrants from oversea, not historical

immigrants at any rate. Their traditions, it may well be, were of that

Druidism which the Romans understood so little. Outlaws and desperate men,

Saxon and Dane, naturally drifted to the Fens, bringing in their own

traditions, and became one people with them. Sledges the denizens of the

Fens doubtless used, and snowshoes perhaps, in the days of Hereward, when

the Fens were indeed the last stronghold of the English; but one would like

to see some kind of evidence for skates. As for the merrymaking on the ice,

the friendly visits and the like, the chances are that they were as much

the products of a happy imagination as the ancient Fenman's joy in the wild

north-easter. Life really was hard and lonely for him. He probably cursed

the north-easter as heartily as a rheumatic man does now, and if he

welcomed the frost it was because it enabled him to approach and kill the

more easily the wild birds with which the Fens teemed. In the main he was

hunter, fisher, fowler, and that was why he resisted civilization.

Junketings on the ice belonged to a later period altogether. Oliver

Cromwell resisted the reclamation of the Fens because he thought he saw in

it a subtle device of the great to enrich themselves. The Fenman resisted

it because he was a fowler and a fisher, and the draining reduced the area

of his happy hunting grounds and of the waters of which he was free and

out of which he could make a scanty living. Men might call him "slodger,"

"yellow-belly"--the first word sounds like the very quintessence of churned

mud, the second is eloquent of sickness--and he might grumble at the

hardships of his lot. Still he knew no other way of living. He could snare

the myriad wildfowl, many of them no longer known in England, which haunted

the fastnesses of the reeds as no other man could. He knew the flight of

each kind at every hour of the day and at every season of the year. No man

so cunningly as he could capture the mighty luce or pike, noosing him

sometimes, at others, and especially in winter, catching him with baits,

craftily let down through a hole in the ice, or could so artfully trap the

fat eels wherewith the clergy of Ely or of Crowland might turn a fast in

the letter into a feast in the spirit. With his stilts and his leaping pole

he could travel over the marshes with the most astonishing celerity; but

that he enjoyed his life so keenly as Kingsley would have us believe is in

the last degree unlikely.

Still the Fenman knew the life, and he knew his powers. He had no ambition

to drive the slow oxen, to turn the fertile furrow, to garner the golden

grain. Indifferent to questions of national welfare he was, as of course.

The rustic of to-day is absolutely indifferent to considerations of the

kind. He likes to see the straw so heavy that it cannot be cut by machines,

laid by storms so that the sickle must needs be employed, because that

means more work for men. Time was, and that not so very long ago, when,

following the example of the artisans and weavers of manufacturing England,

Hodge rioted and broke up the thrashing machines and the like, which did

the work of twenty men and more. "It stands to reason," he used to say,

"that such newfangled notions are bad for the likes of us." It stood to

reason, from the Fenman's point of view, that to drain the Fens would be to

leave him without the only occupation for which he was fit; it probably

never occurred to him that he might adapt himself to altered circumstances

and become a regular worker, tied to fixed hours, instead of an amphibious

wanderer, fowling and fishing when he pleased, or when necessity drove him

to exertion. Who shall blame him? Certainly not the sportsman, the

naturalist, or the botanist, who have felt a pang of regret as they have

watched, elsewhere than in the Fens it may be, the marsh that always held

snipe, from which the bittern has been known to rise, in the recesses of

which some almost extinct herb survived, converted into a fruitful field.

Yet what man familiar with the life of the country has not felt these

regrets, even while he knew all the time that the change was for the public

good and that his own livelihood would not be directly affected? Is it

possible, then, not to sympathize with the resistance of the Fenmen, who

knew nothing of "the public good" and saw their livelihood, or the chance

of obtaining it, destroyed before their helpless eyes. It was the old

story. One man's meat is another man's poison all the world over and for

all time; and there can be no progress, no wholesale and beneficial change

in the ways of life, without much incidental tribulation. Nevertheless,

when all things are weighed in the balance, not a scintilla of doubt

remains that the draining of the Fens was begun and continued, as the old

knight in _Hereward the Wake_ said, "by the inspiration of God." It

banished a few birds; but we could better spare a few kinds of birds than

preserve them with the fevers and the agues which were the inseparable

accident of their haunts. It was the end of the "slodgers" and the

"yellow-bellies," who were but a handful of men; but in their place are

thousands of human beings who, in spite of agricultural troubles which the

drainers of the Fens could not by any means have foreseen, are at least

sufficiently clad and fed, and decently housed.

It is not always, it is not indeed often, that the reflections appropriate

to a scene throng into one's mind when that scene is visited. Sometimes, at

the foot of Niagara, for example, thoughts refuse to come into the mind at

all; it is only afterwards that with Dickens one reflects, it was surely

only afterwards he reflected, that the one abiding impression left by

Niagara is the remembrance from time to time that a like mass of water is

still falling, and falling, and falling, yesterday to-day and for ever.

But, in relation to the Fens, I can truthfully say that most of these

thoughts ran through my mind as we rolled along the road. Details of course

did not. I had forgotten about Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and Rennie, but I

remembered the great deeds of the House of Bedford and boyhood's delight in

Hereward. As the road followed the sinuous bank of cabined Ouse, as I

looked at the flat fields of rich black soil in which the corn showed green

or of pasture springing into life, I felt to realize that on these very

places the reeds had whispered and, as Sir Bedivere said to King Arthur, so

man might have reported, to Hereward if you will, "Nought heard I, save the

waves wap and the waters wan." Each church with its hamlet rose a little

above the general level of the plain, making it the easier to understand

that each stood on firm ground, once an island among the marshes, upon

which the church had set her beacon light. If Downham Church, which we

passed, might be taken as a sample--and it may be with safety--then the

more leisurely topographers who have gone before are abundantly justified

in saying that the churches of the Fen country are of an uncommon

stateliness and beauty. This place, by the way, shares with North Walsham

the honour of having taken a share in the education of Nelson.

With such thoughts flooding into the mind we were quickly, or seemed to be

quickly, at Ely, of which something has been written before, and no more

shall be written. The road thence to Cambridge needs no fresh description,

and at Cambridge, for our purposes, the account of this expedition might

end but for one small incident of a doubly instructive character. First,

however, let it be said, since the "Bull" has been praised before, that on

this occasion it turned out to have been unhappily chosen as a place at

which to take luncheon. Appetites were ravenous, but the meal was not a

success. Perhaps because it was vacation time, the house was not prepared

for guests. At any rate, the stair-carpets were "up"; but Cambridge is a

big place, on an important highway, and, in fact, the guests were many and

the mutton was tough. So, somewhat dissatisfied, to Royston and home, quite

a long way but, so far as Royston, familiar already, and beyond that

outside the present manor. Still, an incident occurring in the next manor

must be recorded, because it was an incident, because it was germane to the

motor-car and its little brother the motor-cycle, and because it had a

double moral. It so fell out that somewhere, between Luton and Dunstable,

if memory serves accurately, we were proceeding at a fittingly careful

pace, and keeping scrupulously to the proper side of a not too wide and

very meandering road. Suddenly, round the corner in front of us, appeared a

motor-cycle, on its proper side of the road too, but proceeding at a good

pace, the motor-cyclist having a young woman on a bicycle in tow. If she

had kept her head all would have been well. As it was she lost it, fell

head over heels into the ditch on her near side of the road, and suffered

nothing worse than a shaking, which, indeed, she deserved. In due course

she was picked up, placed in the tonneau, and taken back to her mother,

while I held her bicycle as it rested on our near foot-board. It appeared

to be the first time this very penitent damsel had tried this suicidal

method of progression; let us hope it was also the last; for that it is

suicidal, potentially at any rate, there is no kind of doubt. She was

really in some danger, for she was just as likely to tumble into the road

as into the ditch. Mr. Johnson could have stopped in time to avoid her if

she had, because he was going carefully, and with a due regard to the

potential dangers of the road. But I know a good many other drivers with

regard to whom I should be sorry to say confidently that they could be

relied upon to have been driving with equal care in the same circumstances.

It was the kind of incident which made one think.

CHAPTER XIII

FROM KING'S LYNN AS CENTRE

PART I

King's Lynn--The Globe Hotel--English hotels--Reform

necessary but difficult--Centre of exploration in

adjacent country--Early history of Lynn--Little

known--Not Roman--Important in the eleventh

century--Formerly Lynn Episcopi--Lynn Regis since Henry

VIII--Chapel of Red Mount--Stopping-place for

pilgrims--"King John's" cup and sword--Possibly that of

King John of France--Early prosperity of

Lynn--Contribution against the Armada--Lynn during the

Civil War--Sir Hamon le Strange--Cromwell at siege of

Lynn--Custom-house and Guildhall--A city of

merchants--Lynn and Eugene Aram--Bulwer's novel and the

facts--Was Aram guilty?--The theatre--Sea-faring

men--To Peterborough via Wisbech--Its association with

the Fens--The cathedral--Cathedrals as books in

stone--Crowland.

PART II

To Castle Rising--Once a port--Once a borough--The keep

and surroundings--The mystery of the earthworks--Not

Roman probably--A suggestion--Robert de Montault's feud

with Lynn--Rising and the She Wolf of France--Not so

harshly imprisoned after

all--Wolferton--Sandringham--Always beautiful

country--The house--Sports and pastimes of

royalty--Dersingham--Snettisham--The Hunstantons and

the Le Stranges--"Twthill"--A suggested

derivation--Brancaster--The Peddars way--The Saxon

pirates--Brancaster described by Mr.

Haverfield--Excavation needed--Burnham

Deepdale--Burnham Thorpe--The birthplace of Nelson--To

Fakenham--Rainham Hall--The early

Townshends--Elmhan--Once seat of

bishopric--Earthworks--East Dereham and George

Borrow--His description--Cowper--Swaffham--The first

Coursing Club--Castle Acre--The Castle's story

clear--That of the earthworks all darkness.

For the purposes of this chapter we will sleep, if it please you, and take

our meals occasionally, at the Globe Hotel, standing in the south-west

corner of the spacious square at King's Lynn, where, in fact, I have often

stayed for many days together. That is why the "Globe" is recommended, not

with any extremity of warmth, but just as an ordinary and rather

old-fashioned hotel, such as one may expect to find--sometimes the

expectation is vain--in a really old-fashioned town like Lynn. It is no

sumptuous palace, but it provides plain and wholesome food, fair liquor,

and clean bedrooms at about the normal English price. That is much too

high, of course, judged by the Continental standard, and some day one may

hope that the mysterious reason why English hotel-keepers, having to pay

less than the generality of their contemporaries abroad for that raw

material of dinners, of which they too often forget to change the original

condition, charge more highly for the results and certainly, to all

appearance, do not thrive so consistently. They would answer, most likely,

that the hotel-keepers of provincial France and of parts of Switzerland can

afford to charge their very modest prices because they can safely rely on a

regular influx of travellers, principally English, German, and American. "I

can never tell," says Boniface, "how many will want dinner on any day.

Whether five come or fifty, all expect dinner; I must always be prepared

for them"--very often he is sadly unprepared--"and my prices do not do much

more than cover my expenses. Many a beautiful joint have I provided, for I

never buy anything but the very best, that has had to be thrown away."

Quote to him hotels abroad, such as we all know, where guests are taken in

_en pension_, and fed fairly well, at from six to nine francs a day, or put

it at 5s. to 7s. 6d. to simplify matters, and, while it is plain that he

does not really believe you, he will bring up again the same old argument.

Nor can you persuade him that a large part of the annual exodus to the

Continent is due to knowledge that touring in England is, so far as food

and accommodation go, so very dear, and often so remarkably nasty by

comparison with touring on the Continent that men are driven abroad.

Individually, however, Boniface is in rather a difficult position. Our

beautiful islands, for they are very lovely in many kinds of loveliness,

and our roads (which, if not equal to those of France, seem to an American

to have attained an almost ideal perfection) will never attract their due

share of voluntary travellers until the general average of hotels shall be

improved, and the general average of charges shall be reduced. Even then

some years must elapse before the reform would be realized as well as

known, and the set habits of the travelling public, the public which

travels of its own free-will and for its own pleasure, might be slow to

change. They also, like the hotel-keepers, are English men and English

women, Scots and Irish of both sexes, not easy to move out of a fixed

groove. In any case the pioneer, the paragon among hotel-keepers, who

should attempt to gain custom by setting an example of prices really

moderate, not moderate according to English standards, would almost

certainly court bankruptcy. One swallow does not make a summer; the

certainty of finding one cheap and comfortable hotel on a tour would not

suffice to turn the stream of tourists into the route on which that hotel

lay.

So, perhaps, the complaints of motorists and others concerning the charges

of English hotels (and Irish and Scotch hotels too) may be regarded as

being rather in the nature of letting off steam than in that of using it in

the hope of effecting any real result. The fault lies in the system; the

system cannot be reformed without concerted action of hotel-keepers, of

which there is no present evidence; and, if reform came, the actual

reformers would probably be losers, although the next generation of

hotel-keepers would reap a rich harvest. The process of reform would be,

indeed, something like making pasture out of arable land, a costly

enterprise, the profits of which are so long in coming that it is rarely

undertaken by tenants for a short term. Since that is so we must take our

hotels as we find them, praising some as being a little better than others

when all might be vastly improved. On these principles the "Globe" at Lynn

is recommended, although the "Crown" or the "Duke's Head" may, for all I

know, be equally good. It may be added, too, that it used to be, perhaps

still is, the hotel used by Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, whose Parliamentary

connection with King's Lynn was long. His presence in it, however, argued

nothing. It may have been the Conservative or Unionist hotel traditionally,

as the "Royal" at Norwich is the Liberal House; or again, Mr. Bowles may

have been no less independent in the choice of a hotel, even in his own

constituency, than he was in selecting his lobby on a division in the House

of Commons.

At any rate the "Globe" will serve as a resting-place. From it we will

examine King's Lynn, thinking a little of its history and associations, and

take a drive of a single day in the first part of the chapter; and in the

second we will take, for purposes of writing, a considerably longer drive

which, for those who desire to see a great number of interesting places at

leisure, would be much better divided into two parts, or even three, than

taken in a single piece. Only, having visited all the places named, by road

too, but not expressly for the purpose of this book, I am disposed to

recommend a return to Lynn for the night, if a day seems to be growing too

long, rather than a sojourn at some outlying place in which the inn or

hotel, where there is one, has not been tested on my vile body. For

example, in this second drive, if my advice be taken, the traveller may

find himself at Brancaster at about the time of afternoon tea. Even on a

summer's day he will hardly be disposed to complete the programme

suggested. He can easily run back to Lynn, in time to dress for dinner

comfortably, along a different road from that which he took in coming, and

if he likes to start again at the next point in the drive on the following

morning, he can reach that again by a new series of roads. He is never

likely to regret his return to Lynn, because it is really an exceedingly

interesting and characteristic place.

"It was an old wild fancy that Catus Decianus," Boadicea's Roman

contemporary in this country, "founded Lynn," says Mr. Haverfield; on the

other hand, according to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, it is supposed to

have been a British settlement. Its origin is, in fact, "wrop up in

mystery" rather more completely than is usual with old English towns. We

know that the earliest entry in the Red Book of Lynn is 1309, and the last

East Anglian bishop who occupied Thetford as his diocesan capital is

believed to have built a church where St. Margaret's now stands.

Presumably, therefore, Lynn was a place of some importance in his day,

which was at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth

centuries. There is an odd tradition concerning the original church, of

which not much is left, for in the eighteenth century the spire collapsed

on to the nave in a gale of wind. The tradition, mentioned by Mr. Rye, is

that the foundation was laid on woolpacks; "but I fancy this only came from

some donation of wool, or of a wool subsidy, in aid of a partial

rebuilding. Whatever it was built on its foundations certainly settled very

much directly, for the tower leans over in such a Pisa-like way that it

makes a nervous spectator quite uncomfortable to go inside it and look up,

though the protecting piers have been there in their present places a

trifle over seven hundred years or so." How to reconcile this with the fact

that the spire was blown down on to the nave in 1741 is Mr. Rye's business,

not mine. Besides that, the fragments of history connected with Lynn are so

interesting that they will leave little, if any, space for those discourses

on ecclesiastical architecture which are the principal parts of the

generality of guide-books.

Of the early history, the really early history of Lynn, little is known. It

had strong walls, relics of which remain, of uncertain date, save that they

were not Roman. It belonged to the East Anglian bishops, or at any rate was

in their temporal jurisdiction, until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries,

when it became Lynn Regis, no longer Lynn Episcopi. It was a stopping place

for pilgrims on the way to the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, who were

encouraged to lay their offerings in the Chapel of the Red Mount, to which

chapel, very small and very beautiful within, an ancient avenue still

leads. Observe the distinct entrance and exit, testifying alike to the

business aptitude of those who were in charge, and to the popularity of the

shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. Lynn has a charter of 1216, given by King

John, and preserves a sword and a cup alleged to have been given by him.

Here "Murray" is "too clever by half," and himself supplies, if it had but

occurred to him, a key which it was left to a local antiquary to apply to

this historical problem. "The cup itself, in elegance of shape, might have

come from the hand of Cellini. The figures in enamel of men and women

hunting and hawking are extremely curious. Judging, however, from the

costume and workmanship this cup cannot be older than the period of Edward

III--the period of the greatest prosperity of Lynn. The sword also,

although an inscription on one side of the hilt records that John took it

from his side and gave it to the town, is really no older than the

sixteenth century. Both articles seem to be substitutes for the original

donations." That is not so certain. On the opposite page the same writer

mentions a brass in St. Margaret's commemorating a Mayor of Edward III's

time, and a representation below of the "Peacock's Feast" given by this

same mayor to Edward III, who is represented at table, having before him a

cup very like the one in question. Now Edward III not only visited Lynn,

but also kept King John of France as an honoured prisoner for many years.

He was as likely as not to take John with him to Lynn, and the chances are

that the cup, as a local antiquary has suggested to Mr. Rye, was the gift

of a king of France. As for the inscription on the sword, it is nothing. It

was in the nature of things that whosoever gave the sword, the inscription

should be placed upon it afterwards, and, as to a date suggested by

workmanship, it would be very unsafe to rely upon it.

"Probably it was in the time of Edward III that, speaking relatively, Lynn

was most prosperous." It is assumed that the statement was not made without

evidence of some kind. Otherwise probabilities would seem to point in the

opposite direction, and it would be natural to expect that, as the Fens

were gradually subjugated, producing some things worth exporting and

supporting men capable of buying things imported, the port provided for

them by nature would grow in respect of trade. Still there is abundant

evidence of its importance later than Edward III and long before the great

and good work of reclaiming the Fens had been take seriously in hand. In

the time of Elizabeth, Lynn and Blakeney (!), the latter now no longer

worthy of mention as a port, furnished "2 shippes and 1 pinnace," a

contribution equal to that of Ipswich and Harwich, to resist the Armada.

Then, as we have seen, Oliver Cromwell resisted the first scheme of

Fen-reclamation formed by the illustrious house of Bedford--the Protector

of later years was then a resident at Ely and member for Cambridge in the

House of Commons. Yet the value of Lynn was quickly made manifest during

the Rebellion. Moved thereto by stout Sir Hamon le Strange of Hunstanton,

Lynn showed itself to be veritably Lynn Regis, almost the only part of East

Anglia that adhered to Charles. It was a matter of no small moment. Even

afterwards, when the Restoration was being planned the projected seizure of

Lynn was regarded by the planners and by Clarendon as an enterprise of

exceptional value because Lynn was "a Maritime Town, of great importance in

respect of the Situation, and likewise of the Good Affection of the

Gentlemen of the Parts adjacent." To the first Charles it would have been

of priceless value could he but have held it, for through it he could have

secured from the Continent that supply of ammunition of which, almost from

the beginning of the war, he was in sore need. With Sir Hamon le Strange

for governor, 50 pieces of ordnance, 1200 muskets, and 500 barrels of

powder, Lynn was held in a manner plainly showing how much value the King

set upon it. The Parliamentary generals, however, were equally alive to the

use that might be made of Lynn as a port from which to obtain supplies.

First Manchester, and later Cromwell, took part in the siege; it is even

said the "Virgin Troop" of Norwich, Puritan Amazons, took the field on this

occasion. At any rate, in 1643 Lynn surrendered, to the grievous loss of

Charles and the corresponding gain of the Parliament.

Lynn's commercial history may be described roughly as the dogged and not

entirely fruitless struggle of a town once really great and prosperous to

fight the new conditions of modern trade, conditions tending to make remote

and out of the way a port which was once accessible and almost central. The

glory has not all departed, but a great deal of it has gone, leaving its

traces plainly to be seen in architecture. The Custom-house, Dutch in

appearance (for the trade with Holland was considerable), and the Guildhall

speak of the days gone by; the central market square is far too spacious

for the present needs of the place. The main streets are narrow, but that

was the way of old cities, and their lights, carried on elegant iron arches

across the streets, give it a distinctly foreign air. Drive away from the

main street towards the Custom-house, and you will find another, running

parallel to it, of substantial Queen Anne houses compelling reflection.

They speak of a bygone prosperity. I have found no trace that Lynn ever

was, as Ipswich and Norwich were in the pre-railway days, and as for that

matter nearly every county town in England was, a centre of county society,

in which the county families kept their town houses, occupying them for a

gay season in each year. These houses seem to speak rather of rich Lynn

merchants of the past, trading with the Low Countries on a scale very large

for those days. Again, with the sea to the northward, after a few miles of

navigable river, and the Fens on every side nearly, living on its trade by

sea, Lynn seems to have been placed in a species of natural isolation,

which perhaps goes some way to account for the fact that it is not quite

like any other town in England.

Probably the Lynn "character" of the past most of us would best like to

meet, not for very long perhaps, was Miss Mary Breeze, who died, aged

seventy-eight, in 1789. It is recorded of her that "she took out her

shooting license, kept as good greyhounds, and was as sure a shot as any in

the county." But a corporation minute beginning, "Guildhall, Lynn. At a

congregation there holden on the 14th day of February, 1758," points to a

contemporary of Miss Mary Breeze, in whom the wider world was once keenly

interested. On that day Eugene Aram was approved as usher to the Grammar

School, on the appointment of Mr. Knox, in the place of John Birkes,

"dismissed." Like, probably, most middle-aged men, I remember reading

_Eugene Aram_ with eager interest as a boy; in these later years the task

has been achieved only after heroic efforts and in obedience to a sense of

duty. The noble author, who could describe a chair in front of a

public-house as "cathedrarian accommodation," is not for this age. By the

help, however, of a paper read by Mr. E. M. Beloe to a county society, and

preserved in _Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries_, I am able to see

something of this celebrated case, once much discussed, as it must have

appeared to the inhabitants of Lynn.

Aram was appointed usher of the ancient Grammar School, now vanished (but

Lynn has recently acquired a far more important Grammar School, named after

King Edward VII), in February, 1758. He lived in the headmaster's house,

spent his holidays with the Vicar of Heacham, and most of his Sundays with

Archdeacon Steadman, who was Rector of Gaywood. He was gloomy of aspect,

given to solitary walks, in the habit of looking back over his shoulder, as

if some one were following him; but he was also obviously a man of

remarkable attainments. Bulwer gives him all these traits, except (I think)

that of looking over his shoulder, which is local tradition. Bulwer also

makes Aram the impassioned suitor of a local lady; but Mr. Beloe says

nothing on that head. If Aram was such, then his intentions must have been

dishonourable and may have been bigamous: on that point, however, Lynn

could have known nothing. Imagine, then, the surprise of the good people of

Lynn when, in August or September of the year 1758, after Aram had been

among them seven months only, two Knaresborough constables came to Sir John

Turner, the most important magistrate of Lynn, and one of those who had

sanctioned the appointment of Aram, with a warrant against the usher. The

warrant, being issued in Yorkshire, required to be backed. Sir John Turner

backed it, accompanied the constables to the Grammar School, and was

present while Aram, having been summoned to an inner room, was duly

arrested. Next, according to Hood's _Dream of Eugene Aram_--

Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,

Through the cold and heavy mist,

And Eugene Aram walked between,

With gyves upon his wrist.

This was poetic licence; as a matter of fact, Aram started for

Knaresborough in a post-chaise. That was all the people of Lynn saw or knew

of Eugene Aram, save that they learned, through the meagre channels of

information then existing, that he was eventually convicted at

Knaresborough, after lying untried for nearly a year in York gaol, on a

charge of murder fourteen years old. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Beloe

wrote and read aloud "His name has been, from my youth upwards, a kind of

fascination for me"; small wonder that Lynn was and remained deeply

interested to find it had harboured a criminal, whose guilt was doubted by

some, whose career was the theme of a stirring poem, nobly recited by Sir

Henry Irving, and of a novel which was at one time much to the taste of the

age.

Eugene Aram's story is really so full of interest that it is worth

summarizing, very briefly and without introduction of the "love interest"

(as his literary agents have it) with which Bulwer strove to give it human

reality. Of quite humble parentage and meagre education, he early showed a

passion for learning. Born in 1704, he was a married schoolmaster at

Netherdale long before he was thirty, and when he migrated to

Knaresborough, still as a schoolmaster, in 1734, he had acquired

considerable knowledge of Latin and Greek. At Knaresborough he remained ten

years. Then his intimate Daniel Clarke disappeared, having previously been

supplied with a large quantity of goods on credit. Nothing worse than a

common swindle seems to have been suspected at the time. Suspicion of

having been concerned in it fell upon Aram; proceedings were taken against

him; his garden was searched; but no evidence was forthcoming and he was

discharged. However, he left Knaresborough shortly afterwards, deserting

his wife at the same time, and for the next ten years he appears to have

wandered about England, acting as usher in all sorts of schools, and

studying comparative philology. The definite story finds him next an usher

at Lynn, peculiar in manner but, by reason of his attainments probably, an

acceptable associate to the cultivated gentlemen of the district.

It would have been well for Aram if, when he left Knaresborough, he had

taken away his wife also. The deserted woman, whom the noble novelist found

it convenient to forget, had doubtless a feeling of resentment against her

husband, and had certainly a long tongue. Talking over her grievances,

which really were quite considerable, she had been heard to suggest that

her husband and Houseman, "the scoundrel Houseman" of Bulwer, were jointly

responsible for the disappearance of Clarke, but her talk was clearly

regarded as the scurrilous spite of an angry woman. Then a skeleton was

found near Knaresborough, in a place where no recent skeleton had a right

to be, and folks began to say that there was some method in Mrs. Aram's

madness. There was an inquest, at which she gave evidence; Houseman was

arrested and "confronted with the bones." He vowed that they were not the

bones of "Dan Clarke," confessed that he had been present while Aram and

another man murdered Clarke, and that Clarke's bones had been buried in a

well-known cave hard by. In that cave bones were found. Where was Aram? A

clue (this is from Mr. Beloe and does not appear in most accounts) was

supplied by a Yorkshire horse-dealer, who had seen Aram at Lynn during his

travels. So Aram was arrested, as we have seen, tried, convicted and

executed, making full confession after conviction, and suggesting, by way

of motive, that Clarke had made too successful love to his wife.

Was Eugene Aram guilty or not? To his confession, probably, no serious

attention need be paid. The man was highly strung clearly, he had been a

penniless prisoner for nearly a year at a time when our prisons were hells

upon earth, he had conducted his own defence during an arduous and, from

our modern point of view, very unfairly conducted trial, he attempted

suicide by opening a vein on the night before his execution, he was

desperate, probably not master of himself, and last, perhaps not least,

confessions were the custom of the criminals of the age. It has been urged

on his behalf that the trial was unfair, from our point of view, since

counsel might not be retained for the defence of prisoners in those days

nor wives called in defence of their husbands. As to the wife's evidence,

if it had been admissible, the story makes it plain that it would have

been more likely to be damning than favourable. She had been deserted, she

had been left to shift for herself for many years, she had said that Aram

knew all about the disappearance of Clarke. It was a distinct advantage to

Aram that she could not be called. That he suffered from having to defend

himself is in the last degree unlikely. Paley, who travelled all the way

from Cambridge to hear his defence, said he had secured his conviction by

his own cleverness. The original defence, preserved by Bulwer, is indeed

marked by singular ability; but it is not in the very least convincing. I

can imagine the jury saying to one another: "If this obviously clever man

can think of nothing better than this to say, he is guilty sure enough."

Houseman, it might very fairly be said, was not a credible witness. He was,

indeed, on his own showing, a most mean and despicable villain; but the

strength of the circumstantial evidence, the fact that Aram ran away, that

he did not cross-examine Houseman or attempt to overthrow his evidence, and

that his defence really amounted to an essay on the fallibility of

circumstantial evidence, were quite enough to secure his conviction then,

or now. The sympathy felt for Eugene Aram has sprung from the fact that the

villain Houseman escaped, and that Aram was an able and a brilliantly

learned man. Hume, I believe, said he was a century ahead of his age in

Celtic research; but neither the one fact nor the other is inconsistent

with a belief that Clarke was murdered, and that Aram was present at the

murder.

Such are the reflections one may carry about the narrow streets of Lynn,

and sometimes, of an evening, one may go to the theatre, but my one

experience of that was not inviting. The maxim _ne coram populo_ was more

flagrantly trodden underfoot surely than ever before, when, in a play

called (I think) _Slaves of the Harem_, a full-blooded and genuine African

went through with a bowstring the gestures of executing an erring lady on

the stage (who in her turn made appropriate grimaces) to the uproarious

delight of an audience which insisted on encoring the scene. On the other

hand, time spent in talking with the people in warm bar-parlours of an

evening, or among the mariners who idle on the quay by day, as mariners

always have and always will, is apt to be rewarded by no means ill. Among

the sea-faring men, at any rate, hardy fishermen for the most part, the

feeling that one may be talking to lineal descendants of Vikings soon

deepens into conviction. They are fine seamen, too, these men of the east

coast, and the Navy depends upon them not a little; but very prudently, and

without saying anything about it, it is arranged that the same ship's

company shall never be part east and part west countrymen.