disturbances and of shooting down their fellow-countrymen, no blame
belongs: they did but obey orders. Yet they felt it a disgrace. The
18th Dragoons had fought at Waterloo the year before, and one of the
troopers who had come through that day unscathed received in this
affair a wound that cost him his arm. He thought it hard that fate
should serve him so scurvy a trick. But among the soldiery employed was
a Hanoverian regiment, whose record is stained deeply and foully with
the doings of one German officer. Patrolling Ely in those tempestuous
days, his company were passing by the old Sextry Barn, near the
Cathedral, when he heard a thatcher employed on the roof call to his
assistant in the technical language of thatchers "Bunch! bunch!" He was
merely asking for another bundle of reeds, but the foreign officer,
not properly understanding English, interpreted this as an insult to
himself, and ordered his men to fire. They did so, and the unfortunate
thatcher fell upon the open doors of the barn, his body pierced by
a dozen bullets. There it hung, dropping blood, for three days, the
officer swearing he would serve in the same way anyone who dared remove
it.
XLIII
THOSE days are far behind. When Bishop Sparke died in 1836, the
temporal power was taken away from the See, and his Sword of State was
buried with him: a fitting piece of symbolism. These memories alone are
left, found only after much diligent and patient search; but with their
aid the grey stones and the soaring towers of Ely, the quiet streets,
and the road on to Littleport, take on a more living interest to the
thoughtful man, to whom archæology, keenly interesting though it be,
does not furnish forth the full banquet of life.
Save for these memories, and for the backward glance at the Cathedral,
looming dark on the skyline, much of the way to Littleport might
almost be called dull. A modern suburb called "Little London" has
thrown out some few houses in this direction during the last century,
but why or how this has been possible with a dwindling population let
others explain, if they can do so. At anyrate, when the Reverend James
Bentham, the historian, was Canon here, from 1737 to 1794, no dwellings
lined the way, for he planted a mile-long avenue of oaks where these
uninteresting houses now stand. A few only of his trees remain, near
the first milestone; a clump of spindly oaks, more resembling elms
in their growth, and in midst of them a stone obelisk with a Latin
inscription stating how Canon James Bentham, Canon of the Cathedral
Church of Ely, planted them in 1787, his seventieth year, not that he
himself might see them, but for the benefit of future ages. The Latin
so thoroughly succeeds in obscuring this advertisement of himself from
the understanding of the country-folk that the obelisk is generally
said to mark the grave of a favourite racehorse!
The descent from the high ground of the Isle begins in another half
mile from this point. Past Chettisham Station and its level crossing,
standing solitary on the road, we come down Pyper's Hill, at whose
foot is the field called, on the large Ordnance maps, "Gilgal." Why
so-called, who shall say? Did some old landowner, struck perhaps by
its situation near the verge of this ancient Fen-island, name this
water-logged meadow after that biblical Gilgal where the Israelites
made their first encampment across the Jordan, and where they kept
their first Passover in the Land of Canaan? It may be, for we have
already seen how that Norman knight, shown the riches of the Isle
of Ely by Hereward, described it even as another Canaan, a land
figuratively flowing with milk and honey.
[Illustration: ELY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE LITTLEPORT ROAD.]
An old toll-house still stands here by the wayside and heralds the
approach to Littleport, whose name, preparing the stranger for some
sleepy, old-world decayed creek-side village, with rotting wharves and
a general air of picturesque decrepidness, ill fits the busy, ugly
place it is. Littleport is more populous than Ely. It stands at the
confluence of the Great Ouse and the Old Croft rivers, and at the lower
end of its long, long gritty streets, lined with whitey-grey brick
houses, the road is bordered by yet another stream--the "Holmes River."
Indeed, speaking of its situation in the Fens and by these waters,
Carter, the eighteenth-century historian of Cambridgeshire, tells us
that in his time it was "as rare to see a coach there as a ship at
Newmarket." Much of its recent prosperity derives from the factories of
the prominent London firm of hosiers and clothiers, "Hope Brothers,"
established here. The church and the adjoining vicarage, where the
rioters of 1816 so terrified the clergyman and his family, stand on an
elevated site behind the main street. There was, until recent years,
when it was built up, a passage through the tower, said to have been
a short cut to the Fenland. If this was its real purpose, it vividly
shows how little solid ground there was here in old days. The tower
top, too, has its story, for it burnt a nightly beacon in those times;
a light in beneficent competition with the marshland Jacks-o'-Lantern,
to guide the wanderer to the haven where he would be.
It must not be forgotten that Littleport is a place famed in the annals
of a certain sport. It is not a sport often to be practised, for a
succession of open winters will render the enjoyment of it impossible,
and its devotees stale and out of form. It is the healthful and
invigorating sport and pastime of skating. Nowhere else in all England
is there such a neighbourhood as this for skating and sliding, for
when the flooded fields of winter are covered with a thin coating of
ice you may skate pretty well all the way to Lynn on the one hand and
to Peterborough on the other. The country is then a vast frozen lake.
Indeed, years before skating was a sport it had been a necessity; the
only way by which a Fenman could travel from place to place in a hard
winter. That is why Fenland skaters became such marvellous proficients,
rivalling even the Dutchmen. Who that knows anything of skating and
skating-matches has not heard of those champions of the Fens, "Turkey"
Smart and "Fish" Smart? And Littleport even yet takes the keenest of
interest in skating carnivals, as the traveller along the roads in
midsummer may see, in the belated bills and placards relating to them
that still hang, tattered and discoloured, on the walls of roadside
barn and outhouse. Reading them, he feels a gentle coolness steal over
him, even on a torrid afternoon of the dog-days.
[Illustration: LITTLEPORT.]
One leaves Littleport by a bridge, a single-span iron bridge of great
width, that crosses the Great Ouse. As you cross it, the way to
Mildenhall lies straight and flat, as far as eye can see, ahead. When
that picturesque tourist, William Gilpin, visited Mildenhall a century
ago, he found little to say in its praise, and of the scenery all he
can find to record is that the roads were lined with willows whose
branches were hung with slime.
Our way is not along the Mildenhall road, but by the left-hand track
following the loops and windings of the Ouse; flat, like that other
way, but by no means straight. It is a road of the most peculiar
kind, somewhat below the level of that river and protected from it by
great grassy banks, in some places from twelve to fourteen feet high.
Windmills are perched picturesquely on the opposite shore, patient
horses drag heavy barges along the stream, and the sodden fields
stretch away on the right to infinity. Houses and cottages are few
and far between; built below the river banks, with their chimney-pots
rarely looking over them.
The reclaimed Fens being themselves things of recent history, there
are few houses in the Fenland, except on the islands, and these few
are comparatively modern. A cottage or a farmstead in these levels may
be a weather-boarded affair, or it may be of brick, but it is always
built on timber piles, for there is no other way of obtaining a sure
foundation; and a frequent evidence of this is the sight of one of the
older of these buildings, perched up at an absurd height through the
gradual shrinkage of the land in consequence of the draining away of
the water and the wasting of the peat. This subsidence averages six
feet over the whole extent of the Fens, and in some places is as much
as eight or nine feet. As a result of this, a man's front door, once
on a level with the ground, is often approached by a quite imposing
flight of steps, and instances are not unknown where a room has been
added underneath the original ground floor, and a two-floored cottage
promoted by force of circumstances to the dignity of a three-storeyed
residence.
[Illustration: THE RIVER ROAD, LITTLEPORT.]
A brick building in these districts is apt to be exceedingly ugly. For
one thing, it has been built within the severely utilitarian period,
and is just a square box with a lid for roof and holes for doors and
windows. For another, the brick, made of the local gault, is of the
kind called by courtesy "white," but really of a dirty dough-like hue:
distressing to an artist's eye.
XLIV
BRANDON CREEK bridge, where the Great Ouse and the Little Ouse and
Crooked Dyke pour their waters into one common fund, and send it
crawling lazily down to Lynn, marks the boundaries of Cambridgeshire
and Norfolk. On the hither side you are in the territory of the
Cambridgeshire Camels, and on the thither are come into the land of the
Norfolk Dumplings.
It is here, at this meeting of the waters, that "Rebeck, or Priests'
Houses," is marked on the maps of Speed and Dugdale, and attributed to
the thirteenth century, but what this place was, no man knoweth. It has
clean vanished from sight or knowledge, and the houses of Brandon Creek
hamlet afford no clue, being wholly secular and commonplace, from the
inn that stands at the meeting of the rivers to the humble cottages of
the bankers and the gaulters.
Southery Ferry is but a little distance ahead, to be recognised by the
inn that stands on the river bank. It is a lonely ferry, and little
wonder that it should be, considering the emptiness of the country
on the other side,--all fens at the Back of Beyond, to whose wastes
cometh the stranger never, where the bull-frogs croak, the slodger
slodges among the dykes, and the mists linger longest.
[Illustration: THE OUSE.]
Away ahead sits Southery village, enthroned upon its hillock, once an
island in the surrounding fen, and still, in its prominence against
the skyline, telling its story plain for all to learn. Even if it
were not thus evident from Southery Ferry how the village of old sat
with its feet in the mud and its head on the dry land, at least the
pilgrim's wheels presently advise him in unmistakable fashion that he
is on an ascent. There is little in the village itself to interest
the stranger. The spire so picturesquely crowning the hill in the
distant view is found on close acquaintance to be that of a modern
church, filled with the Papistical abominations commonly found in
these days of the forsworn clergy of the Church of England. The old
church of St. Mary, disused forty years ago, and now in ruins, stands
at a little distance, in a bend of the road, overlooking many miles
of what was once fen. There it stands in its heaped-up graveyard, a
shattered and roofless shell of red-brick and rubble walls, thickly
overgrown with ivy, and neighboured by an old windmill as battered and
neglected as itself. From a field-gate overlooking the levels you see,
in the distance, the high ground about Thetford, and, near at hand,
an outlying part of Southery called Little London. An old inhabitant
shares the field-gate and the outlook with the present writer, and
surveys the many miles with a jaundiced eye. He remembers those lands
below, when he was a boy, all swimming with water. Now they are
drained, and worth ever so much an acre, "'cause they'll, as you might
say, grow anything. But a man can't earn mor'n fourteen shillun a week
here. No chance for nobody."
[Illustration: SOUTHERY FERRY.]
No local patriot he. He was born here, married in the old church forty
years ago, and went away to live in Sheffield. "Ah! that _is_ a place,"
says he. That is a phrase capable of more than one interpretation, and
we feelingly remark, having been there, that indeed a place it _is_.
His regretful admiration of Sheffield is so mournful that we wonder why
he ever left.
The road between Southery and Hilgay dips but slightly and only for
a short distance, proving the accuracy, at this point at least, of
Dugdale's map showing the Fen-islands of Hilgay and Southery conjoined.
They are divided by the long, straight, and narrow cut called "Sam's
Cut Drain," crossed here at Modney Bridge. Here the true Fenland begins
only to be skirted, and hedgerows once more line the way, a sign that
of itself most certainly proclaims fields enclosed and cultivated
in the long ago. The ditches, too, are dry, and not the brimming
water-courses they have been these last twenty-five miles. Moreover,
here is hedgerow timber: ancient elms and oaks taking the place of the
willows and poplars that have been our only companions throughout a
whole county. They have not consciously been missed, but now they are
come again, how fresh and dear and welcome they are, and how notable
the change they produce!
Between Hilgay and that old farmhouse called "Snore Hall," from an
absurd tradition that King Charles once slept there, we cross the river
Wissey and the Catchwater Drain. The road between is still known as
"the Causeway," and, with the succeeding village of Fordham, teaches in
its name a lesson in old-time local geography.
In 1809, when that old tourist, William Gilpin, passed this way,
Hilgay Fen extended to one thousand acres. According to the picturesque
story told him, the district was periodically visited, every six or
seven years, by an innumerable host of field-mice, which began to
destroy all vegetation and would have laid everything bare but for
a great flight of white horned-owls that, as if by instinct, always
arrived at such times from Norway and, immediately attacking the mice,
destroyed them all, when they disappeared as suddenly as they had come.
XLV
RYSTON STATION, between Ryston Park and Fordham, marks the
neighbourhood of a very interesting spot, for Ryston, though a place of
the smallest size and really but a woodland hamlet, is of some historic
note, with "Kett's Oak," or the Oak of Reformation, standing in the
Park, as a visible point of contact with stirring deeds and ancient
times. It is a gigantic tree with hollow trunk and limbs carefully
chained and bound together, and marks one of the encampments of the
Norfolk peasantry in Kett's Rebellion of 1549. This was a popular
outbreak caused by the lawless action of the Norfolk gentry of that
time in enclosing wastes and common lands. "The peasant whose pigs and
cow and poultry had been sold, or had died because the commons where
they had once fed were gone; the yeoman dispossessed of his farm; the
farm-servant out of employ because where once ten ploughs had turned
the soil, one shepherd watched the grazing of the flocks; the artisan
smarting under the famine prices the change of culture had brought--all
these were united in suffering, while the gentlemen were doubling,
trebling, quadrupling their incomes, and adorning their persons and
their houses with splendour hitherto unknown."
The outbreak began at Attleborough in June 1549, and a fortnight
later there was fighting at Wymondham, where the country-folk, led by
Robert Kett, a tanner, of that place, destroyed many illegal fences.
Thence, headed by Kett and his brother William, an army of sixteen
thousand peasants marched to Mousehold Heath, overlooking Norwich,
where their greatest camp was pitched. Under some venerable tree in
these camps Robert Kett was wont to sit and administer justice, and
Conyers, chaplain to the rebel host, preached beneath their shade while
the rising of that memorable summer lasted. Never were the demands of
rebellion more reasonable than those put forward on this occasion. They
were, that all bondsmen should be made free, "for God made all free
with His precious bloodshedding"; that all rivers should be made free
and common to all men for fishing and passage; that the clergy should
be resident, instead of benefices being held by absentees; and, in the
interest of tenants' crops, that no one under a certain degree should
keep rabbits unless they were paled in, and that no new dove-houses
should be allowed. That last stipulation sounds mysterious, but it
referred to a very cruel grievance of olden times, when only the Lord
of the Manor might keep pigeons and doves, and did so at the expense of
his tenants. The manorial pigeon-houses often seen adjoining ancient
Hall or old-world Grange are, in fact, relics of that time when the
feudal landowner's pigeons fattened on the peasants' crops.
[Illustration: KETT'S OAK.]
The story of how the people's petition was disregarded, and how the
city of Norwich was taken and retaken with much bloodshed, does not
belong here. The rebellion was suppressed, and Robert and William Kett
hanged, but the memory of these things still lingers in the rural
districts, and everyone in the neighbourhood of Ryston knows "Ked's
Oak," as they name it. There were Pratts of Ryston Hall then, as
now, and old legends still tell how Robert Kett seized some of the
Squire's sheep to feed his followers, leaving this rhymed note in
acknowledgment--
"Mr. Prat, your shepe are verry fat,
And wee thank you for that.
Wee have left you the skinnes
To buy your ladye pinnes
And you may thank us for that."
Some of the insurgents were hanged from this very tree, as the rhyme
tells us--
"Surely the tree that nine men did twist on
Must be the old oak now at Ryston."
The present Squire has recorded these things on a stone placed against
the trunk of this venerable relic.
[Illustration: DENVER HALL.]
Denver, which presently succeeds Fordham and Ryston, is remarkable for
many things. Firstly, for that beautiful old Tudor mansion, Denver
Hall, by the wayside, on entering the village; secondly, for the
semicircular sweep of the high road around the church; and, thirdly,
for the great "Denver Sluice" on the river Ouse, a mile away. This is
the massive lock that at high tide shuts out the tidal waters from
flooding the reclaimed Fens, and at the ebb is opened to let out the
accumulated waters of the Ouse and the innumerable drains of the Great
Level. The failure of Denver Sluice would spell disaster and ruin to
many, and it has for that reason been specially protected by troops
on several occasions when Irish political agitators have entered upon
"physical force" campaigns, and have been credited with a desire to
blow up this main protection of two thousand square miles of land
slowly and painfully won back from bog and waste.
[Illustration: THE CROWN, DOWNHAM MARKET.]
[Illustration: THE CASTLE, DOWNHAM MARKET.]
Denver gives its name to a town in America--Denver, Colorado--and has
had several distinguished natives; but, despite all these many and
varied attributes of greatness, it is a very small and very modest
place, quite overshadowed by the little town of Downham Market, a mile
onward. Downham, as Camden informs us, obtains its name from "Dun" and
"ham," signifying the home on the hill; and the ancient parish church,
which may be taken as standing on the site of the original settlement,
does indeed rise from a knoll that, although of no intrinsic height,
commands a vast and impressive view over illimitable miles of
marshland. It is not a church of great interest, nor does the little
town offer many attractions, although by no means unpleasing.
They still point out the house where Nelson once went to school; and
two old inns remain, very much as they were in coaching days. In the
Crown yard you may still look up at the windows of the room where the
magistrates were sitting on that day in 1816 when the rioters made them
fly.
Villages on these last twelve miles between Downham and Lynn are
plentiful. No sooner is the little town left behind than the church of
Wimbotsham comes in sight, with that of Stow Bardolph plainly visible
ahead. Both are interesting old buildings, with something of almost
every period of architecture to show the curious. Beyond its church,
and a farmstead or two, Wimbotsham has nothing along the road, but Stow
Bardolph is a village complete in every story-book particular. Here is
the church, and here, beneath a spreading chestnut (or other) tree the
village smithy stands; while opposite are the gates of the Park and the
shady avenue leading up to the Hall where, not Bardolphs nowadays, but
Hares, reside in dignified ease; as may be guessed from the village
inn, the Hare Arms, with its armorial sign and motto, _Non videre, sed
esse_--"not to seem, but to be," the proud boast or noble aspiration of
the family. Almshouses, cottages with pretty gardens, and a very wealth
of noble trees complete the picture of "Stow," as the country-folk
solely know it, turning a bewildered and stupid gaze upon the stranger
who uses the longer title.
The pilgrim through many miles of fen revels in this wooded mile from
Stow Bardolph village to Hogge's Bridge, where the road makes a sharp
bend to the left amid densely overarching trees, commanding a distant
view of Stow Bardolph Hall at the farther end of a long green drive.
South Runcton Church, standing lonely by the road beyond this pretty
scene, is an example of how not to restore a pure Norman building. It
still keeps a very beautiful Norman chancel arch, but the exterior,
plastered to resemble stone, is distressing.
[Illustration: HOGGE'S BRIDGE, STOW BARDOLPH.]
At Setchey, originally situated on a navigable creek of the river
Nar and then named Sedge-hithe, or Seech-hithe--meaning a sedge
and weed-choked harbour--we are come well within the old Dutch
circle of influence over local building design. There are still some
characteristic old Dutch houses at Downham; and Lynn, of course, being
of old a port in closest touch with Holland, is full of queer gables
and quaint architectural details brought over from the Low Countries.
Here at Setchey, too, stands a very Dutch-like old inn--the Lynn Arms.
[Illustration: THE LYNN ARMS, SETCHEY.]
Commons--"Whin Commons" in the local phrase--and the scattered houses
of West Winch, lead on to Hardwick Bridge, where, crossing over the
railway, the broad road bends to the right. There, facing you, is an
ancient Gothic battlemented gatehouse, and beyond it the long broad
street of a populous town: the town of King's Lynn.
XLVI
THERE is a tintinnabulary, jingling sound in the name of Lynn that
predisposes one to like the place, whether it be actually likeable or
not. Has anyone ever stopped to consider how nearly like the name of
this old seaport is to that of London? Possibly the conjunction of
London and Lynn has not occurred to any who have visited the town,
but to those who have arrived at it by the pages of this book, the
similarity will be interesting. The names of both London and Lynn,
then, derive from the geographical peculiarities of their sites, in
many respects singularly alike. Both stand beside the lower reaches
of a river, presently to empty itself into the sea, and the ground
on which they stand has always been marshy. At one period, indeed,
those were not merely marshes where Lynn and London now stand, but
wide-spreading lakes--fed by the lazy overflowings of Ouse and Thames.
The Celtic British, who originally settled by these lakes, called them
_llyns_, and this ancient seaport has preserved that prehistoric title
in its original purity, only dropping the superfluous "l"; but London's
present name somewhat disguises its first style of _Llyn dun_, or the
"hill by the lake"; some inconsiderable, but fortified, hillock rising
above the shallow waters.
When the Saxons came, Lynn was here, and when the Norman conquerors
reached the Norfolk coast they found it a busy port. To that early
Norman prelate, Herbert de Losinga, a tireless builder of churches
throughout East Anglia, the manor fell, and the town consequently
became known for four hundred and thirty years as Lynn Episcopi. It was
only when the general confiscation of religious property took place
under Henry the Eighth that it became the "Kings Lynn" it has ever
since remained.
[Illustration: THE SOUTH GATES, LYNN.]