Stour and so into Suffolk. It is not an exciting seven miles. Passing
the eastern outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and puddles
beside the slattern streets offend the sense of propriety, as, having
reversed their natural positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.
"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who would linger there?
But the Fair Field cannot be passed unawares. If not seen, it will be
heard, for on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and travelling
circuses that still draw rustic crowds with their fat women, giants and
dwarfs; or delight them with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the
bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs follow the traveller
in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy when the wind unkindly wills it so.
The sounds nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between himself
and those siren strains, and happily the road is a fast one, so that
he need not be long about the business. It goes, as an old turnpike
should, broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of six miles,
with little to vary the monotony of trim hedgerow and equi-distant
telegraph poles.
Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying some three hundred
yards along the Harwich Road, come across a railway level-crossing to
the suburb of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage called
Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up, but an inscription in the wall
of a cottage still proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It seems
strange that the Hermitage should have been placed, not on the main
road where pilgrims were surely more plentiful, but on the seaward
route. The explanation may probably be sought in the existence already
of another establishment of the kind, long since forgotten. Here, then,
the Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy well and an oratory
made appeal to the piety or the superstition, as the case might be, of
all who passed by. To these the hermit presented his leathern wallet,
beseeching travellers, who would have gone without giving alms, to
spare a trifle for the upkeep of the road, even though they valued not
the Blessed Saints.
For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted, and a long line of
hermits lived here. Some were pious and industrious, keeping the road
in repair; others had neither piety nor industry, spent their time
in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and fought, so that the road
became scandalously neglected, and many Colchester worthies received
apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such an one must have
been the hermit who lived here in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and
was indicted in 1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in 1535,
when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, the Hermitage was
closed, and the then occupant turned out, with a warning that if he
solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded as a "sturdy beggar,"
and dealt with accordingly.
The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the second half of the
seventeenth century, shortly after the first coaches had started
running, of many highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was
deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679 three men were
rewarded with £6, 8s. between them "for apprehending those y^t robbed
the Ipswich coach." Again, in September 1698, three men were rewarded
"for pursuen hiewaymen," and for "going to Ardlegh" on that business;
but as they received only two shillings each and an extra shilling for
"drinck," it looks as though the pursuit was unsuccessful.
[Illustration: COLCHESTER.]
The high road, to which we have now returned, has already been
described as an excellent highway, but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a
roadside inn on what was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.
It has, however, the advantage of commanding the best general view of
Colchester, with the inevitable Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town
Hall tower in rivalry with it.
Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the road changes its
character and drops sharply down by an almost precipitous descent, to
where a lazy river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and bends
between the grey-green foliage of willows lining either bank. It flows
through a land of rich green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land,
too, of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the waters of a salt
estuary sparkle in the sun, while in between, from this Pisgah height,
rises the tall tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing
Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale of Dedham. The
estuary is that of the Stour at Manningtree, and the church tower
that of Dedham. This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that fact
explains the homelike and familiar look it wears, even to the stranger.
Constable, born close by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes
lovingly for over forty years, and remained constant to his native vale
all his life. By the magic power that comes of sympathy, he transferred
the spirit of these lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully
as he did their form and colour; with the result that the veriest
stranger viewing them becomes reminiscent.
Nor did Constable only _paint_ his native vale; he has described it in
almost as masterly a way. To him it was "the most cultivated part of
Suffolk, a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which
river separates that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the
surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats
sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods
and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and
picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity
and excellence hardly anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing
story of travelling home by coach down this very hill. He shared the
vehicle with two strangers. "In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of
them remarked, on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes, sir, this is
Constable's Country.' I then told him who I was lest he should spoil
it."
From this hill-top to the left of the road, and in what are now the
woodlands of Langham Hall, Constable painted his best-known Vale
of Dedham. In one respect the scene has changed. The willows still
fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or pollarded, are now allowed
to grow as they will, and the river is not so visible as it was once.
Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered. Even on this hill,
close by Langham church, Church Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm,"
remains as it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church tower. Only
the foliage has changed, and the little guttering stream been drained
away.
[Illustration: THE VALE OF DEDHAM. _After Constable._]
[Illustration: GUN HILL.]
This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the Stour, is Dedham Hill,
more often locally known as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the
summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently a most picturesque
old inn, with the painted sign of a cannon hanging over the road. The
sign has gone, and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation
for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead. At the foot of the hill the
road, turning abruptly to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the
Stour and its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long series of
flood-water arches across the oozy valley. The old toll-house, taking
tolls no longer, still stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and
bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,--
THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.
Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,
Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;
Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,
Let not one curse escape your lips,
God sees and hears.
T. T. H., POSUIT.
[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.]
This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the
country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first
glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.
When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice
they could scarce help seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts
attention now.
Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque
building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable
"white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue;
a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no
chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is
more or less bedevilled with it.
This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village
built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the
hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It
is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on
the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the
site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers
of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps
a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other
East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry,
just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a
grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and
changes and romances of their own.
From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in
giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the
chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate
its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech
the wayfarer to pray for their souls. Vain request! The work had not
been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the
Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for.
The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas
Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:--
Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete uxoris ejus qui istam
alam ffieri fecerunt anno dni mcccc^m lxxxxviiii
Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife
Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less
self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian
souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:--
Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys hys wyfe and all
crysten sowlys, Anno Domini 1530.
Many other inscriptions and devices are seen, among them the letters,
P B A E S, said to be the initials of an invocatory sentence,
"_Propitiemini beati ad eternam salutem_," addressed to Saints Thomas
and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and Margaret Mors. But,
stranger than any, is the appearance of the entire alphabet on these
walls. Many attempts have been made to explain the reason of this,
among them the view that the object was to educate the villagers in the
rudiments of spelling!
XXX
THE long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich lies through a
beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland, with ancient trees gripping sandy
banks in a tenacious clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road, and
one in which, when the coaches were toiling up, the guards' hands went
instinctively towards their blunderbusses and swordcases. One never
knew what or who might be lurking in that shade.
But if it was a chancy spot then, how very suspicious a place it must
have been hundreds of years before. That it was so regarded may be
learnt from the _Paston Letters_, the instructive correspondence of the
Paston family in the fifteenth century. Therein we read how a rival of
John Paston in the wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out
of Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers, all armed
with bows and arrows in their hands, with saletts on their heads,
well-padded jacks and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in
their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the Pastons in the hollow
way where the trees meet overhead and a mid-day darkness broods under
the dense foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being afraid of
the Pastons or any of their friends; but if not, why did he go escorted
with this motley crew, tricked out with all the ancient weapons and
rusted armour they could find? Happily they were not attacked, but that
it was possible for petty warfare of this kind to be plotted is proof
that the Merry England of that period was no safe place for peaceful
travellers.
Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack county of England," as
Cobbett called it, the "sweet and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a
county to which the alliterative term "silly" has long been applied.
It is probably by this time quite hopeless to scotch that nickname,
for it is of a considerable age and has a specious and easy glibness
that comes trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves--whom it
most concerns--are at pains to explain that the real, and entirely
flattering, solution of the phrase is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon
for "holy" or "blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy
religious houses within the county, and to the East Anglian saints and
the many places of pilgrimage. Another party advancing the theory that
the epithet was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the seasons,
would thus have us believe that Suffolk must have been more observant
than other counties, which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk
of the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele," but this is
not the only county that uses the phrase. It becomes evident that the
nickname must go unexplained.
Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than historic grounds.
"I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there," said William,
the coachman, to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and
certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry here, as indeed
throughout England, to serve pudding, or "dumpling," before meat in
order to take the edge off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than
butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of the peasantry scarce
demand such a practice nowadays, and in any case, Norfolk is the county
of dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that speech in the
coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings," he should have known, are as
proverbial as "Silly Suffolkers."
Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world for the "Suffolk
Punch." This sounds convivial, but has no connection with punch-bowls;
the reference being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.
"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said William, the Canterbury
coachman, to David Copperfield. "A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good
'un, is worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not a very great
exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the fields or an observant glance
along the road, and the Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his
native country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or dragging with
indomitable spirit the heaviest loads that the stupidity of the most
stupid of waggoners could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise
contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he is "a Noble Animal,
the Friend of Man," it is to this breed that it most particularly
applies. The Suffolk Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will
pull against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been said that the
Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse in early British times, and
it has been supposed that his remote ancestors were the horses that
drew Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is invariably
a chestnut, it might be supposed that his fame in the county had
originated the sign of the "Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from
chestnut the breed never varies. It may be of various shades, from the
darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown, but never any other hue.
It is, of course, not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the
Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in London, drawing heavy
loads, and are to be seen expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,
thousand of miles away from their native claylands.
The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and Norfolk, but the
"Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the county; it is a rising inflection
of the voice towards the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech
"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and archaic words, heard
occasionally in Essex, grow more common as the traveller advances.
So also does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood of
Colchester--the custom of affixing the place-name to the sign of
an inn in ordinary talk. The "Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is
always spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley, the custom
is emphasised by the sign of a roadside inn being inscribed "Bentley
Tankard," and not merely "The Tankard."
[Illustration: SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. _After Constable._]
But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary
to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The
agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give
themselves up to play and gossip. Then, as the long summer day draws
to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in
which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than
they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm
labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins,"
at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time
for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning
gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East
Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"--the
young men, in short.
But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so
is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle
the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet
learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any
Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll
spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and
Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be
immediately distinguished anywhere.
When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter,"
or quarts and pots of beer--the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance,
aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers
and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering
dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the
labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen": the men mostly
in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are
saying:--
"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"
"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'.
The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi'
me sure."
"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so
much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."
"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out
sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."
"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."
"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked
from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he
ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish
and fresher'n a paigle."
A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's
birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those
golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning
achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant
in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually
the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.
[Illustration: THE CORNFIELD. _After Constable._]
The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow,
is careful to explain his cornfields away. When asked why, if it
does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he
grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when
agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days
when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller
was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo,
largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the
village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook,
and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest,
elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and
their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen.
The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their
sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing
wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of
the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work
instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is,
what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the
intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock
forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose
name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere,"
to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady
hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless.
Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever"
and "levenses" remain yet in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk
as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.
Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching
and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green,
and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from
Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the
cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four
sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here
and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their
social status, the story does not tell.
Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so
by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape
of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of
its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow,
together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash
Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons
and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the
Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,
together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical
conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now
spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first
fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a
right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.
It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London
and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial
reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from
Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach
route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead
of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of
the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a
toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the
foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage
between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the
"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but
now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and
can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and
cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to
Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the
Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.
XXXI
THERE can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly
captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.