no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views
that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do
not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to
this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom
and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had
already for years been painting these very scenes.
The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's next remarks: "And
then, the country round about is so well cultivated; the land in such
a beautiful state, the farmhouses all white and all so much alike; the
barns and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stock of turnips
so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the
wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter
of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with
a level; in short, here is everything to delight the eye and to make
the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout
the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great
boasters of their superiority over others, and I must say that it is
not without reason."
Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round Ipswich so numerous
that, while standing in one place, he counted no fewer than seventeen,
all painted or washed white, with black sails. They are fewer to-day,
and could Gainsborough, old Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of
their artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the picturesqueness
they gave these woody scenes and fertile hills and vales. It is from
the crest of one of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There
it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell; "doubtlesse one of
the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built townes in England," as John
Evelyn thought in 1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect of
dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess aright who these
fanatics were. They were neither sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but
merely Quakers.
One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of the Orwell when
descending into the town by the London road, and the crowded mass
of the place rises confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply
descends, and forms no picture. You must take Ipswich in detail to
admire it, and the actual crossing of the river at the foot of the
hill where the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch before it
widens out into the noble harbour that makes the fortune of the port.
A sign of that accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the great
railway sidings and goods yards spread out before the stranger's eye as
he comes downhill. One may say that the town begins at the door of the
"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying the fine
"old coat" of this famous seaport; a shield with a rampant golden lion
on a red field on the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on
the dexter side.
"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says Cobbett, still harping on
an unwonted string of praise. "The town is substantially built, well
paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched dwellings to be
seen on its outskirts." He knew no town to be compared with it, except
it were Nottingham, which, after all, is not properly comparable,
Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a vale, and moreover,
is situated on an arm of the sea. It is amusing to read Cobbett's
remarks on the population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at twelve
thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think Ipswich was far larger and far
more populous seven hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"--that
hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked upon "the twelve large,
lofty and magnificent churches," each of them seven hundred years old,
one capable of holding from four to seven thousand persons, and came to
the conclusion that, in fact, although he found Ipswich populous, it
must, even thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self. That shrewd
observer was right. Ipswich had grievously decayed even in Charles the
Second's reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described it as "a town
without inhabitants, a river without water, streets without names, and
where the asses wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river without
water," was probably referring to the estuary of the Orwell at low
tide, when mud-banks stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison
feeble and thread-like through them. In its then nameless streets,
Ipswich was not singular, for many small provincial towns were in like
case. The asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling the lawn
of a neighbouring park, the object probably being to prevent their
hoofs injuring the surface.
"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to her husband over
four hundred years ago, spells the name, derives its title from
the aboriginal Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down beside
the Orwell, and not only established their primitive village of
Gippingswick here, but contrived to foist their tribal name upon the
non-tidal part of the river above the town, which therefore still
generally bears this _alias_. The town probably saw its greatest
prosperity in the time of Cardinal Wolsey, a native, and, according
to legend, son of a butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious
nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his birthplace should
be great in learning as well as in commerce, and to that end founded
a College which he intended to be in some sort preparatory for his
greater college of Christ Church at Oxford. That his foundation was
reared on the spoliation of a religious house and its revenues,
procured by him for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its
prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to completion, and the
omen was speedily fulfilled, for the new-made abode of learning never
sent forth a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth almost
before the mortar of its brick walls was dry; the buildings themselves
torn down and the endowments confiscated. All that remains of Wolsey's
College is one noble red-brick gateway in College Street.
Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a curious contrast with
Wolsey, his brother townsman of two hundred years before. In his day
the old prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress of Dutch
competition and the virulence of the plague; but modern times have made
amends for that temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four times
larger than when, shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth
century had gone, Cobbett noted its many and empty churches and its
scanty population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls, and its trades are
numerous and prosperous. Whether it be in the making of agricultural
and milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial manure making, or
the manufacture of corsets, Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune
of those who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not put all their
eggs in one basket.
[Illustration: WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.]
Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the traveller who merely
passes through the chief streets. Not in the open square of Cornhill,
where the cabs and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross and
the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office and the Town Hall
rise, side by side, does it appear, nor in the long street beyond;
but rather in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct to the
waterside. There be streets in that quarter with odd names, among them
Silent Street; and almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.
Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls, unhappily rebuilt
in modern times, the charitable Smart and his no less charitable
coadjutor, Tooley, are commemorated:--
"Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,
Behold his charity. Respect his dust."
"In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,
Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."
It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile at the expense of
great Tooley and gentle Smart.
[Illustration: THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.]
As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction of the "Lion and
Lamb," pictured here, and the "Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a
fine sound of the sea in their names. Some of these old hostelries yet
retain their corner-posts: for example, that of the "Half Moon" in
Foundation Street, where the post still keeps its mediæval carving of a
fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching to three geese and a
griffin; a satirical effort no doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy
of St Mary Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt key
serves as vane to that church and perpetuates the error in the name,
which was originally, and rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house
quay and the harbour being close by, as the sight of certain
corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and windlasses, and the sounds
of throaty steam-sirens sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands
in midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside the quay
wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged, and railway-sidings, along
whose maze of points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,
dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently, as though saying
to the bellowing steam-vessels, "_You_ just wait; can't you see I'm
coming as quick as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and seems,
surrounded with dutiable goods, to be aristocratically sneering at
the trade in whose midst it is necessarily placed, and with as great
a consciousness of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty of her
Greek nose.
Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and merchants' fine mansions
stood by the quay and in the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but
traces of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and wood carvings
remain, and here and there a courtyard, or a house that sheltered
family circles in the amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural
Ipswich of the sixteenth century.
[Illustration: SPARROWE'S HOUSE.]
Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to show is the wonderful
old place in the old Butter Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House,"
although the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has long since
gone to his home in the family vault within the Church of St Lawrence,
where, over their tomb-house, may yet be read the punning motto,
_Nidus Passerum_, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes seem to have
been endowed with some of the attributes of the cuckoo, for _they_
did not build the house that bears their name. It owes its origin to
a certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but alterations and
additions made in the Jacobean period give its architectural history
a span of over a century. The woodwork of the bay windows and the
grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of the shop premises, was
added at the time. But the great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its
decorative plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the
exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with quaint devices
emblematic of the four quarters of the globe. Here Europa, cornucopia
in one hand, book and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who
might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk shorn off; here,
on another bay, a podgy plaster relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree
and a building of Oriental character in the background; followed by
Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his head and sitting
on a shark, at which four tiny figures at a respectful distance
express astonishment, while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of
quite uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly resembles
a battered meat tin. America is typified by an Indian in a feather
head-dress which represents his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow
and arrows, attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very beautiful
representation of the Royal Arms occupies one of the spaces between
the windows, and other devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas
supporting the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd bows as
gracefully as the artist in plaster could make him to a rural nymph; St
George and the Dragon, and several smaller subjects.
XXXII
THE most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither ancient nor
beautiful, yet it is an object to which most visitors to the town turn
their first attention: it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White
Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the road, justly
thought enormous. It has been left for the present age to build many
hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more
hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse," but in its own
especial era that house fully justified the adjective in its sign.
Especially did its bulk strike the imagination of the reporter of the
London _Morning Chronicle_ who was dispatched to Ipswich in 1830 for
the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election in the town. He was
a very young, a very impressionable and a very bright reporter, and
although we may be quite sure that the business on which he was come to
Ipswich was an arduous piece of work, calculated to fully occupy his
time and thoughts, he carried away with him so accurate an impression
of the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time afterwards, he
wrote about it the description was as exact as though it had been
penned within sight of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,
and it is his description in the _Pickwick Papers_ which has made the
place famous.
[Illustration: THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."]
It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever
been said of inns than those Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse."
Indeed, if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or hotel, the
writer might confidently expect to be made the defendant in an action
for libel. Yet (such is the irony of time and circumstances) the house
that Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its advertisements
to quote the association; and the adventures of Mr Pickwick in the
double-bedded room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have
brought many more visitors than the unfavourable notice of the
"uncarpeted passages" and the "mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned
away. If, as has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in order
to be revenged for some slights and discomforts he may have experienced
here, certainly fortune has played the cynic in converting his remarks
into the best of all imaginable recommendations.
The exterior of the house is much the same as it was when Dickens first
saw it, "in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the
way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space
fronting the Town Hall."
It is the same plain, square building, constructed of a pallid kind of
brick suggesting underdone pastry, and is still, although the coaches
have disappeared and railways have supplanted them, "known far and
wide by the appellation of the 'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the
pillared entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself,
perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that famous breed of equines, the
"Suffolk Punches," a very muscular race, more famous for their bulk
and strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders mares to
which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened his bride, Anne of Cleves.
Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist, describes this effigy
as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and
tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated above the
principal door." Quite apart from the fact that the word "rampacious"
is unknown to the English language, and is probably meant for
"rampageous," the horse is really represented in the act of beginning a
gentle trot, and looks as mild as the mildest milk that ever dewed the
whiskers of a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some period,
has been restored of a size that does not match with the other three.
Never, in the whole of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone
on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his manners have always
been distinguished by their unobtrusiveness.
"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is famous in the
neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county
paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its enormous size. Never
were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy,
ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or
sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between
the four walls of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further, he
describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose door, when Mr Pickwick
descended from the coach, stood a waiter whose description quite
takes one's desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man with a
fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs."
Although that must have been in the best and most prosperous days of
the highway, this waiter does not appear to have had anything more
pressing to do than "staring down the road," while the account of
the internal arrangements of the house does not indicate flourishing
business. The private room into which the guests were shown was a
"large, badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a
small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast
sinking under the dispiriting influence of the place." After this we
are not surprised to read that it was only "after the lapse of an hour"
that "a bit of fish and a steak," representing a dinner, appeared.
When this was disposed of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled up
to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port
wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank
brandy-and-water for their own."
Certainly Dickens must have had some very bitter grudge against the
"Great White Horse."
Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and the difficulty of
a stranger's finding his way about the interminable corridors, or
distinguishing between one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties
which led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the middle of
the night. The rooms, not so mouldy now, and the passages, just as
perplexing, remain, structurally unaltered to this day; but certain
alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard, now roofed in
with glass and made very attractive, without spoiling the old-style
character of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an American,
they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom; and can meet any of Dickens's
criticisms by telling how Nelson stayed here with--ahem!--Lady
Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and others of world-wide fame
have occupied the "mouldy rooms."
XXXIII
LEAVING Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside fringe of
Whitton village, known as Whitton Street, Claydon, nondescript, and
neither very beautiful nor quite commonplace, is reached in two
and a half miles. Just before entering the village, an old mansion
is glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion which, on
inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon declare to be "Mockbeggar
Hall." Claydon Hall is its true title; but the popular name has been
handed down since many, many years ago, when the old house (not old
then) long remained tenantless. Like the many other places named
"Mockbeggar," it stands well within view of passing travellers, and
must have induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge wearily
up the long approach in search of alms, only to find the windows dark,
the chimneys innocent of smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all
but fluttering bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must have
sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants. Inhabited now, Claydon
Hall is a handsome old house bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like
gables. It will probably never lose its popular name. Behind the old
Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly approaching within view
of the road, and then, as it were, timorously retreating again; its
brimming stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses, potent
in its effect upon at least three miles' length of the road, from
Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in the loveliest stretch of woodland,
where the fierce mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage,
and twilight comes early in the afternoon through the dense masses
of leaves. These are the woodlands of Shrubland Park. The Hall lies
secluded to the right hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible
lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where he has seen their
like before; until, like a flash, the memory of certain great London
cemeteries and their mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating
fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings of forest trees
and the scurryings of white-tailed rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown
pheasants that inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The lodges,
built like the Hall, from designs by Sir Charles Barry, are of white
brick and stone, in the Italian Renaissance style.
[Illustration: MOCKBEGGAR HALL.]
At no great distance from the entrance to this lordly domain, and
noticeable from the road, in an exquisitely damp situation by the
river, eminently calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the
Barham Union-house--the "Work'us" of peasant speech. It is quite an
old-world building, and one of the earliest built under the new Poor
Law Act of the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief gave place
to retirement within these prison-like buildings. Hodge well named them
"Bastilles." They say who should know of what they speak, that life
in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable, but the design of the
building, a quadrangular structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer
walls blank or only provided with windows at a height from the ground,
closely follows the prison, or restraining, idea.
The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse," standing in midst
of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing contrast with the Campo Santo
pretentiousness of Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the
Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the scarped side of
the highway reveals a momentary change from the prevailing claylands
to chalk; a change so sudden and so strictly confined to this
hillside that it at once attracts the attention of even the least
geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom that love the chalk
and refuse to grow on clay. Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow
scoured out ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that crosses
the road was a considerable force, is Creeting Bottom, and Creetings of
several sorts are set about the countryside, all hiding from the road
that goes now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as though
the little town of Needham Market and the larger town of Stowmarket
were not almost within sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the
highway parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds. To be on "on
the road to Needham" is an obvious Suffolk saying, applied to those who
are badly off for worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham
itself was for many years, and until quite recently, a place of fallen
fortunes, lamenting the decay of its textile trades in empty houses
and an "irreducible minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate
as to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut Hall" that still
clings to a farmhouse marks that depressed period to all time; but in
the spicy odours of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and
other thriving industries and businesses that cluster round the railway
station, the explorer finds evidences enough that Needham is reviving.
[Illustration: "STONHAM PIE."]