Norwich, where the cottage outposts of Stonham Earls and Stonham
Aspall alone tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their gardens,
spread on bushes or waving in the summer breeze, intimate articles of
underclothing are prominently displayed, in the society of old hats
and coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family wardrobe as in
desperate attempts--bringing up all the reserves--at scaring away the
hungry birds from currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,
the only warring incidents on the way, in which the birds are generally
the victors, bring one to a level road where Little Stonham stands,
its chief feature the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of those
old gallows signs, stretching across the road, that were at one time a
common feature. The picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,
has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its old ironwork
frame above, now that the piled-up coaches that once passed beneath
are gone. Shortly before their going, and while turnpikes and tolls
appeared likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the
succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles onward, to Stoke
Ash, where, at the beginning of the pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the
later toll-house remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.
Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of the Waveney, is
preceded by Brockford Green, where the quiet road is made narrow by its
sides being encroached upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying
sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was taken.
[Illustration: NEAR BROCKFORD.]
Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this level stretch of
road, the country is tumbled into combes and rounded hills, where the
River Gipping takes its rise in the village of that name, springing
from the hill where the church tower stands solemn and grim, as though
it held inviolate the story of the place, away from those days when the
Gippings first settled here and gave it a title.
But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the winding by-roads. The
way, if not far, is not easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and
infrequent farmhouses there be, at whose back doors to inquire the way,
but rustic directions are apt to mislead. In any case, it is little
use approaching the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear you
knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and savage dog, trained to be
on the alert for tramps; and you are like to hear him snuffling and
gasping on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner which will
render you thankful that the door is closed and bolted. And not only
bolted on this occasion, but always. The steps, and the space between
the door and the threshold, where stray straws and wind-blown rubbish
have collected, are evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family
do not use the front door, but make their exits and entrances by way
of the kitchen. It is an old East Anglian custom, and although many of
the farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up to be as up-to-date
as the retired tradesfolk and small squires they are neighbourly with,
many others would no more think of using the principal entrance to
their homes than they would make use of the "parlour," where massive
and sombre furniture, covered with antimacassars, is disposed with
geometric accuracy around the room, in company with the family Bible
and the prizes taken at school by the farmer's children; the stale and
stuffy atmosphere proclaiming that this state apartment is only used
on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the "best room" and the front
door only came into use in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.
Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea of paying the
greatest possible respect to the dead, but it is one which certainly
gives a gruesome mortuary significance to both the entrance and the
room.
[Illustration: "THWAITE LOW HOUSE."]
Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable of pronouncing "th,"
call it, less than a mile beyond Brockford, numbers few cottages.
Beyond it, where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is in
local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so called on account of
any disreputable character it may once have earned, but from its
situation. The name obviously entails the existence of a "High House,"
which was, like the other, a coaching and posting inn. The last named,
now a farmstead, was in those days the "Cock," the other the "Queen's
Head." While the "Low House" has fallen upon times so irredeemably evil
that it has been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow of
a house, with gaping holes in its walls and windows battened up, the
"Cock," save that its sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to
show a later generation what manner of place the roadside inn was in
days of yore.
[Illustration: THE "COCK," THWAITE.]
Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce it, like many another
village, makes no sign from the road. Its church tower seen to the
right, dimly, amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like
red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn, "Stoke White Horse,"
are the only other evidences of its being. The remaining six miles to
the Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and Brome: Yaxley, where a
branch railway runs under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly
misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan" stands for all the
village to those who look to neither side of the road; church and
houses skulking down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There, down that
pretty road, where the thatched cottages nestle under tall trees
and the blue wood-smoke from rustic hearths curls upwards into the
boughs and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze--there is the Rectory,
approached in lordly fashion past a fine brick entrance and exquisite
avenue, and, at a little greater distance the old black flint,
round-towered church, restored and titivated out of all antiquity
of tone: the stone sand-papered, and the flints polished with a
handkerchief. The only thing missing--and, under the circumstances,
it is missed--is a glass case, so that no damp, nor lichen, nor any
effects of weather may come to spoil the housewifely neatness.
It was along this road to Hoxne that those who sought the revered head
of St Edmund, King and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led to
it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;" at length finding the
sainted relic in charge of a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from
between his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably a much less
supernatural manifestation, and was doubtless the hooting of owls in
the woods. They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears untuned
to the miraculous, they simply seem to ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity,
however, vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf incident.
XXXIV
NOW, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed banks
through a flat country, the road enters Norfolk at Scole. Coming over
the little bridge, the village is seen huddled together on either side
of a narrow rising road; village and church alike wholly dominated by
a great building of mellow red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and
long row of beautiful gables give the impression of an historic mansion
having by some strange chance been taken from its park and set down
beside the highway. This, however, was at no time a private residence,
but was built as an inn; and an inn it remains, after the passing of
nearly two centuries and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was
often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village was not called
by its _alias_ of Osmundeston), was by reason of this inn quite a
celebrated place in the days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern
England had then either seen or heard of "Scole White Hart" and its
famous sign that stretched completely across the road, and as a great
many coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers had plenty of
time for examining what Sir Thomas Browne thought to be "the noblest
sighne-post in England." Both house and sign were built in 1655, for
James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant," whose initials, together
with the date, are yet to be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate
sign alone cost £1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded with
twenty-five carved figures of classic deities and others. Chaste Diana,
with bow and arrow and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in
company with Time in the act of devouring an infant, Actæon and his
dogs, a huntsman, and a White Hart _couchant_. On a pediment above
the White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance, was the effigy
of an astronomer "seated on a Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical
Preparation is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces the North and
against bad Weather He faces that Quarter from whence it is about to
come." On either side of the dizzy height occupied by the astronomer
were figures of Fortitude and Prudence, a position suitable enough for
the first-named of those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for
the last.
Further suggestions of Olympus, with references to Hades and Biblical
history, adorned the other portions of this extraordinary work.
Cerberus clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon dragged
a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune bestriding a dolphin, and
Bacchic figures seated across casks alternated with the arms of
twelve East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels supported
respectively the arms of Mr Peck and his lady and two lions those of
Norwich and Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a huge
carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's mouth, while, suspended in
mid-air, and surrounded by a wreath, was another White Hart.
Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne was impressed with this
work, an early nineteenth-century tourist (so early indeed as 1801)
curtly dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous ornaments," and
shortly after that it seems to have been taken down, for the reason
that it cost the landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of
the house permitted. Together with this, the once celebrated Great Bed
of the White Hart has also disappeared. It was a round bed capable of
holding twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger than the
famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it was because guests did not relish
this co-operative method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,
blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable, that the
Scole Great Bed was chopped up for firewood; but did anyone _ever_
suppose beds of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?
The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign shows one of the
peculiar basket coaches of the second half of the eighteenth century,
on its way to London.
[Illustration: THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.]
"Scole White Hart" must have been among the very finest of inns and
posting-houses. Its wide staircases, of a width sufficient for the
proverbial coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms and fine
panelled doors, its great stone-flagged kitchen, all proclaim how great
must have been its old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in
the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings, gives some hint
of how heavy the traffic was at this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay,
Diss and Thetford road with that from London to Norwich. Shrunken trade
has caused portions of the inn to be let off; the stone and wooden
porches seen in the old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has
long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour, and the
mullions of the windows have given place to sashes; but the building
still retains a noble architectural character, and is perhaps more
interesting in these latter days, now that its story is told, than ever
it was when that story was in the making. Little or nothing is found in
contemporary records of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its
later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers stood at the door
on a day in October 1822 and saw the drivers of the "Norwich Times"
and "Gurney's Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless in
their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding furiously down the road
and over the bridge, pass the inn without stopping, and disappear in
clouds of dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know what it is to
lose a train and to wait an hour for the next? You do? Then it will
not be difficult to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that
possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and saw the coaches dash
away, to leave them with half a day's wait.
Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both started from London at 5.30
a.m. The "Day" coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the "Times" ten
minutes later, neither having stopped for changing horses during the
last twenty-five miles. This was a "record" for that period, the usual
time being fourteen hours.
Probably the would-be passengers had to remain the night; a fate which
no one who has done the like of late would be apt to complain of.
The guest at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in the lofty
sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique plated candlesticks, and
with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century beauties of the Lely type gazing
down upon him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly as though
he were living in another era; a feeling that grows as he wanders
upstairs to bed, almost losing himself in the roomy corridors. When
he has closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant clang,
and, creeping into the generous embraces of a damask-hung four-poster
that may have been new a century and a half ago, gazes reflectively
about the panelled room and on the curiously coffered ceiling, he drops
off to sleep straightway into the times when the inn was new-built and
dreams of how the news of the Restoration may have come to Scole in
1661. Old times live again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten
footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has Been is enacted
again, with all the convincing air of such visions. Post-chaises and
chariots clatter up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper
to the consciousness that the sound is but that of a jolting rustic
tumbril going down the road in the early morning; that this is the
twentieth century, and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back
eddy of life.
[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."]
Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at Scole. The plain
flint tower of the church stands by the roadside, on the ascent that
leads from the village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic shops
and cottages, and a private residence or so make up the tale. Scole,
in fact, has not grown greatly since when it was a Roman station, and
when the Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near the river
occupied the military post on the long road to Venta Icenorum.
The legionaries first stationed in these East Anglian wastes must
often have longed for their native Italy. When the sky sank almost to
the level of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and the
biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy scrub; when agues
or the lurking enemy accounted for many of their comrades, and when
some favoured few were recalled to the capital, they must have thought
wistfully of a more congenial clime than this, situated on the edge of
the Unknown. Rome, either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,
and when no fighting was in prospect employed the troops ingloriously
as road-makers. The advanced garrisons in the wilderness cleared the
enemy out of the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working parties
built roads under the protection of guards, or improved the rude
trackways they found already in existence. Some fell by the way, and
their skeletons have been found in these latter days, the teeth still
clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's mouth to pay Charon
for ferrying him across the cold and darkling Styx; or, where the coin
has perished, still stained with the metal's long decay. They perished,
those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just as countless thousands of
our own blood have laid their bones on distant shores, under burning
skies or in the Arctic night, to make England what she is. Respect
their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you honour your own creeds, take
from the dead men their passage-money across that mystic river.
XXXV
THIS, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is Arcady. The scene
is pleasant, but the stage waits: where are the actors? Gone, where
and for what reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall
presently be considered. But if the merry days of old are done and
population dwindled, at least in East Anglia, and especially in
Norfolk, dialect flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk drant"
or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk whine"--that rising
inflection of the voice towards the end of sentences--is even yet a
mark of the sister county. They are, indeed, said to have originated
the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk and Suffolk were
largely represented among the Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of
North America. With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity
is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance of sixty years
ago has disappeared, and the Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it
possible to emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart. The
story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm labourer "didn't fare
rightly to knaw" by what route they were going to the United States,
"but we'm gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to kinder
break t' jarney." When railways came, and access to London grew easy,
these simplicities gradually faded away. The young men took to "gettin'
up the road," as the saying ran--otherwise, going to London--to "better
themselves," and old illusions were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the
mavis may still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the rustic
hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger gleefully sporting at
the old game of tittymatorterin; the cowslips that in springtime turn
the meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small field remains,
as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman throws anything into a
ditch, he "hulls" (or hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors
did hundreds of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just noted be
explained before we proceed any further. "Mavis" is the idyllic name
of the thrush, and the "dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"
or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way, a "hodmadod."
"Tittymatorterin" is just the simple game of "see-sawing." Besides
these fleeting instances there are many other peculiarities. The
Norfolk peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be possible
to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and a head becomes a "hid,"
while hens are "hins." Throughout the whole of the eastern counties,
too, the elision of the final in the present tense is a feature of
rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity are found not only in
modern speech, but in old epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some
hundreds of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum, at Norwich,
bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's head with the words, "When
dragon drink, Heigham sink." The meaning is that when the river rises
and touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man would say, the
dragon's mouth, the neighbouring Heigham becomes flooded. An older
example still is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John Jenkin,
in the words:--
"Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"
while a comparatively modern one may be found in Stratford St Mary
church, in the concluding lines of an epitaph dated 1739:--
'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,
So man that die shall Live again."
Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect readily enough in _David
Copperfield_, where he makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther"
to Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes," while Ham talks
to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor." The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do
she now?" and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product of the
soil.
For the benefit of those not to the manner born, let it be repeated
that a "mawther" is not necessarily a parent. It is the generic name
for a female. A "mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown
woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour," but need
not, in fact, specifically mean a neighbour, and is practically the
masculine of "mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close at hand
or stranger from distant parts.
The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction of being made the
subject of study, and glossaries and collections of local words have
long been made by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most
interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk talk is found in the
East Anglian version of the _Song of Solomon_, published many years ago
by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a reading by a
Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be instructive:--
* * * * *
1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.
2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth; for yar love is better
'an wine.
3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar name is as intements pored
out, therefoor du the mawthers love yĕ.
4. Dror mĕ, we'll run arter yĕ: the king he ha' browt me into his
charmbers; we'll be glad and reījce in yĕ; we'll remahmber yar
love more 'an wine: the right-up love yĕ.
5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm, as the taents o'
Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.
6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos the sun t'have
barnt mĕ; my mother's children wor snāsty wi' me; they made me
keeper o' the winyerds, but m'own winyerd I han't kept.
7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye fade, where ye make
yar flock to rest at nune: fur why shud I be as one tarn aside by yar
cumrades' flock?
8. If so bein' as yĕ don't know, O yow bootifullest o' women, go yer
ways furth by the futtin' o' the flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the
shepherds' taents.
9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o' hosses in Pharer's
charrits.
10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry, yer neck wi'
chanes o' gold.
* * * * *
The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be obtained by reading
the original verses side by side with the above.
Among the sports that obtained on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk
of old was "camping." "Camping" was an old East Anglian game that,
could it be revived, would please the footballing maniacs of our own
day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these commons, often
with a hundred players aside, and we are told that the roughest kind
of Rugby football was child's play compared with it. If stories of old
camping contests be true, it might almost seem that in ascribing the
thinly-populated condition of Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing
effects of the Black Death, and to mediæval insurrections and their
resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to pestilence and the sword,
and fail to make count of the casualties received in play. As the
wondering Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If these
savages be at play, what would they be in war?"
"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were not infrequently
fatal to many of the combatants. I have heard old persons speak of
a celebrated camping, Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with
three hundred on each side. Before the ball was thrown up, the Norfolk
men inquired tauntingly of the Suffolk men if they had brought their
coffins. The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the victors. Nine
deaths were the result of the conflict in a fortnight." Camping went
out of favour about 1810, and the coroners had an easier time.
XXXVI