place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great
church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly
screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly
enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to
the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once
passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on
either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints,
and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn
down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.
They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve
the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the
"King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than
intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles
none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time
favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted
in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large
for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but
there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge
buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken
villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled
of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that
dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population
of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes
were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and
labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was
stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion,
than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted
the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently
agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase;
only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in
the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture
of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the
decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the
great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in
especial, has become almost deserted.
[Illustration: DICKLEBURGH.]
The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest
in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one
hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs
and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now
overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles;
and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain
tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers,
and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately
surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty
shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and
the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles
on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle,
and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the
straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to
twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest
which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have
brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit.
Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present
hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful
harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other
wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to
these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders
of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the
English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand
at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used
in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731
acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the
population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many
more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands
produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of
cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the
towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or
from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail
would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must
starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall
them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land
which has long gone untilled.
But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a
house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the
farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in one
direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat, as
it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other
products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days were
difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among farmers
for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are
difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed proprietors has
dwindled away. The results are painfully evident here, in the old
families reduced or beggared, and their seats either in the market or
let to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while the old owners
have disappeared or live humbly in small houses once occupied by the
steward or bailiff of the estate.
While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone down
to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered rent
free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out
of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural
labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the
miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen
shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel,
and finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than
his grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as
difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death had
swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred and fifty
years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have done of recent
years in East Anglia--for lack of hands to gather them in. It was in
1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and adjacent
parishes were sold by auction for a farmer who could find no labourer
willing to be hired.
What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and
the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the
middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all read
and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so off they
go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a
stool in an office, and others become workmen of many kinds; but all
are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the towns, and by the
excitement of living in the great centres of population, and only the
aged and the aging will soon be left to till the fields.
Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural
labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious;
but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is
a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to
till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted
hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among
the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same
food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He
has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,
undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started
certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it.
Hear him:--
"When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time)
what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected
are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is stuck up in a
place she calls the parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young
ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a
_sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up;
some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner
brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she;
two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a
pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to
come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that
there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by
the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too
clever to _work;_ they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to _plough_!
Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_,
or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_
as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What
a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful
convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and
jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms."
The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has not come about. This is
not a country of earthquakes or of violent social upheavals. Free
Trade has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his way to
the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives to live in better style
than possible three quarters of a century ago, while his pretensions
to gentility certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding and
jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest dreams, have foreseen
Limited Liability and the fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation,
or the modern "enslaving and starving system" of the gigantic Trusts
that, like vampires, feed on the blood of industry. We need look for
no convulsions; not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or, at least,
the taxing out of existence, of the millionaires. Our expectations of
the future are quite different. The people will inhabit the towns, and
the country will become a huge preserve of game for the sport of the
millionaires aforesaid; a preserve broken here and there by the model
farm or the training establishment of some colossus of wealth.
XXXVII
BEYOND Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn, a fine, dignified
house still lamenting its decadence from a posting-inn to a beerhouse,
Tivetshall level-crossing marks where the railway runs to Bungay and
Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the Virgin quite near, with Pulham
St Mary Magdalene close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and
other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas pudding, but no
sign of them is evident. Only windmills, whirling furiously on distant
ridges, break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of charts, a
carter jogging along the road with his team is evidently the authority
to be consulted.
"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and intelligent horses; and
they coom accordingly, with much jingling of harness, and stand in the
shade of roadside trees while their lord takes his modest levenses and
haffles and jaffles--gossips, that is to say--with the landlord of the
"Ram."
"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question; "niver heerd of un."
Then a light breaks in upon him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em;
Tishell St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep of the arm
comprising the whole western horizon, "Theiy'm ower theer."
"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"
"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham Maaket, yar mean, bor.
Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower _theer_"--a comprehensive wave to the
eastwards.
And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it is found, a little
forgotten town, the greater proportion of whose inhabitants appear
to walk with two sticks. It is ranged round a green or market-place,
with a great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed within, and
with a very good recent "Ascension" over the chancel arch, painted
and stencilled timber roof, and elaborate stained-glass windows. The
townlet and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object of such
care and expense, afford a curious contrast.
An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings of Depwade Union
conspire to make desolate the road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot,
along it, turning neither to the right nor to the left, may readily be
excused a legitimate wonder as to what has become of the great feature
of East Anglia, its spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite
the fame they have long since attained, no vestige of them is glimpsed
from the road itself. One has usually to turn aside to some of the
villages lying near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find the
yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of geese, ducks and turkeys;
but a striking exception to this now general rule is the huge common
of Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the hundredth mile from
London, where a cottage and a wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone
represent Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common, reputed to be
the highest point in Norfolk, although of no less extent than three
hundred and fifty acres, might perhaps be passed without being seen,
for the reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is screened
from the high road by a hedge and entered through an ordinary field
gate. The inn and the cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently
taken from the common in the long ago, serve with their gardens to hide
that glorious expanse of grass and heather. Here roam those chartered
vagabonds, the plump geese, that pick up a living on the grassy commons
and wander, like free-booting bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the
heaths, closing their careers with royal feasting in the August and
September stubble, and a Michaelmas martyrdom.
[Illustration: A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.]
Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those
martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London markets,
between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they once
attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion of railway
vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the
Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save geese and
turkeys, beside the coachman and guard. Full inside and out with such
a freight, the proprietors of fast coaches made a great deal more by
carrying them than they would have taken by a load of passengers; so
the fowls had the preference, while travellers had to take their chance
of finding a seat in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the
turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning
and Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred, and
weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were followed
on the two succeeding days by half as many more.
A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese
would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the
donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls are
among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk famous
to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who,
startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and common and fen
between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at the lumbering
flight of the huge bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden
hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed in, dismayed,
heard the bittern booming among the reeds, or with misgivings of the
supernatural saw the fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with
prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers, like
the creation of some disordered imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home
of these and of many another strange creature, is no more, and these
species, now chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of natural
history.
[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
What Wacton lacks along the high road the village of Long Stratton
has in superabundance. They named it well who affixed the adjective,
for it measures a mile from end to end. Beginning with modern and (to
speak kindly) uninteresting cottages, it ends in a broad street where
almost every house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned
plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare stands the church, one of
the Norfolk round-towered kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond
it the Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and neo-classical
palm branches in plaster for trimmings, set back at some distance
behind a very newty, froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the
village street broadens out. Looking back upon it, when one has finally
climbed uphill on the way to Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely
charming. Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the Roman
Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in sight, keeps yet its Roman camp
strongly posted above the River Tase. Tasburgh--what little there is
of a village--occupies an acclivity on the further side of that river,
across whose wide and marshy valley the mists rise early, seeing the
sun to bed dull and tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon
with ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and picturesquely
occupied by the parish church, another round-towered example. Excepting
it, the vicarage and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand" Inn,
there is little else.
[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation that drown the
soothing, distant rattle of reaping machines on the hillside: a voice
raised in reproach, and another--a treble one--in gusty shrieks of
combined pain, fear and peevishness? Coming round a corner, the cause
of the disturbance is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty
knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached by an
indignant woman.
"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine spettacle. I'll give
yow a good sowsin', my lord; coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled
suddenly inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled yells heard,
alternating with thumps. The offender is receiving that sowsing, or
being "yerked," "clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"
being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk phrases for
varieties of assault and battery.
XXXVIII
THE Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of
Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is
broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in
unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched, tiled
and slated cottages and the church that stands on a commanding knoll
in the background. When Newton was really new it would be impossible
to say; perhaps its novelty may have been measured against the hoary
antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down the valley. For what says the
folk-rhyme:--
"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,
And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"
and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in
degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more than a
camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone ones.
Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint only, of
which Norwich is principally built, is available for building materials.
[Illustration: TASBURGH.]
One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a
little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn,
so thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult
to give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this
district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age,
when it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late
eighteenth century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual
decoration of inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron
sign of the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.
In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies Dunston,
trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and the "Dun
Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the circular
brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few miles into
Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used who shall
say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and its wooden gate has
gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into
disuse.
Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the left,
but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half
a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a grey
beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its ancient camp
may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of
the great Roman camp established here to overawe the stronghold of the
Iceni, four miles away on the banks of the Wensum, and now the site of
Norwich.
[Illustration: NEWTON FLOTMAN.]
Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified
_castrum_. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic
of its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments
of flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at
Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,
its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the laggard imagination
of the layman in matters archæological, which refuses to be stirred
before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch that can be
rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed and paced on three
sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to physical test both height,
depth and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure, now a
turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase and was sufficiently
defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so that no works are to be
found there. How long it was before the Romans subdued the Iceni, whose
great city is thought to have stood where Norwich does now, is not
known. Nothing of that early time here, indeed, is _known_, and guesses
are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman advance into East
Anglia, which had for its objective the principal stronghold of the
tribes, here came to its military ending. To compare things so ancient
and romantic with others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman
camps on the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near
Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with
those that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the
wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally
came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date continued
northward.
[Illustration: THE OLD BRICK POUND.]
Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when
the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really
was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities,
Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and
odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of
streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might,
for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact
that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes
when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of
it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North
"wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.
The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of
these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at
the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of
the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of
the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified
port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which
indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is
now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out
a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the
"South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where
the navigation ceased.
[Illustration: CAISTOR CAMP.]
It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears
signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman
citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie
preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old
channel.