and the hours are early. To each horse on these early morning trials is
his attendant lad: apprentices of the training-stable, with everything
possible to them in the way of professional prizes. They may develop as
jockeys or as trainers on their own account, or may perhaps go to the
Devil in many of the easy ways that racing affords. But there are few or
no lads in any profession you like to name smarter in personal
appearance or better disciplined than the apprentices and stable-boys of
Newmarket. The modern trainer, with the consideration and income of an
ambassador, the authority of the headmaster of a public school, and the
domestic appointments of a prince of commerce, is the benevolent
autocrat of his establishment. His lads have no excuse for outside
pleasures, for he provides them with billiard-rooms, newspapers, and
magazines, and every imaginable comfort of a well-appointed club, with
the result that the well-known enthusiasm for and belief in horses
trained at Newmarket in general becomes crystallised into an _esprit de
corps_ for particular stables. The whole profession has been
revolutionised in every grade and in most methods. The jockey who used
to reduce the “too, too solid flesh” that troubled even Hamlet—who had
not the jockey’s excuse for ridding himself of it—by the heroic and
uncomfortable course of wearing two pairs of trousers, five or six
waistcoats, two or more coats, and then walking seven or eight miles in
all that clothing, now adopts other methods—greatly to the sorrow of the
local tailors. Those old-time jocks who thus mortified the flesh must
surely command our retrospective sympathy, for they did not merely so
dress and so walk, but, coming to some inn at the end of the prescribed
miles, took a seat by a roaring fire, and, piling on more clothes,
sweated away the avoirdupois at a truly alarming rate until it was time
to tramp home-along. Turkish baths nowadays perform the same office with
little trouble, and jockeys more than usually keen on reducing weight
take medicines in addition. It was through the severity of this
self-adopted course that Archer brought himself into the low and
feverish state in which he committed suicide.
But who would not be a successful jockey in these days of high retaining
fees, special rewards, and popular favour? From the worldly point of
view, judging things from the purely monetary standpoint, such an one
looks down from his pinnacle upon the whole bench of Bishops, upon the
Army, the Navy, the Church, the Stage, Literature, Art, and all the
things that really count. You may not like it, but—“there you are,” and
it is useless to point out that the old verb “to jockey” means “to
cheat, to trick,” and must have derived from this profession. To one who
might so point out this derivation, an obvious retort could be made that
things have changed, and that as actors have risen from being in the
eyes of the law mere roguish vagrants and “players of interludes,” so
jockeys may now be honourable men. We cannot hark back to the times when
every jock was made keep his place, and was paid less than his worth,
instead of absurdly more.
What were the rewards of the jockey in those days? He received five
guineas if he won and three if he lost, and when a former Duke of
Grafton sent his jockey two five-pound notes after winning both the One
Thousand and the Two Thousand Stakes, with the injunction to “take care
of them,” he was thought generous. In these days no jockey of repute,
with the winning of classic races to his record, will get into the
saddle for a smaller fee than £1,000, win or lose
XXVII
THE road on leaving Newmarket, at the crest of the High Street, branches
in many directions from where a modern clock tower stands, like a
policeman, in the parting of the ways. The Clock Tower, which, as a
prominent and venerated landmark, and one of the principal features of
Newmarket, it behoves us, in all humility, to spell with capital
letters, was erected by one “Charley” Blanton, owner of Robert the
Devil, in honour of Victoria the Good. The Clock Tower is Blanton’s, but
the antithesis is our very own. Beyond this point the roads are reduced
to two: that on the left leading direct to Thetford and Norwich; the
right-hand fork conducting to Thetford by the loop road through Bury St.
Edmunds. We will examine this road in detail before taking the direct
route.
This is the “Bury side” of the town mentioned in the Jockey Club notices
of the gallops available for exercising the horses, and the triangular
stretch of common in the fork of the roads is the place referred to on
all such notices as “the Severals,” a name here in direct contradiction
to its general meaning, which is an enclosed, as opposed to a common,
field.
A busy day on the Severals is a pretty sight, for it is the place where
the frisky yearlings are trained to obedience. Here you see them,
cantering round and round, at the end of a rope, rejoicing in their
youth, young and silly, before they have learnt their business in life,
and, with their manes and long flowing tails not yet docked, and their
limbs not grown to the lankiness of the full-grown racer, the most
beautiful of animals. Their triumphs, and equally the anti-climax of
their after-careers as cab-horses, and their final conversion into
ha’porths of cats’ meat on skewers, are mercifully hidden from them.
The road to Thetford through Bury is a lonely and, on the whole, a dull
route, but it begins in lordly style, with lengthy rows of portentous
racing establishments in all the showy glory of long gravelled drives
and imposing gates. The later history of domestic architecture is
unrolled before you, as you go along the Bury road, in mid-Victorian
grey brick and stucco, with gas-globes like unto the lamps of the
Metropolitan Railway; in later Victorian white Suffolk brick with
string-courses of red brick set angle-wise in a style alleged to be
decorative; and in the “Queen Anne” _plus_ Victorian Renaissance
composite style of these latter days. The Edwardian style is still to
seek. We need not study to tell who lives where, because the merest
nonentities invariably live in the most ornate houses, and, with the
varying fortunes of the Turf and them that fleet their little day upon
it, those who flaunt so bravely this year are the next season gone no
man knoweth whither; and few, except their creditors, care.
At last the houses end, and we are upon the open road, with the roadside
plantation of firs, called the Long Belt, on the right, and the heaths
and downs on the left, stretching away until they are lost in distance
and in the harrs of the Fens. This, for the cyclist, is an express
route, but we must not, for that reason, forget to pull up at the
cross-roads, where a sign-post points in one direction to Chippenham and
in the other to Moulton. Halt awhile and notice the great grassy mound
beside that sign-post, for it is a spot known to the villages round
about, and in Newmarket, as the “Boy’s Grave.” The boy thus handed down
to fame was, according to the traditions of the countryside, a shepherd
boy who lost a sheep from his flock, and, afraid to go to his employer
and acknowledge it, hanged himself here—from the sign-post, say some
more credulous than their fellows. A big boy, and even a giant, you,
looking at this mound, might think; but its size is due to the care of
the road-menders, who not only keep it in order, but bank it up with
turf cut from the selvedges of the wayside.
[Illustration: THE “BOY’S GRAVE.”]
Legends are not rare in this neighbourhood. Indeed, along the by-road in
the direction of Moulton one reaches Folly Hill, the crest of the downs
can be seen from here, with a fragment of wall and a clump of
beech-trees on its summit, and a story of its own in the making. Here,
in fact, we are peculiarly fortunate, for on Folly Hill it is possible
to note the genesis of a legend and to record it ere time has evolved a
story, full-blown and mysterious, out of very matter-of-fact materials.
A story of sorts is, indeed, already current in Newmarket, where the
enquiring stranger after things in general can obtain some finely
inaccurate information as to what he may expect to see on Folly Hill, or
“God’s Evil,” as it is alternatively known. With this he is prepared to
find a stone pillar in a wood, the sole relic of a house built, at some
time unspecified, by “a man almost a millionaire,” unfortunately
unnamed, but with the blackest of reputations.
There is not really (it may at once be said) any such pillar, but the
gable-end of a ruined old red-brick house stands up against the sky on
the hill-top, and is known to the farmer of Trinity Hall Farm, on which
it stands, as “the Pilgrim.” The ploughmen know the beech clump on the
hill as “Cobbler’s Bush,” because, according to their tale, “a ole
cobbler what used to mend boots lived there. There’s a ole tree there
what nobody mustn’t touch, because he planted it.”
“And what is that old building on the hill-top?”
“That’s a ole rewing they calls the Barks. Nobody mustn’t touch it.”
“Not touch it; why not?”
“Because the soldiers come to look at it.”
At that explanation a flood of light is thrown upon the name of “Barks.”
It is the local pronunciation of “Barracks,” and that name comes, of
course, from the “soldiers” who go to look at it. Who are those
soldiers? Merely those who have at some time or other accompanied a
surveying party of the Ordnance Survey, for map-making purposes. No
doubt a fine gory embattled legend will be built on this some day,
probably with Cromwell, that arch-villain of popular imagination, as the
moving figure in it.
Passing over the Kennett at Kentford, where the ragged remnants of the
old bridge even yet stand in the water, beside the new, and where the
unusually good Flamboyant-traceried Gothic windows of the church,
looking down from a roadside knoll, gladden the heart of the
ecclesiologist, the character of the road becomes, like the life of a
saint on earth—flat, featureless, dull, and uninteresting. Just as the
follies and vices of the hardened sinner make the most readable
biography, so do those scenic accidents that give steep hills and
difficult roads make interest for the amateur of the picturesque. Higham
station, with the spire of Barrow church peering over distant trees, is
not of itself either remarkable or romantic, and in so far that it does
not look its real age, the toll-house standing at the cross-roads is
like those modern grandmothers whose jimp waists and springtide tresses
are the wonder of their grandchildren.
Few signs of life vary the monotony of the flat fields, and when the
roadside inn known as “Saxham White Horse,” and inappropriately endued
with a coating of red wash, opens out ahead in one of the long
perspectives, it is as though one had found an unexpected habitation in
an empty land. Risby village shows some indications, off to the left
hand, and, for so unpromising a district, is remarkably picturesque,
with rugged dingles and ridges, and a round-towered old church in a
tree-embowered lane looking as though it had been designed by Morland.
It is an Early English church, without aisles, but with a lofty chancel
arch on whose either side are elaborate stone tabernacles. A slip of
brass on the chancel floor records that
“Here lyeth the body of Mr. Edward Kirke,
Esq., 1613.”
[Illustration: LITTLE SAXHAM CHURCH.]
Returning to the road, a detour made on the other side of it, to Little
Saxham church, reveals another, and finer, tower. A great deal of
mystery has been made of the round-towered churches of East Anglia, and
antiquaries of a bygone age expended much unnecessary ingenuity in
seeking some out-of-the-way reason of ritual or defence for their
existence; but the reason of their being is simple enough. They are
found, almost exclusively in England, in these eastern counties, where
building-stone does not exist. Norfolk has no fewer than 125 of these
round towers, and Suffolk 40. Essex has 7, and Cambridgeshire only 2.
The greatest number are found where flint is plentiful, for they are
constructed chiefly of that material, and the circular walls have that
shape because it is thus possible to dispense with the stone quoins
necessary for binding the angles of square buildings. In a word, the
round towers are round for the same reason that compels a man to wear a
silver watch when he would like a gold chronometer—they were less
expensive.
Here, at Little Saxham, we have a particularly fine example, of Norman
date. It is probable that in this case a desire existed, for some reason
now lost to us, to make a greater show than customary, for the tower
here is taller than most. Its lower stages are in severely plain
flint-work, but the upper storey is quite elaborate and wholly faced
with stone.
An elaborate monument to Lord Crofts fills one side of a chapel in
Little Saxham church. He was one of Charles II.’s merry companions, but
here is made to look sufficiently unhappy. The effigies of himself and
his wife are shown in painful semi-reclining attitudes, as though they
would very much like to get up, but could not. My lord’s expression,
underneath his Baron’s coronet, is particularly agonised.
The uneventful road on to Bury St. Edmunds is brought to a conclusion by
the barracks, the first harbinger of the town, at the outer end of the
long wide street called Risby Gate
XXVIII
I HAVE never been able to see Bury St. Edmunds in the favourable light
of Carlyle’s description of the town. Listen to what he says of it: “The
_Burg_, Bury, or ‘Berry’ as they call it, of St. Edmund is still a
prosperous brisk Town; beautifully diversifying, with its clear brick
houses, ancient clean streets, and 20,000 or 15,000 busy souls, the
general grassy face of Suffolk; looking out right pleasantly from its
hill-slope towards the rising sun: and on the eastern edge of it still
runs, long, black, and massive, a range of monastic ruins.... Here
stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure amid these vast grim
venerable ruins, may persuade himself that an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury
did once exist; nay, there is no doubt of it: see here the ancient
massive Gateway, of architecture interesting to the eye of Dilettantism;
and farther on, that other ancient Gateway, now about to tumble, unless
Dilettantism, in these very months, can subscribe money to cramp it and
prop it.”
That is the Carlylean picture of the place, and a very desirable
habitation of picturesqueness and all the joys he paints it. But that is
not quite the real Bury. How it managed so to impress him is a mystery,
for the town itself is commonplace, and the great churches and the ruins
of its still greater Abbey are quite distinct from it. Even those Gothic
remains are sad and grim, and have not the usual inspiring quality of
such vestiges of the past. In fact, nothing in the present condition of
Bury in timber, brick, and stone can serve to envisage its ancient
story. This is the tragedy of Bury, for that story is one of the most
gorgeous of romances.
We first hear of the place, as “Beodric’s Weorth,” at the very remote
period of A.D. 631. Of Beodric we known nothing, and the spot is
mentioned thus early only because Sigebert, King of East Anglia at that
time, founded a monastery here, a monastery in which he became a monk,
and whose cloisters he only forsook to wage war with the heathen Penda.
Fighting for the Cross he died, and thus early did the town secure the
chance of honouring a martyr.
But not to the earliest or most deserving of those who have laid down
their lives in the cause did the highest honours accrue, and we can
scarce blink the fact that to St. Edmund, King and Martyr, who suffered
a hundred and sixty years later, fell a great deal more than his just
share.
Edmund, who was crowned King of East Anglia on Christmas Day, 856,
reigned thirteen years before the great invasion of the Danes in 869
broke up his kingdom and brought him to a tragical end at Eglesdene,
near Hoxne. Oakley Park is supposed to be the site of “Eglesdene.” Near
by is a bridge over the Dove, known as “Gold Bridge,” the successor of
the one under whose arch the fugitive King was hiding, according to the
legend, when a newly-married couple, crossing the bridge by moonlight,
caught the glint of his golden spurs in the water and revealed his
lurking-place to the Danes.
If you consider it at all closely, the legend is not at this point very
convincing, for, in the terrible wars of extermination then waged, when
not only the actual combatants, but the entire people, went in fear, it
is not very likely that honeymooning couples would be wandering about in
the moonlight; but that is a detail. St. Edmund was, after all, very
human, as well as very saintly, for he did what many an unregenerate
would have done—he cursed that couple who revealed his presence. Nay, he
did more; and perpetrated a wickedness of which no mere son of Belial or
everyday child of ungodliness would have been guilty. He cursed every
couple who in the future should cross that bridge to be married. ’Twas
not well done, St. Edmund!
The legend goes on to tell how the Danes bound him to a tree and shot
him to death with arrows until he was stuck full of them, like St.
Sebastian. The very tree—an ancient oak—was for ages pointed out, and it
is a marvellous fact that in 1849, when it fell, and was cut up, an
arrow-head was found in the heart of that hoary trunk. This is not the
place to tell of the many marvels that followed; but in the year 903,
after the body had lain for thirty-three years in a wooden chapel at
Hoxne, it was removed to Beodric’s Weorth, where it was placed in the
Church of St. Mary, and became the bone of contention between the
regular and the secular canons, until the time came, in 1010, when the
Danes again overran the country, when they sank their differences, and
conveyed the precious body of the Saint to London, for safety. It was
escorted back in 1013, working many incredible miracles on the way, and
replaced in the church, where it remained until Aylwin’s great monastic
church, begun under Canute, in 1020, was completed.
Already the sainted King had become more powerful than any other
miracle-monger, but his name had not yet been given to the town, which
retained its old style until the time of Edward the Confessor, when it
first became known as St. Edmund’s Bury.
As everywhere else, the Norman Conquest meant a great increase of
ecclesiastical wealth and power at Bury. The Monastery was rebuilt, and
its Abbot, mitred and all-powerful within the wide-spreading Limits of
St. Edmund, was little less than a Bishop. The sanctity and potency of
St. Edmund were not less than those of St. Thomas in after-years became.
Pilgrims of every estate in the realm flocked to his shrine. Even kings
entered into his courts with humility. Edward the Confessor walked the
last mile bare-foot. Henry I., Henry II., and Richard I. were frequently
here. King John, however, was in different sort. Jocelin of Brakelond,
the old monkish chronicler, who was born in that very street of “Short
Brakland” we may see in Bury to this day, tells us how, in 1203, that
King stayed with the Abbot a whole fortnight, the said Abbot and
Monastery being at that time only by way of recovering from much
domestic mismanagement of former Abbots, and ill-prepared for the costs
and charges of such entertaining. Carlyle, with picturesque efforts at
recovering something of that visit beyond the mere dry and innutritious
bones of dates, pictures that monarch “a blustering, dissipated human
figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or
other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing;
amid numerous other noisy figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks;
talking noisy nonsense; tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury
Convent (its larders, namely, and cellars) in the most ruinous way.”
And when at last he went his ways, and the Abbot expected something
kingly, he merely left a handsome silk cloak for St. Edmund, or rather,
pretended to leave it, for one of his retinue borrowed it, “and _we_,”
says Jocelin, or Carlyle for him, “never got sight of it again.” And all
else the King gave was “one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for
him; and so departed—like a shabby Lackland as he was! Thirteen pence
sterling! this was what the Convent got from Lackland, for all the
victuals he and his had made away with. We, of course, said our mass for
him, having covenanted to do it—but let impartial posterity judge with
what degree of fervour!”
The memory of King John’s hungry hordes and his shabby thirteen pence
lingered at Bury, and it must have been with a peculiar satisfaction
that the Abbot saw assembled at the high altar of his church the
representative concourse of Barons who, on St. Edmund’s Day, 1214, swore
to obtain from the King that Magna Charta which they did actually wring
unwillingly from him in the following year.
Royal visits continued until the time of Henry VI., who held a
Parliament here, but all the glories of the place are gone, and are only
dimly perceived amid the mouldering ruins and damp churchyard walks that
alone are left. The spot where the liberties of the English people were
sworn to be upheld is accurst by the memory of how, three hundred years
later, in the Marian persecution, twelve martyrs suffered at the stake
for liberty of religious thought
XXIX
A GREAT open space stretches outside the boundary walls of the old Abbey
precincts. Here, on “Angel Hill,” as it is called, Bury fair was held in
days of old. It was no mere rustic saturnalia, but a fashionable
institution, and lasted a fortnight. A one-day fair still held annually,
on September 21st, is the sole relic of this once important event,
famous not only for the business, but also for the matrimonial matches
concluded there.
The “Angel,” a dyspeptic and gloomy-looking house of huge proportions
and sad-coloured brick, faces this wide, empty space, and adds a quite
unnecessary emphasis to its dulness. There was an inn of the same name
here so early as 1452, neighboured by others, but in 1779 the whole of
the buildings on this side were removed and the present row erected. No
one would suspect from the commonplace exterior of the “Angel” that its
great cellars are of mediæval date, and comprised of groined crypts; but
they do not redeem the general aspect of the building, and we do not
look upon the “Angel” with interest because it figures in the _Pickwick
Papers_, but only in surprise that Dickens should have thought it worth
mention. He did so mention it because the “Angel” was the principal
coaching-inn of the town. There was—indeed, there still is—the “Suffolk”
hotel, but to and from the “Angel” came and went the Norwich Mail and
the best of the post-chaise traffic. In the days when “every gentleman
visited London at least once in his lifetime,” the house may by dint of
much business have worn a cheery look; but now that almost every one
comes up to town by rail many times a year, the place has the air of a
public institution of the hospital or infirmary order. Looking upon this
scene, the proverbial slowness of the Bury coaches recurs to the
stranger, who remembers that old story of a pedestrian walking from
Newmarket and overtaking—not being overtaken by—the stage. The coachman
offered him a lift. “No, thank you,” said he; “I’m in a hurry to-day,”
and soon disappeared in advance of the lumbering conveyance.
[Illustration: “ANGEL HILL,” BURY ST. EDMUNDS.]
One never thoroughly realises the full meaning of the word “respectable”
until the acquaintance of Bury St. Edmunds is made. Respectability
squats heavily upon the place and is incarnated on every flat-faced
house-front, twinkles from every matutinally polished brass
door-knocker, is seen down every dull street vista, and dogs your
footsteps into the Abbey grounds, where the respectable burgesses lie in
their respectable graves, in hopes of a Heaven planned on respectable
and exclusive lines. Even the old abbots and monks are robbed of their
historic glamour and are respectable likewise—and by that same token
commonplace. It is a respectable landscape, too, upon whose flat suave
fields you look from the higher streets of the town; flat and
featureless, good for the husbandman, but, lacking even the dropsical,
water-logged interest of the Fens, the very negation of the picturesque.
In Defoe’s time it was equally respectable, as he naïvely tells us. “The
beauty of this town,” he says, “consists in the number of gentry who
dwell in and near it, the polite conversation among them, the affluence
and plenty they live in, and the pleasant country they have to go abroad
in.” How exquisitely fragrant of snobbishness!
XXX
THE ditchwater-dull town of Bury comes to an end with Northgate Street
and its continuation of “Out-Northgate”; past the curious railway
station built in the Jacobean style, and presenting an odd likeness to
some ancient mansion of the Hatfield House type, through whose centre a
railway has been driven, leaving only the wings standing. Everything is
on the largest scale: broad roads, with few people in them; great brick
railway bridge over them; tall cupola’d towers of the station looking
down upon them, and roomy houses facing them. Resultant emptiness and
chilly vastness, infinitely uncomfortable and unhomely.
At the end of Out-Northgate, looking upon the footpath, are the
shattered remains of St. Saviour’s Hospital, very small and unobtrusive.
It is possible to stand here the livelong day and challenge the
passers-by with questions about this old ruin, and to find when day is
done that a monumental ignorance prevails upon the subject. Yet it is an
historic place, for it was here that, according to tradition, the good
Duke Humphrey of Gloucester was found strangled in 1446.