Fornham St. Martin and Thetford along the dullest of roads. Away to the
left hand is Fornham St. Geneviève, the scene of the obscure Battle of
Fornham, fought in 1173. That was a short-lived rebellion crushed here
in that year at the passage of the little river Lark. The aggrieved Earl
of Leicester, striving against Henry II. and flying the country, had
returned with an army of Flamand mercenaries, and, marching across
country, made for St. Edmundsbury. He had come thus far when he was met
by a strong force opposing any further advance, and completely routed
near the church. It remained for modern times to discover the bodies of
the many slain on this occasion. A hoary and decayed ash-tree that from
time immemorial had grown at the crest of a great mound was being
demolished, when at its roots the awe-struck countrymen uncovered a
number of skeletons neatly arranged in a circle, one above the other;
and somewhere about the same time a gold ring of antique design, thought
to have belonged to the Countess of Leicester, was fished up from the
river-bed, together with relics of the pots and pans of that overwhelmed
host, and some Henry II. pennies that those slaughtered men-at-arms had
doubtless hoped to expend in long drinks at Bury, after the hoped-for
victory was won. The ancient church of Fornham St. Geneviève was burned
down, June 24th, 1782, through the extraordinary accident of a man
shooting at jackdaws and firing into the thatched roof. The ruins stand
in Fornham Park, and fill the humble office of helping to support a
water-tank.
Ingham church, beside the road on to Thetford, is highly uninteresting,
and the few wayside cottages commonplace. Away to the left, out of
sight, is Culford Park, seat of Earl Cadogan, exploiter of Chelsea in
these days and recipient of fabulous sums of “unearned increment” in the
shape of ground-rents. Two miles onward from Ingham, the dozen cottages
of the hamlet called Seven Hills dot the lonely road at short intervals,
and behind them is the long line of the seven prehistoric sepulchral
mounds that stand sponsors for this modern settlement. At Rymer Point, a
little distance onward, we touch upon the broad acres of the Duke of
Grafton’s estate of Euston, and presently come into the village of
Barnham. Beyond the village the battered remains of the old “Franchise
Cross,” which once marked the boundary of the Liberty of St. Edmund,
stand by the way, and still mark the limits of Thetford and Barnham
parishes. None is sufficiently humble to do that cross reverence
nowadays, but in the old times, when it was protected by a specific
proclamation by the Abbot of Bury, that all who injured it would be
anathematised and cursed with the fires of Hell, this old landmark was
dealt gently with.
It is from here at Barnham that the Icknield Way can with little
difficulty be reached and traced into Thetford. To find it, we must turn
to the left in Barnham Street, and, passing the little railway station,
pursue the cross-road that leads for a mile along open commons to where
the boundary of the Elveden estate is marked by one of Lord Iveagh’s new
lodges. Just short of this lodge is the Icknield Way, a green track
crossing the road at right angles on the skirts of a dark wood of
fir-trees. Here the boundaries of the two parishes of Barnham and
Elveden march together, the Way itself the dividing line. It is still a
very noticeable grassy track, but has for centuries been disused as a
public road. It was used by the cattle-drovers, who to the last favoured
the prehistoric tracks of the country, and thus avoided the payment of
tolls levied along the turnpikes. Their flocks and herds were great
features of old wayside life, until the cattle-trucks of quick railway
transport in modern times destroyed the drovers’ business.
Very few of the country folk know this as the Icknield Way, and not a
great number have ever heard of it as the drove-road, but the
cross-roads are known in all the neighbourhood by the little turfy mound
called “Marman’s Grave,” traditionally the burial-place of a suicide in
those uncharitable old times when the midnight burial without Christian
rites, and with a stake driven through the body, was the world’s last
act of injustice towards those poor despairing souls whom cruel
circumstance had tortured beyond endurance. Who the unhappy “Marman”
was, and when or why he gladly left an existence so hateful to him that
he could even contemplate with equanimity that _post-mortem_ indignity
of a stake through his vitals, we shall never know, and the little stone
post cresting his grave tells us nothing, for although it looks like
some simple memorial of him, its sole inscription, the letters “B” and
“E,” give no clue in his direction, for they only mark the respective
bounds of Barnham and Elveden.
[Illustration: MARMAN’S GRAVE.]
The Way reaches Thetford in another two miles, across the heath. Its
course lay athwart the present road from Barnham, into the town, just
where the gasworks stand, in the outskirts. But not only those far-off
Icenians came this way, where those unromantic gasometers scent the
heath and stop up the immemorial track: for this portion of the Way
remained the chief, if, indeed, not the only, entrance into Thetford
until the close of the seventeenth century, when the river Ouse was
first bridged along the line of the main road from Elveden.
XXXI
[Illustration: AVENUE NEAR NEWMARKET.]
HAVING now disposed of the loop road to Thetford through Bury, we are
free to take the main route from Newmarket, by Barton Mills and Elveden.
It is a wilder and a lonelier, but yet not a dull road, like that just
traversed.
Once beyond the long line of trainers’ houses and stables, fringing the
road as far as the entrance to Chippenham Park, the heaths that surround
Newmarket begin again and plunge the explorer once more into unsheltered
wilds. It is after a sun-stricken, wind-swept, or rain-beaten course of
these that the mile-long elm avenue leading to the Kennett stream, and
the Red Lodge beyond it, comes so welcome. There is surely no more
beautiful avenue in the kingdom than this, whose trees interlace their
branches overhead in the shape of a true Gothic arch, and really form
that similitude to a cathedral nave of which we often hear but in
avenues so very, very rarely see.
At the crossing of the little Kennett we finally leave Cambridgeshire
and come into Suffolk. On the Suffolk side stands the “Red Lodge” inn, a
solitary old house on the heaths that again resume, and continue until
the chalk is changed for a gravelly soil at the summit of the rise
called Chalk Hill. It is a lonelier road now than ever it had been in
all the centuries between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the railway
era. Railways at one blow took not only the passenger traffic, but the
carriage of goods and minerals; and the cattle and sheep once driven in
hundreds of thousands along the highways and byways began to be
despatched in cattle-trucks.
We cannot fully realise this olden state of the roads, but we can make
an effort towards it: can project ourselves into the seventeenth
century, and see and hear the droves of turkeys, five hundred in each,
come gobbling and bubbling, in the manner peculiar to turkeys, all the
way from the farmyards to the London markets. Can also watch in
imagination the waddling march of the thousands of geese bred on these
commons, and sent hissing and snapping down this long course of a
hundred miles to celebrate the September feast of St. Michael on many a
metropolitan dinner-table. Alas, poor Michaelmas geese! Alas, too, for
the Christmas geese! but _they_ went more gloriously to martyrdom, being
carried all the way instead of driven. The reason for this was that the
muddy roads of late autumn and early winter were too soft and sticky for
their feet, and so they rode to town in the “goose-cart,” a
four-storeyed conveyance as Defoe tells us, “with two horses abreast,
like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that
thus ride.”
A neglected item of information, from a local newspaper of the time,
helps the imagination in later, but still forgotten, things. Thus we
read of a village on the Ipswich route from London to Norwich: “In the
last droving season, 1845, the landlord of the ‘Bird in Hand,’ Tasburgh,
housed 9,300 beasts. He purchased for their consumption and for horses,
etc., fifty tons of hay; but in the following year, owing to the opening
of the Norfolk Railway, only twelve beasts were taken in, and only 8½
cwt. of hay was wanted.”
Flat lands, under cultivation, bring us from this point to the river
Lark, at Barton Mills, whose church tower, with that of Mildenhall, a
mile away, now begins to puzzle the stranger. The village of Barton
Mills, lying directly on the road, is a kind of preface to, or outpost
of, Mildenhall, a town placed on an out-of-the-way loop road, and never
seen by those who make straight for Thetford. But we, at any rate, will
see it, coming to this backwater of life along a flat road that doubles
on itself and winds artfully amid a maze of lazy rills and brimming
ditches, covered with an unbroken surface of duckweed. The name of
Mildenhall suggests mildew, and although there be nothing in its origin
to indicate anything of the kind, it is indeed set down in a fine damp
situation, on the very edge of the sodden Fens. Mildenhall’s
characteristic trees are the black poplar and the willow, both
water-loving species. Mildenhall suffices to itself, and it is well it
can so compass a full-orbed life, for if this solitary little town were
dependent in any way upon outside existence for protection against
_ennui_, that would be a maimed existence its burgesses would lead. It
stands at the end of a branch line from Cambridge, and on the Lark
Navigation, and has an air of enduring the railway as an interloping
enterprise, while regarding the canal with a benevolent interest. The
busy flour-mills, the gas-works, and the oil-cake stores that cluster
round the canal wharf support this self-sufficing aspect, and the grave
majesty of the old houses in and near the market place, overlooked by
the noble tower of the cathedral-like parish church, supply the last
touch of satisfied independence. But the town takes a kindly interest in
the chance stranger whom good roads and a bicycle do occasionally bring,
in summer-time; and the artist who sits down on the pavement to sketch
the picturesque grouping of the curious old wooden market cross with the
church tower is sure of the courteous offer of a chair from some polite
shopkeeper.
Hard by is the old manor-house. The church, whose great size has already
been remarked, has the tombs of Norths and Bunburys, who have lived and
died there, with that of a fifteenth-century Lord Mayor of London, a
native of Barton Mills, and named from his birthplace, Henry de Barton,
who was the first to see that London was lighted by night.
Mildenhall church is kindred in spirit with the town. One of the finest
Perpendicular buildings in the county, it has a metropolitan aspect, an
air of over-lordship above the villages far and near that is not a
little striking.
[Illustration: MILDENHALL.]
Even here, at Mildenhall, the shadow of the second Boer War has rested,
for a brass tablet on a wall in the church records simply how natives of
the town laid down their lives for England on that alien soil. Thus on
the bones of the English is the Empire reared, and there be few among
the rural churches of this mother-land of ours that do not record some
such sacrifice, for the army of 250,000 men came from the highways and
byways, and few were the families, rich or poor, that had not the
keenest personal interest in the struggle which newspaper lies and
contradictions, and the grossest political jealousies conspired to
render inglorious in report and speech. Those soldiers were, perhaps,
commonplace enough in their everyday lives, but these simple records,
and the many other such throughout the country, elevate them to the
status of martyrs in a cause, beside whom the little peddlers in votes
seem mean and sordid indeed. But we must return to Barton and make for
Thetford, and since we cannot reform the politicians, may e’en leave
them alone
XXXII
THE sinuous road out of Barton Mills is one of the chief beauty-spots of
all these one hundred and thirty miles to Cromer. Nowhere is a more
curving and undecided main road than this, at the crossing of the little
river Lark, and few have so great a charm. Here, close by that old
roadside inn, the “Bull,” stand the flour-mills that continue to give a
meaning to the old place-name, and past them flows that fishful river,
along a reach densely shaded by poplars and willows. Graceful
plantations line the road and stud the marshy ground that presently
gives place again to mile upon mile of heath.
Over seven miles of heather and bracken lead to Elveden, said by Fox,
more than a century ago, to have been the best-stocked sporting estate,
for its size, in the kingdom. The wayfarer of the present day can
honestly re-echo the opinion of that statesman, for the pheasants swarm.
Even upon the highway, as the cyclist passes, instead of scurrying away,
they come out of the hedges and stare after him, impudently, as though
they alone have a right here. To the pedestrian they are rather
embarrassing, following to heel like dogs. They are so used to being
handled that they take every man-person for a keeper or
food-distributer, and with the inducement of a pocketful of maize,
judiciously distributed, they could no doubt be induced to follow one
into Thetford.
Those whose business it is to look after the game at Elveden—or “Elden,”
as the country people call it—are legion. Elveden is, in fact,
maintained by Lord Iveagh, just as it has always been, but now still
more strictly, for sport, and here along the white ribbon of the road,
or across the purple heaths, you may, in due season, see the “sportsmen”
and the beaters setting forth in the morning to slay by wholesale, or in
the evening returning, their lust for death and destruction sated for
the day. It is undoubtedly a large question, but to the present writer
it seems that the real sporting era was when the gunner spent a long day
tramping the coverts, the turnip-fields, or the stubble, and sought his
quarry with the hunter’s skill, rather than waiting for it to be driven
to him.
[Illustration: BARTON MILLS.]
Elveden has seen a good many changes in the last hundred years or so.
Admiral Viscount Keppel, who purchased the property in 1768, and died in
1786, left it to the fourth Earl of Albemarle, and here was born in
1799, in the old Hall, rebuilt, or rather, remodelled, in 1870, that
tough one of that tough and long-lived race of Keppels, George Thomas,
the sixth Earl, who as a boy of sixteen fought at Waterloo, and
succeeding his elder brother in the title in 1851, died in 1891. It was
somewhere about the year of Waterloo that difficulties of sorts befell
the Keppels, and Elveden then passed out of their hands into those of
the Newtons, an undistinguished family, who held the estate until 1863,
when it was purchased by the Maharajah Duleep Singh, and thus became
associated with the romance of that dispossessed ruler of Lahore.
Imperial interests in India, and in greater measure the fears of the
statesmen of that time, dealt harshly with that Oriental prince;
excluded him from his ancestral honours, and made him a life-long
stranger to his own people, and to the land of his birth. In exchange
for his native rule and glorious sunshine, he was to have an annuity of
“not less than £40,000 and not more than £50,000,” for “himself, his
family, and dependents,” with domicile in our isle of fogs and mists.
How ill the Government kept faith with him may be judged when it is
stated that he never at any time received more than £25,000 a year.
Strange to say, he took kindly to our ways, and settled down here as a
country gentleman. With the general reduction of rents, and the heavy
outlays he had made upon the reconstruction of Elveden Hall, he
eventually found it necessary to have recourse to the India Office, for
immediate financial aid. As a result, his income was reduced to an
annual £12,000.
The Maharajah had early embraced Christianity, and in 1864, in Egypt,
had married Miss Bamba Müller. In 1882, after he had vainly striven to
bring the Government to a performance of the original compact, and had
fruitlessly petitioned Parliament to that end, he sailed for India, but
was refused permission to enter. At Aden, from political motives, and
also, we may suppose, from indignation at the breach of faith he had
experienced, he abjured Christianity, and flung himself into the arms of
Russia. Thence he retired to Paris. A few years later he re-embraced the
Christian religion, and made his peace personally with Queen Victoria,
at Grasse. He died at Paris, in 1893, in his fifty-sixth year.
With that event, the Elveden estate again changed hands, being purchased
by Lord Iveagh, then newly raised to the Peerage. He had been
disappointed in his earlier purchase of Savernake from the Marquis of
Ailesbury, the Courts setting the bargain aside and refusing sanction
for the property being alienated from the Bruce family.
[Illustration: ELVEDEN.]
Since then, the village of Elveden has been transformed. It is still a
village, placed like a settlement in a wild, uncultivated country, with
the primeval heath visible from every cottage door, but the black flint
cottages have given place everywhere to red brick, and it now lives in
the memory of the passing motorist fleeting the lonely road at an
illegal thirty miles an hour as a red streak on a brown plain of
moorland. The red brick is, no doubt, very smart, but it is distinctly
an alien material here, and altogether out of place. It would, indeed,
in any earlier period than this of cheap transport facilities, have been
impossible, for red bricks are not a local manufacture and the cost of
bringing them here would in other times have been altogether
prohibitive. The vanished black-flint buildings, constructed of the
material found locally, were instinct with the spirit of the place, and
looked as though they had grown out of the soil, and were a part of the
land.
To a less hurried passenger than a motorist there is much food for
reflection in the changed aspect of the village; but reflection is all
that will be fed here, for to find a wayside hostelry is a difficult
quest, and the traveller who comes, hungry and thirsty, perhaps wet
through, from the many miles of wild, inhospitable heath on either side,
is like to go on until he reaches Barton Mills or Thetford before he
obtains shelter and refreshment, unless, indeed, he would be content
with an obscure beerhouse off the road. To suggest a bottle of
Guinness’s genuine Dublin brew may, for all one knows, be _petit
treason_ at Elveden, and the villagers must, possibly, see to it, lest
they grow stout—and allusive!
It is a handsome, although inhospitable village that has grown up at the
bidding of the master of millions whose coroneted “I” stares you out of
countenance from every red-brick cottage. Architectural taste is evident
in the schools, the beautiful estate office, the village hall, the post
office, and the village in general. All around, on the warrens, the
waterless hills are dotted with wells, and the whole estate provided
with the most exquisitely steam-rolled roads, and cared for as no one
ever could have cared for it before. Yet it is not unpleasing to one who
has experienced the courtesy of the Maharajah in years bygone to find
that the memory of the “Black Prince,” as he was here affectionately
known, is still cherished at Elveden, even though it is now owned by
the, as far as mere lucre goes, more princely prince of black beer.
Elveden Park forms one side of the village street, and through the trees
the golden glitter of pinnacles can be seen, leading the stranger to
think his eyes have rested on the Hall. But those are merely the
stables, where the horses are housed in a manner that might almost have
contented Heliogabalus. The stables at Sandringham are not so lavish,
but then, of course, they belong merely to the King. The Hall itself is
not externally so flamboyant, and is in essentials the staid Italian
Renaissance of some years ago. But once within, it is a gorgeous display
of wealth rejoicing in itself and attempting feats resembling the
painting of the lily and the gilding of refined gold. You pass from an
oak-panelled entrance hall, with doors barbarically sheathed in
glittering patterned metal and flanked by passages whose coved ceilings
are covered with Renaissance designs in raised plaster, into a domed
central hall of pure white marble, designed in the Indian style and most
elaborately carved and fretted in that extravagant Oriental taste. It is
like coming from the Hotel Metropole into a first-class mausoleum, and
when you enter you cannot help thinking you are dead and buried and laid
to rest in an inferior copy of the Taj Mahal. This extravagant feature,
newly completed, is said to have cost £10,000.
As one leaves the Park the lions of Lahore are noticed, still decorating
the stone gateways. Near by is Elveden church, the only remaining
vestige of the old village: a humble little place, with mural monument
and medallion portrait of Admiral Keppel and an east window to the
memory of the Maharajah Duleep Singh and Bamba, his wife.
So we will leave Elveden, cut adrift, save in this sole respect, from
old times. Useless to look for the “Hare and Hounds” posting-house,
where the post-chaises changed horses, and equally fruitless to seek the
old toll-house, the scene on October 25th, 1825, of an accident to the
“Magnet” coach, on its way from London to Norwich, when the leaders
shied as they were passing through the gate and the coach was upset,
with the result that an outside passenger, a widow from Hargham, was
killed.
XXXIII
THE 3¾ miles onwards to Thetford were known and dreaded in the old days
as “Thetford Heath.” Elveden Gap, passed on the way, is the name of a
clump of firs, marking where the boundaries of estates and parishes run.
Beyond it stretches the lonely heath. Pollard, in his terrifying print
of the “Norwich Mail in a Thunderstorm,” makes this the scene of a very
dramatic picture, with the lightning horribly forky and the rain very
slanty and penetrating. Thetford Heath was an ill place on such an
occasion; but the elements were not the chiefest of its dangers, which
in any year from mediæval times until modern were rather to be expected
at the hands of man.
[Illustration: ELVEDEN GAP.]
There still exists in the old church of St. George Colegate, Norwich, a
tragical epitaph to the memory of a traveller slain on these wild wastes
in those dangerous times. It is engraved on a ledger-stone forming a
part of the flooring at the west end of the nave, and is hidden from the
gaze of the casual visitor only by the matting. A skull and cross-bones
are placed above the inscription, which runs:—
“Here Lyeth y^e Body of Mr. Bryant Lewis, who
was Barbarously Murdered upon y^e Heath,
near Thetford, Sep. y^e 13th, 1698.
Fifteen wide wounds this stone veils from thine eyes,
But Reader, Hark! their voice doth pierce the skyes.
Vengeance! cried Abel’s blood, ’gainst cursed Cain,
But better things spake CHRIST when He was Slayn
Both, both, cries Lewis ’gainst his bar’brous foe,
Blood, Lord, for Blood, but save his soul from woe.
THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER (Exodus xx. 13).
Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
For in y^e image of God made He man (Genesis ix. 6).”
The register of St. George’s, which records the burial of the
unfortunate Bryant Lewis on September 19th, six days following the
murder, is at curious variance with the epitaph, for it makes the date
1697.
We do not hear anything of the circumstances under which Bryant Lewis
was killed, nor does it appear that his murderers were ever caught.
Thetford must have been a welcome sight to the timorous travellers of
old, and surely no place of pilgrimage was hailed with more delight than
that with which they first glimpsed the tower of St. Mary’s and the
outlying houses of the Suffolk suburb of the town.