Lesser Ouse, which divide the county of Suffolk and the land of the
Norfolk Dumplings. The flint-towered church that thus heralds the town
is the oldest of the remaining three, and was severely handled in
Cromwellian times, when it was converted for a while into a stable. It
had, until 1850, a thatched roof. Here the road from Bury St. Edmunds
falls in, a junction of roads still known by some of the older
generation as “Cockpit Corner,” a name that marks the site of the
cockpit which stood here in those brutal days of yore and moved a
letter-writer of 1785 to say, “I believe most of the young Thetford
people are dissipated, simple, ignorant young men (what a nice
‘derangement of epitaphs’!) that mind nothing but the low and insipid
sport of cock-fighting.” From this point, into the town across the Town
Bridge, the road narrows amazingly, and, arrived at the “Bell” inn, and
St. Peter’s Church, it wears almost the appearance of a lane
XXXIV
THE situation of Thetford and the history of the roads by which it is
approached make an interesting subject of enquiry. All ancient accounts
of Thetford agree in describing it as from the earliest times a place of
great importance—a strongly fortified post and a seat of government.
The first mention of Thetford takes us back to the year 575, when Uffa,
first King of the East Angles, made this his capital city, and called it
“Theotford,” by that name describing the situation of the place, lying
secure against approach from the Suffolk side, behind a network of
difficult fords across the marshes and many branches of the confluent
rivers we now call the Ouse and Thet. Others had been here before him,
but all that earlier story of Thetford is purely speculative. That it
had an earlier history and was from very remote times a fortified post,
the great prehistoric earthworks which guard the passage of the river
amply prove. By whom, or by what race they were reared, who shall tell?
But certainly Uffa and his Saxons found them here. The Romans, still
earlier, had been astonished by them, but made haste to adapt the huge
mounds to their own purposes. For the Romans were everywhere, and to
acknowledge their presence here it is not necessary to identify this as
the _Sitomagus_ of the “Itineraries.” Camden considered Thetford to be
identical with that Roman station, and thought the name derived from
_Sit_ or _Thet_, and _magus_, a great city; and many have been content
to follow him, “the common sun whereat our modern writers have all
lighted their little torches.” Thus Bishop Nicholson, strong in satire
upon Camden’s copyists; but more modern writers have made flambeaux of
their very own, and by the light of them have groped about to some sort
of inconclusive opinion that _Sitomagus_ was probably at Dunwich, on the
Suffolk coast.
Thetford was at the very centre of the East Anglian realm, and therefore
a place of great security. Thus it was that the Royal Mint was early
established here and so continued, through the history of this one of
the seven kingdoms.
For two hundred and sixty-three years East Anglia and England in general
remained under Saxon rule. The kinglets were always at war with one
another, and their boundaries, and even the numbers of their kingdoms,
were ever changing, but it was not until 838 that an alien danger
threatened them. It was in this year that the Danes first invaded the
country, and were defeated at Rushford Heath. With that decisive result
the land was left in peace for twenty-seven years.
In the meanwhile that most famous and most legendary East Anglian
Christian king, the sainted Edmund, had succeeded to the throne, and had
reigned ten years when the terrible invasion of 866 befell. Then was
fought the battle of Snarehill, which lasted for several days, and whose
bloody memories were so vivid, even a hundred and fifty-four years
later, that the Abbot of St. Edmundsbury founded a monastery on the
spot, in honour of the thousands who fell on both sides. This, the
Battle Abbey of its era, was in Henry VIII.’s time granted to Sir
Richard Fulmerstone. The “Place” farm, an ecclesiastical building now
used as a barn, and a training-stable for horses now occupy the site of
what is locally called “The Nunnery.”
The Battle of Snarehill was not conclusive. The invading Danes certainly
occupied the town for the winter, but they would appear to have
afterwards retired, and it was not until 870 that the crowning disaster
came. In the spring of that year the Danes again returned, destroyed
Thetford, and utterly defeated the army Edmund had drawn from every nook
and corner of his kingdom. Edmund himself did not fall in that
tremendous slaughter, but met with his martyrdom, as we have already
seen, at Hoxne, some twenty miles away.
All over England the Danish invasion then spread. In Wessex even, where
the reign of Alfred then began, that heroic king was for a time
overborne by the heathen hordes; while Eastern England, with but few
intervals, was for many years subject to fire and sword. Only the
payment of a heavy tribute kept these pirates away. When at length a
number of Danish settlements had been made and the two races at last had
begun to forget the bygone years, the mad folly of that King of All
England, whom men called Ethelred “the Unready,” devised in 1002, on
November 14th, the feast of St. Brice, a general massacre of those
Danish settlers. It was no worse measure than, time and again, those
Northern foes had meted out to the Saxon people; but the folly was
criminal, if the deed was not, for from those shores of Denmark came
avenging hosts with Sweyn at their head. It was almost two years before
he came, but with his advent the old miseries began to be re-enacted.
Norwich was burnt, and Thetford felt the full force of his onslaught.
But for the military genius of one Ulfcytel, himself the owner of a
Danish name, but acting as the bulwark of East Anglia, Sweyn would at
once have marched through the land. Ulfcytel, however, drove him back to
his ships, and it was not until 1010 that he returned, and, defeating
the still active Ulfcytel at the battle of Ringmere, burnt Thetford
again to the ground. Elsewhere in England Sweyn was even more
successful, and penetrating to Winchester and Bath, was proclaimed King
in London in 1013. That same year he died and was succeeded by that
Canute, who in the moral story of the flattering courtiers and the
advancing tide has been made hateful in every elementary schoolroom. It
was in battle with Canute in 1016, at Ashingdon, in South Essex, the
valiant Ulfcytel at last fell.
With Canute’s accession, however, the early blood-dyed history of
Thetford reached its last page, and when the Saxon line of kings was
restored with Edward the Confessor in 1041, the oft-burned town numbered
944 burgesses.
[Illustration: GATEWAY, THETFORD PRIORY.]
From that time, with but one short period in the reign of William the
Conqueror, the town rapidly grew in importance. It became the site of
the East Anglian bishopric in 1075, when the see was removed from
Elmham, and although that much-moved Bishop’s chair was again removed,
to Norwich, nineteen years later, Thetford suffered little from that
circumstance. If it ceased to be technically a city, it was a great town
and a very stronghold of the Church. Although it has now but three
churches, it owned twenty, so late as the time of Edward III., and the
ruins of many of them can still be traced, proving the truth of those
old records that tell of them. Seven were on the Suffolk side. These we
might call suburban, but of them only that of St. Mary-the-Less is now
extant. Its big sister, St. Mary-the-Great, stood adjoining the Grammar
School, but only fragmentary walls remain. This was converted by Bishop
Arfast into the cathedral of those nineteen years. Elsewhere in and
around the town the shattered and shapeless walls of old-time
ecclesiastical buildings abound, and the ploughman who drives his furrow
across fields that were once streets, turns up mediæval tiles with the
lack of interest that comes of constant use, or fervently damns the
occasional abbot’s sarcophagus that dints his ploughshare.
With the Crusades Thetford declined in population and fortune. Why, we
do not know. It is not reasonable to suppose that the people went off in
a body to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.
But the monasteries remained in being. Like the clinging ivy that
flourishes even when the tree it has ruined is dead, they continued
until Henry swept them away. They were four: that monastery, founded to
commemorate the battle of Snarehill, which afterwards became a
Benedictine nunnery; the Abbey, or Priory, founded by Roger Bigod in
1104; the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre, Earl Warren’s foundation of
five years later; and the Friary of St. Augustine, established by John
o’ Gaunt in 1387. Besides these were numerous hospitals, together with
the Manor House and the King’s Palace, used by sovereigns from Henry I.
to James I.
The only approach to Thetford in very distant times was doubtless by the
Icknield Way, and for many centuries later that ancient track continued
to be the chief road into and through the town on to Larlingford, where
the existing highway from Thetford to Norwich falls into it. If we take
up the line of the Icknield Way where, on page 189, we left it, we shall
find it pointing straight through the Gasworks to the three bridges that
now span the parallel stream of the Thet, a nameless intermediate
rivulet, and the Little Ouse. These are (doubtless from the immediate
neighbourhood of what is even now called “the Nunnery”) known as the
“Nuns’ Bridges,” but one of them was formerly known as “Incelland”
Bridge, and in that name we may perhaps find a distorted echo of
“Icknield.”
It is a pretty spot, and made romantic by its ancient story. You find it
by tacking round the Gasworks, for which we need not claim any romance,
and thence by a group of melancholy pines, where—at a point which was a
junction of roads before this short two hundred yards’ stretch of the
Way was stopped up—a mound marks the site of “Chunk Harvey’s Grave.” One
cannot look upon this more or less tragical spot with reverence, for
Harvey’s grotesque name and the discarded boots and battered tin cans of
the town that decorate his legendary resting-place forbid. “Legendary”
is written advisedly, for not the most diligent of delvers into the past
shall succeed in reducing Chunk Harvey to cold dates and exact records.
But his story has a distinctly moral tone, and may be recounted as a
warning to any would-be pirates now trembling on the brink of a lawless
life under the Jolly Roger. According, then, to the received legend,
Chunk Harvey was a sea-rover who, by strict attention to his piratical
profession and by a prudent and saving disposition, managed early in
life to secure a large fortune. He retired to Thetford, and might have
become a churchwarden and died in every circumstance of comfortable
piety had it not been for a former acquaintance who had cut many a
throat with him in bygone days on the high seas, but now, reduced to his
last stiver, came tramping through Thetford. By a cursed (or fortunate)
chance, just according to how your sympathies lie, this broken-down
bandit met his old comrade, and in the result blackmailed him long and
successfully until his victim could endure it no more. When at last he
refused to be bled any longer, the man betrayed him, and—to cut the
story short—Chunk Harvey was convicted and hanged. He was buried here,
amid the rejoicings of a virtuous populace, who—if you like to share the
children’s belief—were granted a Bank holiday and wound up the
festivities with a display of fireworks.
[Illustration: THE “NUNS’ BRIDGES” ON THE ICKNIELD WAY, THETFORD.]
A little stretch of common land leads on to the “Nuns’ Bridges.”
Thetford town is hidden as you approach, by the dense trees of the
Spring Walk and by others on either side, growing luxuriant by favour of
the water, and thus forming the strongest and the most grateful of
contrasts with Thetford’s situation amid wild heaths, bare and treeless,
or planted only with the melancholy pine, and dotted here and there with
gnarled hawthorns.
When this, now a side route into Thetford, was supplemented by that of
the present main road over the “St. Christopher’s,” or Town Bridge, must
be a matter of conjecture. We must not suppose, because that bridge was
built only in 1697, there was no bridge or road up to the river and into
the town before that time. Morden’s map of Norfolk in 1695 does not mark
one; but it is incredible that there should have been no direct
communication across a not very broad stream between these Suffolk
suburbs and the chief part of the town. On the other hand, the fact that
a ducking-stool was erected on the “Nuns’ Bridge” in 1578 would seem to
prove that this was certainly then the chief approach, for the practice
was to make the head-over-ears ducking of the scolds and shrews as
public an exhibition of their shame as possible.
XXXV
THE most prominent hostelry at Thetford in coaching days was the “Bell,”
and it still occupies that geographical pre-eminence, even though its
commercial importance has decayed. The “Bell,” in fact, has never
recovered from the blow dealt it in 1846, when the coaches ceased to
run, and overhangs the narrow street, its great courtyard a world too
large for the diminished traffic.
Lord Albemarle has a good deal to say of the “Bell” in his book of
reminiscences. As a young man, travelling about 1810 between London and
Elveden Hall, then in the possession of his family, he sometimes, in
common with the sporting youngsters of that age, had the opportunity of
driving the Mail for a stage or two. It was not always, indeed, an
opportunity desired by the passenger who shared the box-seat with the
coachman, for those who sought that glorious elevation, paying rather
heavily for the privilege in the form of a tip to the yard-porter who
reserved the seat and in a series of drinks to the successive Jehus who
drove, were, much more often than is generally supposed, quite content
to let the coachman do the driving. Comparatively few were ever to be
found skilled in the difficult art of guiding four horses, and not every
box-seat passenger was eager to “take the ribbons.” The coachmen, on any
quiet stretch of road, were generally more keen to make the offer of
“taking ’em for a bit” than their passengers to accept, for those
professional occupants of the box were, in the well-known etiquette of
coaching, always sure of half a sovereign as a tip from the sportsman
who “took ’em,” and when, from sheer timidity, their offer was not
accepted, they were indignant, especially if some one who _would_ have
“taken ’em,” and tipped accordingly, was elsewhere on the coach. Under
such harrowing circumstances a coachman generally felt himself to be
defrauded. “What are you ’ere for, then?” asked such an one of his
box-seat passenger who had declined the honour and glory—and the danger;
and when, after a halt for refreshment, the passengers resumed their
places, this one who would not have distinction thrust upon him found
his place taken by a dashing fellow who, a few miles down the road,
landed them all into a ditch and most of them into hospital.
[Illustration: THE “BELL INN,” THETFORD, AND ST. PETER’S CHURCH.]
But to return to the youthful Keppel. “At the ‘Bell,’” he says, “I used
to sit down to a most sumptuous breakfast of eggs, buttered toast, fried
ham, etc., and all for love, and not money. I was a prime favourite with
the landlady, Betty Radcliffe, so much so that for the many years that,
as man and boy, I frequented her hostelry, she would never accept a
sixpence from me. Betty wore a high cap, like that in which Mrs. Gamp is
seen in Dickens’s novel, and a flaxen wig which she appeared to have
outgrown, for it ill-concealed her grey hairs. Being the sole
proprietress of post-horses into Norfolk, she assumed an independent
demeanour and language, to which every one was compelled to submit.”
Betty Radcliffe is still a Thetford legend, and the tale is yet told
how, when the Duke of York was paying for his post-horses, on one of his
visits to a neighbouring squire, she jingled the coins in her hand with
a humorous air of satisfaction, and said, “I may as well take a little
of your money, for I have been paying your father’s taxes for many a
long day.”
The church of St. Peter, adjoining the “Bell,” is locally known as the
“Black Church,” from the more than usually dark colour of the flints of
which its tower is built. It is not so old a tower as it looks, for it
was built so lately as 1789, in imitation of the then almost forgotten
Gothic style. The imitation, making due allowances, is not so bad. The
footpath here is so narrow that a projecting buttress has been cut back
to give room to pass.
The older one grows, and the nearer to occupancy of the churchyard, the
less does one care to frequent such places; and besides, those of
Thetford are of no great interest. But the historian’s duty compels a
search for the farcical rhymed epitaph stated, in many collections, to
be “at Thetford.” It is—but read it for yourself:—
My grandfather was buried here,
My cousin Jane, and two uncles dear;
My father perished with a mortification in his thighs,
My sister dropped down dead in the Minories.
But the reason why I am here, according to my thinking,
Is owing to my good living and hard drinking;
Therefore, good Christians, if you’d wish to live long,
Beware of drinking brandy, gin, or anything strong.
Many a pilgrim in search of such mortuary extravagances has sought this;
all of them sent on a fool’s errand by the original wag who invented it,
and by the copyists of other people’s collections who have performed the
easy task of copying without verifying. Thetfordians disclaim it
altogether.
Every traveller come to Thetford has dwelt at length upon its mazy
streets, and how infallibly those who are not Thetford born lose
themselves in them and walk in circles. It is indeed difficult to find
one’s way about Thetford. A far-off echo of the desperate old times,
sounding across the void of a thousand years, was the old name of what
is now called Guildhall Street. Until fifty years ago it was still, as
it had always been, “Heathenman Street,” a title alluding to the march
of the pagan Danes; and I would the name were restored, for romance is
evident in that old name.
It is down Guildhall Street, behind the recently rebuilt Guildhall, that
the old Friends’ Meeting House stands, in Cage Lane. That name marks
where the old lock-up, or “cage,” once stood. The Meeting House, now
threatened with destruction, was in use by the Quaker community of the
town until about 1865. It was built in 1696, seven years after the time
of persecution had been brought to a close by the Toleration Act of
1689. Those were humble days, and, newly freed from persecution and
imprisonment for the mere act of meeting together, those early
Dissenters were probably thankful enough even for this little cottage of
one room. It is built of a mixture of flint, brick, and chalk, and
heavily thatched. In common with almost every other building of any
considerable age in Thetford, there may be found among those varied
materials large pieces of freestone, the spoils of the ancient religious
houses of the town. The Quakers are a hard-headed, rather than a
sentimental, body; else they would not have abandoned this historic
cottage, which has since 1865 been used successively by the Plymouth
Brethren and the Salvation Army, and is now ruinous.
Past the Guildhall, a street leads directly to what was the gaol in
those days, still regretted in the town, when the Assizes were held
alternately at Thetford and Norwich. The gaol is now merely a
police-station. Thetford lost its Assizes in 1833, its Parliamentary
representation in 1868, and all its old fairs have decayed; so that the
only excitement in the lives of the worthy burgesses is when an
itinerant circus pitches its tents in the neighbourhood. The road-life
between Thetford and Norwich had its own picturesqueness before 1833,
for prisoners were conveyed in waggons to be tried here or at Norwich,
and Attleborough March Fair, from being generally held while the Assizes
were in progress, was popularly known as “Rogues’ Fair.” There were
sometimes in those days “maiden” Assizes at Thetford, but the term had a
different signification from that it now bears. In those times a
“maiden” Assize was one of those exceptional occasions when no one was
condemned to death. Things were not at the last so bad as in earlier
times, when the Manor Courts, the Ecclesiastical Courts, and the Mayor’s
Court were competent to inflict the death penalty, but it was still a
barbaric age in 1824, when twenty-six prisoners were condemned to death,
some for sheep-stealing.
Thetford Gaol still remains, an appropriately grim building of black
flint, with representations of fetters over the doors, together with the
town arms and an inscription stating that “This Gaol was enlarg’d in the
Year 1816.” Opposite is a great brewery of old standing. It would be
pleasing to the teetotal interest to establish a connection between the
building of the brewery and the enlarging of the gaol as cause and
effect, but it cannot be done.
This is the quaintest corner of old Thetford, and abounds with inns.
Among these is the sign of the “Good Woman.” It is at the rear of the
row of houses of which the “Good Woman” forms part that the most
interesting thing in Thetford is to be seen. This is the giant
earthwork, to which a passing reference has already been made, the
earthwork known as “Castle Mound,” or, in a manner better befitting the
dignity of it, “Castle Hill.” It is not the tallest of the mysterious
tumps England has to show, for it is but 100 feet in height, and its
bigger brother, “Silbury Hill,” on the Bath Road, is 70 feet taller, but
it rises more abruptly from the level, and looks all its height, while
Silbury Hill is spread over a wider base and ascends more gently. No one
knows what race of men raised this tremendous heap of chalk. They heaped
it up, undoubtedly, for purposes of defence, and as the pilgrim
painfully climbs its steep and now grassy sides, principally on hands
and knees, he is fain to acknowledge that an ancient enemy seeking to
storm this stronghold would have had an almost impossible task.
The Castle Hill stands on a considerable space, its circumference
measuring 984 feet. Three deep grassy trenches and two steep ramparts
guard the foot of it, and the defenders at the summit found shelter in
the deep cup-like depression, resembling the crater of a volcano. A
bygone generation planted a clump of trees in this hollow, and they have
now grown to noble and striking proportions. There was never at any time
any building on this defensible earthwork, which was itself the
“Castle.”
The place stands in a beautiful spot on the eastern outskirts of the
town, in the midst of noble trees and luxuriant turf. Unlike the great
majority of the prehistoric earthworks noticed in guide-books and in the
learned papers of archæological societies, it is generally interesting,
and appeals to the eyes even of those uninstructed in archæology.
[Illustration: CASTLE HILL, THETFORD, IN 1848.
_From an old print._]
[Illustration: CASTLE HILL, THETFORD.]
That the Castle Hill was built for defence there can be no doubt, and
its height, its steep sides, and the defensive earthworks that describe
a rude half-circle around it give the measure of the fear its unknown
builders had of their unknown enemy. They who reared these works were
terribly scared. That enemy was evidently expected to come out of the
south, for the great mound stands on the northern side of the rivers and
marshes which then spread over all the neighbouring flat meadows; and
the horns of the semicircular ditches and ramparts at that time touched
those kindly frontier waters. The Icknield Way, already traced to the
“Nuns’ Bridges,” came across that watery waste and pursued its course
into Norfolk under the shoulder of the mysterious mound.
XXXVI