Wrotham, in Norfolk,” who, as “a common and notorious thief and lurker
on the roads, and murderer and slayer,” in unholy alliance with one
“Thomas Tapyrtone, farryer,” had in 1416 plied the trade of highwayman
on Newmarket Heath, and being charged with robbing a Londoner of £12,
was, with his concubine, flung into Newgate, where he died. What became
of his improper companion, or even of Tapperton, is unknown.
But the clergy around Thetford in times of old included several queer
characters. There was Lowe, the curate of Rockland, who on January 12th,
1608, aided by the rector’s wife, murdered the Rev. Mr. James, the
rector of that place. Lowe was hanged at Thetford and Mrs. James burnt
at the stake. Again, in 1635, the rector of Santon Downham was charged
with being “an alehouse haunter and swearer, being distempered with
liquor, keeping malignant company, and calling the Puritans hypocrites.”
[Illustration: THE RUINED CHURCH OF ROUDHAM.]
Nay, not merely the clergy of this district, but of broad Norfolk, might
be made to figure in a _chronique scandaleuse_; and if we had a mind to
it, we could end in modern times with that thirsty clerk who was found,
very drunken, beside the river at Stratton Strawless, declaring he would
drink that up before he left. He must have been like to that wondrous
toper created by one of the loveliest slips ever made by a reporter; who
would strain at a gnat and swallow a canal; which we must allow to be a
more heroic feat than swallowing the more usual camel.
Roudham Heath owes its name to the parish and village of Roudham. The
village stood less than half a mile to the right of the road, but has in
these latter days wholly disappeared, save for fewer than half a dozen
cottages and the gaunt ruins of the great church. Roudham church owes
its ruinated condition to the fire that burnt it in 1736, a disaster
caused by carelessness on the part of plumbers at work on the leads of
the tower. Tradition says funds were collected for the repair of the
building, but the treasurer made off with them. Roudham’s local industry
was that of malting; but the place is a scene of desolation, punctuated
and italicised by the two inhabited cottages that neighbour the ruins
and look on to the almost impassable road. The place has now no church,
no chapel, no charities, no shop, no pub, no anything; but it was
formerly a large and populous village, with two inns—the “Dolphin” and
“Three Hoops.” Foundations of vanished buildings are still visible in
some of the fields
XL
LARLINGFORD, a tiny hamlet on the Thet, in a dip of the road, long since
became a misnamed place, for the ford is replaced by a bridge, itself of
a respectable age. Two miles beyond the old ford there existed in
Ogilby’s time, in the second half of the seventeenth century, a beacon
on the right-hand side of the road, duly pictured on his road map as a
cresset, or fire-basket, mounted on a post and reached by ladders; a
contrivance eloquently witnessing to the wild state of the road in those
times.
[Illustration: LARLINGFORD.]
A little way beyond the site of the old beacon, at Hargham—or, as the
country folk have it, “Harfham”—cross-roads, stands a time-worn stone
shaft, reared on equally shapeless steps. The country folk call this
shattered stump of an ancient wayside cross “Cockcrow Stone.”
It is only when exploring to right and left of the road, along the
byways, that the stranger comes in touch with rural life. The great
highway goes lonely, for mile after mile the country seems deserted;
but, unknown to him who does not turn aside from the beaten track,
villages cluster, like beads upon a string, continuously along the
lesser roads. A little way back from these cross-roads of Hargham comes
Hargham village, and then the village of Wilby, in whose church,
recently restored, has been discovered, under one of the old
floor-boards, a lady’s hawking gauntlet some three centuries old. Framed
and exhibited on the wall, it forms a trivial yet intimate link with the
past.
But to reach the church and village one must pass Wilby Old Hall, a
romantic building of red brick, with corbie-stepped gables, that peer
darkly across the meadows. One cannot resist a closer glance, and the
old place well repays that attention. It is now, and long has been, a
farmhouse, but was built as a mansion somewhere about the beginning of
the seventeenth century. It was when Elizabeth reigned, or in the first
years of James I., that the hall first rose within the girdle of its
moat: that moat only in part now remaining, but still plentifully
stocked with fish. A family of Lovells probably built it; but the place
soon passed from them into the hands of the Wiltons, of whom Robert
Wilton, a Royalist colonel, had it at the time of the Civil War.
Scratched with a diamond on a pane of one of the old casement windows of
an upstairs bedroom is the name “Elizabeth,” with the date 1649. The
surname is included, but is illegible. Perhaps it was this Elizabeth who
inscribed the Latin lines on another window—lines that seemed to hint at
some heavy sorrow. “Alas!” they said, when translated, “Alas! how can I
tune my lute to a broken heart!” We may seek in vain for the personal
sorrow that prompted this record; or was it the outpouring of a loyal
soul? for the year 1649, when the unknown Elizabeth inscribed her name
on the other casement, was the date of the execution of Charles I.
[Illustration: WILBY OLD HALL.]
Those lines, we say, _seemed_ to hint, and they are thus spoken of
because quite recently, when the house was the scene of a sale at
auction and pervaded by strangers, some unknown person prized the
inscribed pane out of its leaden setting and made off with it. Invoking
a murrain on all such, we come into the ancient market-town of
Attleborough.
XLI
ATTLEBOROUGH, quiet enough on all other days of the week, wakes up and
does a considerable business on market-day, although even that weekly
fixture does not command the trade of sixty years ago, before the
railway brought the better marketing of Norwich within reach. But the
trade of the town is still large enough to support several large inns, a
Corn Hall, and a long street of shops. It would be unprofitable to argue
the origin of the “Attle” in the place-name, for it has already been
discussed by Norfolk antiquaries without any light being thrown on it,
excepting the fact that the name is shared with Attlebridge on the river
Wensum, fifteen miles away. Some topographers, mindful of the fact that
the youthful Etheling, or Saxon noble, afterwards Edmund, King of East
Anglia, spent a year at this place in A.D. 856 in pious preparation for
his kingly and saintly career, have thought the place to be named after
him, Etheling-borough; while others are of opinion it enshrines the name
of some otherwise unrecorded chieftain whose stronghold was the burh or
mound that gives the “borough” termination. However that may be,
Attleborough is a place of greater age than might be thought from a
casual glance. Nothing in it, except the great church, is of any high
antiquity, for the College of the Holy Cross, founded by Sir Robert
Mortimer late in the fourteenth century, has disappeared, and the church
itself, a part of that religious establishment, although still very
large, has been reduced from its original size. All this destruction
took place in the time of Henry VIII., when such things were repeated at
every monastery and religious college in the land. At that time the
Mortimers, the ancient lords of the manor, had given place to the
Radcliffes, then newly created Earls of Sussex, and Robert, the first
Earl, who ruled at that period, lent a willing hand. One might almost
suppose him to have been animated by a personal hatred of his forbears,
for it is still recorded in the parish register how he busied himself in
the work of demolition and tore up many “fair marble gravestones of his
ancestors, with monuments of brass upon them, and carried them, with
other fair good pavement, and laid them for floors in his hall, kitchen,
and larder-house.” He died in 1542, and was buried in the City church of
St. Lawrence Pountney, London. In later years the bodies of himself and
his son, with those of their wives, were removed to the church of
Boreham, in Essex. With the grandson, the line of Radcliffes, Earls of
Sussex, ended; and in that church their three marble effigies lie side
by side, on one elaborate altar-tomb, fulfilling the threat, or
prophecy, that in the third generation of that spoiler of the Church his
race should become extinct.
These records of old time explain how it comes that Attleborough church
tower is so oddly situated at the east end of the building. It was once
at the centre of the cruciform church, but the choir being destroyed in
that time of trouble, it is now, of course, immediately over what is now
the chancel.
[Illustration: ATTLEBOROUGH.]
Standing beside the high road, the church is, of course, a very
prominent object. It has a singularly beautiful north porch, containing
an ancient wooden poor’s-box. Under a slab in the nave rests that
Captain John Gibbs of Charles II.’s time, who earned a kind of fame by
his foolhardy feat of driving his chaise and four horses over the
deepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, on Newmarket Heath, for a wager of
£500. The chancel is Norman architecture, the nave and aisles Decorated
and Perpendicular. The pulpit is part of the spoil of one of the City of
London churches, demolished in modern times, and the magnificent
rood-screen is now at the west end, painted white, decorated with the
arms of thirty dioceses, and black-lettered with moral maxims from the
Proverbs, the work of the Rev. John Forbie, vicar in the first half of
the seventeenth century, commentator in the parish registers upon
national and local events, and censor, in the safe seclusion of those
pages, of his parishioners’ characters. His favourable opinion of James
I. is seen in the entry made when that monarch died: “It might be truly
said of him, as in the Gospell, ‘Never man spake as this man speaketh.’”
John Forbie evidently did not dislike Scots pawkiness.
His _post-mortem_, testimonial in 1625 to the landlady of the “Cock”
inn—a hostelry still standing by the roadside at the entrance to the
town—is hearty. “August 11th,” he says, “there was buried Mary, the wife
of Gilbert Greene, hostess of the ‘Cock,’ who knew how to gaine more by
her trade than any other, and a woman free and kind for any one in
sickness ... and for answering (_i.e._, standing godmother) to any one’s
child, and readie to give to any one’s marriage.” Surely, one thinks, it
was ill sojourning at the house of one so accomplished in gaining more
by her trade than any other. Did she accomplish it by overcharging her
guests or diluting their drinks?
He records the death of one John Dowe, “an unprofitable tradesman of
great estate.” This, he says severely, and moved to verse by
indignation, should have been his epitaph:—
Here lyeth the Dowe who ne’er in life did good,
Nor would have done, tho’ longer he had stood.
A wife he had, bothe beautiful and Wise,
But he ne’er would such goodness exercise.
Death was his friend, to bring him to his grave,
For he in Life _Commendam_ none could have.
The situation of Attleborough, isolated on the lonely flats, surrounded
by commons, must have been singularly aloof from the world in days of
old. Up to the very doors of the townsfolk came the dangers of those
far-off times, as we may perceive in the road that now leads to the
railway station, but is marked on old maps as “Thieves’ Lane.” Where
those thieves lurked, there now stand the respectable red-brick villas
of modern times, with a “Peace Monument” of 1856 at the cross-roads,
celebrating the close of the Crimean War, and at one and the same time
recording the victories of that strife and acting as lamp-post, general
gazetteer, and compendious milestone
XLII
To Wymondham is our next stage, a flat six miles.
In midst of this level tract of country, where villages, and houses
even, are few and far between, the wayfarer’s eye lights upon a stone
pillar on the grassy selvedge of the road, a dilapidated object that
looks like a milestone. But as it occurs only three-quarters of a mile
after passing the sixteenth stone from Thetford, it is clearly something
else, and inspection is rewarded by the discovery of this inscription:—
“THIS PILLAR | was erected by | the order of the sessions of the | Peace
of Norfolk | as a gratefull | remembrance of | the Charity of | Sir
Edwin Rich Knt | who freely gave | y^e sume of Two hundred | povnds
towards y^e | repaire of y^e highway betweene Wymondham | and
Attleborough | A.D. 1675.”
Who, then, was this Sir Edwin Rich, whose charity was so necessary to
the upkeep of these six miles of road between Attleborough and
Wymondham? He was a distinguished lawyer, a native of Thetford, born in
1594. His monument in the church of Mulbarton, three miles from
Wymondham, rich in moral reflections, surmounted by a large hour-glass,
and further adorned with eulogistic verse written by himself on himself,
quaintly tells us the circumstances of his birth and breeding:—
Our Lyef is like an Hower Glasse, and our Riches are like Sand
in it, which runs with us but the time of our Continuance here,
and then must be turned up by another.
To speak to God, as if men heard you talk,
To live with men, as if God saw you walk.
When thou art young, to live well thou must strive;
When thou art old, to dye well then contryve;
Thetford gave me breath, and Norwich Breeding,
Trinity College in Cambridge Learning.
Lincoln’s Inne did teach me Law and Equity.
Reports I have made in the Courts of Chancery,
And though I cannot skill in Rhymes, yet know it,
In my Life I was my own Death’s Poet;
For he who leaves his work to other’s Trust
May be deceived when he lies in the Dust.
And, now I have travell’d thro’ all these ways,
Here I conclude the Story of my Days;
And here my Rhymes I end, then ask no more,
Here lies Sir Edwin Rich, who lov’d the poor.
He died in 1675, at the advanced age of eighty-one, and not only left
those £200 towards the repair of the road, but made the curious bequest
to the poor of Thetford of the annual sum of £20, to be distributed for
five hundred years, on every 24th of December, in bread or clothing. Why
he should have limited his charity to a mere five centuries does not
appear, nor does it seem to be clearly understood what is then to become
of the property of Rose Hill Farm, Beccles, whence the income is
derived. Perhaps he thought the end of the world will have come by that
time.
It will be observed that Sir Edwin was a prudent as well as a pious
man. Desiring some recognition of his excellent traits and
achievements, he judged it best to write the epitaph himself: and a
very curious mixture of humility and pride it is. There were
sufficient reasons for his leaving a bequest for the maintenance of
this road, which was in his time an open track, going unfenced the
whole twenty-nine miles between Thetford and Norwich, and plunged in
the fourteen miles between Larlingford and Wymondham into successive
bogs and water-logged flats. If we consult a large map of Norfolk and
scan this district well, it will be seen that on descending from the
uplands of Thetford Heath to the Thet at Larlingford the road
traverses a considerable district, veined like the leaf of a tree with
the aimless wanderings of many streams, and dotted here and there with
such meres, or marshy lakes, as those of Scoulton and Hingham. It is
even now an oozy plain, but was then a veritable piece of fenland,
where the bitterns boomed among the reeds, the corncrakes creaked, the
great horned owls hooted, and the gulls screamed in unstudied
orchestration. The last bittern—“bog-bumpers” the country-folks called
them—long years ago was gathered into the natural history collections
of rare birds, and the bass-viol bellowings of his voice are no longer
heard after sundown. The great horned owls, too, are no more; but
lesser owls still tu-whoo in the woods, and the screaming gulls of
Scoulton yet startle the stranger as they rise, voiceful, in their
many thousands from the mere.
In 1675, when Ogilby’s “Britannia,” that first, and most magnificent,
survey of the roads, was published, this spot was pictured on his
sketch-plan of this road as “Attleburgh Meer,” and was apparently
something between a bog and a lake. It stretched across the road, and to
a considerable distance on either side. This was in the very year of Sir
Edwin Rich’s death, when his bequest became available, and we may
suppose that this hindrance to travellers was abolished very shortly
afterwards and the monument to his liberality erected here, on the very
spot where that slough had once been.
From its old name of the “Portway,” it is obvious this road must have
been in existence in very ancient times, but it is equally obvious it
was early discarded for other routes, for Ogilby is the earliest
map-maker to mark it, and Will Kemp, who seventy-five years earlier
danced his nine days’ dance from London to Norwich, went the less direct
road to Norwich from Thetford by way of Rockland, Hingham, and Barford
Bridge, which he would not have done had the way through Attleborough
and Wymondham been passable.
Kemp, who was a low comedian, and, according to his own showing, spent
his life in “mad Igges and merry iestes,” wagered he would dance down
all the way, and did so perform the distance in nine days jigging, with
intervals for rest and entertainment in between: not a very difficult
performance, even for that time, and even though it was winter when he
did it. He tells us fully in his “Nine Days’ Wonder” how, accompanied by
his tabourer, or drummer, he skipped and joked the miles away, and gives
the route he took, over Bow Bridge to Romford, Ingatestone, Widford,
Braintree, Sudbury, Long Melford, and Clare, to Bury St. Edmunds. It was
on a Saturday, at the close of his sixth day’s dancing, that he entered
Bury, and there, “by reason of the great snow that then fell,” he stayed
until the following Friday morning, February 29th. The distance between
Bury and Thetford is really twelve miles, and so Kemp does not take full
credit for this day’s performance when he tells us that “Dauncing that
tenne mile in three houres,” and leaving Bury shortly after seven in the
morning, he was at Thetford soon after ten o’clock: “So light was my
heeles that I counted the tenne mile no better than a leape.”
Master Kemp jigged to some profitable purpose, for as many people came
to see him as are attracted by the modern pedestrians who wear out so
much shoe-leather on the classic miles of the Brighton Road; nor were
the county magnates above patronising this Merry Andrew. Thus he
reports, “At my entrance into Thetford the people came in great numbers
to see mee, for there were many there, being Size time. The noble
gentleman, Sir Edwin Rich,[1] gaue mee entertainment in such beautiful
and liberal sort, during my continuance there, Satterday & Sunday, that
I want fitte words to express the least part of his worthy vsage of my
unworthines; and to conclude liberally as hee had begun and continued,
at my departure on Munday his worship gaue mee fiue pound.”
On that Monday Kemp danced to Rockland and Hingham. At Rockland his host
at the inn was a boon companion, but stood a little upon his dignity,
for he would not appear until he had shifted from his working day’s
suit; when, valiantly arrayed, he entered, hat in hand, with “Dear
Master Kemp, you are even as welcome as—as—as—” and so stammering until
he found a comparison—“as the Queen’s best greyhound.”
Footnote 1:
Father of the Sir Edwin, the benefactor.
“After this dogged, yet well-meant salutation,” says Kemp, weakly
punning, “the Carrowses were called in, and they drank long and deep.”
So merry did this convivial interlude make him that, although he was an
extravagantly fat man, he insisted upon dancing off with Kemp; but two
fields sufficed him, and then, breathless, bade his visitor “go—go, in
God’s name.” So they parted. From Thetford to Rockland, Kemp had found
“a foul way,” and onwards to Hingham it was not only foul, but deep, and
no one knew the road. There were twenties and forties, nay, sometimes a
hundred people, in groups, come to see him pass, but of the way to
Norwich they could tell him nothing. “One cried, ‘The fayrest way was
thorow their Village,’ another, ‘This is the nearest and fayrest way,
when you have passed but a myle and a half.’ Another sorte crie, ‘Turn
on the left hand,’ some, ‘On the right hand’”; but with it all he did at
last reach Hingham, and on the next day through Barford Bridge reached
Norwich.
It was a roundabout way, and Kemp would have found more publicity had he
gone through the towns of Attleborough and Wymondham. But the people of
Thetford had probably warned him of the bad way through those places.
Sir Edwin Rich’s £200 probably did not suffice for anything beyond
filling up that ambiguous stretch of watery mud called Attleborough
Mere, and thus we find, twenty-one years later, an early Turnpike Act,
the Act of 1696, 7th and 8th of William and Mary, passed for the repair
of the highways between Wymondham and Attleborough. This road is thus
claimed by Norfolk antiquaries as the first turnpike road to be
constructed in the kingdom, but that is a slight error, for the Act was
passed merely for repair, and was antedated by thirty-three years, in
the first of Turnpike Acts, that of 1663, which provided for the repair
and turnpiking of the road from London to Stilton—the “Old North” and
the “Great North” roads of modern parlance. If, however, we somewhat
limit that claim, and declare this to be the first turnpike road in
Norfolk, we shall probably be correct
XLIII
WYMONDHAM town, to which we now come, stands at the junction of many
roads, and was long a centre, both of religious and trade activity.
Strangers, uninstructed in Norfolk usage, pronounce the name as spelled,
and thereby earn the contempt of those to the manner born, who smile
superior; but when the East Anglian travels into Leicestershire and,
arriving at _that_ Wymondham, calls it, after his own use and wont,
“Windham,” he in turn is made to feel outside the pale, for
Leicestershire folk take full value out of every letter in the name of
their Wymondham. The Windham family, of Felbrigg, near Cromer, who
settled at that place in 1461, came from Wymondham and were possibly
descendants of the Saxon Wymund after whom the town was named.
Wymondham is said to stand higher than the surrounding country, but such
a statement, unilluminated by comparison, might be misleading. You do
not climb exhaustedly up into it, nor in leaving drop sheer down into a
corresponding vale: the difference, in fact, between the levels through
which we have come and the heights we now reach is merely one of inches,
and so slight that only a robust faith can believe in it.
Wymondham was the child of that great Benedictine Priory founded here in
1107, by William d’Albini, chief butler to Henry I., whose son became
first Earl of Arundel, and was the hero of that very tall story which
tells how the Queen Dowager of France fell in love with him when he was
in Paris and offered him marriage. He refused that very flattering
offer, because as a matter of fact he was engaged already to another
distinguished lady; no less an one, indeed, than the widow of Henry I.
“Earth hath no rage like love to hatred turned,” says the poet, and the
rage of the rejected Queen was really a right royal, consuming, and
devastating rage, quite worthy of the second line in that poetic
couplet, which says, “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” She planned
a visit to a lion’s den, conveniently handy to the palace, and, when
there, pretended to be frightened of that fierce beast. D’Albini said it
was nothing, only women would be afraid; whereupon she pushed him into
the den and came away, happy in the thought that if she could not have
him, at least the other woman should not. But she mistook, for D’Albini,
wrapping up his hand in his cloak, put his hand in the lion’s mouth
and—pulled its tongue out! He left it at the palace as a present for the
Queen, and then returned to England, became known as William of the
Strong Hand, married the Dowager Queen of England, and lived happy ever
after. That breed of lion must early have become extinct, for the
exploit has never since been repeated.