Eighth Harry’s time, and is now a mass of ruins. The existing noble
church was even in early days parochial and built on to the west end of
the monastic church, whose only important surviving fragment is the
great eastern tower, whose two octagonal upper stages, with shattered
windows, look so weird and unaccountable beside the even greater western
tower. The “two towers to one church” have indeed a gloomy and heavy
nightmare-like effect in certain lights, and it was not without a grim
sense of impressiveness that the revengeful Government of 1549, at the
close of the peasants’ rebellion, hanged one of its leaders, William
Kett, higher than Haman, from the summit of the western tower.
[Illustration: WYMONDHAM CHURCH.]
The nave of the great church, incomparably the finest example of Norman
architecture in Norfolk, after the nave of Norwich Cathedral, has a
Perpendicular clerestory, is flanked by Perpendicular aisles, and roofed
with a noble open-timbered roof of East Anglian character, decorated
with the usual serried ranks of angels with outstretched wings.
But it is not of architecture, even though ranking with the noblest,
that we must talk here, but rather of that strenuous flesh and blood
which, although long resolved into dust, gives to Wymondham the interest
of living, breathing—aye, and hating and fighting—men, who fought and
failed and died the death for their fellow-men in this fair land of East
Anglia, more than three hundred and fifty years ago.
That rebellion for which William Kett suffered here, and his brother
Robert from the battlements of Norwich Castle, was the very natural
revolt of the Norfolk peasantry from the rapacity and selfishness of the
landowning class, who sought to enclose the wide-spreading commons where
the peasants’ cattle and geese freely pastured. There were other rural
grievances, but of a minor kind. No one of them was new when the trouble
broke out, but they had at length, after the smouldering discontent of
years past, come to such a pass that but very slight excuse was needed
to set Norfolk in a blaze. Already, nine years earlier, a certain John
Walker, of Griston, had said, “It would be a good thing if there were
only as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls,” and this
remarkable expression of opinion was rendered the more impressive by the
favour it found among the country folk, who passed it from mouth to
mouth with every sign of approval. Some rhymester, too, had been at
work, and produced this prophetic verse:—
The country gnoffes, Hob, Dick, and Hick,
With clubs and clouted shoon,
Shall fill the vale of Dussin’s Dale
With slaughtered bodies soon.
Dussin’s Dale was, and is, outside Norwich, and the picture of a rural
revenge was thus presented to the rustics, who had long suffered from
manorial encroachments.
The initial incidents of the outbreak happened upon this very road from
Wymondham into Norwich, when the new fences erected by a local landowner
upon Attleborough Common were demolished on June 20th, 1549. A fortnight
later new hedges at Morley and Hethersett were destroyed. The
destruction of those at Hethersett brought about the rising. It seems
that the land-grabber of that place was one Serjeant Flowerdew, between
whom and the Ketts of Wymondham there was a violent enmity. The Ketts
were substantial folks, engaged in tanning. It cannot be said that they
were blameless, for they, too, had enclosed; but had set the crowd on to
destroy Flowerdew’s landmarks without considering their own case. The
Serjeant naturally retorted by instigating the rustics in turn to level
and tear into fragments the hedges and palings of the Ketts, who in the
meanwhile seemed to have found salvation, for they not only permitted
this work of vengeance on their own illegal enclosures, but heartily
joined in it themselves. When this work was completed, and having thus
proved their sincerity, the two brothers headed the mob back to
Hethersett and destroyed what remained of Flowerdew’s enclosures;
marching on to Cringleford and meeting the High Sheriff, who had heard
of these riotous proceedings, and now admonished the people to return
home. So far, however, from doing so, they put the Sheriff to flight,
and, boldly setting forth upon an armed movement for reform, laid waste
an enclosure beside the approach to Norwich, and, in defiance of the
Mayor, marched round the city, climbed to the high ground of Hellesdon,
and, reaching Mousehold Heath, pitched their camp there
XLIV
SOME years earlier a short-lived but significant movement had been set
afoot by one self-styled “John Amend-all,” whose name is sufficient
earnest of there being wrongs grievously calling for justice to be done.
It had then been said that three or four stout fellows, riding overnight
through the towns of Norfolk, with bell-ringing and exhortations to
rise, would by morning have collected 10,000 men, and it was now
perceived that this had been no idle talk; for 16,000 peasants joined
the camp on Mousehold Heath, whence the Ketts and the leading spirits
despatched a very moderate and fair-minded petition to the King for
redress of their grievances.
Norwich, as the place of residence of many landowners and, as a
manufacturing centre, quite out of sympathy with the country people, was
meanwhile practically invested by the rebels, who from the commanding
heights of Mousehold intercepted everything going in or coming out.
There for more than a fortnight they lay, the summer weather in alliance
with them, and with raiding parties looting cattle and provisions from
all quarters for the feeding of this rustic host, which by this time had
increased to 20,000.
Never did rebellion begin in more orderly fashion, for the Ketts, with
their chaplain, Conyers, held open-air court on the Heath, and conducted
things decently and in order. Food they were obliged to seize, but no
violence and no robbery were permitted, and had the Government returned
an answer showing any disposition to relieve the peasants from the
landlords’ exactions and aggressions, all would have been well. But
vague promises, coupled with an offer of pardon for all concerned if
they would first disperse and return to their homes, was all the
satisfaction they received; and Robert Kett very rightly retorted to the
herald who brought this message that “Kings were wont to pardon wicked
persons, not innocent and just men.”
Norwich then prepared itself for attack. The Bishop’s Bridge over the
Wensum, and the gate that then straddled across it, were put in a
condition for defence against the expected descent from Mousehold, and
pieces of cannon were mounted on the quays. The next morning the assault
was delivered, and Kett’s men, although many were slain by arrow-flights
from the defenders, swarmed across the river and seizing the guns, which
had refused to shoot, were soon masters of the city. The Mayor, Mr.
Alderman Codd, and the principal citizens were made prisoners and
marched up to “Kett’s Castle” on Mousehold, where they doubtless
expected a violent death, Robert Kett sending down a message that any
one coming to Mousehold should have a Codd’s head for a penny. But that
was only his humour, with nothing tragical at the back of it, for the
worst that befell those prisoners was the being made ridiculous in a
mock-court held on the Heath.
Norwich, in despair, welcomed the tardy arrival of some 2,500 men,
chiefly Italian mercenaries, under the command of the Marquis of
Northampton, but they made little impression, and one of the aliens,
being captured, was stripped of his armour and hanged. On August 1st
there was renewed fighting in the streets, and Lord Sheffield was
killed, at a spot still marked by an inscribed stone. This first force
sent against the rebels was by this time defeated with heavy loss, and
Norwich remained in the hands of the victorious peasants until August
23rd, when a second expedition, cautiously feeling its way through
disaffected East Anglia, appeared at the entrance of the city by St.
Stephen’s Gate.
It was not yet too late for the rebels to lay down their poor arms of
bows and arrows, scythes, pikes, and bill-hooks, but, fired with the
successful bloodshed that had given them possession of the city, they
rejected all offers made by the Earl of Warwick, commanding the strong
force that now sought entrance. Three days’ fighting, in the city and on
the slopes of Mousehold, followed, with varying fortunes, and had it not
been for the reinforcements of 1,100 German mercenaries, the rebellion
might again have proved successful. As it was, however, their arrival
turned the scale. It was at this juncture that, driven from the city,
the peasants, remembering the old prophetic verse, moved to the hollow
of Dussin’s Dale on Mousehold, where they were to “fill the vale with
slaughtered bodies.” Here, they thought, if there was any truth in
prophecy, they would achieve the final victory. It never occurred to
them that there were two ways of reading that verse, and thus it was
here they made their last stand and were cut down in hundreds, grimly
fulfilling its words, if not its spirit. Three thousand five hundred of
these poor countrymen were slain in this final struggle, and perhaps an
equal number had fallen in the almost two months’ fighting and
skirmishing of this fatal rising. Thus it ended, but vengeance had yet
to take toll of their number. The chiefs of the movement had held their
court on Mousehold, under an oak they called the Oak of Reformation, and
it was from its branches that nine of them were now hanged. Robert Kett
was hanged higher still, three months later, when, after having been
sent to London and flung into the Tower, he was brought back and
suspended from a gallows on the roof of Norwich Castle. Forty-five minor
leaders were hanged, drawn, and quartered in Norwich Market place, and
some 250 of the others were plainly hanged, without these fiendish
extras. The others, a disheartened mob of 12,000, having learned an
unforgettable lesson, were bidden go home, for even the bloodthirsty
rage of the victors might well be aghast at the prospect of meting out a
like penalty to such a number; and moreover, counsels of prudence and
expediency had something to say. “What shall we do, then?” asked the
victorious Earl of Warwick, himself a Norfolk landowner, anxious how his
lands should be kept tilled if they thus made away with the tillers of
them, “What shall we do, then? Hold the plough ourselves, play the
carters, and labour the ground with our own hands?” Good Heavens
forefend such disaster!
Thus ended the great agrarian uprising of the mid-sixteenth century, and
no man can with certainty say that it had any result. It sprang out of
the void, and into nothingness it returned. But none the less it behoves
us to honour those simple souls who laid down their lives for their
immemorial rights in their common and free pasturages, who saw with a
manly indignation the preserving of fish in the rivers, and that
stopping up of public ways which even in the fierce publicity of our own
times requires all the vigilance of a public society to keep in check.
Wymondham or Norwich should in public memorial honour the men who by
their action said that these things should not be, if they could help,
and in laying down their lives for the cause were as truly martyrs as
any of those who died for conscience’ sake in religion
XLV
THERE are modern epitaphs to Ketts in Wymondham churchyard, whose
fir-grown space admirably sets off and embellishes the gaunt towers. It
is in the narrow lane leading to the church that the most picturesque
inn of the town is to be found, in the sign of the “Green Dragon,” a
characteristic old English title and a very fine specimen of old English
woodwork.
Most of the ancient inns of Wymondham have either disappeared, or have
been rebuilt or otherwise modernised, but it was once, in common with
most other mediæval towns clustered around great priories, a town of
much good cheer and inordinate drinking. Piety and early purl went hand
in hand in those days, and often staggered off to bed together in a very
muzzy condition, or fell into the gutter, wholly incapable. Those were
the days when the ascetic early use of the religious was forgotten, and
before the Puritan rule of life had come into existence; and men were
not less devout because they were drunken.
[Illustration: WYMONDHAM.]
But the Priory guest-houses are all gone, and even the very pretty brew
of “Weston’s Nog,” once famous in all this countryside, is no longer
proclaimed over the old “Leather Bottle” inn. The sign of the bottle
that once dangled over the door, and was inscribed with the name of that
potent tipple, has itself disappeared.
The chief secular feature of the town is the Market House, an ancient
building of timber frame and plaster filling, raised high above the
level of the street, and entered by a lofty wooden stair. It has ceased
to serve any market purpose, and now plays the part of a reading-room;
and a very much larger room it is found, on inspection, to be than would
from a casual glance at its exterior be supposed.
Among the decorative carving that covers the old woodwork of the Market
House may be seen rough representations of spoons, skewers, tops, and
spindles; allusions to the ancient staple trade of the town in articles
of wooden turnery. It is a trade that has long wholly died out, but
another old local industry—that of horsehair weaving—is still carried
on. This trade was established somewhere about a century ago, and was
once a great deal more important than now. One can readily imagine that
Wymondham must have been particularly busy in the dreadful era of
horsehair upholstery of sofas and chairs. The horsehaired chair or sofa
belonged to the period of the cut-glass lustres that used to serve as
“chimney ornaments,” and to the era of the “ornaments for yer
fire-stoves” once sold in summer-time by itinerant vendors. Horsehair
upholstery was very chilly, very sombre and severe, and afforded a
particularly slippery and uncomfortable seat. One, happily, rarely sees
those tomb-like sofas now, and the chairs are not often met; but when
horsehair coverings disappeared from the household they found a lasting
favour with railway companies, and still penitentially furnish many a
waiting-room.
Thus the horsehair weavers at Wymondham even now find in their
occupation a living wage. It is a cottage industry, and the old treadle
looms may even yet be seen in work by any one curious enough to halt
awhile and make due quest. They are cumbersome affairs of heavy wooden
framing, rattle and clatter like the pots and pans of a travelling
tinker, and give the minimum of output to the maximum of labour, the
weavers having to perform the treadling, and at the same time to feed
the shuttle with horsehair at every revolution of the machine. The local
masters and the hair-cloth dealers of Norwich supply the weavers with
the raw materials—so many pounds of hair—and it is brought back as a
manufactured article, weighed, and paid for at the rate of 1¼_d._ per
yard. The fabric is black and white when it leaves the looms, and is
dyed in Norwich.
An ancient house, with handsome timbered front, well cared for, and now
in private occupation, although said once to have been an inn, is one of
the last objects to catch the eye in leaving the town. It bears the
inscription, in bold raised letters: “_Nec mihi glis servus, nec hospes
hirudo_,” which may be Englished, “I have neither the fat dormouse as a
servant, nor the bloodsucker as a guest”: a bold and cheering statement
for such travellers of old as could read Latin, and who might feel
inclined to test the smartness of the service and the freedom of the
bedrooms from fleas and bugs
XLVI
HETHERSETT, whose name means “Heather-heath,” and is pronounced
“Hathersett” in the local speech, is heralded along the open road by a
solitary roadside inn with the sign of the “Old Oak.” No ancient oak is
within sight, but the accustomed pilgrim of the roads has not for years
been exploring the highways and byways without having long ago arrived
at the conclusion that there is a substantial reason for most things,
even the names of inns, and so from that sign deduces an historic oak
somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood. And surely enough, a short
distance beyond the inn, on the left-hand side of the road, opposite the
milestone that marks the twenty-second mile from Thetford and the
seventh from Norwich, there stands the gnarled and weatherworn trunk of
what the country folk call “Kett’s Oak,” one of the several ancient
trees that own the name, and traditionally said to have been one of the
meeting-places of Robert Kett and his followers, and one of the scenes
of his rough-and-ready sylvan court. But although oaks grow slowly, and
although the tradition is an old one, handed down, unbroken, through the
centuries, many will find it difficult to believe that a tree which must
have been a considerable one when Kett and his followers foregathered
here would not now have a greater girth than this.
The village green of Hethersett was enclosed, together with its large
common, in 1800. The parish at that time claimed, and was allowed, a
portion of the vast common of Wymondham, on the curious plea that it had
buried, at the expense of the community, the body of a dead man found
there and refused interment by the parish of Wymondham.
A local jape, which we may be sure will not willingly be let die, makes
a play upon the name of Hethersett. It dates from many years ago, when
the railway through the village to Norwich was new, and the train
service incredibly slow. “Hethersett,” cried the porters at the station
when a train stopped on one of those weariful occasions. “Here they
set,” indignantly rejoined an old woman in one of the third-class
carriages; “yes, and here they’re likely to set!”
The old church of this scattered village looks down upon the road from
its slightly elevated situation at a point where the remains of the old
highway, re-modelled over two hundred years ago, may yet be seen. The
name of “highway” in a descriptive sense is, however, wholly misleading,
for it plunges down between the church and the present road in the
likeness of a broad and deep ditch. This hollow way, with its
overhanging banks, proclaims, more than anything else can do, the
dangers of bygone times, when travellers “travailed,” and a journey was
really and truly what that word etymologically means, an expedition made
by _day_. In these hollow ways lurked of old those outlaws who made even
daylight travel perilous, and we can readily believe it was with dismay
that benighted travellers saw the sun go down, and, simultaneously with
its disappearance below the horizon, felt their courage ooze out at
their boots. Trees and bushes now grow in the hollow where our
forefathers of more than two centuries ago went so fearfully. It is long
since it was used, and all who used it are gone, but Romance lives
there, immortal, with the mud of years and the decaying leaves of autumn
past.
The curious device of a dove and two serpents forms the weather-vane of
Hethersett church. The living is in the gift of Caius College,
Cambridge, and the vane displays the crest of Dr. John Caius, the
re-founder of the College, officially and fully styled “Gonville and
Caius.”
It was in 1561 that the Heralds’ College found a crest for that worthy
man: “a clove argent, bekyd and membred gewles, holding in his beke by
the stalke, flower gentle in proper colour, stalked vert.” “Flower
gentle” is the old heraldic term for the wild amaranth, the “love lies
bleeding” of old-fashioned gardens. In heraldic lore, it signified, as
the grant of arms to Caius states, “immortalite that shall never fade.”
The two serpents denote wisdom and grace.
[Illustration: HETHERSETT VANE.]
An amusing record of old country superstition survives in the
proceedings arising out of the theft of seven cheeses at Hethersett in
1797. A Mrs. Wissen, whose cheeses had mysteriously disappeared, instead
of consulting a magistrate, a lawyer, or even the parish constable, went
to a “cunning woman,” or white witch, who, after much supernatural
mystification, told her that the missing cheeses had been stolen by a
woman with a prominent mark on her nose. Whether the “cunning woman”
really meant any particular person or not does not appear, but there
unfortunately _was_ a woman, a Mrs. Bailey, so nasally decorated, living
hard by. The owner of the cheeses thus spirited away must have known the
owner of that carbuncly, or otherwise, marked organ, but she seems to
have been loth to act upon her information, or to do more than talk
about it. At any rate, we do not hear any more of her; but the affair
was not ended at that, for one Chamberlain, a local shoemaker, coming on
one occasion into violent dispute with the unfortunate Mrs. Bailey,
taxed her with the robbery, saying, “she showed her guilt in her nose
and couldn’t get it off.” The owner of that compromising nose was
naturally indignant, and brought an action for slander against the
shoemaker at the Norwich Assizes; but the jury of country folk, equally
susceptible to superstition, looked with suspicion upon that organ, and
brought in a verdict for the defendant.
From Hethersett we make for Cringleford, and down the winding,
tree-shaded descent past Cringleford church to the level where
Cringleford mill sits serenely beside the weedy river Yare. Not only is
the descent winding, but it is narrow as well. Yet, not so very long
ago, it was narrower still, for a tablet in the wall at the foot of the
hill tells us, rather grandiloquently, that—
THIS ROAD WAS WIDEN’D
13 FEET
ANNO DOMINI 1823.
GARRATT TAYLOR KNOTT,
SURVEYOR.
Prodigious! Careful pacing discovers the fact that it is only
twenty-five feet wide even now. By what careful driving, or special
interposition of Providence, did the Norwich Mail and the stage-coaches
succeed in escaping disaster at this point, when the road measured only
twelve feet in breadth? One accident is, indeed, recorded to have
happened to a coach described as the “Newmarket Mail” in 1846. It was an
overturn at Cringleford Gate, and was not very serious, the only results
being a general distribution of bruises, and a broken arm and
collar-bone.
[Illustration: CRINGLEFORD.]
The situation of Cringleford church is sufficiently pretty, but
examination proves it to be uninteresting, and its churchyard deformed
with huge polished granite memorials to the undistinguished rich. More
satisfaction comes from a lazy sojourn in the sunlight upon the old
bridge that spans the Yare. The subdued rumbling of the mill, the
leisured loading of a waggon with sacks of flour, and the evolutions of
a boat’s crew among the weedy shallows of the Yare, induce a laziness
which the certainty that Norwich is only two miles distant does much to
intensify. It increases one’s sense of the permanency of things to learn
that the floury miller, who comes out and casts an approving eye upon
his fat sacks, is but the latest of a long line of his trade who have
been following the art of grinding corn, by aid of the river Yare, for
nine hundred years. How do we know that? By the evidence of Edward the
Confessor’s Domesday Book, when the mill was stated to be worth 20_s._ a
year, and by the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror, when the annual
value had risen to 40_s._
By all means let the pilgrim linger here, for he shall no sooner have
climbed yonder rise, through that steep and narrow street of Eaton which
is clearly visible from this point, than old Romance flies, ashamed,
before the terminus of the electric tramways which reach out from
Norwich and serve the discreet suburbs that now spread out from the city
and threaten to absorb and transform Eaton itself.