heights of Cringleford and Eaton; but here, in East Anglia, we call
those hills which we should disregard in the precipitous West. The
valley broadens out on the right, where it meets that of the Tase, and
from that confluence the combined streams, under the name of the Yare,
flow onward through a widening valley that eventually loses itself in
flat marshlands, to Yarmouth.
This bridge that spans the Yare, and is continued as a causeway over the
flat, often flooded, water-meadows, although of a considerable age, is
but the successor of a very ancient structure, once in charge of a
succession of hermits, licensed by the Priors of Norwich to reside here
and to solicit alms of travellers crossing by it. A history of these
worthies would be a very desirable thing, but it is not likely ever to
be produced. They have mostly gone their ways unchronicled; all, indeed,
save Roger de Brugge, whose memory only lives because he was so
robustious and insistent a person. We have no means of learning whence
Roger came, or what his real name was, “de Brugge” being merely “of the
bridge.” He flourished about 1390, and was a very troublesome person,
who does by no means realise for us the usual picture of a hermit.
Instead of living in a damp cell, unwashed and uncombed, in the
verminous condition proper to all hermits of right feeling, he appears
to have obtained a commercially good thing in his licensed wardenship of
the bridge, and to have employed toll-collectors of his own, who were
not content with soliciting alms, but demanded money at the point of the
cudgel of all those whom it seemed safe to threaten in that way.
Unfortunately for one of these eremitical under-strappers who did their
soliciting with the persuasive advocacy of a big stick, he tried the
method with a man who proved to be a soldier, unused to taking treatment
of that kind quietly, and who punched him in the eye, stole his
money-pouch, and dropped him into the river, where he was drowned, much
to the consternation of his companion, who, early in the proceedings,
had beaten a retreat to Eaton, whence he saw all these developments.
Roger de Brugge, who was an absentee hermit, and lived amid much evil
company at Norwich, was deprived of his post, which was given to
another, and, let us hope, more worthy person.
The name of Cringleford has puzzled many. Blomefield thought it meant
“Shingleford”; some moderns think it derives from Kringel, said to be
Norse for a curve or loop, and point to the many-looped windings of the
Yare; but we can never know.
The meaning of Eaton is, however, self-evident. The place is first
cousin to all the other Eatons and Etons (sometimes, I am ashamed to
say, they are spelled Heaton, which is of course a h’error) in this
country: places that obtained their name, as this does, from being
situated beside streams. Eatown, the “water town,” is the signification
of the name, and Eaton here dabbles its feet in the overflow of the
Yare, just as Eton next Windsor does in that of the Thames, or the
Cheshire Eaton in the overrunnings of the Dee.
[Illustration: EATON “RED LION.”]
Here, when once up the rise through Eaton village street, past the
Dutch-like “Red Lion,” the old highway to all intents and purposes ends,
and it is only a suburban two miles, travelled by electric trams, by
which you enter the City of Norwich. It is a noble road, bordered by
young avenues and lined with private residences, but still suburban, and
out of key with old road romance. Along it we come to the junction of
roads opposite the fine Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, where the road
from London, through Colchester and Ipswich, falls in, and both go
forward together down St. Stephen’s Street into the City.
XLVII
DISTINGUISHED travellers of old generally made their entrance here,
through the long-vanished St. Stephen’s Gate in the equally vanished
walls. This way came, in 1600, on his public entry, that dancing Will
Kemp, of whom we have already heard much. On the completion of his ninth
day’s jigging, from Hingham to Barford Bridge and Norwich, he ended at
St. Giles’s Gate, and thence, to avoid the crowd, rode into the City.
Three days later, having duly advertised his intentions, he danced in
through St. Stephen’s Gate. The City Waits assembled to do him honour,
huge crowds pressed forward to see him, the Mayor entertained this
caperer and gave him £5 in Elizabethan angels, and altogether he had a
truly phenomenal reception.
The delightful old City of Norwich was ever hearty and hospitable, and,
although much else be changed, it is so still. No merely ecclesiastic
settlement, the cold glories of its Cathedral are but one phase of
Norwich. Prosperous and self-sufficing in the best sense; its citizens
public-spirited, its situation beautiful, its highways imposing and
byways quaint and curious, Norwich stands by itself, in its likeness to
no other town or city in England. If one must seek a parallel, it is to
Exeter one must look, for there is much in common between the two. Both
are, very distinctly, the capitals of their respective provinces;
Norwich still metropolitan to East Anglia, and Exeter to the West of
England. In both, too, the streets are winding and without plan,
affording facilities, unparalleled elsewhere, of immediately losing your
way.
Unhappily—it is purely an antiquarian criticism—the prosperity and
business energy of Norwich have swept away many landmarks of absorbing
interest to the student of the roads, and much havoc has been wrought
with the old coaching-inns. While many of the more obscure old taverns
remain, the great coaching houses, standing on prominent sites and
occupying much valuable ground, have, for the most part, been destroyed.
Only “Rampant Horse Street” now remains to tell of the inn once bearing
that name. The “Maid’s Head,” a splendid specimen of an old hostelry,
remains, it is true, in Tombland, but where is the “King’s Head,” to
which the Newmarket, Thetford, and Norwich Mail once came, and where the
“Coach Office, Lobster Lane,” whence the Cromer Coach, the “Unicorn,” by
North Walsham, set out twice a day? What the “Unicorn” was like we may
see from Pollard’s picture. It was something between an omnibus and a
hearse, and was drawn by a “unicorn” team—_i.e._, three horses; whence
the name of the coach.
[Illustration: THE “UNICORN,” NORWICH AND CROMER COACH.
_From a print after J. Pollard, 1830._]
St. Peter’s, the narrow thoroughfare adjoining Rampant Horse Street,
behind the loop road, and overshadowed by the great bulk of St. Peter
Mancroft, was a great rendezvous for the coaching and carrying
interests, and signs of that old-time feature in its history still
remain in the numerous inns and houses that once were inns, now
converted to other uses. Of these the most important by far was the
“White Swan,” sometimes called, for convenience, merely the “Swan.” Many
years have passed since it retired from public life, and it is now
occupied as a wholesale provision store, for which the spacious old
coach-yard and its great ranges of buildings seem to render it
peculiarly suitable. Many might pass the house unnoticed, for its
red-brick front is severely plain. The old coach-archway, however, is
sufficient to attract the attention of the observant, for although the
fine late seventeenth-century decorative carvings of festooned fruit and
flowers on its framing are blunted by time and many successive coats of
paint, their excellence still proclaims itself to the critical eye. A
cursory glance shows that the house was re-fronted with brick in the
Georgian period, and that beneath that commonplace skin an ancient
building, in parts dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, still exists. A little fragment peeps interestingly from one
corner of the red brick; it is an ancient corner-post, ornamented with
the carving of an armed man. Not even those Georgian builders had the
heart to destroy it.
[Illustration: ST. PETER MANCROFT, AND YARD OF THE “WHITE SWAN.”]
Among coaches frequenting the “White Swan” were the “Light Post Coach,”
the “Expedition,” and its successor, the “Magnet,” referred to in the
earlier pages of this book. But long before any coaches ran the “White
Swan” was an important house; the foremost in Norwich. Traces of that
ancient import are not far to seek, and are stimulating to the
imagination, even if facts be wanting. Directly opposite the entrance,
across the very narrow street, is the great church of St. Peter
Mancroft, and in line with it are the ancient Gothic vaulted cellars of
the old inn. Antiquaries, on their periodical visits to Norwich, descend
these depths, and, standing amid the butter-tubs and the sacks of nuts
and miscellaneous groceries, speculate darkly on possible secret
communications between the mediæval inn and the church, with little
enlightenment ever forthcoming.
A ramble over the premises discloses nothing more of really ancient
date, but does reveal something unexpected, in the splendid long room on
the first floor of the buildings stretching down the yard. It dates from
about 1760, and is, architecturally speaking, a noble room, of moulded
ceiling and panelled plaster walls, with a raised platform at one end,
surmounted by a Chippendale shield with coat-of-arms greatly resembling
that of Caius College. It is now degraded to the position of a
stock-room, piled with hams, sacks, and biscuit-boxes, but keeps its
distinction throughout adversity, and is a reminder of times when the
“White Swan” was the centre of Norwich social life; when balls and
assemblies were held beneath its roof, and the original “Theatre Royal,”
nursery of much dramatic talent, was established here. At the “White
Swan” those pioneer players, the “Norwich Company of Comedians, servants
to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk,” as they humbly styled themselves,
began their performance. At that time the play began at 7 p.m., but the
doors were opened at 5. An hour earlier than that, the servants of the
playgoers were sent to keep the seats, which were not highly expensive.
The highest price was half a crown for a box; and the pit, then
fashionable, cost only two shillings. When such prices ruled, the
actor’s lot was not exactly luxurious, and stage-furnishing was quite a
negligible quantity. But dramatic art was never higher than then
XLVIII
IT has been already remarked how winding are the ways of Norwich, and it
is indeed only with difficulty those once in it can find their way out.
If it were required to turn a very pretty compliment to Norwich, here we
have the most obvious foundation for one. But we must on to the coast,
and take the City only incidentally, as its mazy streets are threaded on
the way to the Aylsham road. It is by no means slighting Norwich so to
do, for the City has been described in a short impressionistic sketch at
the close of that companion volume to this, the “Norwich Road.”
From St. Peter’s, across St. Giles’ Street, by the back of the
Guildhall, to Charing Cross is the most interesting way. This Charing
Cross does not in the least resemble the place of the same name in
London, and obtains its title from quite a different source. No “_chère
reine_” gave this name, which is a corruption of “Sherers’ Cross,” a
wayside cross so styled from the sheermen or cloth-cutters who once
inhabited this quarter. It was demolished in 1732.
[Illustration: GATEWAY, STRANGERS’ HALL.]
Here, fronting on the narrow street, is the so-called “Strangers’ Hall,”
one of the most deeply interesting places in Norwich; what, in fact, is
nothing less than a well-preserved specimen of a mediæval merchant’s
house. We do not, in this England of ours, lack churches and cathedrals,
palaces, castles, and mansions of the great, to show us how we
worshipped, and how kings and nobles housed, in days of old; but we are
very sadly lacking in remains of the houses built for, and occupied by,
the wealthy traders of anything from five to two centuries ago. We know
comparatively little of the way in which the Mayors of our great towns
lived, and thus the accidental preservation of this house, built by a
mayor of Norwich, and inhabited by and added to by a long succession of
such worthies, is particularly instructive. The oldest portion is the
crypt, used anciently as cellarage and store-room, built probably by
Roger Herdegrey, who was a Member of Parliament in 1358, and Bailiff of
Norwich two years later. After passing through many hands, the property
came, about 1490, to Thomas Cawse, mercer, twice Mayor, and twice the
chosen representative of the City in the Council of the State. From him
it came to Nicholas Sotherton, mercer, who seems to have rebuilt the
greater portion. In 1610 his family sold it. Already the house had
acquired the name of the “Strangers’ Hall,” for Sotherton, under the
patronage of the Duke of Norfolk, had warmly welcomed the Flemings,
refugees from Holland under the Spanish domination, and had given those
strangers the use of his house. Although they did not reside here, and
probably did not use it for any great length of time as the central
meeting-place of their community, it has, singularly enough, retained
the name under many changes. Francis Cock, grocer, and Mayor in 1627,
resided here, and built the great staircase in the Hall, together with
the large oak-framed oriel window; and another Mayor, Sir Joseph Paine,
followed him, and made alterations for his own comfort and dignity in
1659. He was the last of that long line, and when he died, in 1668, the
history of the old place becomes obscure. Early in the nineteenth
century, however, we obtain a glimpse of it as the Judges’ Lodgings, but
thenceforward the old relic fell upon neglect, and would have been
recklessly destroyed for rebuilding had not an enthusiastic and
public-spirited citizen purchased it in 1899. It still bears the
misleading name of the “Strangers’ Hall,” and no one sufficiently
impresses the visitors who pay their sixpence a head for being shown
over it that the building is a rare and splendid specimen of the
domestic surroundings of the wealthy and cultured traders who made
Norwich prosperous in old days.
[Illustration: THE STRANGERS’ HALL.]
Sotherton lies, with many another worthy citizen, in St. John’s church,
Maddermarket, or other one of the many churches—“steeple-houses” the
Quakers would call them—set so thickly about Norwich. Where Gibson lies,
who in those old days set up the neighbouring water-fountain, I know
not; but surely his spirit must be unquiet since the ornamental portion
of it has been built into the wall of Bullard’s brewery, and the water
of which he was so proud cut off. No longer can one drink here, but
Gibson’s very excusable little crow over his work may yet be read:—
This water here cavght
In sorte as yowe see
From a spring is brovghte,
Thereskore foot and three
Gibson hath it sovghte
From Saynt Lawrens wel
And his charg this wrowghte
Who now here doe dwel
Thy ease was his coste not smal
Vouchsafid wel of those
Which thankful be his worke to see
And there can be no foes.
Near by, on our way to Cromer, is a building notable above all others in
the varied culture of the good City of Norwich. This is St. Andrew’s
Hall, where the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festivals are
held. The long, flint-built structure, of late Gothic design, wears a
strikingly ecclesiastical appearance, as it has every right to do, for
it really _is_ a church, and was built by the Dominicans, or Black
Friars, as the church of their monastery. The City certainly acquired it
at a bargain-price when that establishment was dissolved, under Henry
VIII., but extraordinary bargains of a precisely similar nature were on
offer throughout the kingdom at that time, and prices ruled so low that
in retired situations, where the huge abbeys and priory buildings were
far away from any possible civic use, they were given to the nearest
local magnate, to do with as he would. King Henry took £80 for this
particular example, and Norwich certainly had full value for its money.
The building then was made to serve the purpose of the City Grammar
School, and so continued for twelve years, until Edward VI., in 1548,
granted the ancient Charnel House Chapel—then usually called the
Carnary—in the Cathedral Close, for the School. A striking change then
came over the Dominicans’ old church, for the citizens, who had found
the Guildhall too cramped, put this fine roomy building, under the name
of the New Hall, to use as an assize-court, an exchange, a place of
assembly, a hall for City feasts, or as anything that the public needs
of the moment dictated. On Sundays the large alien Dutch population were
permitted the use of the nave for their services, and the Flemish
refugees had the choir. Perhaps the grandest of all the sumptuous feasts
and receptions given here was that at which Charles II. and his Court
were entertained, in 1671. It was on this occasion that he knighted Sir
Thomas Browne.
[Illustration: CARICATURE IN STONE, ST. ANDREW’S HALL.]
The eastern part of the building, anciently the choir, is still divided
from the nave, and is known as Blackfriars Hall. It is in the nave, or
“St. Andrew’s Hall,” that the Musical Festivals have long been held.
Portraits of Norfolk and Norwich worthies, pictures of historical
events, and naval trophies decorate the walls.
The good folk of Norwich are rightly proud of their noble Hall, and the
ways of its custodians have always been keenly followed. Its restoration
and re-arrangement in 1863 were the cause of a good deal of local
searchings of heart and contention, and a survival of that war of
parties may still be seen in the grotesque carvings that form stops to
the hood-mould of a door on the south side of the Hall. They are carved
in the true mediæval style, one representing a pig blowing a horn; the
other showing a pig with a very self-satisfied expression of countenance
playing an organ, while a number of grinning demons blow the bellows.
These were the satirical efforts of the victorious party who thus sealed
their victory; the point of these satires in stone being that the head
of the defeated faction was a Mr. Bacon—Richard Noverre Bacon, editor
and proprietor of the _Norwich Mercury_, born 1798, died 1884.
[Illustration: CARICATURE IN STONE, ST. ANDREW’S HALL.]
XLIX
[Illustration: TOMBLAND ALLEY.]
BY Prince’s Street we come to Tombland, the open space by the Cathedral,
where St. George’s Church and Tombland Alley make so picturesque a
group; and thence across the Wensum at Fye Bridge and along Magdalen
Street. Bearing to the left, by Botolph Street, and noticing the gable
end of the “King’s Arms” inn, with its ornamental tie-rods “I.C. 1646,”
on the gable-end, we finally pass along St. Augustine Street, to come to
the long suburban rise of the Aylsham Road, through Upper Hellesdon.
Here, just beyond the “One Mile” inn, is an ancient cross, recently
restored, looking like a survival of some historic event, but a near
glance reveals that it only marks the boundary of the City in this
direction.
Horsham St. Faith’s village—generally called in these parts merely
“St. Faith’s,” or “St. Fay”—is just over the hill-top, and is the
usual small Norfolk village with a large church. It stands aloof from
the centre of the place, up a by-lane, and opposite a row of six old
seventeenth-century red-brick cottages, known as “Church Row,” all
very rural. A last touch in that sort is the sight of a bird’s nest
built into the delicately undercut stonework of the upper part of a
tabernacle on the south parvise.
A general air of dilapidation and put-off-all-the-repairs-to-next-year
kind of aspect belongs to the central spot of this village—the hub of
St. Fay’s. A very large, very rush-overgrown, and excessively duckweedy
pond occupies the best part of the road, slyly lying in wait to receive
into its green and rank bosom the village tippler or the incautious
midnight roysterer from Norwich; nay, even the unwary cyclist.
This out-at-elbows air reflects ill upon the condition of the horsehair
weaving, still the staple trade of the village. It is “not what it was,”
say the natives, and although some thirty to forty weavers are still
employed, the trade is a decaying one. Historically, St. Faith’s is
interesting, for it is bound up with the story of Katharine Howard, who
was daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and
fifth wife of that professional widower, Henry VIII., who wrought so
greatly in all manner of affairs of Church and State during his
thirty-eight years’ reign that we meet him at almost every turn.
It seems that while still a child, not yet thirteen years of age, in the
house of her father’s step-mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, at St.
Faith’s, she was debauched by one Henry Manox, perhaps a music-master,
described as “a scoundrelly player on the virginals,” and that she had
relations of a more than questionable nature with one Francis Derham.
Loud as are the moralists in denouncing the levity of our own times, we
have but to read the intimate accounts of the household in whose vile
society this forward girl was brought up, to be convinced that we have
advanced since then. The fury of Henry knew no bounds when these
disclosures were made, eighteen months after his wedding with her, and
she paid the penalty with her life, in the Tower, in the twentieth year
of her age.
[Illustration: “ST. FAY’S.”]
Of Newton St. Faith, scarce more than a mile down the road, there is
little to be said, but its few houses are succeeded by the loveliest two
miles of highway in Norfolk. Enclosed fields, trim with their neat
hedges and long lines of wheat and barley, or well-ordered in their
infinite perspectives of winter furrows, give place suddenly to a land
rich in the varied tints of bracken and heather, and wooded, now in
dense clumps, or again in isolated trees. These are the fairy-like woods
of Stratton Strawless. The peculiar beauty of these ferny glades is
chiefly due to the large numbers of silver birch—that airy and graceful
“lady of the forest”—intermingled with the dark pines, the grey beeches,
and the sturdy oaks that all go to make up the ranks of the Stratton
woods, whose picturesque _abandon_ is greatly added to by their being
open to the road. For this is common land, and before Robert Marsham
planted it in 1797, was a stretch of heath, barren of aught save heather
and bracken. It is, in fact, in the existence of this ancient heath that
Blomefield, the historian of Norfolk, rightly or wrongly, found the
origin of the “Strawless” in the place-name, for he points out that no
corn could have been grown here. His finding is probably wrong, for Mr.
Walter Rye, eminent in Norfolk archæology, has found it was “Stratton
Streles” in the time of Henry III., and that the name almost certainly
is Danish, deriving from the village of Stroeden Strelev in Denmark.
We need not hasten to acclaim the Marsham who created these woods as a
public benefactor, because he did not aim at anything of the kind, and
merely wished to improve the outlook from his hideous house, now
confronted with these glades, instead of by a monotonous flat. There is
no denying the ugliness of that square brick mansion. A benefactor would
have hidden it from the public gaze, but it is, instead, rather
ostentatiously on view from the road, across a wide, uninterrupted
stretch of grassy meadow. The lodges are far more endurable than the
mansion, and although built in the same dull brick, in a manner fondly
thought classic, the brilliant coat of whitewash given them makes their
clumsiness almost picturesque.
[Illustration: STRATTON STRAWLESS LODGES.]
The village lies nearly a mile away from the road, past the reedy lakes
that follow the course of a little stream. In the church may yet be seen
the monuments of Marshams, from 1250 onwards; together with a window
filled with probably the very worst stained glass on earth.