A PRIORY—GREAT HOUSES AND THE FENS
Troubles over—Road viâ Lower Sheringham, Salthouse, Cley-next-Sea, Blakeney, Stiffkey and Wells-next-Sea—Impressive desolation—Wells—Binham—The building and making of Holkham—"Coke of Norfolk"—The Cokes—Walsingham—Remains and history—The Shrine—Ecclesiastical trickery and temporal gain—Froude quoted—Ceremonial at the shrine—Its miraculous transportation—Houghton—The Walpoles—Sir Robert's pictures—Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill—The mad Lord Orford—His ruling passion—Stag "four-in-hand"—The hounds pursue—Motor-cars many in these parts—Fakenham—Lynn—Glanced at in the rain—The Fens—Kinship of the Useful and the Romantic—The beauty of the Fens actually, and enhanced by imagination—The great reclaimers—Resistance of the old Fenmen—Charles Kingsley quoted—"The inspiration of God"—To Ely and Cambridge—The "Bull" unready—Homeward bound and a narrow escape—Motor-cyclist towing a girl on a bicycle—A wicked practice—Value of care in motorist.
From this point we never looked back, as the saying goes, mechanically. Our troubles were over, and we looked forward to our drive along the north coast of Norfolk with intense eagerness. It is a pleasure in retrospect now, but it was not quite the same sort of pleasure as had been anticipated in previous topographical innocence. The road we had taken designedly on leaving Cromer, when it was determined to follow the sea as closely as possible, left Felbrigg and Sheringham, justly beloved of artists, on one side, passed through Lower Sheringham, Weybourne, Salthouse, Cley-next-Sea, Blakeney, and Stiffkey to Wells-next-Sea. They were not in themselves particularly interesting villages, although I remember that at one of them—I think it was Weybourne—to which the road winds inwards from the sea a little, and where there is some shelter of a hill from the salt winds, there were fine trees about the church, and another little church, on the left-hand side of the road at Blakeney, had one full-sized tower at the west end and another funny little tower at the east end. The prevailing impression left by the whole drive is of impressive desolation. The road, dead flat for the most part, but not half bad in point of surface, runs as close to the sea as its makers dared to lay it. On the right, as one journeys westward, are wide stretches, half sea and half marsh; on the left is a range of low hills. Sometimes it is close at hand, at others it recedes a little, and the space between the road and the hills is again a species of half marsh. The streams, running parallel to the road often, have a look of being partly tidal. The sides of the road are guarded by a fence, the bottom part of which clearly shows that at spring tides, especially if they be aggravated by the wind, the sea must flow over the road also; else whence came that fringe of withered seaweed hanging round the bottom of the fence? Small wonder that the folk in these parts have preserved, in Cley-next-Sea and in Wells-next-Sea, the reminder that the sea is close at hand. It is with them always, threatening them, devouring their land, strewing their flat shore with wreckage. From Cley for some miles to the westward extends a bill of sandy land, not very high, enclosing a long lagoon, apparently very shallow, and the outlook over this lagoon, with the dreary ridge of land broken, if memory serves correctly, only by a lighthouse, is intensely and absolutely characteristic. One feels no sort of desire to see it again unless indeed it is, as by its appearance it well might be, a haunt of wildfowl worth shooting; but at the same time it is good to have seen it once in order to know what this scenery of the most remote and northerly district of Norfolk is like, and to realize the kind of life which its scanty population must lead. They live face to face with Nature in her sourest mood, Nature never majestic, except when the storms come from the northward, smiling but a hard smile when the sun shines. In fact, this is a stretch of land, when it is worthy of the name, dismal as the mind of man can conceive.
When you get to Wells-next-Sea, where the houses are plain but of some age, and there is a little port on a winding creek, the aspect of the country changes for the better; or rather it so changed for us, because we determined to give the coast up and to take the inland road viâ Fakenham and Flitcham for King's Lynn. For this route there was ample reason close at hand, in Holkham Hall, Walsingham, Binham Abbey, and Houghton, about all of which a good deal must needs be said with as little tedium, be it hoped, as possible. Before saying it, however, it may be as well to state that in another chapter, and that the last, King's Lynn will be treated as an imaginary centre for many little drives. Imagination, since it has happened to me often to stay at Lynn for many days together and to explore the surrounding country and roads, will not be severely taxed, and the method is adopted for the convenience of writer and reader. In this chapter we have before us the historic houses just named and, after them, the Fens from Lynn to Cambridge. These last we drive through in the early afternoon, taking in the character of them better than on any previous occasion. So the material for this chapter is at least ample. If we added to it Castle Rising, the birthplace of Nelson, the Sandringham country, divine in its kind, Hunstanton, Brancaster, and King's Lynn last of all, the chapter must run to unwieldly and intolerable length.
At Binham we have part of the Benedictine abbey, enveloped in ivy and part still used as a church, a very fine piece of unspoiled Norman work. For Holkham, Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls, by Mr. John Timbs and Mr. Alexander Gunn, is a treasure-house of information. Holkham is Hœligham, "Holy Home," and it was the work of the famous Kent under the direction of Thomas Coke, Lord Leicester, who himself spent many years in Italy studying the works of Palladio. "Coke of Norfolk," as the Lord Leicester of George II's time was called, was emphatically a landowner who deserved to be magnificently housed. An inscription over the entrance to the Great Hall records the fact that "this seat, on an open, barren estate, was planned, planted, built, decorated and inhabited in the middle of the eighteenth century by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester." It naturally does not record the fact that the barren estate, for such it was, is now, mainly by virtue of Coke of Norfolk's sagacity in planting, one of the most nobly timbered to be found anywhere in the kingdom and a perfect paradise for game first and for those who shoot game later. In one respect the great Lord Coke's plans were changed, one might almost write providentially. It had been intended to build the outside of the Hall of Bath stone, but an earth was found in a neighbouring parish which produced bricks of much the same colour as Bath stone, but heavier and closer in texture. That was as it should be. Coke of Norfolk had bought much of the land and, by enclosing, cultivating and planting, had practically made it. It was part of the fitness of things that a "mansion of almost peerless magnificence, as far as its noble proportions, its gorgeous decorations, and its art and literary treasures" were concerned, should be built out of bricks baked out of Norfolk earth. The Hall stands in a spacious but level park, and a glimpse of it may be had from the road. In the middle is a great quadrangular block having, at each angle, a wing, 70 ft. by 60 ft., connected with the central block by a corridor. The wings are: the stranger's wing, the family wing, the chapel wing, and the kitchen wing. The library and the MSS. rooms are in the family wing; the gallery of statues and the state apartments are in the central block. This is 114 ft. by 62 ft., its most noble feature being the hall, suggested to Lord Leicester by Palladio's plan for a Court of Justice, and having a gallery round three sides of it. Of the pictures the most notable are Claude's Apollo and Marsyas in a landscape, and other landscapes, Vandykes, Poussins, a Raphael, and a Rubens. There is also a group of nineteen figures by Michael Angelo. The manuscripts are of great value and curiosity, and contain, amongst other things, the papers of the great Chief Justice. In fact, Holkham is, in itself, for its contents, and for the story of its creation, one of the most wonderful places in this marvellous England of ours; and that is why so much is here written concerning it in a book whose author is not at all eager to pry into the houses of other and greater men.
Who were these Cokes who attained so much magnificence? That is a natural question. The name is first traceable in a deed of 1206, referring to a Coke of Didlington. From him descended Edward Coke, the commentator on Littleton, who was Attorney-General, Speaker of the House of Commons, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1613. Oddly enough, from our modern point of view, it was after this that he was elected member for Buckinghamshire, and drafted and moved the Petition of Rights. No doubt he made a great deal of money himself; he acquired more by marrying first one of the Pastons, and after her death, the Lady Elizabeth Cecil, daughter of the first Earl of Exeter. Such was the real founder of the family, who bought, or acquired by inheritance, much of the existing Holkham estate. His grandson died unmarried, and the estate fell to a kinsman, Henry Coke, of Thorington. From him sprung Sir Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester, whose son died in 1739, when the peerage became extinct. But the estate went to Sir Thomas Coke's nephew, Wenham Roberts, who naturally took the name of Coke, and also naturally called his son Thomas; and this son was "Coke of Norfolk," "the handsome Englishman," as he was called at Rome, in whose favour the peerage was most justly revived. It was due not so much to his magnificence as to his service to agriculture. "All the country from Holkham to Houghton was a wild sheep-walk," writes Arthur Young, "before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants; and this spirit has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds and uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarcely anything but sheep, the country is all cut up into enclosures, cultivated in a most husbandlike manner, richly manured, well-peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce that it did in its former state. What has wrought these great works is the marling; for under the whole country run veins of a very rich kind, which they dig up, and spread upon the old sheep-walks, and then by means of inclosing they throw their farms into a regular course of crops, and gain immensely by the improvement." For this Coke of Norfolk was principally responsible, and for this his name deserves all honour.
At Walsingham the remains of the Priory are interesting: a magnificent door, a gateway, the walls, windows and arches of the refectory, a Norman arch with zigzag mouldings—the rest of the remains are later, Decorated and Perpendicular. But the record of the foundation and of the pilgrimages to the shrine, which was second only to Canterbury in importance, is much more entertaining. First the Chapel of the Virgin was founded by the widow of Richoldie, the mother of Geoffrey de Favraches. (Of course everybody knows all about them!) Then Geoffrey himself started on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, having previously executed a deed in which granted "to God and St. Mary, and to Edwy, his clerk," the chapel which his mother Richoldie had built at Walsingham, and other real property, to the intent that Edwy should establish a priory there. The supreme treasure was a relic, the alleged milk of the Virgin, purchased, as an inscription seen by Erasmus high upon a wall stated, from an old woman at Constantinople with an assurance that it was far superior to any other relic of the same kind, as it alone had been taken from the breast, the other having fallen to the ground first. It was enclosed in crystal and set in a crucifix. This, says the matter-of-fact Erasmus, occasionally looked like chalk, mixed with the white of eggs, and was quite solid. That the more pilgrims, the richer the better, might be attracted to visit this relic and to lay down their offerings, often very costly, it was stated by the monks that the Milky Way in the firmament pointed to Walsingham. So it did no doubt, so it does on occasion now, and to a lot of other places besides. "The Virgin and her Son, as they made their salute, also appeared to Erasmus and his friend, to give them a nod of approbation."
The sentence last quoted, wherein the meaning is a great deal clearer than the construction, comes from Messrs. Timbs and Gunn. Let me place side by side with it another quotation from Froude's lecture on "Times of Erasmus and Luther." "The rule of the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an image of a Virgin and Child. If a worshipper came in with a good handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious; if the present was unsatisfactory it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till the purse-strings were untied again. There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent, where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its good will. When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our Boxley Rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was afterwards torn to pieces by the people." No sort of disrespect towards the Roman Catholic religion is involved in recording this absolutely true statement of historical fact. The trick described was undoubtedly played upon pilgrims in Saxony and in Kent; whether it was justifiable from some points of view matters not at all. The Roman Catholic religion is a great truth, may conceivably be the most exact and precise truth, behind all this kind of thing. It is considerably more than likely that similar devices were employed at Walsingham. They may even have been employed by ecclesiastics otherwise blameless, for the rules of professional practice still occasionally justify strange conduct, or seem to justify it. But the evidence, if there was any, was destroyed at the Dissolution, when Thomas Cromwell took the sacred image away to Chelsea, and burned it. Henry VIII on this occasion, by the way, got some of his own back. He, too, like other kings and queens, native and foreign, had made the pilgrimage to Walsingham before his quarrel with Rome, and had walked the last four miles or so, from Barsham, barefooted. Quære, whether, when a king was on pilgrimage bent, the roads were spread with soft sand as they are now, with sand and gravel, when King Edward is going to make a progress in London. Henry gave an offering in the shape of a priceless necklace; but he secured it again in later life, and may even have given it to one of the wives, of whom, it may be remembered, he had several.
WALSINGHAM PRIORY
An account of the ceremonies used, quoted again from Messrs. Timbs and Gunn, is not without interest. "The pilgrim who arrived at Walsingham entered the sacred precinct by a narrow wicket. It was purposely made difficult to pass, as a precaution against the robberies which were frequently committed at the shrine. On the gate in which the wicket opened was nailed a copper image of a knight on horseback, whose miraculous preservation by the Virgin formed the subject of one of the numerous legendary stories with which the place abounded. To the east of the gate, within, stood a small chapel, where the pilgrim was allowed, for money, to kiss a gigantic bone, said to have been the finger-bone of St. Peter. After this he was conducted to a building thatched with reeds and straw, inclosing two wells in high repute for indigestion and headaches; and also for the rare virtue of ensuring to the votary, within certain limits, whatever he might wish for at the time of drinking their water. The building itself was said to have been transported through the air many centuries before, in a deep snow; and as a proof of it, the visitor's attention was gravely pointed to an old bearskin attached to one of the beams. The 'Tweyne Wells,' called also 'the Wishing Wells,' an anonymous ballad speaks of:—
A chappel of Saynt Laurence standeth now there
Fast by, tweyne wallys, experience do thus and lore;
There she (the widow) thought to have sette this chappel,
Which was begun by our Ladie's Counsel.
All night the wedowe permayning in this prayer,
Our blessed Ladie with blessed minystrys,
Herself being her chief artificer,
Arrered this sayde house with Angells handys,
And not only rered it but sette in there it is,
That is twyne hundred feet more in distance
From the first place folk make remembraince."
Of a very truth, as Froude said, "The world is so changed that we can hardly recognize it as the same." Imagination retires baffled from the effort to picture kings and queens walking barefoot over primitive Norfolk roads, passing through a wild waste too, for Coke of Norfolk was not yet born, to go through these ceremonies and to present their gifts. Erasmus, with his tongue in his cheek, is easily conjured up; so are the robbers whom the shrine attracted. But why were there not any number of pilgrims in the sceptical mood of Erasmus? There seem to have been plenty of robbers.
We pass (the roads hereabout are flat as the sands of the sea, the land about them richly timbered, and there is nothing else to be said of them) from the ruins of a religious house to one indissolubly associated with the names of two men, each exceptionally worldly, each in his own singular way, and with that of one remarkably eccentric. Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole from the designs of Colin Campbell, while the former was Prime Minister, and Ripley, say Messrs. Timbs and Gunn (who speak with authority), undoubtedly improved on Colin Campbell. Pope, it is true, wrote:—
Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool,
And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule.
*...*...*...*
So Ripley, till his destined space is filled,
Heaps bricks on bricks and fancies 'tis to build.
Pope, always bitter and not a little of a snob, was hardly likely to have a good word to say for an architect who had been a working carpenter. It is true, too, that Lady Hervey wrote in 1765: "I saw Houghton, which is the most triste, melancholy, fine place I ever beheld. 'Tis a heavy, ugly, black building, with an ugly black stone. The Hall, saloon, and gallery very fine; the rest not in the least so." Time, it may be, has given the stone mellowness; certain it is that Houghton now, in spite of a certain pretentiousness of Ionic columns, is really pleasing.
Of Houghton's most noted masters, the Walpoles, a few words must be said, but of two of them not many, for they are well known to all. The first Lord Orford was Sir Robert Walpole, the great Prime Minister who believed in letting well alone, in corruption as a method of Government, in the venality of all men, and in the collection of pictures. It is curious, but true, that this most sagacious statesman was, in a scholarly age, no scholar, and that this fastidious connoisseur of Art was, in a coarse age, exceptionally plain spoken and free-living. When the then Lord Townshend heard that Lord Orford was at Houghton he made a rule of leaving Rainham and Norfolk himself. The second Lord Orford was of no account. Of the third I shall write a little more here than of the fourth, because the eccentricities of the third are not so well known as are many of the details, whimsical rather than eccentric, of Horace Walpole, the fourth and last Lord Orford.
Sir Robert Walpole collected pictures by Guido, Vandyke, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Salvator Rosa, Teniers, Paul Veronese, Wouvermans, Titian, Poussin, Snyders—in a word, by most of the best of the old masters, and housed them in his majestic Norfolk home, girt by a park whose trees testify to this day to his skill in planting. Horace Walpole, who had loved Houghton in his youth, himself wrote in after life a catalogue of these pictures and a description of the apartments in which they hung. The first Lord Orford slept with his fathers—they had been Walpoles of Walpole in Marshland since the time of Richard I—and his son reigned in his stead. Meanwhile his youngest son Horace, of whom it has been suspected on good grounds that he was not truly the son of the Prime Minister, lived that curious life in that curious house, Strawberry Hill, details of which are known to many because they have passed into English literature. He was the best letter-writer of modern times, or of nearly modern times, and his eccentricities are easily forgiven. He could afford them by virtue of two sinecures for life which his all-powerful father had secured for him; and he appears to have been perfectly happy building and altering his toy palace, collecting all sorts of curios, writing the most charming letters to his lady friends, writing for the press also (and childishly vain of his work), and hardly dreaming that he might succeed to the estate and the title. Even when, after the death of the second earl, the property fell to his eccentric son, Horace Walpole hardly seems to me to have realized that he might some day succeed to the title and the estate. He was growing to be an old man. His grief over the sale of the celebrated gallery was not that of an expectant heir.
What of the third earl, who died without issue, and so left Horace Walpole to be the fourth and last Lord Orford? The world at large knows him as the madman who sold the first Lord Orford's unparalleled collection of pictures to Catherine of Russia. But he did many madder things than that for, commercially speaking, he did not make a bad bargain over the sale of the pictures, for which he received more than his father had given. In him the English love of sport ran to insane excess. Indeed it even brought him to his death. At a time when he was under restraint the date came when his greyhound Czarina was matched to run a course. Devoted to coursing as he had always been, he determined to be present and, with the cunning of a madman, he jumped out of a window while his attendant was out of the room, ran to the stable, saddled his favourite pony, a piebald, galloped to the scene of the match, refused to go home in spite of all entreaties, saw Czarina win, fell from his saddle, and died there and then. George, third earl, could not have died more appropriately, nor, from his own point of view, more happily. He was mad, of course, very mad indeed; but he was a thorough sportsman. Perhaps the maddest and at the same time most sporting thing he did was to train four stags to go four-in-hand. "He had reduced the deer to perfect discipline and, as he sat in his phaeton and drove the handsome animals, he, no doubt, fancied he was performing no inconsiderable achievement." If the writer of that pompous sentence tried to break four stags, or even a pair, to harness with his own hands, he would not have much doubt of the quality of the achievement; that is assuming he survived the effort. But the stag four-in-hand almost brought Lord Orford to a sporting death before his time. He was driving his strange team to Newmarket, where he was a familiar figure, when a pack of hounds came across the scent and gave chase in full cry. The sequel, except for Lord Orford, must have been simply paralysingly funny. Picture it for a moment. Think of the stags, thoroughly panic-stricken, no longer trotting, but tearing along the road with huge bounds; of Lord Orford helpless on the box as the phaeton leapt and swayed; of the hounds racing behind and of the savage music of their cry. It was, it must have been, a sight for gods and men; and many men saw it; for the run ended in the yard of the "Ram" at Newmarket, where phaeton, stags, and noble driver disappeared into a barn and the doors were shut in the face of the clamouring pack. Surely this is the maddest, funniest true story that ever was told, and the oddest part about it is that Lord Orford was not then and there clapped into a madhouse. Yet one cannot help feeling a lurking regard for this mad sportsman. His foibles are more to the taste of some of us than the affectations of Horace Walpole.
By the road over which the mad Earl of Orford used to career with his extraordinary team, over which Horace Walpole doubtless drove when he left his beloved London and "Strawberry"—for so he called it "all short"—to fight an election at Lynn, we also drove in a chariot which, to the eighteenth-century Norfolkian, would have seemed just as strange as the phaeton and four stags would appear to us in the twentieth. The motor-car, however, attracts less attention in north-western Norfolk, perhaps, than in any other part of the kingdom; for at Sandringham are many motor-cars of many makes, and some there are at the Cottage also. This part of the country learned before others did the elementary truth that there is no essential connection between speed and peril, and it was good for automobolism that an object-lesson should have been given in this respect by the magnificent cars, Daimlers for the most part, of him whom the law regards as incapable of offence, because he is the spring and source of the law itself. Of this country of heather, bracken, fir and oak, of glorious gorse and of glowing rhododendrons, of the numerous acclivities and declivities, sufficient to give variety to the scene without trying the powers of any competent car, of its air, an incomparably sweet mixture of the breaths of the sea and of the moorland, little will be said at this moment, for the simple reason that, in the next and final chapter, I hope to be able to give an impression of its beauties at many times of the year, from the point of view of a frequent eye-witness.
The whole distance from Wells to King's Lynn, by way of Fakenham, which was our way, is a generous thirty miles; but the going was so good and the roads were so clear that we entered the great square of the old-fashioned Lynn a little too early for luncheon, having regard to the fact that engagements in the world which we had put out of sight began to bulk rather large in the near future. The single town of any interest we passed through before reaching Lynn was Fakenham; and we agreed with Mr. Rye that it is "a particularly clean and pleasant market town, with several good old-fashioned inns, especially the 'Crown.'" That is to say the first statement is endorsed from experience; as to the second the responsibility rests with Mr. Rye. Here also, for those who care to halt, is a singularly fine church showing many a crowned "L" in stone to testify that Fakenham was once the head-quarters in Norfolk of the Duchy of Lancaster. As for Lynn, some of us had visited it before, one had sojourned in it long (but his tale is postponed), and time, as has been mentioned, began to press a little. Drifting on the roads, careless of where you shall eat or where sleep, is delightful, but for most of us it cannot go on indefinitely, and therein, probably, consists its chief charm. It is of the essence of a "treat," to use the good old word of childhood, that it should be more or less exceptional. So, at King's Lynn, we did but halt for a space at the "Globe" in the corner of the wide and cobbled square and, although a little rain began to fall, compel the new-comers to walk about a little, and look at the narrow streets, the estuary of the Ouse, and the Custom-house. The compulsion had better have been omitted, for Lynn with its streets empty of people, with the rain falling, and with the tide out, assuredly does not allure, and that was the state of things on this Sunday morning in April. In other circumstances, as it is hoped to prove ere long, Lynn and its people are much more attractive.
So the halt was not prolonged and, the rain abating, we started on the drive of forty-five miles roughly for Ely and Cambridge. It took us through the heart of the East Anglian Fens, and the day was one in which the spirit of them entered into me, or perhaps I, having set my mind thereto, entered into their spirit. Of a truth the task was one presenting little difficulty, so far as the general mood was concerned. For me, at any rate, there has never been any real gulf between the useful and the romantic. To one nurtured at the foot of the mighty amphitheatre of the Penrhyn Slate Quarries, scooped out from the heart of a mountain, rising in purple tiers of Cyclopean scale, the work of man, so long as it be grand in outline and in purpose, has always seemed to possess an entrancing beauty of its own. Men live who find the Fens flat and uninteresting. They demand our compassion, by no means our censure or our scorn. One does not despise a blind man because he cannot see; and these men simply suffer from partial blindness, physical and mental. There is, beyond all question, a beauty of the Fens as they are, appealing to the eye alone; they had another beauty for the eye in their original state, original that is to say so far as human history reaches, and of the nature of that original beauty a miniature presentment may be seen still at Wicken Fen, which lies between the Isle of Ely and Newmarket Heath. Happy is the man or woman who can rejoice in both of these aspects of the Fenland. Happier still, because more intelligently charmed, are those who, while they travel through the rich cornland, following the banks of rivers whose waters run at a level higher than those of the surrounding fields, can picture to themselves the scene as it was before the skill and the courage of man made the good wheat grow where the reeds once waved, made firm pasture for sleek cattle out of the quagmire, caused domestic fowls to thrive in the sometime domain of the bittern and the heron. Men never tire of singing the praises of the Dutch who, by dogged courage and centuries of unrelaxing effort, made a country for themselves, a country to which they cling with a love passing the love of women. The conquest of the Fens, begun, so far as we know, by the Romans, was, in its way, an enterprise of equal nobility and courage, and Vermuyden, Francis, Duke of Bedford, and Rennie deserve credit great as any given to any Dutch engineer. The details are perhaps dull; they would certainly be out of place here; the result is grand, a colossal gain for humanity which can best be realized and valued, be admired most cordially and warmly, as one rolls along solid roads where the Fenman of old stalked gingerly on stilts.
Who will not remember the last words of Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, when they are quoted?
"Let us send over to Normandy for a fair white stone of Caen, and let us carve a tomb worthy of thy grand-parents."
"And what shall we write thereon?"
"What but that which is there already? 'Here lies the last of the English.'"
"Not so. We will write, 'Here lies the last of the old English.' But upon thy tomb, when thy time comes, the monks of Crowland shall write, 'Here lies the first of the new English; who, by the inspiration of God, began to drain the Fens.'"
Here is absolute truth of sentiment, and to say this is by no means to deny sympathetic appreciation of the dogged resistance offered by the Fenmen of many generations to those who rescued the Fens from the condition of a watery wilderness. Of course the Fenmen hated the very idea of the subjugation of the Marshland. Their feeling towards those who began the long and arduous work differed only in degree from that with which the savage inhabitants of a new country—new to us, that is to say—regard the advance of civilization. They were not savages, but they were hard men and hardy, for only the fittest survived the agues and the fevers, accustomed to a free out-door life, having its pleasures no less than its trials. Let me quote Kingsley:—
"Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and that vastness gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles. They might well have been star worshippers, those Gervii, had their sky been clear as that of the East; but they were like to have worshipped the clouds rather than the stars, according to the too universal law, that mankind worship the powers which do them harm, rather than the powers which do them good. Their priestly teachers, too, had darkened still further their notion of the world around, as accursed by sin and swarming with evil spirits. The gods and fairies of their old mythology had been transformed by the Church into fiends, alluring or loathsome, but all alike destructive to man, against whom the soldier of God, the celibate monk, fought day and night with relics, Agnus Dei, and sign of Holy Cross. And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword or axe, feared witches, ghosts, Pucks, Wills-o'-the-Wisp, Werewolves, spirits of the wells and the trees, and all dark, capricious and harmful beings whom their fancy called up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark, wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its dark aspect. The foul exhalations of the autumn called up fever and ague, crippling and enervating, and tempting, almost compelling, to that wild and desperate drinking which was the Scandinavian's special sin. Dark and sad were those short autumn days, when all the distances were shut off, and the air reeked with foul brown fog and drenching rains from the eastern sea; and pleasant the bursting forth of the keen north-east wind, with all its whirling snowstorms. For though it sent men hurrying into the storm, to drive the cattle in from the fen, and lift the sheep out of the snow-wreaths, and now and then never to return, lost in mist and mire, in ice and snow; yet all knew that after the snow would come the keen frost and bright sun and cloudless blue sky, and the Fenman's yearly holiday, when, work being impossible, all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against township, or visit old friends forty miles away; and met everywhere faces as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wind of that dry and bracing frost."
Tumultuously eloquent Kingsley gives here an impression which, as an overture to the stirring story of Hereward the Wake may not have been guiltless of anachronism; but it suits our purpose the better. He is too severe, in this case as in others, on the Roman Catholic clergy. Most likely the Gervii were not immigrants from oversea, not historical immigrants at any rate. Their traditions, it may well be, were of that Druidism which the Romans understood so little. Outlaws and desperate men, Saxon and Dane, naturally drifted to the Fens, bringing in their own traditions, and became one people with them. Sledges the denizens of the Fens doubtless used, and snowshoes perhaps, in the days of Hereward, when the Fens were indeed the last stronghold of the English; but one would like to see some kind of evidence for skates. As for the merrymaking on the ice, the friendly visits and the like, the chances are that they were as much the products of a happy imagination as the ancient Fenman's joy in the wild north-easter. Life really was hard and lonely for him. He probably cursed the north-easter as heartily as a rheumatic man does now, and if he welcomed the frost it was because it enabled him to approach and kill the more easily the wild birds with which the Fens teemed. In the main he was hunter, fisher, fowler, and that was why he resisted civilization. Junketings on the ice belonged to a later period altogether. Oliver Cromwell resisted the reclamation of the Fens because he thought he saw in it a subtle device of the great to enrich themselves. The Fenman resisted it because he was a fowler and a fisher, and the draining reduced the area of his happy hunting grounds and of the waters of which he was free and out of which he could make a scanty living. Men might call him "slodger," "yellow-belly"—the first word sounds like the very quintessence of churned mud, the second is eloquent of sickness—and he might grumble at the hardships of his lot. Still he knew no other way of living. He could snare the myriad wildfowl, many of them no longer known in England, which haunted the fastnesses of the reeds as no other man could. He knew the flight of each kind at every hour of the day and at every season of the year. No man so cunningly as he could capture the mighty luce or pike, noosing him sometimes, at others, and especially in winter, catching him with baits, craftily let down through a hole in the ice, or could so artfully trap the fat eels wherewith the clergy of Ely or of Crowland might turn a fast in the letter into a feast in the spirit. With his stilts and his leaping pole he could travel over the marshes with the most astonishing celerity; but that he enjoyed his life so keenly as Kingsley would have us believe is in the last degree unlikely.
Still the Fenman knew the life, and he knew his powers. He had no ambition to drive the slow oxen, to turn the fertile furrow, to garner the golden grain. Indifferent to questions of national welfare he was, as of course. The rustic of to-day is absolutely indifferent to considerations of the kind. He likes to see the straw so heavy that it cannot be cut by machines, laid by storms so that the sickle must needs be employed, because that means more work for men. Time was, and that not so very long ago, when, following the example of the artisans and weavers of manufacturing England, Hodge rioted and broke up the thrashing machines and the like, which did the work of twenty men and more. "It stands to reason," he used to say, "that such newfangled notions are bad for the likes of us." It stood to reason, from the Fenman's point of view, that to drain the Fens would be to leave him without the only occupation for which he was fit; it probably never occurred to him that he might adapt himself to altered circumstances and become a regular worker, tied to fixed hours, instead of an amphibious wanderer, fowling and fishing when he pleased, or when necessity drove him to exertion. Who shall blame him? Certainly not the sportsman, the naturalist, or the botanist, who have felt a pang of regret as they have watched, elsewhere than in the Fens it may be, the marsh that always held snipe, from which the bittern has been known to rise, in the recesses of which some almost extinct herb survived, converted into a fruitful field. Yet what man familiar with the life of the country has not felt these regrets, even while he knew all the time that the change was for the public good and that his own livelihood would not be directly affected? Is it possible, then, not to sympathize with the resistance of the Fenmen, who knew nothing of "the public good" and saw their livelihood, or the chance of obtaining it, destroyed before their helpless eyes. It was the old story. One man's meat is another man's poison all the world over and for all time; and there can be no progress, no wholesale and beneficial change in the ways of life, without much incidental tribulation. Nevertheless, when all things are weighed in the balance, not a scintilla of doubt remains that the draining of the Fens was begun and continued, as the old knight in Hereward the Wake said, "by the inspiration of God." It banished a few birds; but we could better spare a few kinds of birds than preserve them with the fevers and the agues which were the inseparable accident of their haunts. It was the end of the "slodgers" and the "yellow-bellies," who were but a handful of men; but in their place are thousands of human beings who, in spite of agricultural troubles which the drainers of the Fens could not by any means have foreseen, are at least sufficiently clad and fed, and decently housed.
It is not always, it is not indeed often, that the reflections appropriate to a scene throng into one's mind when that scene is visited. Sometimes, at the foot of Niagara, for example, thoughts refuse to come into the mind at all; it is only afterwards that with Dickens one reflects, it was surely only afterwards he reflected, that the one abiding impression left by Niagara is the remembrance from time to time that a like mass of water is still falling, and falling, and falling, yesterday to-day and for ever. But, in relation to the Fens, I can truthfully say that most of these thoughts ran through my mind as we rolled along the road. Details of course did not. I had forgotten about Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and Rennie, but I remembered the great deeds of the House of Bedford and boyhood's delight in Hereward. As the road followed the sinuous bank of cabined Ouse, as I looked at the flat fields of rich black soil in which the corn showed green or of pasture springing into life, I felt to realize that on these very places the reeds had whispered and, as Sir Bedivere said to King Arthur, so man might have reported, to Hereward if you will, "Nought heard I, save the waves wap and the waters wan." Each church with its hamlet rose a little above the general level of the plain, making it the easier to understand that each stood on firm ground, once an island among the marshes, upon which the church had set her beacon light. If Downham Church, which we passed, might be taken as a sample—and it may be with safety—then the more leisurely topographers who have gone before are abundantly justified in saying that the churches of the Fen country are of an uncommon stateliness and beauty. This place, by the way, shares with North Walsham the honour of having taken a share in the education of Nelson.
With such thoughts flooding into the mind we were quickly, or seemed to be quickly, at Ely, of which something has been written before, and no more shall be written. The road thence to Cambridge needs no fresh description, and at Cambridge, for our purposes, the account of this expedition might end but for one small incident of a doubly instructive character. First, however, let it be said, since the "Bull" has been praised before, that on this occasion it turned out to have been unhappily chosen as a place at which to take luncheon. Appetites were ravenous, but the meal was not a success. Perhaps because it was vacation time, the house was not prepared for guests. At any rate, the stair-carpets were "up"; but Cambridge is a big place, on an important highway, and, in fact, the guests were many and the mutton was tough. So, somewhat dissatisfied, to Royston and home, quite a long way but, so far as Royston, familiar already, and beyond that outside the present manor. Still, an incident occurring in the next manor must be recorded, because it was an incident, because it was germane to the motor-car and its little brother the motor-cycle, and because it had a double moral. It so fell out that somewhere, between Luton and Dunstable, if memory serves accurately, we were proceeding at a fittingly careful pace, and keeping scrupulously to the proper side of a not too wide and very meandering road. Suddenly, round the corner in front of us, appeared a motor-cycle, on its proper side of the road too, but proceeding at a good pace, the motor-cyclist having a young woman on a bicycle in tow. If she had kept her head all would have been well. As it was she lost it, fell head over heels into the ditch on her near side of the road, and suffered nothing worse than a shaking, which, indeed, she deserved. In due course she was picked up, placed in the tonneau, and taken back to her mother, while I held her bicycle as it rested on our near foot-board. It appeared to be the first time this very penitent damsel had tried this suicidal method of progression; let us hope it was also the last; for that it is suicidal, potentially at any rate, there is no kind of doubt. She was really in some danger, for she was just as likely to tumble into the road as into the ditch. Mr. Johnson could have stopped in time to avoid her if she had, because he was going carefully, and with a due regard to the potential dangers of the road. But I know a good many other drivers with regard to whom I should be sorry to say confidently that they could be relied upon to have been driving with equal care in the same circumstances. It was the kind of incident which made one think.