For in ye image of God made He man (Genesis ix. 6).”
The register of St. George’s, which records the burial of the unfortunate Bryant Lewis on September 19th, six days following the murder, is at curious variance with the epitaph, for it makes the date 1697.
We do not hear anything of the circumstances under which Bryant Lewis was killed, nor does it appear that his murderers were ever caught.
Thetford must have been a welcome sight to the timorous travellers of old, and surely no place of pilgrimage was hailed with more delight than that with which they first glimpsed the tower of St. Mary’s and the outlying houses of the Suffolk suburb of the town.
One comes downhill into Thetford: down into the valley of the Thet and Lesser Ouse, which divide the county of Suffolk and the land of the Norfolk Dumplings. The flint-towered church that thus heralds the town is the oldest of the remaining three, and was severely handled in Cromwellian times, when it was converted for a while into a stable. It had, until 1850, a thatched roof. Here the road from Bury St. Edmunds falls in, a junction of roads still known by some of the older generation as “Cockpit Corner,” a name that marks the site of the cockpit which stood here in those brutal days of yore and moved a letter-writer of 1785 to say, “I believe most of the young Thetford people are dissipated, simple, ignorant young men (what a nice ‘derangement of epitaphs’!) that mind nothing but the low and insipid sport of cock-fighting.” From this point, into the town across the Town Bridge, the road narrows amazingly, and, arrived at the “Bell” inn, and St. Peter’s Church, it wears almost the appearance of a lane
XXXIV
The situation of Thetford and the history of the roads by which it is approached make an interesting subject of enquiry. All ancient accounts of Thetford agree in describing it as from the earliest times a place of great importance—a strongly fortified post and a seat of government.
The first mention of Thetford takes us back to the year 575, when Uffa, first King of the East Angles, made this his capital city, and called it “Theotford,” by that name describing the situation of the place, lying secure against approach from the Suffolk side, behind a network of difficult fords across the marshes and many branches of the confluent rivers we now call the Ouse and Thet. Others had been here before him, but all that earlier story of Thetford is purely speculative. That it had an earlier history and was from very remote times a fortified post, the great prehistoric earthworks which guard the passage of the river amply prove. By whom, or by what race they were reared, who shall tell? But certainly Uffa and his Saxons found them here. The Romans, still earlier, had been astonished by them, but made haste to adapt the huge mounds to their own purposes. For the Romans were everywhere, and to acknowledge their presence here it is not necessary to identify this as the Sitomagus of the “Itineraries.” Camden considered Thetford to be identical with that Roman station, and thought the name derived from Sit or Thet, and magus, a great city; and many have been content to follow him, “the common sun whereat our modern writers have all lighted their little torches.” Thus Bishop Nicholson, strong in satire upon Camden’s copyists; but more modern writers have made flambeaux of their very own, and by the light of them have groped about to some sort of inconclusive opinion that Sitomagus was probably at Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast.
Thetford was at the very centre of the East Anglian realm, and therefore a place of great security. Thus it was that the Royal Mint was early established here and so continued, through the history of this one of the seven kingdoms.
For two hundred and sixty-three years East Anglia and England in general remained under Saxon rule. The kinglets were always at war with one another, and their boundaries, and even the numbers of their kingdoms, were ever changing, but it was not until 838 that an alien danger threatened them. It was in this year that the Danes first invaded the country, and were defeated at Rushford Heath. With that decisive result the land was left in peace for twenty-seven years.