Wymondham is said to stand higher than the surrounding country, but such a statement, unilluminated by comparison, might be misleading. You do not climb exhaustedly up into it, nor in leaving drop sheer down into a corresponding vale: the difference, in fact, between the levels through which we have come and the heights we now reach is merely one of inches, and so slight that only a robust faith can believe in it.
Wymondham was the child of that great Benedictine Priory founded here in 1107, by William d’Albini, chief butler to Henry I., whose son became first Earl of Arundel, and was the hero of that very tall story which tells how the Queen Dowager of France fell in love with him when he was in Paris and offered him marriage. He refused that very flattering offer, because as a matter of fact he was engaged already to another distinguished lady; no less an one, indeed, than the widow of Henry I. “Earth hath no rage like love to hatred turned,” says the poet, and the rage of the rejected Queen was really a right royal, consuming, and devastating rage, quite worthy of the second line in that poetic couplet, which says, “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” She planned a visit to a lion’s den, conveniently handy to the palace, and, when there, pretended to be frightened of that fierce beast. D’Albini said it was nothing, only women would be afraid; whereupon she pushed him into the den and came away, happy in the thought that if she could not have him, at least the other woman should not. But she mistook, for D’Albini, wrapping up his hand in his cloak, put his hand in the lion’s mouth and—pulled its tongue out! He left it at the palace as a present for the Queen, and then returned to England, became known as William of the Strong Hand, married the Dowager Queen of England, and lived happy ever after. That breed of lion must early have become extinct, for the exploit has never since been repeated.
Wymondham Priory, or Abbey, was, of course, brought to an end in the 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.
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,