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 1¼d. 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.
