The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road / Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

CRINGLEFORD.

The situation of Cringleford church is sufficiently pretty, but examination proves it to be uninteresting, and its churchyard deformed with huge polished granite memorials to the undistinguished rich. More satisfaction comes from a lazy sojourn in the sunlight upon the old bridge that spans the Yare. The subdued rumbling of the mill, the leisured loading of a waggon with sacks of flour, and the evolutions of a boat’s crew among the weedy shallows of the Yare, induce a laziness which the certainty that Norwich is only two miles distant does much to intensify. It increases one’s sense of the permanency of things to learn that the floury miller, who comes out and casts an approving eye upon his fat sacks, is but the latest of a long line of his trade who have been following the art of grinding corn, by aid of the river Yare, for nine hundred years. How do we know that? By the evidence of Edward the Confessor’s Domesday Book, when the mill was stated to be worth 20s. a year, and by the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror, when the annual value had risen to 40s.

By all means let the pilgrim linger here, for he shall no sooner have climbed yonder rise, through that steep and narrow street of Eaton which is clearly visible from this point, than old Romance flies, ashamed, before the terminus of the electric tramways which reach out from Norwich and serve the discreet suburbs that now spread out from the city and threaten to absorb and transform Eaton itself.

It is a pleasant strip of valley thus set between the not very Alpine 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.

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.