XLIX
TOMBLAND ALLEY.
By Prince’s Street we come to Tombland, the open space by the Cathedral, where St. George’s Church and Tombland Alley make so picturesque a group; and thence across the Wensum at Fye Bridge and along Magdalen Street. Bearing to the left, by Botolph Street, and noticing the gable end of the “King’s Arms” inn, with its ornamental tie-rods “I.C. 1646,” on the gable-end, we finally pass along St. Augustine Street, to come to the long suburban rise of the Aylsham Road, through Upper Hellesdon.
Here, just beyond the “One Mile” inn, is an ancient cross, recently restored, looking like a survival of some historic event, but a near glance reveals that it only marks the boundary of the City in this direction.
Horsham St. Faith’s village—generally called in these parts merely “St. Faith’s,” or “St. Fay”—is just over the hill-top, and is the usual small Norfolk village with a large church. It stands aloof from the centre of the place, up a by-lane, and opposite a row of six old seventeenth-century red-brick cottages, known as “Church Row,” all very rural. A last touch in that sort is the sight of a bird’s nest built into the delicately undercut stonework of the upper part of a tabernacle on the south parvise.
A general air of dilapidation and put-off-all-the-repairs-to-next-year kind of aspect belongs to the central spot of this village—the hub of St. Fay’s. A very large, very rush-overgrown, and excessively duckweedy pond occupies the best part of the road, slyly lying in wait to receive into its green and rank bosom the village tippler or the incautious midnight roysterer from Norwich; nay, even the unwary cyclist.
This out-at-elbows air reflects ill upon the condition of the horsehair weaving, still the staple trade of the village. It is “not what it was,” say the natives, and although some thirty to forty weavers are still employed, the trade is a decaying one. Historically, St. Faith’s is interesting, for it is bound up with the story of Katharine Howard, who was daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and fifth wife of that professional widower, Henry VIII., who wrought so greatly in all manner of affairs of Church and State during his thirty-eight years’ reign that we meet him at almost every turn.
It seems that while still a child, not yet thirteen years of age, in the house of her father’s step-mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, at St. Faith’s, she was debauched by one Henry Manox, perhaps a music-master, described as “a scoundrelly player on the virginals,” and that she had relations of a more than questionable nature with one Francis Derham. Loud as are the moralists in denouncing the levity of our own times, we have but to read the intimate accounts of the household in whose vile society this forward girl was brought up, to be convinced that we have advanced since then. The fury of Henry knew no bounds when these disclosures were made, eighteen months after his wedding with her, and she paid the penalty with her life, in the Tower, in the twentieth year of her age.
