John Kitton, who bought the estate and the Hall as they stood, including the furniture, library, and the entire appointments of the house, had been a grocer in a small way of business—one may almost say he had owned a small chandler’s shop—in Norwich. His rise dated from a small speculation in wheat shipped from Russia on the eve of the Crimean War. By the time it had reached these shores the price of grain had become enormously enhanced, and he netted a very handsome profit. His next venture, of sending out a heavy shipment of oil-cake to the Crimea, was equally successful, and laid a solid basis for the great fortune this clever man of business rapidly acquired. The sum he is stated to have given, in one cheque, for Felbrigg, “lock, stock, and barrel,” when the estate was sold under “Mad Windham’s” bankruptcy, was £137,000. He then changed his name to Ketton, and set up as a country squire. He died, aged sixty-one, in 1872.
When Augustus Hare visited Felbrigg in 1885, he found Ketton’s daughters had adopted the Windhams and all their heirlooms and traditions, as though they were their very own. Nothing whatever had been removed at the sale, and, as a matter of fact, the ancient family portraits and the statesman’s library are here, even now. Said Miss Ketton: “Mr. Windham comes every night to look after his favourite books in the library. He goes straight to the shelves where they are: we hear him moving the tables and the chairs about; we never disturb him, though, for we intend to be ghosts ourselves some day, and to come about the old place, just as he does”—so that Felbrigg Hall bids fair to become a congested area, in the spookish sort
LII
There can be few more delightful woodlands than those of Felbrigg, and no more romantic approach to a seaside than that of the woodland road which goes, as though tunnelled through the trees, steeply down from Felbrigg’s height to Cromer’s level. In the distance, down there, you see the illimitable sea, Cromer’s great church tower standing up against it, and the houses of the town clustered around—a little group set in a vast expanse of salt water and green fields. This is the most delightful way into Cromer, but we may not take it. Like Moses, permitted merely to look upon the Promised Land, we must only gaze upon that road and retrace our route to Roughton, there to pick up the coach-road, by no means so delightful and prepossessing an entrance to Cromer.
It is, however, only comparatively that this entrance is to be despised. It is true it leads past the railway station and a lengthy line of suburbs, down a long gradient, with houses instead of seascape in front of you; but if, indeed, everything be newly created and baldly uninteresting, at least there in nothing sordidly unprosperous in view, and everything is spick-and-span, even to the road-paving, which in every street in Cromer is composed of asphalte. Almost every one of those smart red-brick villas is of the boarding-house order, and only when the very centre of the town is reached, by the church, do the shops commence.
Cromer, until modern times a small fishing village, but now grown to the proud estate of a fashionable, expensive, and exclusive seaside resort, was once a portion of the town of Shipden, and lay quite half a mile distant from the sea. “Shipedana” and “Seepedene,” the names by which Shipden is referred to in the “Domesday Book,” remind us that Shipden was not necessarily merely a place of ships, but that the name perhaps came originally from Anglo-Saxon words meaning a sheep pasture. Vague accounts still tell how Shipden was suddenly destroyed by a violent storm and eruption of the sea in the reign of Henry IV., and half a mile out to sea is still visible, at exceptionally low tides, the mass of flint walling called the “Church Rock,” said to be the remains of Shipden church. A Yarmouth excursion steamer was wrecked on it in the summer of 1888.
Cromer was spoken of in 1374, and again in 1382, as “Crowmere.” Although it thus, by the disappearance of Shipden, was thrust into the foremost place, it never attained the size of that unfortunate town. The sea was advancing too surely for a repetition of Shipden’s fate to be dared. In 1551, if we may judge from the petition then presented to the Privy Council, Cromer was in sore case:—
“It is situate and adjoining so near the sees that of late in our memorye, by the rages and surges of the same sees, the number of a grete sort of houses knowen by us have been swallowed uppe and drownded. The inhabitants hathe to their grete and importunate charges defended the same by making of grete peers, and dayle put to insatiable charges scharse and onetheable to be borne of the same inhabitants.”
This anxiety seems to have made havoc with their literary composition. A direct result of this petition was the grant, thirty years later, of a licence to levy dues upon wheat, barley, and malt, the revenue from them to be applied in defending the town from the sea; but when Taylor, the “Water Poet,” visited Cromer on his “Very Merry—Wherry—Ferry Voyage” round the coast in 1623, the sea was still encroaching, and he describes the place in doleful strain:—
It is an ancient market-town that stands