The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway

by Charles G. Harper

It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old channel.

The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins with this, and together they descend into the city.

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This way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress" of 1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even condemned the belated citizen to lodge the night without the precincts of the city, in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned safe.

Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the better he becomes acquainted with it.

Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists, brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern; and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly Conisford Street.

The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name, standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."

Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the "Phenomenon" favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times" house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the "Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled together under the lee of the castle mound, were then to be found in the Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the rear that still goes by name of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age, are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the "Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century, the last named still standing between King Street and the river, with a picturesque but battered entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew and pig together down ancient courts and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored; and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do with tombs, is the "Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an "hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric light; but its restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary, with both the opportunity of purchasing the property and the means of doing so, has been carried through with taste and discrimination. The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history of six hundred years, and is thought to have been built upon the site of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of evident antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or even a greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is its beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the "Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely name was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to Queen Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches have proved the change to have been made at least a century earlier, and so goes another belief!

The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was the meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern town bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the crypt that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of the home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew. "Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given to one of his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle dungeons. A long succession of owners, including the Pastons, followed; last among them Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided here in 1633.