The “Music House” inn, King Street, Norwich, situated in what is now a poor and densely populated part of that city, has a vaulted cellar of Norman masonry, a vestige of the time when the Norwich Jews were very rich and numerous. The house of which it formed part was then the residence of one Moyses, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew, who in the reign of King John seems to have come, like many of his race, to some mysterious and uncomfortable end, probably in the dungeons of Norwich Castle. In the course of time the famous Paston family came into possession of the house, and in 1633 the great lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, resided here. Shortly afterwards it became the meeting-place of the “city music,” ancestors of modern town bands, who seem to have practised the waits and other performances within, until they had their parts sufficiently perfect to dare inflict them on the city. Hence the sign of the “Music House.”
In the same neighbourhood we have the “Dolphin” inn at Potter Heigham, a place sadly changed in modern times.
Potter Heigham is no longer rural, and the long, long and narrow street leading to it, out of Norwich, is crowded with the waggons and railway-lorries of the old city’s expanding commerce. In midst of all this rumbling of wheels over uneven pavements stands the “Dolphin” inn, the home in his declining days of Bishop Hall, who rented it for some ten years, until his death there, in 1656, in his eighty-second year.
THE “DOLPHIN,” POTTER HEIGHAM.
It was a comparatively new house then, for while you see the date, 1587, over the entrance door and a merchant’s mark and the initials R B on either side, a prominent gable shows the date 1629 done, very large, in vitrified brick.
Still you come grandly into the house, though it be a humble tavern now, between an old pillared entrance, and across a courtyard, and in the house are Jacobean fireplaces, with a fine newel staircase carved in the manner of an old church bench-end, with an heraldic lion and the Gothic foliage known as a “poppy head.” The “Dolphin” would be capable, if it were differently situated, of being converted into a handsome old-world hotel, but the poor and crowded neighbourhood of Potter Heigham forbids anything of that kind, and so it remains humble and unassuming.
A tragical little story belongs to the humble old “Nag’s Head” inn at Thame, formerly the “King’s Head.” The old sign of it was used as a gallows for a Parliamentary rebel who had deserted his side and joined the King, and was so unlucky as to be captured. Those Puritans had a grim humour. One of the condemned man’s executioners, before turning him off, turned his face, bound with a handkerchief, to the sign, with the words: “Nay, sir, you must speak one word with the King before you go. You are blindfold, and he cannot see, and by and by you shall both come down together.” And then he was hoisted up.
There is another historic house at Thame, for it was into the yard of the “Greyhound” in that town that John Hampden came, lying mortally wounded upon the neck of his horse, from the skirmish of Chalgrove Field, on June 18th, 1643. He had unwillingly taken arms against oppression and iniquitous taxation, and was thus at the outset killed. No enemy’s bullet laid him low: it was his own pistol, overloaded by a careless servant, that, exploding, shattered his hand. He died, on the 24th, of lockjaw.
The front of the house has been rebuilt, and the yard somewhat altered, since the patriot rode in at that tragical time; but the house is in essentials the inn of his day. Long since ceased to be an inn, it is now occupied as a furnishing ironmonger’s shop and warehouse.