Margaret Catchpole
May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid; her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous family, one of whom was my grandfather. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine that men alive within our memory should have shared even as young children in the scenes I have to describe—the lawlessness of the country, the wild acts recorded, the stilted language employed by the chief actors. The strange callousness of the criminal code, the very piety displayed by some of the principal characters, are completely out of date and almost incomprehensible. The author himself of this true romance, though he only died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought in ways quite alien to those now in vogue.
I shall continue what I have said about Crabbe by attempting briefly to describe the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which must occupy our attention during this lecture. I do so with no apology, for I believe that many a New England family tree springs from roots deeply embedded in its soil.
One thing realised by every child born in East Anglia is that he is not one of those inferior people who are born in the “Shires.” His native land is not called after any town, Northampton, Bedford, Leicester, or Cambridge: he belongs to a race, not to a territorial division, invented less than a thousand years ago. He and his kinsmen, the North folk, are East Anglians; and the rest of the world are to him “furriners,” or people who came from the “Sheeres.” Not that he is an unmixed race—far from it. The peasantry were in the land long before the Angles arrived. They are a small dark people, who have survived countless invasions and will probably outlive modern civilisation. When you see them beating a field or covert for game and kill hares and rabbits by throwing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel that they do much as their ancestors did before the dawn of history. The Anglian is a big blond man slow of speech and apparently somewhat dull, but in a bargain he is seldom the loser. The little town of Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred’s rival, Guthrum, the Dane; and the Norse origin of many families reveals itself in Grimwood, Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots, have all contributed to the population of East Anglia; but despite the blending of nationalities there is a strong feeling of a common tie binding all these heterogeneous elements together. Yet there are curious local divisions existing to this day. The eastern and western parts of the county are at constant feud. When the county councils were established in the ‘eighties,’ Suffolk had to be divided into East and West, because the two would not work together. When last year the county was made a single diocese, Ipswich would not allow the ancient western monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds to give the bishop his title; and Bury St. Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer but less aristocratic Ipswich. So in desperation the diocese had to be called ‘St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.’
To look at an Ordnance map one would say that Suffolk was very flat and eminently agricultural. The highest hill I could find was 402 feet above the sea; seldom does the land rise over 200 feet. Yet a motor drive in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having been on a switchback railway. One is never on the level, and some of the little ascents and descents are very sharp. The beautiful church towers are usually on hills and the churches are often placed outside the villages. The road or ‘street’ (Roman stratum) on each side of which the hamlet stands frequently runs up a hill. The lanes are narrow and muddy; and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. Communication must have been exceedingly difficult—a fact which explains many peculiarities of the people.
Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn by nature in the county than between the agricultural land in the centre and the coast. Rarely do the corn lands reach the sea. A belt of breezy commons, bright with gorse, extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, and a glance at the map shews how thin the population is. Only by branch lines of recent construction does the railway reach the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a wild tract of commons and marshes, the inhabitants of the little ports formed strangely isolated communities, and regarded with no friendly eye the villagers of the interior, marrying only among themselves and keeping carefully apart. A brief survey of the coast throws a light on the character of the people. All along the shore the five fathom line, sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much as three miles from the shore, marks the continual encroachment of the North Sea. Towns like Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once standing a mile or more from the shore, are now, as in the case of the first, threatened by the waves; or, like Dunwich, once a famous seaport, almost entirely washed away and submerged. Occasionally, as from Aldeburgh to Orford, the sea makes its own breakwater by casting up long banks of shingle, and even now, for nearly ten miles, save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, the Suffolk foreshore is absolutely uninhabited.
One of the most striking features of the coast is the inland tidal rivers. In the south are the Stour and the Orwell, which converge at the important harbour of Harwich; and at the head of the tidal waters of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself when the tide is high is a most beautiful estuary with parks and woods sloping down to the water—Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, Woolverstone on the south, Alnesbourn Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A few miles north of the estuary of the Orwell and Stour is the river Deben, which culminates inland at Woodbridge and was the scene of many a solitary boating expedition by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle bank I have spoken of, parting the river Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when it turns inland and becomes the Alde, giving its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes in many places fringe these rivers and impart an air of desolation to the surrounding scenery.
Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort. One must go back, and not so very far after all, to a time when it would have needed a guide to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the coast, and when you would have received the reverse of a hearty welcome from its inhabitants, “a surly race” who viewed strangers with “a suspicious eye,” and no wonder, since they had the best of reasons for concealing “the way they got their wealth.” You must transport yourself into this past, if you would wish to understand what the poet Crabbe has to tell you about his native place.
I think I caught something of his spirit when I went to Aldeburgh to prepare myself for writing this lecture. It was on a chill December day, damp and cold with a northeast wind. I had had a cold for a week and it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits were the reverse of buoyant. Rain was falling as I made my way along the deserted High street and walked to Slaughden Quay, where Crabbe was born, and as a young man worked at rolling casks from the hookers to the stores. A “dirty sea” at low tide was breaking against the shingle bank, and on the other side was the valley of the Alde and dreary marshes stretching to the low uplands on the horizon. On the rising ground above the town rose the church tower of Aldeburgh; and one could well imagine what a dreary home the desolate quay and the squalid little town must have been, when the only approach was by the harbourless sea, or by sandy tracks over a bleak moor, or by the sluggish river winding through the marsh.
The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. Despite this fact perhaps no part of Great Britain has produced so many “worthies” of the highest order. In almost every one of these the “animal” is very strong and the intelligence is dominated by practical considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respectively have bred perhaps the two greatest of English statesmen—Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Robert Walpole. Wolsey impressed his contemporaries by his native force and arrogance; and Bishop Creighton explains in his biography of him how sane a view he took of his country’s position in regard to the politics of Europe. Walpole, with the tastes of a boorish squire, little delicacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for mankind, was an unrivalled financier and minister in days of material prosperity. In the forefront among the pioneers of English science stands the famous Suffolk name of Bacon. In his great achievements and his equally serious faults Francis Bacon, Viscount Verulam, is an East Anglian. His luminous mind is seen in the singularly lucid English in which his thoughts are expressed, his rough common-sense reveals itself in the way in which he brushes aside the speculative theories of the philosophers, and goes directly for results based on practical experiment. And on the darker side, the unscrupulous way in which he crushed friend and foe alike in order to attain the position, which his genius entitled him to take in the country, discloses the same lack of sensibility which we frequently see in the East Anglian character.