Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year a.d. 910, describes East Anglia as ‘very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on all sides. On the south and east it is encompassed by the ocean, on the north by the moisture of large and wet fens which, arising almost in the heart of the island, because of the evenness of the ground for a hundred miles and more, descend in great rivers into the sea. On the west the province is joyned to the rest of the island, and, therefore, may be entered (by land); but lest it should be harassed by the frequent incursions of the enemy it is fortifyed with an earthen rampire like a high wall, and with a ditch. The inner parts of it is a pretty rich soil, made exceeding pleasant by gardens and groves, rendered agreeable by its
convenience for hunting, famous for pasturage, and abounding with sheep and all sorts of cattle. I do not insist upon its rivers full of fish, considering that a tongue as it were of the sea itself licks it on one side, and on the other side the large fens make a prodigious number of lakes two or three miles over. These fens accommodate great numbers of monks with their desired retirement and solitude, with which, being enclosed, they have no occasion for the privacy of a wilderness.’ Before the monks came the place was held by the Iceni—a stout and valiant people, as Tacitus describes them. In the time of the Heptarchy, King Uffa was their lord and master. In later times Suffolk, when explored by Camden, was celebrated for its cheeses, which, to the great advantage of the inhabitants, were bought up through all England, nay, in Germany also, with France and Spain, as Pantaleon Medicus has told us, who scruples not to set them against those of Placentia both in colour and taste. To the Norfolk people, it must be admitted, Camden gives the palm. The goodness of the soil of that country, he argues, ‘may be gathered from hence, that the inhabitants are of a bright, clear complexion, not to mention their sharpness of wit and admirable quickness in the
study of our common law. So that it is at present, and always has been, reputed the common nursery of lawyers, and even amongst the common people you shall meet with a great many who (as one expresses it), if they have no just quarrel, are able to raise it out of the very quirks and niceties of the law.’ In our time it is rather the fashion to run down the East Anglians, yet that they have done their duty to their country no one can deny. ‘They say we are Norfolk fules,’ said a waiter at a Norfolk hotel, to me, a little while ago; ‘but I ain’t ashamed of my county, for all that.’ Why should he be, the reader naturally asks?
The Saxons of East Anglia gave the name of England to this land of ours; but before this time East Anglia had attained, by means of its sons and daughters, to fame far and near. If we may believe Gildas, a Christian church was planted in England in the time of Nero. Claudia, to whom Paul refers in Philippians and Timothy, was a British lady of great wit and greater beauty, celebrated by the poet Martial. She may have been converted by Paul, argued the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, a local historian, Rural Dean and Rector of Stowmarket; nor is it at all improbable, he adds, ‘that Claudia, the British beauty, may have been
an Iceni, or East Anglian lady, as her brilliant complexion, for which so many in these counties are celebrated, had caused a vivid feeling of sensation and curiosity and envy even among the haughty dames of the imperial city of Rome.’ The Romans were glad to make terms with the Iceni till the unfortunate Boadicea perished in the revolt which she had so rashly raised. The Saxons came after the Romans, and took possession of the land. Saxon proprietors compelled the people, whose lives they spared, to till the very lands on which their fathers had lived under the Roman Government or their own chiefs. Pagan worship was reintroduced; but when Sigberht, the son of Redwald, King of East Anglia, reigned, he sent to France for Christian ministers, and one of them, Felix, a Burgundian, landed at Felixstowe, and there commenced his Christian labours. Felix was held in high repute by the Bishops in other parts of the kingdom. His opinions were quoted and revered. The diocese was large, and the fourth Bishop divided it into two parts, the second Bishop being planted at North Elmham, in Norfolk. In 955 the see was again united, when Erfastus, the twenty-second Bishop, removed to Thetford. A little while after the Bishop’s residence was removed
to Norwich, and there it has ever since remained; but the land was not long permitted to remain in peace. In 870 a large party of Danes marched from Lincolnshire into Suffolk, defeated King Edmund, near Hoxne, and, as he would not become an idolater, shot him to death with arrows. Bury St. Edmunds still preserves the name and fame of one of the most illustrious of our Anglo-Saxon martyrs. King Alfred, with a policy worthy of his sagacity, made Guthrum, the Danish governor of Suffolk, a Christian, and continued him in his rule. The Danes in East Anglia were then an immense army, and thus at once they were turned from foes into friends. Guthrum was baptized, and it is to be hoped was all the better for it. At any rate, he returned to Suffolk and divided many of the estates which had been held by Saxon proprietors killed in war. He died in peace, and had a fitting funeral at Hadleigh. The children of those Danish soldiers were dangerous friends, and too frequently betrayed the Saxons. Blood is thicker than water, and as each succeeding band of Danish adventurers landed on our eastern coast, they were welcomed by such followers of Guthrum as had settled in Suffolk as friends and allies. Nevertheless, the Danes found the conquest
of the island impossible. Divine Providence, Mr. Hollingsworth tells us, did not suffer the Saxon race to be vanquished by those who were connected with them by blood. Nevertheless, the struggle was long and severe. The two races were equally matched in courage, but the Saxon surpassed his foe in that stern, unyielding endurance which enabled him to resist every defeat and prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home. History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that, according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as English lords, and divided between them the land in which their rapacious forefathers had won many a precious treasure.
‘The red gold and the white silver
He covets as a leech does blood,’
wrote an old poet of the Norseman.
Let us take, as an illustration of the county, a Norfolk family. In Westminster Abbey there is monument to Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was buried in the ruined chancel of the little church at Overstrand, near Northrepps, ‘a droll, irregular, unconventional-looking place,’ as Caroline Fox calls it, where he loved at all times to live, and where he retired to die. The family from which Sir Thomas descended resided, about the middle of the sixteenth century, at Sudbury, in Suffolk. It was while at Earlham that he made his début as a public speaker at one of the earlier meetings of the Norfolk Bible Society. In the winter of 1817 he went over to France with some of the Gurneys and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, who was anxious to establish a Bible Society in Paris. He was also anxious to inquire into the way in which the gaols at Antwerp and Ghent were conducted. On his return he examined minutely into the state of the London gaols, and, to use his own expression, his inquiries developed a system of folly and wickedness which surpassed belief. In the following year he published a work entitled ‘An Inquiry whether Crime be Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Penal Discipline,’ which ran through six editions, and tended powerfully to create a proper