Some of Our East Coast Towns

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Norwich has been a famous city ever since, at any rate, the time when Sir Thomas Browne wrote his famed Religio de Medici there. It was to the house of Mrs. Taylor, wife of a Norwich tradesman, that Sir James Mackintosh and the other leading Liberals of the day used to repair to hold high discourse on the origin of society and the rights of man. Windham, one of the greatest statesmen of his day, the friend of Johnson and Burke, represented Norwich. There lived William Taylor, the friend and correspondent of Southey, who was the first to open up to the public the vast treasury of German thought. Harriet Martineau was born there, as was likewise her more celebrated brother James, who still lives to illustrate the mental and religious speculation of our day. A grand old city is Norwich, with its castle, now a museum, looking over it all, with its St. Andrew’s Hall, now utilised for concerts and public meetings, with its great markets, with its Colman’s Mustard Mills, with its old houses and narrow streets. The workman, with his strikes, has driven away from Northampton a good deal of its boot and shoe manufacture. What Northampton has lost Ipswich, Colchester, and especially Norwich, have gained. There is beautiful country round Norwich; and Norwich ought to be eminently holy, for there are forty churches there, many of them very ancient. We hear a good deal of the piety of our forefathers. In Norwich we realise that fact as well as anywhere. Norwich, consequently, is the home of bell-ringers. Mr. Suffling tells us, “I suppose no other place in England can boast of so many bell-ringers, or such good ones, as Norwich.” On certain occasions you are deafened by the clamour of its bells.

Away from Ipswich, and Colchester, and Norwich there is a delicious sleepiness about the old East Anglian towns, as if they feel they have done their duty in their day and are out of the world. They are all in a declining way. They have all seen better days. They have not quite died out, because the Great Eastern Railway has connected them all together and insists on their sharing in the labours and triumphs of the present day. But they had rather not. They would rather live on their past glories—Bungay, with its renowned castle, Framlingham with its castle still more renowned, Bury with its memories of its martyr king, Woodbridge mildly illuminated by the fame of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, Beccles with its fine church, Halesworth where Archbishop Whateley was for many years the rector. They are all places to live in happily if you have had enough of excitement and would shun the wicked world and its ways.

VII.
A DAY AT LYNN.

One of the most curious corners of old England is known, and has been known to the community for many years, as King’s Lynn, Norfolk, on the borders of the Wash. It was a great place for traders. By means of it in the olden time many a tun of good red wine came into the country, and it is still a great place for trade, as it has fine docks, available to steamers with a tonnage of 2,000 tons. Thus Lynn is a great port for the landing of foreign sugar (which ought to be made at home) from Hamburg. A hundred years ago its annual shipping revenue was only exceeded by the ports of London, Liverpool, Bristol and Hull. It is also easily available by means of railway communication, which renders it accessible from all quarters—the Great Northern, the Midland, and the Great Eastern all find their way to Lynn. The population has rather declined since the last census; but still the town is a large one—upwards of 18,000 in population—and one wonders how all the people hidden away in its shops and narrow streets can manage to find a living. The fact is, it is the centre of an enormous agricultural district, and thus twice a week has a large extra population, drawn thither by the attractions of its Saturday and Tuesday markets. There seems to be no great manufacturing industry, the chief being that of Mr. Savage, who employs about three hundred people, all engaged in the manufacture of various kinds of roundabouts and steam velocipedes, such as are seen at our country fairs. It is the most important business of the kind in the Eastern Counties, and of it the people of the Town of Lynn are justly proud. Nevertheless, to most of us the charm of Lynn is chiefly antiquarian. Its wonderful old churches are well worth visiting. In the good old times Lynn was a fortified town, and there are still abundant remains of the old walls, as well as a handsome Gothic structure, known as the South-gate. Unfortunately the East-gate, an equally fine specimen of ancient architecture, was demolished in the first year of the present century. In the centre of one of the public walks, well shaded by trees, which in summer cast a grateful shade, stands an ancient chapel, known as the Red Mount, a great resort for pilgrims. Stowe tells us it was in the reign of King John that Lynn was fortified. The cup used by the Mayor on the occasion of municipal festivities is said to have been the gift of that monarch, as is likewise the sword usually borne before the Mayor. In the Museum is preserved one of the old ducking stools, which have gone out of fashion in consequence of the increasing good temper of the ladies in these latter days. There is an immense deal to see in Lynn. I would gladly have tarried there longer, especially as I obtained good quarters at the Temperance Hotel, which seemed to be much patronised by commercial men. I found many of them there after the day’s work was over, reading one or other of the good books provided for them by the Christian Commercial Travellers’ Society, a society which does much good in many ways. Lynn has a good hospital and a fine library.

Lynn has given birth to some notabilities, at any rate. In 1752 Fanny Burney was born there, who wrote novels which still find readers. The fair Fanny lived to be the friend of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, and, as Madame D’Arblay, left us diaries and letters which give us a vivid idea of life when George III. was king. As is the case generally, nothing in her childhood indicated that she would, while still a young woman have secured for herself an honourable and permanent place among English writers. Then there is the great African explorer and artist, Thomas Baines, whose name, says a writer in The Cape Monthly Magazine, must ever be associated with the explorers of the country north of the Cape Colony, in the same rank with Livingstone, Chapman, Anderson, and Green—a man to whom the wilderness brought gladness and the mountains peace. He was a native of that nursery of the Anglo-Saxon race whose energy he so truly inherited—Norfolk. He was born at Lynn in 1822. “His father,” writes his biographer, “also a man of considerable energy, was the master of a small vessel belonging to that port, and no doubt his marine life, as well as the striking scenery of the Norfolk coast, gave a tinge to the early artistic tendencies of his son.” As was the case with our great painter of cattle, it was while he was learning coach painting that he became an artist. He landed at the Cape, where he managed to obtain a scanty living by painting African landscape, and teaching drawing. And then, when there was war with the natives, he won reputation by painting the leading incidents of the engagements. It is to the credit of Lynn that on his return to his native town, in 1857, he was presented with the Freedom of the Borough. Alas! his career as an explorer and discoverer was cut short by African fever, and he now sleeps in Durban Cathedral, where a monument records his memory. Eugene Aram was an usher in the Lynn Grammar School; Sawtree, a Wycliffe priest, burnt at Smithfield in 1400, came from Lynn; and Bishop Goodwin, just deceased, was born at Lynn in 1818. John Copegrave, a Provincial of the Austin Friars, and author of the Chronicle of England, and Geoffry, a great grammarian, and author of a Latin-English Dictionary, were natives of Lynn.

Politically, Lynn has rather a celebrated history. Formerly it was a close borough, belonging to the Walpole family. The great Whig Minister represented it in Parliament, as did also his equally celebrated son. Lord George Bentinck, it may be remembered, sat for Lynn, also the great diplomatist Sir Stratford Canning, known and feared in Turkey. But Lynn has opened its eyes and burst its old traditions. For the first time in its history it has a Liberal majority on its Town Council; of course the Noncons. in the place have had much to do with this. I find that no less than six of the members of the Congregational church, under the care of Rev. A. Furner, are members of the Corporation. Congregationalism in such a city of churches and antiquity as Lynn is, has not been much of a success. Baptists and Independents were both at a low ebb, but they are reviving greatly, and the night I was there I attended a meeting in the mission-hall, where I found a clergyman and his Dissenting brethren standing side by side. The Baptists, who are now doing well since Rev. Thomas Perry has been amongst them, have an interesting history. In 1687, Mr. Thomas Grantham, a General Baptist Minister, well-known in Lincolnshire, and related to some of the first families in that county, came to Lynn at the period referred to, and obtained permission to preach in the town-hall. He died at Norwich in 1692. In 1690, a persecution broke out against the Baptists at Lynn, and James Markam, their minister, was proceeded against under the Conventicle Act, for attempting to establish “a new religion,” on the deposition of two informers, and a fine of £20 was levied on the house in which they met, £20 on the preacher, and 5s. on each hearer. In 1818, there were many high Calvinists among the Lynn Baptists, and some of the most devoted friends of the cause, believing such sentiments to be an unfair view of the Gospel and injurious, withdrew, and went to the Independent Chapel. In 1839, the veteran preacher, Thomas Wigner, came to Lynn, little anticipating, he tells us, that in the then state of his health he would be there long, but he was there many years. Lynn has a Union chapel, and it must be remembered, to its credit, that its pulpit was occupied by Rev. William Hull, a very superior preacher indeed, of whom the late Dean Stanley declared that he was the Robertson of the Nonconformist Church.

One of the most celebrated of Lynn residents was, perhaps, the Rev. William Richards, M.D., who was for twenty years pastor of the General Baptist Church in that town. He commenced his career in Wales, not many miles from Haverford West. In 1773, at the age of 24, he entered the Bristol “Academy.” Two years later he became co-pastor at Pershore, with the late Dr. John Ash, author of the English Dictionary. Perhaps it was through contact with Dr. Ash that he first conceived the idea of writing his very popular Welsh-English Dictionary. In 1776, he settled at Lynn, and during his residence there wrote, besides many other works, a “History of Lynn” in two octavo volumes, printed in 1812, at Lynn, by W. G. Whittingham. He willed his library to the Brown University, Rhode Island, from which university he received his doctor’s degree. He died in 1818, in Wales, where for supposed unsoundness in the faith—a groundless charge, however—he suffered a good deal. Dr. Richards was a man of exemplary life, of much learning and of downright independence of judgment, and from all I can learn of him he deserved to be remembered at Lynn and throughout the country. Since his time, there has been advance in politics in Lynn, as well as elsewhere. When the judicious Dod published his Electoral Facts, the town had one newspaper—Conservative, of course—with a circulation of 654 copies; now it has a Liberal newspaper as well, and both papers enjoy a large circulation; and owing to the facilities afforded by the Great Eastern Railway, Lynn has its London morning papers down by nine o’clock. At the period of the passing of the Reform Act, Lynn had a voting force of 660. One of the best things I saw in Lynn, as I was groping my way in the uncertain light, was the fine schoolroom of the Congregational Church, filled with a cluster of clean, happy looking girls, all hard at work sewing. I knew no living soul. I felt I was an intruder, and popped out as speedily as I popped in; but I have the picture before me as I write, of happy girls under the sanction of the Christian Church, preserved from the contagion of the streets, learning to work. Christianity has been dogmatic long enough, a little mild and benevolent socialism will not do it much harm. This old world town may be described as a city of churches, and one of its most characteristic remains is Road Mount Chapel, a curious octangular structure containing a beautiful but tiny perpendicular apartment, that once contained the rood of our lady of Lynn. Every schoolboy knows how unwarily, King John nearly lost his life in crossing Lynn Wash, and did lose all his baggage, devoured by the unexpected flood.

VIII.
FRAMLINGHAM AND ITS CASTLE.

“I often wonder,” said a local tradesman to me the other day as I was contemplating the majestic ruins of Framlingham Castle and the seat of power in the Eastern Counties, “that the Great Eastern Railway does not run excursion trains here.” I must own that I shared in that feeling. I am sure thousands would rush from town to see the place if they had a day excursion there. The railway in question has done a good deal for Framlingham. When I knew it as a lad it was out of the world altogether. It laid quite off the turnpike road. To get to London a Framlingham resident had to make his way to Wickham Market. Now it has a railway to itself, and that railway takes you to London, and thus makes Framlingham a living part of the British Empire of to-day. In one respect this has been a great gain for the town, as it led to the establishment, in 1864, of the Albert Memorial College, a handsome pile of buildings adapted for the accommodation of 500 boys. The object of the institution is to provide for the middle classes, at a moderate cost, a practical training, which shall prepare the pupils for the active duties of agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial life, and qualification for the Civil Service and other competitive examinations. The religious instruction is in accordance with the doctrines and practice of the Church of England. But I am glad to find that there is a conscience clause for the sons of Dissenters who are exempted from Church of England teaching and from Sunday attendance at the parish church or college chapel. It speaks well for the school that, though at one time it was in a declining state, for the last few years it has been in a very prosperous condition. It is interesting, as you stand on the lawn in front of the college and look at the decaying ruins of Framlingham Castle, to note how we have swept into a younger day. Ages have passed away since Hugh Bigod lived there; indeed, the origin of the castle is somewhat obscure. Its last royal occupant was Queen Mary. Thence she proceeded in state to take possession of her crown, amidst crowds of misguided men, who had rallied round her standard in the hope that she would respect the work of Reformation begun by her father, and continued by her brother. When the castle was built, brute force ruled the land. When the new college was erected, it had come to be understood that knowledge was power. The college flourishes; the old castle is a ruin. The world moves, after all.

I find Framlingham itself but little changed. There was a barber who, in my youth, had a picture of Absalom caught by his hair in the wood, while David cries—