Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

by James Edmund Vincent

Considering that the earthwork is a hundred feet high and a thousand feet in compass it would certainly be rather a large-sized burial mound. Let us look at what Mr. Haverfield says. He relegates Thetford to an index of the "principal places where Roman remains have been found, or supposed, in Norfolk," but does not dignify it by a position in the text, which is confined to "places where vestiges of permanent occupation have been found." The "finds" at Thetford have been first Roman coins, according to Sir Thomas Browne and Blomefield. But coins alone do not carry us far.

"Hoards of coins have their own value for the students of Political Economy, since they often reveal secrets in the history of the Roman currency. But they do not so often illustrate the occupation or character of the districts in which they are found. Sometimes they occur in the vicinity of dwellings, buried—for instance—in a back garden, which the owner had constantly under his eye. But they occur no less often in places remote from any known Romano-British habitation; they have been lost or purposely hidden in a secluded and unfrequented spot."

This is a general remark on the test applicable to "sporadic finds," such as those at Thetford, which are banished to the index. There another sporadic "find," which if it had been real would have conveyed more meaning, receives very short shrift. "A lamp is said by Dawson Turner to have been found at Thetford in 1827 under the Red Mound, and the lamp he figures is now in Norwich Museum." That sounds promising, does it not? Men might bury hoards of money in odd places and forget them, or meet their deaths before they unearthed them. They would hardly be likely so to conceal their household lamps. Alas for this pretty piece of foundation for an imaginative structure, "the curator tells me it was brought from Carthage, and presented by Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, and it certainly has the look of a foreign object." Finally, "Thetford has been called Sitomagus by Camden and others, and also Iciani; but it does not seem to be a Roman site at all; its earthworks are post-Roman. Camden's 'river Sit or Thet' is a piece of characteristically bad etymologising."

The learned scholar deigns to write no more than this of Thetford, and, being concerned only with Romano-British Norfolk, sets up no positive theory. But why was the Mound built? Exit Mr. Rye's à priori view, that it could not have been built in such comparatively recent times as those of the Danish invasions, because the energy and labour would have been expended to better purpose in those times, for the Mound is post-Roman. It may have been raised between the date of the Roman "departure," in 410, and that at which the kingdom of East Anglia was established. This is one of the most delightful chapters of history, to a persistently boyish mind, because next to nothing is known about it. There is no reason to suppose that the Romanized Britons remaining in East Anglia, as it was to be, welcomed the Saxons with open arms, and every reason to believe that the Saxons were a thoroughly barbarous crew. The Britons may have raised it against them. Or again, it may have been raised by the Saxons against the Danes, as, in the opinion of Dr. Jessopp, were Castle Rising, Castle Acre, Mileham, Elmham, and the Norwich Mound. The works at some of these places are certainly post-Roman, and at none of them is there clear evidence of Roman occupation; in fact, the chances are that they were all of later date; and the chances are also that there was a great deal more fighting in these parts between 410 and 800 a.d. than the muse of history has chosen to reveal. But this problem is glanced at later. As for Mr. Rye's à priori view that the exertion would have been better employed in those days, why, bless the man, Offa's Dyke was made, from the mouth of the Dee to that of the Wye, late in the eighth century, and it is a Cyclopean work.

The Mound is "wrop in mystery," that is all about it, and a heap of earth whereof the meaning is not known to the learned is a precious dull spectacle. So, to tell the plain truth, is Thetford. To us the most interesting facts it provided were a substantial tea at the "Bell," itself quite old enough to please. While tea was in preparation we saw quite as much of Thetford as any reasonable man could wish to see; when tea came it was marked by the appearance of weird things in the nature of tea-cakes, combining something of the toughness of the muffin and the texture of dry toast, not very new dry toast, with the shape of the crumpet. The other memory of Thetford is of a strange old man, having toy windmills for sale and attached to every part of his person, after the fashion of those street musicians who, by dint of ingenious contrivances in string, can play, or at any rate make a noise with, some half-dozen rude instruments at the same time. This wandering toy seller was a blessing in disguise. He was, and is, a providential reminder that windmills, here, there, and everywhere, are striking objects in the East Anglian landscape. Travelling eastward from the Midlands one sees them as far west as Buckinghamshire, and there not in the Chilterns only, and in East Anglia proper their name is legion. In or out of working order—and in a country of much wind travelling fast, of water moving, as a rule, very slowly, they are mostly in working order—they add picturesque character to the landscape. Moreover, in beauty they have a distinct advantage over the watermill. The latter may be, often is, exquisite at close quarters; its foaming stream, its dripping and moss covered wheel, its gleaming pond with willow-shadowed or elder-girt bank, are among the loveliest objects in England when seen at close quarters. Your windmill, on the other hand, must in the nature of things be placed either on an eminence or in a wide and open space. Not so beautiful, perhaps, only perhaps, at close quarters, as the watermill, it is still more than pleasing, and it can be seen for miles. It is as a beacon on the coast which the mariner can see for many leagues before he passes it, as the motor-car passes the windmill, at a safe distance. Constable, it is worth while to remember, learned some of his skill in an East Anglian watermill.

It was only afterwards that, consulting the faithful "Murray," I learned that Thetford had been the birthplace of Thomas Paine, "the infamous author of The Age of Reason," and that the house in which he was born was standing thirty years ago. It would not, perhaps, have been very interesting to discover whether it was still standing; but it was decidedly quaint to learn that Tom Paine was the son of a Quaker staymaker. Could there be anything more incongruous? That a Quaker should be the father of Thomas Paine was bad enough; that a Quaker should make stays—let us hope he never measured his fair customers for them, but made them in stock sizes—was monstrous. Yet on investigation in other books it turned out to be a true story, and from the investigation came an awakened memory, which others may need also, that Thomas Paine was a really influential personage among the founders of American Independence.

During tea and the consumption of the strange tea-cakes (which may, after all, have been slices of the traditional Norfolk dumpling, more or less toasted) rose a suggestion that we might turn southward for three or four miles, cross the Waveney, enter Suffolk again, and take a motorist's view of Euston Park. It would be the same Euston Park, planted with many of the same trees, grown bigger, which surrounded the house, when Lord Ossory heard the thunder of guns from the east and rode off, as has been recounted before this, to be a spectator of the great sea-fight in Sole Bay. It would be the same house, too, for it was acquired by the first Duke of Grafton, with the property, by marrying Lord Arlington's daughter in the days of Charles II, and the Dukes of Grafton from time to time hold it still. The decision not to make a detour was reached partly because, as we meant to make Norwich by way of Attleborough and Wymondham, it would have involved a return by the same road as that taken on the outward journey, and partly because the descriptions were unpromising. The reference here is distinctly not to the description in "Murray." "It is a large, good, red-brick house, with stone quoins, built by Lord Arlington in the reign of Charles II, and without any pretensions to beauty, except from its position in a well-timbered and well-watered park." That description, such is the perversity of human nature, raised a suspicion that the house might, if it were visible from the road, turn out to be a very satisfying structure, conveying that idea of spacious comfort and substance which is completely lacking in many a more imposing "mansion." Nor was I moved by the fact that Walpole wrote "the house is large and bad," for it might have been possible to disagree with Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, on a question of taste. But Walpole went beyond matters of mere opinion. "It was built by Lord Arlington, and stands, as all old houses do, for convenience of water and shelter in a hole; so it neither sees nor is seen." That settled the question. Euston might, or might not, be one of the stately homes of England, whose owners permit them to be inspected by strangers on stated days; this March day might have been such a day; but not even the prospect of seeing "Euston's watered vale and sloping plains," or some fairly interesting portraits, or Verrio's frescoes, would have induced me to avail myself of the privilege, if indeed it had existed. I know what the legitimate inmates of a great house feel on those occasions. Besides, motorists are unpopular in ducal parks, and with good reason. It is absolutely true that a duke, riding a bicycle in his own park, has been abused, coarsely, violently, and recently, by a motorist who was enjoying that park by the duke's grace. That park is now closed to motorists, and no wonder; and the case is not exceptional in character.

So we glided onward—gliding is the true word for the onward movement of a good car—over the open ground of Croxton Heath first, then past sundry villages, not lying close up to the high road, between the houses of Attleborough, and noticed, without halting, Attleborough's fine church. After this, for quite a long while, there were no more villages, and then, in front of us and dominating the view, rose a huge church, having two towers, one at the west end. It stirred memory of pleasant browsings in Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries. This could be, and in fact was, none other than Wymondham, pronounced Windham, where the Benedictine monks and the parishioners quarrelled over the parish church, which had been appropriated to the abbey. So bitterly did they quarrel that the east end, transepts, and part of the nave were walled off for the monks—they certainly took the lion's share—in 1410, the parishioners being relegated to a portion of the nave; and there, at the west end, they built them a tower and hung bells in 1476.

A mighty religious house was this of Wymondham, entitled to all wrecks between Eccles, Happisburgh, and Tunstead, and to a tribute of two thousand eels every year from Elingley. This tribute, we may be sure, was paid in Lent, for it is pretty clear from the Paston Letters that, while herrings were the stock food of the days of fasting, eels were the luxury that made them tolerable. Mistress Agnes Paston writes to her husband in London that she has secured the herrings—from Yarmouth, no doubt, as she lived hard by at Caister-by-Yarmouth—but that the eels are delayed, which appears to be accounted very sad. Just because this was a mighty religious house at Wymondham it is not surprising to find that Kett, of the famous rebellion, was a Wymondham man. Here, unfortunately, it is necessary to be at partial variance with Mr. Walter Rye. He writes: "Lingard, as of late Professor Rogers, has said that Kett's Rebellion had a religious origin; the former so writing from religious bias, the latter from ignorance." That is rather a brusque way of putting things, for, although Lingard, as a Roman Catholic, was a little apt to think too ill of the effects of Henry VIII's policy towards the religious houses, Professor Rogers deserved to be spoken of with more respect. Enclosures were, of course, the main cause for Kett's Rebellion in 1549, and Kett had a private grudge to avenge against one Sergeant Flowerdew at the outset. But, as a Wiltshire labourer once said to me, "where there's stoans there's carn," so, where there have been great religious houses in England, the rebellious spirit manifests itself in the pages of history before and after those houses came to an end. At Abingdon and at Bury St. Edmunds—I quote the two places of which the story happens to be fresh in my memory—conflicts were incessant, and there is no reason to doubt that the state of things was the same at Wymondham. The religious houses had become, with exceptions of course, corrupt within and extortionate without the gates. They were oppressors of the poor, whose best friends they had once been; there was no limit to the variety of the tolls they demanded. They were by far the largest landowners in the country. All this had ceased but a very few years before Kett's Rebellion, but the spirit which it had created, the very men in whom that spirit had been raised by extortion and injustice, were very much alive. If Kett's Rebellion had not such a directly religious origin as Lingard supposed, it is more than likely that it was indirectly due to the spirit of unrest and discontent which always arose in the vicinities of religious houses. Indeed, the very success of Henry VIII's stern treatment of the monasteries is proof positive that he was supported by popular opinion. As for the enclosures, some may have been made by the new lords of manors; others, and probably the vast majority, had been made by the grasping "religious." Moreover, the petition sent up to the king when the rebellion was at its height contained express allusions to religious grievances. It asked "that parsons shall be resident, and all having a benefice worth more than £10 a year shall, by himself or deputy, teach the poor parish children the catechism and the primer." Not a very outrageous demand surely; and if we scan the material grievances complained against—establishment of numerous dovecots, and claims to exclusive rights of fishing, for example—we see that they are essentially the grievances which the religious houses had originated. How Kett and his men marched in due course to Mousehold Heath, on the outskirts of Norwich, the grievous fighting which followed in and about Norwich, how they killed Lord Sheffield by the Palace Gates at a spot marked to this day by a stone with an S on it, how Warwick, after many reverses, finally defeated Kett, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered, shall not be told at length in this volume. These things are an essential part of the history of England; they are far and away the most exciting events in the history of Norwich, and, since they cannot be dealt with fully here, they are best passed over with this slight mention.

At Wymondham is, or was, an old house having a very curious inscription, "Nec mihi glis servus, nec hospes hirudo," which is not quite free from difficulty even as it stands, for a verb is left to be understood, and it may be "sit" or "est." In the one case the guest hopes, in the other the house boasts, the servant to be no dormouse and the host no leech. Things were worse when somebody read hirudo as hirundo, though one might make attractive translations of that too. But we cannot linger over that when we are close to the scene of a tragedy far more recent, and therefore a good deal more affecting, than that of Kett's Rebellion. Stanfield Hall is close to Wymondham. It is the reputed birthplace of Amy Robsart, who may or may not have been murdered at Cumner—Lady Warwick says she was not—and Stanfield Hall was certainly the scene of a series of remarkably cold-blooded murders in times which may still be counted recent. Prefacing a frank confession that my personal interest in murders is small, which seems to be a misfortune judging by the enraptured attention they attract from many intelligent and cultivated persons, I endeavour to give some account of these murders partly because I desire to please, partly because a very old friend, now dead, devoted a vast amount of attention to them. His meticulous care in studying the locus in quo may serve to compensate for my lukewarmness as a student of homicide; nay more, his interest in the subject seems to have been infectious, for, having read his monograph of some five-and-twenty octavo pages on the subject since the foregoing sentence was penned, I am now distinctly conscious of being keen on the subject and of finding interest in it.