Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

by James Edmund Vincent

Still, on the whole, the argument that Lexden represents the Camulodunum of the Britons (I wonder what they really called it, for Camulodunum is about as unBritish as it well can be) is fairly strong. It is strong enough at any rate to warrant the belief that here "the British warrior Queen," letting her barbarian troops loose on the panic-stricken and defenceless colonists, avenged her wrongs ruthlessly and in a wild abandon of cruelty. Sluggish Colne and the Roman river really did, we may take it for almost certain, run with the blood of Romans; and this is no figure of speech, as it usually is when battles are so described. Camulodunum was not a battle but a massacre; Boadicea was furens femina with a vengeance, and with good cause. She really had bled from the Roman rods, her daughters had been outraged, her just possessions had been stolen; the Iceni were, clearly, in a wild ecstasy of murderous madness. If ever there was slaughter grim and great in this world, Lexden saw it in the year of grace 61. Another place, some say Messing, not far off and near Kelvedon, saw the tables turned a little later. Then, said the Romans, eighty thousand British fell, and Boadicea anticipated the vengeance of her foes by taking poison before they reached her. Still, if she in any way resembled her sisters of to-day, she had enjoyed at least some measure of satisfaction.

From Lexden, a Roman road runs all the way to Haverhill, at the south-west corner of Suffolk; but Haverhill is just beyond our route of to-day, and is certainly not worth a detour. We are going now almost due north, through Wake's Colne and Bures St. Mary to Stoke by Nayland, in Suffolk and across the Stour. Wake's Colne is reserved for the return journey to which, since that journey follows the downward course of the Colne for some considerable distance, it belongs more properly. Bures St. Mary appears to be far more probably than Bury St. Edmunds the place of the coronation of King Edmund of East Anglia; but that and his canonization, as we noted in connection with Bury St. Edmunds, were long ago, so long indeed, that if Bures St. Mary fails to attract otherwise, the legend does not matter. For us, at any rate, Bures St. Mary is but a place passed on one side in entering the valley of the Stour and Gainsborough's country. Whether any of the views "near Sudbury" included the remarkably striking hill on which Stoke by Nayland stands ignorance prevents me from stating, but certainly, that house-crowned hill, rising as it does from the very flat land below and the leisurely Stour, makes, as a valued picture in my possession proves to demonstration, an ideal subject for a modern artist. Its value is due to abruptness of contrast. At Bridgnorth from the Severn, and at Durham, the hills with their clusters of old roofs, rise more abruptly and to a greater height, are more rugged, not necessarily therefore more truly picturesque. At Durham, however, and at Bridgnorth, we are in country where hills are many; at Stoke by Nayland a commanding hill seems all the more commanding in that it is unlike anything in the neighbourhood. No wonder artists love this quiet riverside scene. Of that scene, apart from the hill and the ancient houses, the grand Perpendicular church is the conspicuous glory. It "ranks with the great churches of the Eastern Counties." These are Constable's words, and they may be trusted the more in that he was not merely a mighty artist in landscape, a native of these parts, and devotedly attached to his native county (which, indeed, might make for prejudice), but also, as his "Salisbury Cathedral" shows, thoroughly and appreciatively versed in ecclesiastical architecture.

To me, however, Gainsborough has greater charm than Constable, partly, perhaps, because of the extraordinary fascination of his portraits of persons. The reference here is not to the fashionable portrait painter of Bath, but to the later days wherein he limned the features of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Heaven forbid that I should enter into the obvious pitfall of discussion which yawns for the unwary here), of Maria Linley and her brother (it is at Knole and a proud possession of Lord Sackville), of Mrs. Sheridan, of Mrs. Siddons, and of the Blue Boy. The model for the Blue Boy, I learn from Mr. Walter Armstrong's monograph, was the son of a wholesale ironmonger named Buttall in Greek Street, Soho. An excellent reproduction of the Mrs. Siddons, in the same monograph (Seeley 1894), lies under my eye now, and as I look at those wonderfully clean-cut and strong features, I can almost hear the painter saying, in his comic wrath, "Damn your nose, madam, there is no end to it." The story, retailed by Mr. Armstrong, makes one feel that Thomas Gainsborough was a man and a brother, and here at Sudbury it is a delight to follow the story of his early days. "He was the youngest of a family of nine, all brought up reputably and well by his father, a thrifty tradesman variously described as a milliner, a crape manufacturer and a shroud maker, who, no doubt, combined all these avocations and, said scandal, occasionally helped them out with a little quiet smuggling." The shroud-making industry was introduced by Gainsborough the elder, from Coventry, and he seems to have enjoyed a monopoly of it; "crape manufacture," as Mr. Armstrong explains, simply meant dealer in the woollen trade introduced with the Flemish weavers by Edward III into Sudbury. The house of Gainsborough's birth, once the "Black Horse," is gone. Stories of his odd but clever brothers and of his pranksome youth survive and give delight. John was an inventor in many kinds, all but a genius, never practical. Humphrey began as an inventor, but degenerated or rose to be a dissenting minister. Still, he invented a novel sundial, preserved in the British Museum, and a tide-mill for which the Society of Arts awarded him a prize of £50.

Thomas, England's Gainsborough, went to the Sudbury Grammar School, cut his name in the woodwork like other boys, covered his books with sketches. Art was bubbling in him and would not be denied. His holidays were all spent in sketching, and it is related that he once took in his schoolmaster, who was also his uncle, with an exact imitation of his father's familiar request "Give Tom a holiday." At Sudbury it was, too, that he drew a lightning portrait, afterwards known as "Tom Peartree," of a peasant whom he saw gazing wistfully at his father's pear trees, which had been sadly lightened of their burden in the preceding days, and that portrait led at once to the identification of the thief who, confronted with it, confessed.

Thomas Gainsborough was not a thwarted genius. He was sent to London at fourteen to study under Hayman, an indifferent artist and a hard liver. From fourteen to eighteen he was loose about London, under a bad influence to start with, and that he sowed a fine lot of wild oats was no wonder. But at eighteen he returned to Sudbury and to landscape, and worked very hard at it. Here again let Mr. Armstrong be quoted, because his authority is real: "In his early years Gainsborough painted landscape with the minutest care. I know pictures dating probably from about 1748 which excel any Dutchman in the elaboration with which such things as the ruts in a country road, and the grasses beside it, or the gnarled trunk and rough bark of some ancient willow, are made out. In the National Gallery of Ireland we have one such picture. It represents just such a characteristic bit of Suffolk scenery as Wynants would have chosen had he carried his Batavian patience over the North Sea. Across a sand-pit in the foreground a deep country road winds away into the distance, where the roofs of a village suggest its objective. An old horse, a silvery sky with a fine arabesque of windy clouds, and a few old weather-stunted trees complete the picture. The execution is so elaborate that the surface is fused into one unbroken breadth of enamel. The Great Cornard Wood," (Suffolk of course) "in the National Gallery, cannot have been painted very much later than this. Its colour has the same gray coolness, its tone is as high, and its execution almost as elaborate." Gainsborough may or may not have been, as Reynolds said, the greatest living landscape painter. Reynolds probably said it to annoy Wilson, who was present. But Horace Walpole pronounced one of his pictures to be "in the style of Rubens, and by far the best landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters." For us the truly interesting point is that this was said of Sudbury's greatest man, and that the valley of the Stour gave to this man, Thomas Gainsborough, all his early inspiration, all his early subjects in landscape. By the way, in stating that Thomas Gainsborough was Sudbury's greatest man I had forgotten Simon of Sudbury, who probably never uttered a coarse oath, nor drank too much wine, nor was, to quote Gainsborough of himself, "deeply read in petticoats." But let any reader who has persevered thus far lay his hand on his heart and reflect honestly whether he can say offhand who Simon of Sudbury was. Well, he was an archbishop of Canterbury who was hanged during Wat Tyler's rebellion. His fate leaves me, and probably the reader also, quite unmoved.

Now let us hie, climbing a hill of 1 in 14, to Long Melford, and tea, and really fine architecture, for Long Melford is grand and, when one halts for any long time a-motoring, a good cause must needs be offered.

Assuredly after the 3-1/4 miles to Long Melford, so called from the length of its street, have been accomplished the excuse needs no making. The village on one side of the green, the spreading trees of Melford Hall, itself a typical Elizabethan mansion, the exceptionally stately church and, last of all, the hill which lends dignity and variety to the whole, combined to make an ideal halting-place. By all means order tea at one of the village inns and, after it, make a thorough inspection of the church, for the interesting particulars concerning which acknowledgment is due to a monograph, undated and probably published for private circulation, apparently by the Rev. R. Francis, some time rector. The author, whosoever he may have been, transcribes much from certain MSS. of 1688 onwards concerning the former state of the church, and from this we may borrow a little. "Much about the middle of the Parish of Melford, al's Long Melford, in Suffolk, upon an hill, most pleasant for air and prospect, there standeth a large and beautiful Church called Trinity Church, because dedicated to the Holy and undivided Trinity.... Part of it was an old erection, viz. the whole North Ile, the Steeple, a great part of the Porch and p'haps the East End of the South Ile. All the other parts are of a much later erection, as by the different sort of building, and the several inscriptions still extant round and about the said Church may most evidently appear.... The Middle Ile, from the Steeple, exclusive, to the East End of the Chancell, hath one entire advanced roof, in length 152 ft. and 6 inches, distant from the pavement beneath 41 feet and 6 inches, supported on each side with ten arched Pillars, separating the said Middle Ile from the 2 other Iles, which are in height 24 feet, and in length 135 feet and 4 inches.... The pious Benefactors concerned in the building the advanced Ile may be known, and let their memories never perish, by the inscriptions under the Battlements, without the Church, and by like inscriptions in the windows, undemolished, within the Church." Of this last sentence an antiquary no doubt could give an exact translation into modern English, but I must be content to follow the general sense, which is indeed pretty clear. The reference is to very curious inscriptions, in flints let into the walls, which, notwithstanding restoration and because it has been carried out with taste and reverence, still remain in part. The names of the benefactors follow, amongst them being many Martins, or Martyns, who are here mentioned to the exclusion of others partly because, when the church was restored in 1869, the Rev. C. J. Martyn, their patron, bore much of the expense and their clothmark, a token of the former greatness of Long Melford and its cause, is frequently mentioned; but most of all because the monograph, like many another treasure, has been lent to me out of sheer goodwill by Mr. Paulin Martin, of Abingdon, my neighbour, antiquary and healer of men. Long Melford "stood by clothing," as the saying went in the fifteenth century. So did its people, and this majestic Perpendicular church, built of flint and stone, is an abiding monument of their wealth and of their piety.

The beautiful church suffered during the Reformation. Roger Martin, of that date, speaks of many ornaments in the past tense. "There was a goodly mount, made of one great Tree, and set up at the foot of the window there" (behind the High Altar), "carved very artificially, with The Story of Christ's Passion.... There was also in my Ile, called Jesus Ile, at the back of the Altar, a table with a crucifix on it, with the two thieves hanging, on every side one, which is in my house decayed, and the same I hope my heires will repaire, and restore again, one day." Other vanished ornaments good Roger enumerates, and then sundry ceremonies in the church and customary celebrations of the village, whereof some examples may be given.

"Upon Palm Sunday, the Blessed Sacrament was carried in procession about the Church-yard, under a fair Canopy, borne by four Yeomen; the Procession coming to the Church Gate, went westward, and they with the Blessed Sacrament, went Eastward; and when the procession came against the door of Mr. Clopton's Ile" (the Cloptons were large benefactors), "they, with the Blessed Sacrament, and with a little bell and singing, approached at the East end of our Ladie's Chappell, at which time a Boy, with a thing in his hand, pointed to it, signifying a Prophet, as I think, sang, standing upon the Tyrret that is on the said Mr. Clopton's Ile doore, Ecce Rex tuus venit, &c.; and then all did kneel down, and then, rising up, went and met the Sacrament, and so then, went singing together, into the Church, and coming near the Porch, a Boy, or one of the Clerks, did cast over among the Boys flowers, and singing cakes, &c."

Some there be, doubtless, whose gorge will rise at this account of ancient usage in and about the church, but surely none can object to the next extract, pointing as it does to a feeling of real friendship between rich and poor.