Of course I do not forget the powerful impulse given by the researches of Darwin in the direction of explaining the why and the wherefore. I only indicate how large a portion of this explanatory field is yet untilled.
In this county a Naturalists’ Society will never lack either for material to work on, or for variety and interest of subject. Much, even in its grosser form, still remains to be learned. And the vast variety presented by the county, in respect of climate, soils, strata, heath, woodland, marsh, stagnant and running water, as well as the proximity of the great ocean with its shore—presents an almost unexampled field for the work of the scientific naturalist—a field, too, which is constantly changing in accordance with the physical and other changes steadily going on in the district.
With these great natural advantages, and with the great love for natural science, which is inherent in Norfolk men, I make bold to hope and prognosticate for this Society a prolonged and continuously useful career. We are glad to see its library growing, and its journalistic interchanges increasing. We are glad of the increasing importance of the position which it holds amongst kindred societies. We are all, I am sure, looking forward to the time when this, our Society, will meet in a handsome airy room on the top of the Castle Hill; [88] when any student of any particular branch of this natural history will be able (on repairing to our Museum) to see not merely inaccessible specimens ranged three or four deep, but so displayed as to be available for study and examination; when lectures and demonstrations will be possible, because there will be sufficient room space to contain both the lecturer and his audience; in short, when we in Norwich shall have a scientific centre worthy of the Museum and of the great reputation which this district has always held.
What a happy change, too, when the old Castle of Norwich—the last of our three city prisons—shall exchange its human prisoners for forms, imprisoned indeed, but not human; and intended only to enlarge and instruct and make more free the mind of man. And when Science and Art and the cultivation of the intelligence shall tend year by year, and ever more and more, to render real prisons less and less required. And when the moral sense and the force of cultivated public opinion shall suffice to reduce crime and ill-doing to its minimum. We gladly recognise how much has already been done, and we look forward with hope in both these directions to the good time coming.
In now resigning this chair to my learned and distinguished successor, I can only trust that he will find his year of office as pleasant, and as profitable to himself, as the Members of this Society, and their excellent Secretary, have rendered mine to me.
VIII.
THE PARISH OF ST. GILES’S, NORWICH, AND ITS CHURCH. [90a]
The parish of St. Giles’s, though relatively not large, yet has always in later periods occupied an important position in the City of Norwich. It formerly—as is usual with parishes dedicated to Saint Giles—lay upon the outskirts of the city, though not necessarily within the city proper previously to 1253 [90b] (as Mr. Hudson has pointed out), when the city was enclosed with a fosse. In recent times Norwich has expanded largely in the direction of Earlham and Heigham, and St. Giles’s is now completely overlapped by these populous suburbs.
Blomefield describes the parish as having been part of a new portion of Norwich called the New Burgh, originally settled in the time of Edward the Confessor, but much increased at the Conquest by the Normans or Frenchmen settling in it. He says they chose and took this position as being the pleasantest part of the city; but it may also have been that they selected it as being merely the best ground as yet unoccupied by earlier settlers.
St. Giles’s parish is broadly triangular in form, with its base along Chapel Field Road and St. Giles’s Hill. It covers (according to Ordnance Survey) a space of 22·952 acres, and comprises within its area rather more than half of Chapel Field. Its western boundary is along the site of the old city wall, and of St. Giles’s Gate, whilst on the eastern or city side it extends as far as Fisher’s Lane and a little beyond. The population in 1881 was 1,438.
A main city street runs through it, now known as St. Giles’s Street, but formerly called Inferior Newport, Nether Newport, or Lower Newport; Bethel Street being then called Over or Upper Newport.