This quaint admixture of scientific research, pleasure-seeking, and superstitious credulity, blended with intellectual enquiry, affords a curious picture of the domestic and professional habits of a physician of the seventeenth century. The father of the writer, the eminent Dr. Thomas Browne, received the order of knighthood from his majesty, King Charles II., on the occasion of his visiting the city in 1671, when he dined in state at the New Hall (St. Andrew’s); the same honour was pressed upon the acceptance of the mayor, who, however, ventured to decline the proffered dignity. In the reign of James II., we find record of Henry, then Duke of Norfolk, riding
into the market-place at the head of 300 knights, to declare a free parliament, the mayor and sheriffs meeting him there, and consenting to the act. But the glory of the palace, once the scene of such regal splendour and magnificence, was not of long duration. A dispute between the grandson of the Duke Henry and the mayor of the city, concerning the entrance of some comedians into the city, playing their trumpets, &c. on the way to the palace, caused its owner, Thomas, then Duke, to destroy the greater portion of it, and leave the remainder untenanted; and among divers transmutations of property that characterized the era of Queen Anne, we find the appropriation of its vestiges to the purpose of a workhouse, when those institutions first sprang into existence—a fate shared at the same period by the cloisters of the old Black Friars monastery.
The river, that once reflected the gorgeous displays of wealth that glittered upon the margin of its waters, in the palace of the Dukes, now flows darkly and silently on, through crowded thoroughfares and gloomy wharfs, and staiths; corn and coal depots, red brick factories, with their tiers of low window-ranges and tall chimneys, have usurped the place of banquetting halls and palace gardens; a toll bridge adds silence to the gloom, by its prohibitory tax on passers-by, a stillness, oppressive by its sudden contrast to the activity of neighbouring thoroughfares,
pervades the whole region round about; and the spot that once was the nucleus of wealth, riches, and grandeur, now seems the very seat and throne of melancholy.
Coeval with the rise of workhouses, in the reign of Anne, is another event of local history—the introduction of street-lighting. An act of parliament of William III., confirmed in the 10th of Anne, enacted “that every householder charged with 2d. a week to the poor, whose dwelling-house adjoined any streets, market-places, public lanes, or passages in the city, should every night, yearly, from Michaelmas to Lady-day, as it should grow dark, hang out, on the outside of their houses, a candle, or visible and convenient lights, and continue the same until eleven o’clock at night, for enlightening the streets, and convenience of passengers, under penalty of 2s. for every neglect.” Lamps, at the cost of the community in general, were soon afterwards substituted, but their shape, and distance from each other, would seem to have rendered them but indifferent substitutes for the illuminations that preceded them; and if memory is faithful to us, in recalling the progenitors of the gas-lights of the present day, we may form some slight conception of the pigmy race of ancestors from which they sprung.
Meantime, during these years of progress and prosperity, while Time was tracing its finger-marks
upon the walls of men’s houses, and writing its lessons on their hearts and minds, there stood, in the centre of the old market-place, a little silent symbol of the religious feeling of the passing ages,—the market-cross, and oratory within the little octagonal structure, whose external corners bore upon all of them the emblem of hope and salvation—the crucifix. In its earliest days, its oratory was tenanted by a priest, supported by the alms of the busy market-folks, who could find means, in the midst of all their worldly callings, to pay some tribute in time and money to religion. And was it such a very foolish practice of our ignorant old forefathers, thus to bring the sanctuary into the very midst of the business of life?—was it a great proof of childish simplicity, to seek to sanctify the scenes of merchandize by the presence and teaching of Christianity? Is it indeed needful that the elements of our nature, spirit, soul, and body, should be rent asunder, and fed and nurtured in distinct and separate schools, until each one of us becomes almost conscious of two separate existences—the Sabbath-day life, within the church or meeting walls, and the week-day business life abroad in the world? Or shall the union be pronounced more beautiful and consonant with the laws of harmony, that carries the world into the sanctuary, and desecrates the house of God by the presence of sordid passions, crusted round the heart by daily exercise
in the great marts of commerce, or in the intercourse of political or even social life, that not the one day’s rest in seven, spent in listening to some favourite theologian’s intellectual teachings of doctrinal truths, or controversial dogmas, can suffice to rub off, to purify, or make clean? A market-cross and priest may not be the remedies for this disease of later times, but they were outer symbols of the reality needed—Christianity, to be carried out into the every-day actions of the world, mingling with the dealings of man with man, master and workman, capitalist and consumer,—that there may no longer exist those monstrous anomalies that are to be met with in almost every phase of society in this Christian land, among a people professing to be guided by the light of “Truth,” to walk according to the law of “Charity,” and to obey the precept, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
But the busy hands of zealous reformers long since began their work upon this little outward expression of “superstition;” the priest disappeared, the crucifixes fell beneath the murmurs of “true Protestants,” and the oratory was transferred to the “masters, and searchers, and sellers of leather;” but, in process of time, falling to decay, the little monument was pulled down, and all traces of its existence obliterated from the scene of its former dominion.
And now a word upon manufactures. The great