The house of God
King Henry the Eight of noble Fame
Bequeathed the City this commodious place,
With lands and rents he did endow the same,
To help decrepit age in woful case,
Edward the Sixth, that prince of royal stem,
Performed his father’s generous bequest.
Good Queen Eliza, imitating them,
Ample endowments added to the rest;
Their pious deeds we gratefully record,
While Heaven them crowns with glorious reward.
St. Giles’ Hospital, to which the church of St. Helen has been united by the appropriation of its nave and chancel, is a relic of great antiquity—a
memorial of the liberality of Bishop Suffield, who in 1249 founded it, appointing four chaplains to celebrate service there for his soul, and all poor and decrepit chaplains in the diocese, endowing it with means to support the same number perpetually, and to lodge thirteen poor people with one meal a day. There were also appointed afterwards four sisters, above fifty years of age, to take care of the clothing, &c. &c. The master and chaplains were to eat, drink and sleep, in one room, and daily, after grace at dinner before any one drank, the bell was to ring and the chaplains to go into the choir and sing Miserere mei Deus. There was also an Archa Domini, or Lords’ Box, from which the poor that passed by, were daily to be relieved as far as the funds permitted. From Lady day to the Assumption, at a certain hour the bell was to ring and a quantity of bread, “enough to repel hunger,” to be given to the poor then present; and “because the house should be properly ‘Domus Dei,’ or the house of God, and of the Bishops of Norwich,” it was ordained that “as often as any bishop of the see should pass by, he should go in and give his blessing to the sick.” Edward VI. dissolved the Hospital and gave it to the city as a house for the poor. A school was also established, which was afterwards transferred to the Free School. The cloisters of the old hospital still remain almost entire, and serve as walks for the pensioners.
St. Edmund, St. James, St. Paul, St. Margaret, all the Saints, St. Saviour, St. Clements the Martyr, St. Peter Southgate, and per Mountergate, St. Julian, St. Michael at Plea, at Thorn, and Coslany, St. Ethelred, St. John’s Sepulchre, and St. John’s Timberhill, St. George, and St. Augustine, fill up the register of ecclesiastical edifices; each possesses some particular claim to notice, down to the legend of the Lady in the Oak, that gave a distinctive title to the church of St. Martin at Oak, where her image once figured in an oak tree in the churchyard, and wrought wondrous miracles, which caused so much adoration to be paid to the graven image, that the purgers of idolatry in good young King Edward’s reign, found it needful to displace it from its high position, and cut down the tree in which it stood.
Among the biographies associated with the various districts over which these patron saints may be said to hold their reign, are those of the eminent divine, Dr. Samuel Clarke, of the seventeenth century; Kay, or Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge; Professors Hooker and Lindley, the great botanists; William Taylor, Sayer, Sedgwick, Gurney, Opie, and Borrow, among the literary celebrities of the age; Professor Taylor and Dr. Bexfield, names known well in the musical world, and many others, whose lives and works entitle them to be ranked among the leading characters
of their time; while in the medical profession, the names and fame of Martineau and Crosse have become European. Few of these can we pause to sketch—many of them are among the number of those whose work is not yet done; and of others it may be said that their memory is too fresh in the hearts of those bound to them by chords of affection and friendship, for a “stranger to intermeddle” therewith.
William Taylor was the friend and correspondent of Southey. It is said, in his “Life,” that he once jocosely remarked, “If ever I write my own life, I shall commence it in the following grandiloquent manner; ‘Like Plato, like Sir Isaac Newton, like Frederick Leopold, Count Stolberg, I was born on the 7th of November, and, like Mrs. Opie and Sir James Edward Smith, I was baptized by the Rev. Samuel Bourn, then the Presbyterian minister of the Octagon chapel.’” His attainments as a German scholar were notorious, and his metaphysical writings earned for him a widely-extended fame. His translations of German theological works, may be regarded as the first introduction of that school of literature, that is at this moment deluging our country with the copious streams of philosophy, whose deep and subtle waters, whether invigorating or noxious, are spreading themselves through every channel of society in our land.
William Jackson Hooker, the son of a manufacturer of Norwich, rose to the rank of Regius Professor of Botany, in the University of Glasgow. In early life he was spoken of by Sir James Smith as the first cryptogamic botanist of the time, and his after-works proved the accuracy of the opinion. His “Muscologia Brittannica,” and “Monograph on the Genus Jungermannia,” are unrivalled as guides to the scientific enquirer, and, with his other works, may be classed among the gems of English literature. In the course of his rambles in the neighbourhood of his native city, he discovered, in a fir-wood near Sprowston, that quaint, curious, one-sided looking little moss, called Buxbaumia aphylla, which, destitute of any visible foliage, rears its little club-like seed-vessels upon its foot-stalks in the most eccentric possible manner. The muscologist may search long and often ere a specimen may meet his eye, even within the precincts of the grove where Dr. Hooker first discovered it; but many another rare and beautiful contribution to a moss herbarium shall reward him for his pains, especially the elegant Bartramia, with its exquisitely soft velvet foliage, and globular seed-vessels, to be met with in such rich abundance in few other soils.
Lindley, the Professor of Botany in the London University, is another genius raised from the nursery grounds of the Old City; his father having followed
the profession of horticulture at Catton, one of the suburbs of Norwich.