Bergh-Apton, near Norwich,
Monday, 10 Dec. 1821.
From the Wen to Norwich, from which I am now distant seven miles, there is nothing in Essex, Suffolk, or this county, that can be called a hill. Essex, when you get beyond the immediate influence of the gorgings and disgorgings of the Wen; that is to say, beyond the demand for crude vegetables and repayment in manure, is by no means a fertile county. There appears generally to be a bottom of clay; not soft chalk, which they persist in calling clay in Norfolk. I wish I had one of these Norfolk men in a coppice in Hampshire or Sussex, and I would show him what clay is. Clay is what pots and pans and jugs and tiles are made of; and not soft, whitish stuff that crumbles to pieces in the sun, instead of baking as hard as a stone, and which, in dry weather, is to be broken to pieces by nothing short of a sledge-hammer. The narrow ridges on which the wheat is sown; the water furrows; the water standing in the dips of the pastures; the rusty iron-like colour of the water coming out of some of the banks; the deep ditches; the rusty look of the pastures—all show, that here is a bottom of clay. Yet there is gravel too; for the oaks do not grow well. It was not till I got nearly to Sudbury that I saw much change for the better. Here the bottom of chalk, the soft dirty-looking chalk that the Norfolk people call clay, begins to be the bottom, and this, with very little exception (as far as I have been) is the bottom of all the lands of these two fine counties of Suffolk and Norfolk.—Sudbury has some fine meadows near it on the sides of the river Stour. The land all along to Bury Saint Edmund’s is very fine; but no trees worth looking at. Bury, formerly the seat of an Abbot, the last of whom was, I think, hanged, or somehow put to death, by that matchless tyrant, Henry VIII., is a very pretty place; extremely clean and neat; no ragged or dirty people to be seen, and women (young ones I mean) very pretty and very neatly dressed.—On this side of Bury, a considerable distance lower, I saw a field of Rape, transplanted very thick, for, I suppose, sheep feed in the spring. The farming all along to Norwich is very good. The land clean, and everything done in a masterly manner.
Tuesday, 11 Dec.
Mr. Samuel Clarke, my host, has about 30 acres of Swedes in rows. Some at 4 feet distances, some at 30 inches; and about 4 acres of the 4-feet Swedes were transplanted. I have seen thousands of acres of Swedes in these counties, and here are the largest crops that I have seen. The widest rows are decidedly the largest crops here; and, the transplanted, though under disadvantageous circumstances, amongst the best of the best. The wide rows amount to at least 20 tons to the acre, exclusive of the greens taken off two months ago, which weighed 5 tons to the acre. Then, there is the inter tillage, so beneficial to the land, and the small quantity of manure required in the broad rows, compared to what is required when the seed is drilled or sown upon the level. Mr. Nicholls, a neighbour of Mr. Clarke, has a part of a field transplanted on seven turn ridges, put in when in the other part of the field, drilled, the plants were a fortnight old. He has a much larger crop in the transplanted than in the drilled part. But, if it had been a fly-year, he might have had none in the drilled part, while, in all probability, the crop in the transplanted part would have been better than it now is, seeing that a wet summer, though favourable to the hitting of the Swedes, is by no means favourable to their attaining a great size of bulb. This is the case this year with all turnips. A great deal of leaf and neck, but not bulbs in proportion. The advantages of transplanting are, first, you make sure of a crop in spite of fly; and, second, you have six weeks or two months longer to prepare your ground. And the advantages of wide rows are, first, that you want only about half the quantity of manure; and, second, that you plough the ground two or three times during the summer.
Grove, near Holt, Thursday, 13th Dec.
Came to the Grove (Mr. Withers’s), near Holt, along with Mr. Clarke. Through Norwich to Aylsham and then to Holt. On our road we passed the house of the late Lord Suffield, who married Castlereagh’s wife’s sister, who is a daughter of the late Earl of Buckinghamshire, who had for so many years that thumping sinecure of eleven thousand a year in Ireland, and who was the son of a man that, under the name of Mr. Hobart, cut such a figure in supporting Lord North and afterwards Pitt, and was made a peer under the auspices of the latter of these two heaven-born Ministers. This house, which is a very ancient one, was, they say, the birth-place of Ann de Boleyne, the mother of Queen Elizabeth. Not much matter; for she married the king while his real wife was alive. I could have excused her, if there had been no marrying in the case; but hypocrisy, always bad, becomes detestable when it resorts to religious ceremony as its mask. She, no more than Cranmer, seems, to her last moments, to have remembered her sins against her lawful queen. Fox’s “Book of Martyrs,” that ought to be called “the Book of Liars,” says that Cranmer, the recanter and re-recanter, held out his offending hand in the flames, and cried out “that hand, that hand!” If he had cried out Catherine! Catherine! I should have thought better of him; but it is clear that the whole story is a lie, invented by the protestants, and particularly by the sectarians, to white-wash the character of this perfidious hypocrite and double apostate, who, if bigotry had something to do in bringing him to the stake, certainly deserved his fate, if any offences committed by man can deserve so horrible a punishment.—The present Lord Suffield is that Mr. Edward Harbord, whose father-in-law left him 500l. to buy a seat in Parliament, and who refused to carry an address to the late beloved and lamented Queen, because Major Cartwright and myself were chosen to accompany him! Never mind, my Lord; you will grow less fastidious! They say, however, that he is really good to his tenants, and has told them, that he will take anything that they can give. There is some sense in this! He is a great Bible Man; and it is strange that he cannot see, that things are out of order, when his interference in this way can be at all necessary, while there is a Church that receives a tenth part of the produce of the earth.—There are some oak woods here, but very poor. Not like those, not near like the worst of those, in Hampshire and Herefordshire. All this eastern coast seems very unpropitious to trees of all sorts.—We passed through the estate of a Mr. Marsin, whose house is near the road, a very poor spot, and the first really poor ground I have seen in Norfolk. A nasty spewy black gravel on the top of a sour clay. It is worse than the heaths between Godalming and Liphook; for, while it is too poor to grow anything but heath, it is too cold to give you the chirping of the grasshopper in summer. However, Mr. Marsin has been too wise to enclose this wretched land, which is just like that which Lord Caernarvon has enclosed in the parishes of Highclere, and Burghclere, and which, for tillage, really is not worth a single farthing an acre.—Holt is a little, old-fashioned, substantially-built market-town. The land just about it, or, at least, towards the east, is poor, and has been lately enclosed.
Friday, 14th Dec.
Went to see the estate of Mr. Hardy at Leveringsett, a hamlet about two miles from Holt. This is the first time that I have seen a valley in this part of England. From Holt you look, to the distance of seven or eight miles, over a very fine valley, leaving a great deal of inferior hill and dell within its boundaries. At the bottom of this general valley, Mr. Hardy has a very beautiful estate of about four hundred acres. His house is at one end of it near the high road, where he has a malt-house and a brewery, the neat and ingenious manner of managing which I would detail if my total unacquaintance with machinery did not disqualify me for the task. His estate forms a valley of itself, somewhat longer than broad. The tops, and the sides of the tops of the hills round it, and also several little hillocks in the valley itself, are judiciously planted with trees of various sorts, leaving good wide roads, so that it is easy to ride round them in a carriage. The fields, the fences, the yards and stacks, the buildings, the cattle, all showed the greatest judgment and industry. There was really nothing that the most critical observer could say was out of order. However, the forest trees do not grow well here. The oaks are mere scrubs, as they are about Brentwood in Essex, and in some parts of Cornwall; and, for some unaccountable reason, people seldom plant the ash, which no wind will shave, as it does the oak.
Saturday, 15 Dec.