Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

Surely Mr. Hare, who wrote many a vivid description, was often entertaining, and sometimes a little spiteful, never penned a passage better calculated than this to bring home the characters of a home and of the dwellers in it. The single trace of the old Adam, or the old Augustus, is the gently sarcastic antithesis of Richmond's "portrait" and the "likenesses." Earlham's peace and goodwill bewitched Augustus Hare, and those who had been entertained by his bitterness, no less than those who have writhed under it, will recognize the strength of Earlham's tranquil witchery. Somewhere I have read of late that the Gurneys are of Earlham no more. That is sad indeed.

"Ask for the Arlham Road when you are near the Guildhall," was what John Ostler said, and we, full of map and guide-book pride, translated it into Earlham; but we were reduced to Arlham at last. Even in England it is wise to adopt local pronunciations of place-names when you know them, unless you have plenty of leisure; and it is easy to do so. (In Wales it is equally wise, indeed wiser, for collocations of apparently English characters have totally distinct values in Welsh words, but English lips have, I am given to understand, some difficulty in expressing those values.) Apart from place-names it seemed to me, talking often and freely with the natives, that the spread of education has banished not a little of the Norfolk dialect, and that the country folk of Norfolk pronounce in a more clean-cut fashion, use more ordinary English words, and are easier to understand, than their contemporaries in Berks, Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, or, infinitely most difficult of all, Durham. Among sundry quaint books lent to me by way of preparation for this are several containing terrific examples of Norfolk dialect, which it would be a real pleasure to transcribe, but it must be confessed frankly that, at the moment of writing, I have no more excuse in experience for copying them out than for introducing a sentence or two of Welsh, Gaelic, or Erse. Yet I am, in the matter of tours to be described, many hundreds of miles ahead of the point which my lagging pen has reached. Suffice it to say that the Norfolk dialect may survive, that I have heard it from the lips of cultivated folk of Norfolk, whose normal talk is the same as that of any educated English folk, but that it has not come my way as an every day phenomenon. Is that matter for regret? Sentimentally, perhaps, it is; but practically it is a decided convenience and, combined with the exceptional intelligence of the East Anglian people, it seems to argue that the schoolmaster has been abroad among them to good purpose. Dialects may be picturesque; the words in them may have philological interest, especially when they are good and old words like "largesse" (much used in East Anglia, but by no means peculiar to it), but persistence in sheer mispronunciation, which is the main ingredient of most dialects, is really a sign of ignorance or of affectation, and neither is to be encouraged. For example, I can talk, and can approach fairly near to writing, English "as she is spoke" by the more ignorant Welsh, without any difficulty; and that is as much a dialect, really, as that of Devon or of Yorkshire; but it would be a very foolish and inconvenient thing to do.

Nothing could have been more delightful, for the time of year, than the travelling, for the air was not too cold, hedges had the unmistakable air of verdure on the point of coming, tree-twigs seemed to have thickened as the buds upon them swelled, spring was in the air, and the steaming horses we passed now and again in adjacent fields, straining at plough or harrow, added to the pleasing effect of a landscape undulating a little, but rich in tall trees. Looking on them from time to time I remembered the lines in the Freer's Tale—

The Carter smote and cried as he were wodeHeit Scot! Heit Brock.

This may sound like affectation, but it is nothing of the kind. Although most travellers in spring are apt to quote, more or less correctly, the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, because they are familiar and because, for simplicity, sweetness, and truth, they are not to be surpassed in the English language, one does not, at least the ordinary man does not, go about the country with all Chaucer on the tip of his tongue; and that, on the whole, is a blessing. On this occasion, however, there was an express reason for having these lines in mind—there were even two reasons—and for looking for a farm horse as an excuse for letting them fly. The first reason was that East Anglian antiquaries have long cherished the tradition that Chaucer was born in Norfolk. There is even a jingling rhyme—

Lynn had the honour to present the worldWith Geoffrey Chaucer and the curledPate Alanus de Lenna.

The rhyme may be true of Alanus de Lenna; it does not matter much whether it be true or false; but it is undoubtedly false about Chaucer, who was the son of a London vintner and was born at Charing Cross, and at Charing Cross, London, not Charing Cross in Norwich, as the learned have now discovered for certain. Still it is a peculiar fact that it is, or is reported to be, the custom of Norfolk farms to apply the name Scot to a very large proportion of their farm horses, and it is true that Chaucer's poetry shows a very intimate knowledge of rural life in Norfolk. The explanation may be found on family tradition, for Dr. Skeat says "It is probable that the Chaucer family came originally from Norfolk."

The second reason was soon to come on the left-hand side of the road in the form of a park, boasting superb trees and ensconcing Kimberley Hall, the seat of the Wodehouse family, who are of far more ancient standing in Norfolk than is the present hall. It was built on Italian lines in the reign of good Queen Anne, but the Wodehouses, of whom Lord Kimberley is the head, had been in the land long before Philip Wodehouse, Member of Parliament for Castle Rising, was created a baronet by James I. Not that the honour attached the family to the Stuart cause, for Sir Thomas, the second baronet, sat in the Long Parliament and, I think, fought for it against Charles. Clearly they were a fighting family. "Agincourt" is inscribed under their coat of arms; their crest is "a dexter arm couped below the elbow, vested argent, and grasping a club or, and over it the motto Frappe fort." The quotation comes appositely, or at any rate one striking word in it does, because the "supporters" are "Two wild (wode) men, wreathed about the loins, and holding in the exterior hand a club, raised in the attitude of striking, sable." Yet with this explanation always before them, staring them hard in the face whensoever a head of the house of Kimberley has been summoned to sleep with his fathers, some good folk of Norfolk have, as the Notes and Queries show, been content to puzzle their brains and to seek far for an explanation of the Wild Man as a tavern sign. They have even gone so far as to drag in the historic Peter the Wild Man, quite unnecessarily, for he is modern by comparison with the "wode" men who support the Wodehouse crest now, as they supported it no doubt in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, when she visited in 1571 a Kimberley Hall which modern taste would probably prefer to the present Italian edifice.

Almost immediately after passing Kimberley Hall we came into full view of Hingham Church, which is exactly what a church should be, and stands exactly as a church ought to stand, for the purposes of the motorist. That is to say, it is a very commanding edifice, which has the appearance, at any rate, of standing with its length at right angles to the road, and both tower and clerestory—surely there are more clerestories as well as more churches to be found in Norfolk than in any county—are visible, and very imposing, from a great distance. It was built for the most part by Remigius of Hethersett, who was rector for forty years from 1319, and is of most remarkable height. Inside, most motorists will be content to believe, are some interesting tombs and much stained glass of admirable quality, presented by Lord Wodehouse in 1813. In fact, Hingham is emphatically one of the places at which a halt ought to be made, for old stained glass of high merit is, unhappily, very rare in this England of ours. This secluded village of Hingham ought to be—perhaps is—one of the places in England to which Americans make pilgrimages, for far away in Massachusetts is another Hingham owing its origin to an emigration, early in the seventeenth century, of one Robert Peck, vicar of Hingham, and many of his parishioners. Apparently, parson and parishioners were Puritans of the violent order, who pulled down the altar rails and lowered the altar, insomuch that they incurred the wrath of the reigning bishop. Parson Peck deemed it wise to flee from the wrath to come, and many of his parishioners went with him. Settling down in Massachusetts, they gave the name of the old village in Norfolk to the new home, and although the parson returned to his cure when Puritanism got the upper hand, parishioners stayed in the new world. At any rate, Hingham, Massachusetts, exists to this day, not, indeed, as one of America's mammoth cities, but with a population (in 1900) of 5059, of whom oddly enough more than 900 were foreigners. In fact, in its minor way, it is as much more important than Hingham in Norfolk, as Boston, Massachusetts, is greater than Boston, Lincolnshire. But it is not likely to be more pleasing to the eye, and it is very safe to conjecture that, in fact, it is not a tenth so pleasing as the Norfolk village.

Before long we reach Scoulton Mere, a silent sheet of gleaming grey, with not a bird to be seen on or over it, a fine expanse of sedge-girt water. "Here," says "Murray," "the black-headed gull breeds in enormous numbers, and their eggs are collected, to be sold as plovers' eggs, by thousands for the London market." This may readily be believed, for the eggs of Larus Ridibundus, although they vary a good deal in marking, are often practically indistinguishable from those of the green plover, or grey plover, except that they are not so sharply pointed at the small end. The imposture does not matter a straw so long as the two kinds of eggs remain, as they are at present, identical in point of flavour. Indeed, the subject prompts a digression, flagrantly irrelevant, but certainly pardonable for its practical value. Ten or twelve years ago the owner of Hanmer Mere, which is situate at about the point where Shropshire and Flintshire are so inextricably mixed that an ordinary atlas will not tell you which is which, desiring to reduce the number of the coots, spent an afternoon with a friend in taking some two hundred eggs. It seemed a pity to destroy them without trying them cold, and hardboiled, like plovers' eggs. They were every whit as good to eat, and they were distinctly the clou of luncheon at Chester races next day. This is certainly worth knowing, for, if plovers be more numerous than coots, there are enough coots and to spare, and their nests are as easy to find as those of plovers are difficult.

But "Murray" proceeds: "There are only three breeding places of this gull in Britain." This must be quite wrong. The late Mr. Henry Seebohm, whose Eggs of British Birds (Paunson & Brailsford, Sheffield) is both admirably produced and of the highest authority, wrote, and Dr. Bowdler Sharpe left the passage in editing the book after Mr. Seebohm's death: "The Black-headed Gull is one of our commonest species. Its colonies are not so large as those of the Kittiwake, but they are much more numerous. It is a resident in the British Isles, frequenting the coasts during winter, but retiring inland in summer to breed in colonies in swamps." Now Mr. Henry Seebohm was a mighty ornithologist, and the most indefatigable birds-nester at home and abroad who ever lived, and, having read often before, and now again, all he has to say of the nesting places of all kinds of gulls claimable by Great Britain, I am convinced that this claim set up by "Murray," perhaps on the word of some local fowler, cannot be maintained either in relation to the Black-headed Gull or any other kind of gull or tern that breeds in England.

Leaving Scoulton Mere behind we were again in a land of flat heaths of wide extent, and of sheltering hedges of dense Scotch fir. It was a country of the most pleasing face but, apart from that, no use for any purposes save those of the motorist and the rabbit-breeder. That it had been well used by the latter evidence was soon apparent on the roadside in the form of a gang of men, with nets, dogs, and ferrets, pursuing their operations on such a scale, and so completely in the open, that they must surely have been authorized rabbit-catchers and not poachers. Still the thought occurred to me that, in bygone days and in far-distant North Wales, we always found from the advertisements that ferrets, who are the poachers' best friends, were to be obtained more easily from Norfolk than from any other part of the country, and that they knew their work very well when they arrived. In fact, there is a huge head of game in Norfolk, and where that state of things exists, there poachers will be. Theirs is a lawless pursuit of course, but Lord! as Mr. Pepys would have said, what good sport it must be "on a shiny night in the season of the year," and what a vast and intimate knowledge of animal and bird life these poachers must possess.

If it was a rabbit-catcher's paradise it was a motorist's paradise also. There was no possible danger to human beings, for, after the rabbit-catchers, there were none; after the fir hedges had been passed the road became an unfenced ribbon of tawny grey running through the bare heath, with no other roads debouching into it, and no cover of any sort for a police trap. There was no reason in life against a good spin at top speed except that superstitious regard for the letter of the law which not one man in a thousand really has. The car simply flew forward; the speed indicator marked 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and even 50 miles an hour; the road seemed to open wide to our advent, to stretch out its arms, so to speak, to embrace us; the motion, smooth, swifter and swifter still, even as the flight of the albatross that stirreth not his wings, and absolutely free from vibration, was, in a single word, divine. Suddenly, a few miles in front of us, a dusty cloud hove in sight over the road. "There," said my friend, half in jest, but only half—for a motorist's paradise is at its best when solitary—"is one of those beastly motor-cars. What a foul dust it is raising!" So it turned out, on rising and looking back over the cape hood, were we; not that it mattered, for no wayfarers had been passed or, therefore, powdered, for many a short mile—I had written "a long mile" from force of habit, but it would have been inappropriate. Was the other car meeting us or going in the same direction? In the same direction surely, for though the cloud of dust was coming nearer to us, it was not approaching very fast. So we determined to pass as soon as might be, and "giving her a little more gas," we were very soon "on terms," as a racing man would say, with a two-seated car going along the middle of the road at a fair pace. Once, twice, thrice our horn sounded, but the occupants of that car never heard us. At last, keeping well to the off-side of the road, and when our bonnet was level with their rear off-wheel, Mr. Johnson and I gave a simultaneous and stentorian yell; and the two pairs of goggles that were turned upon us, who were then, as nearly always, un-goggled, clearly covered four eyes starting with surprise. It was a lesson to them and to us of the very poor penetrative power of a motor-horn in relation to motor-cars in front, and of the necessity of looking behind you now and again, especially if you be in a noisy car. So that two-seated car was passed as if it had been standing still, and the lot of the dust-recipient, which one or other must needs endure for a while, was transferred from us to them; but they were not called upon to endure it, nor could they have kept it if they had so desired, for any length of time.

So hey for Watton, near which lies Weyland Wood, fondly famous in local story as being the identical wood in which the ill-fated babes in the wood were lost. That is a tradition as to the origin and true locality of which, so far as I know, even the most ardent folk-lorists have not concerned themselves very seriously, and certainly the likeness of sound between "Weyland" and "Wailing" may have caused it to be localized here. As it happens, however, there is a very much simpler explanation of the name of the wood and of the Hundred in which it is situated. Weyland is simply the modern representation of the "Wanelunt" of Domesday, and that again is simply descriptive, like Blacklands in Berks, and the names of scores of Hundreds besides. For "Wanelunt" is just "wan land," and a more wan land than this, from the agricultural point of view, it would be hard to find. Islington in Norfolk may be, in all probability was, the place in which the Bailiff's daughter lived and was beloved by the squire's son, but Weyland Wood cannot detain us. It has no more claim to this particular honour than a hundred other woods in other parts of the kingdom have, except upon an etymological basis, and that has the trifling disadvantage of being quite wrong.

Nor did Watton detain us, any more than it need detain anybody else. Brandon, the next place passed, was renowed in ancient times for its rabbits and its quarries of gunflints, and the "Grime's graves" in the vicinity are said to be interesting earthworks. The glory of the rabbits remains, but the gunflint trade was, of course, vanished. "Murray," it is true, says that flints "are still (1875) exported to Arab tribes round the Mediterranean," but that was more than thirty years ago, and Mr. Rye is, no doubt, correct in saying that the old industry has, naturally enough, died out of late years. But those desert tribes on the African coast of the Mediterranean still use some charmingly antique pieces, and it may be that Brandon flints are still fitted to some of them. They were the same kind of flints which the ancient Briton, or perhaps Neolithic man, used to dig out at Brandon, for excavations some time since revealed a stag's antler, says "Murray," in what was clearly a "working" of a prehistoric flint quarry. Thus much the writer tells us and no more. It would really have been much more interesting to know something of the nature of the antler; but on that point he is silent.

If one were in a hurry, and a train happened to be convenient, it would, for once, be simpler to reach Ely from Brandon by train than by car: for the railway follows the course of the Brandon River across Mow Fen and then cuts straight across Burnt Fen and Middle Fen to Ely. On the other hand the road, dating very likely to a period long before the reclamation of the fens, and keeping to the high ground, turns south-west by south to Mildenhall and then, skirting Mildenhall Fen, nearly due west to Fordham and Soham, and from Soham north-west to Ely: and this is a long way round. Here there would be a first rate opportunity for saying something of the romantic history of the Fens, for it is truly romantic, and of the real glamour which they exercise upon a traveller through their midst. The opportunity is deliberately reserved to a later point for three reasons. First, there is much to be said on other matters; secondly, you really do not see very much of the Fens by this line of route; thirdly, it was found later that the drive from Lynn to Ely is par excellence the occasion upon which the peculiar character of the Fens, their limitless extent, their rich and black soil, and the reflection that all this wealth has been reclaimed from the wasting waters by the industry and the enterprise of man, the very spirit of the Fens in fact, enter into the traveller's soul.

Fordham and even Soham, with its remarkable church and its legends of Canute's passage over the long-vanished mere upon the ice, were passed almost unnoticed, for our eyes were fixed upon the horizon in front in longing for the vision, often seen from a train, of Ely Cathedral rising in beautiful majesty from the centre of the plain-girt isle, once fen-girt, in which the Saxon made almost his last heroic stand against the all-conquering Norman. Truth to tell, for this once only, the train has the advantage of the motor-car in providing a splendid and memorable spectacle. Approaching Ely from Cambridge by rail one sees the cathedral, and the cathedral is the only object that catches the eye, for miles, and miles, and then miles. It is a divine sight, stirring up memories of Canute and of Emma his Queen, of ravaging William the Conqueror (concerning whom the Saxon chroniclers probably wrote without exaggerated regard for truth) and of the heroic figure of Hereward the Wake. Memories of this vision, often seen, never to be forgotten, had prepared us for something really great and for prolonged enjoyment of it. As a fact, and it was one which intelligent study of a contour map might have prepared us for, the vision did not break upon our eyes until we were through Soham, and speeding along the causeway built by Hervé le Breton early in the twelfth century across the mere which stood where the golden corn is reaped and tied and carried every autumn now. When it came it was, be it stated with the more warmth now in that what is to be written shortly is not entirely the conventional view, supremely lovely. The air was of that pellucid transparency which is the sure prelude of rain. At a distance of four miles or thereabouts the eye could distinguish shades of colour, could follow all the delicate tracery of the central octagon and of the huge western tower; and it was natural, remembering that Ely is one of the largest cathedrals in Europe, to observe that, so excellent are its proportions, it does not impress the spectator from a distance by its length. This very excellent effect is due doubtless to Alan of Walsingham's fourteenth-century design for a grandly broad basis to the octagon tower under which he lies.

And here rhapsody must cease at the command of candour. I had visited Ely before as quite a young man; I had read much of the history of the cathedral, much concerning its architecture. Yet this time it failed to please as a whole, within or without, when viewed at close quarters. The octagon, regarded from a distance of not many hundred feet, looked to be wanting in substance rather than possessed of airy grace. Somehow or other, in the perverse fashion which is at once irresistible and fatal to cordial admiration, it suggested to my mind a ludicrous comparison. Resist as I might, I continued to think of wedding cakes. The western tower, so far as it was built by Bishop Riddell in the twelfth century, that is to say up to the level of the clerestory of the nave, seemed, and was, and is, proud, substantial, massive, impressive; but the Decorated superstructure, an octagon with turrets alongside, did not satisfy at all; nor do I believe that it would have been more satisfying even if the slender spire of wood, long vanished from its top, had survived. On me it produced, and I found that it has produced on other and more highly cultivated men, an impression of flimsy and jarring incongruity. Far other was the effect of looking at the honest red brick of the Bishop's Palace near the west door, for the gently warm tone of the bricks builded as our forefathers loved in the reign of the first Tudor king, was a joy and a rest to the eye.

Before entering the cathedral itself we took luncheon at the "Lamb," for a hungry man is an impatient sight-seer. But even after that, to one returning in contented mood, the outside of the western tower satisfied only up to the level of the clerestory. In fact, the original impression, whether it argued crass ineptitude or no, remained; and it is better to write oneself down a boor than to invent raptures which would be untrue. Inside our experiences were unfortunate. The ladies had gone before, had seen and enjoyed a good deal. My friend and I entered with due reverence. The vastness of the nave took seisin of us at once; but the charm was rudely broken. To us approached a verger of immemorial age—he had informed the ladies that he had been attached to the cathedral for half a century—wearing a velvet skull-cap and saying in strident tones, "It is a fine cathedral, gentlemen; have you seen it before?" "Yes," said I, shortly, and hoping to be rid of him, for to have a babbling guide at one's elbow on occasions of this kind is fatal to intelligent enjoyment. But the hope was vain. He joined himself to us and went on talking. In despair we divided forces, and walked briskly away in opposite directions. Nothing daunted he stood in the middle and talked louder than ever. So, after admiring the inside of the octagon, which is very fine, and failing to admire the roof of the nave, we left in despair without having studied the architecture in detail, without seeing the hammer beams of the transept roofs, without lingering over the original Norman work in the transepts. To us it was a loss and a bitter disappointment; but there are some inflictions that are beyond bearing, and this doubtless worthy old gentleman was one of them. Still, there are compensations in things, and nothing is made quite in vain. One of the objects for which this verger was created was that of saving the reader from the infliction of an essay on the architecture of Ely Cathedral by one who has, by his unashamed candour, demonstrated himself unworthy to indite such an essay.