" \ Li jW¥* *
BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME

rn

Edward Wells Southworth
Fund

%J3iP0M 'R.O^AMIOiG

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

ARCADY : For Better, for Worse. Fourth
Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.
COMING OF THE FRIARS (The), and other
Mecliceval Sketches. Sixth Edition. Crown
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STUDIES BY A RECLUSE: In Cloister,
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TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON : Some
P'ugitive Papers. Third Edition. Crown
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London : T. FISHER UN'WIN,

ONE GENERATION OF A NORFOLK
HOUSE: A Contribution to Elizabethan
History. Second Edition. 8vo. 1876.
THE HISTORY OF THE DIOCESE OF
NORWICH. 1884. S.P.C.K.

RANDOM ROAMING
Unt) ®tber papers

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D.
Rector of Scanting,
Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge,
Hon. Fellow of Worcester College, O.xford,
Hon. Canon in the Cathedral of Norwich

SECOND EDITION

QLon&on
T, FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
MDCCCXCVI

" Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains ; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new Ihings."

lo

B3b

V

/.

[Alt m^kli fvseti^d.}

Preface.
It must always be a question, for a writer who has once
put on record his serious convictions on subjects which
have long occupied his thoiights, how far he is at liberty
to alter the form in which those convictions were originally
published to the world. A work of art does not admit of
being tinkered at indefinitely ; it has an interest as a
record of the artisfs effort to express his thoughts under
such influences of times and circumstances as can never
recur. As the world goes round the lights and shadows
change ; as the world moves on our point of view must
needs be other than it was. We see " with larger other
eyes." It is so in pictorial art — it is so in literary art also.
Therefore in republishing the papers in this volume, I
have made only such changes as are mere corrections of
misstatements or oversights ; in some few instances I
have omitted a sentence which seemed to me ill-worded.

viii PREFACE.
unkind, or obscure. In the main, however, the volume
expresses pretty faithfully the opinions which I held two
or three years ago and the conclusions which seemed to
me deducible from that measure of knowledge which was
accessible to me and to others at the time I wrote.
But the pace at which we live and the indefatigable
energy of explorers in every department of Scientific or
Historic research is so bewildering, that he must be a bold
man indeed who will hope to keep abreast of that band of
alert and brilliant pioneers who are in the van ofthe army
of progress. The very first paper in this volume is already
behind the times. The existence of a Christian Church
which I with some hesitation ventured to think might be
found at Silchester, has actually been proved by the exca
vations on the spot; and the guess of yesterday has passed
into one of the certainties of to-day. So with such hints
and suggestions as T have ventured to throw out with
regard to the pre-historic roads of East Anglia — the
significance of the few remaining tumuli along their lines,
and the probability of our finding many more evidences
of the commerce and civilisation of our remote progenitors
than we have yet discovered. It can be but a few years
before we shallhave largely increased our certainties upon
such questions, and every contributor to the common stock
of Knowledge must be left behind by those who start from
the point which he reached before them. Even the most
learned find it hard to keep their books up to date ; their

PREFACE. ix
labours become absorbed by those they teach; they cannot
choose but pass the lamp on to other hands and submit
with what grace they may to be superseded.
Of course there are great men whose work must last.
It is difficult to believe that the day will ever come when
Gibbon will not be read by old and young ; difficult, too,
to imagine that tJie magnificent researches of General Pitt
Rivers or of Sir fohn Evans could ever be regarded as
ephemeral, or cease to be the recognised landmarks by
the help of which others must steer their course. But the
rank and file — who trudge along the track as they are led,
and count it glorious to follow at a distance the leaders
who give the word of command — they have their day and
cease to be, illustrating too aptly the provoking theory,
that " The final cause of Nature's laws
Is io grow obsolete.''
For myself I have had a certain purpose in writing on
Historical and A rchceological subjects. I have found so
much delight in such studies, they have made the common
objects by the wayside so full of interest, and brought me
into such close and mysterious relations with the genera
tions behind us that, from very craving for sympathy, I
have felt impelled to bring others under the spell of that
same fascination which has not only added to the happi
ness of my life, but has, I believe, added to my usefulness
in the duties of my calling. But I have never pretended to

X PREFACE.
be anything more than an eager learner, always asking
questions of the past, and desiring to awaken in others an
intelligent curiosity. My readers may very easily get far
beyond me, but in the meantime — Fungar vice cotis.
Even so unpretentious a thing as a whetstone serves its
purpose if men will deign to use it.
The last two papers attempt to deal with two crying
needs of the present ; and the first of them may seem to
have little or nothing to do with the past. Nor has it,
except in one respect. The provisions which our forefathers
made on so liberal a scale for the maintenance of a body
of men who should be the religious teachers of the nation
and something more, are proving inadequate for the main
tenance of the clergy now. The immense increase of our
population is bringing about many changes in our attitude
and sentiments towards one another in view of the fierce
struggle for a livelihood. There is a growing conviction
that the young and strong should have the work of the
world committed to them, and that the old should be laid
on the shelf as soon as may be. In more industries than
one the ''old hands" are rudely reminded that they have
had their innings, and that it is time that they sliould
make way for their juniors. I am told that even in the
clerical profession it is becoming increasingly difficult for
those who have passed middle life to obtain employment.
The fact, if it be a fact, is significant. But if this is
the direction in which we are all moving, what is to

PREFACE. x\
become of the ageing and the aged among the clergy who
have never had more than a bare subsistence and much
less than the " living wage " which the working men in
other walks of lif e are sternly claiming as their due? I
can see no remedy but the one I have ventured to sketch
out. It seems to me that among the clergy some form of
compulsory insurance against death and old age must be
resorted to in the near future — that it is inevitable, I
cannot doubt. Those who have done me the honour of
reading my essays on The Church and the Villages and
that one entitled Quis Custodiet,^ will see that this
paper on Clergy Pensions follows as a sequel to those
earlier attempts to deal with some ecclesiastical problems
of the day.
The last paper I most earnestly commend to the atten
tion of those who belong to the wealthy classes and who
have a real desire to devote a portion of their wealth to
add to the comfort and happiness of the needy and the
stricken. Never a week passes by without an announce
ment appearing in the newspapers that some benevolent
person has given thousands for promoting the well-being
of the poor in our towns. God forbid that I should say
one word which could imply that I regard such munifi
cence as other than noble and sure to carry a blessing
with it. But this I do venture to say, that we are in our
time so mastered by the pressure of the masses, so awed
' " Trials of a Country Parson," pp. 97, 143.

xii PREFACE.
by the clamours of the thronging multitudes in our
crowded cities, that we have no ears to hear the faint
crying of the feeble and sore broken, the widows and the
aged in our country villages who pine and wither and
weep and die off in pathetic silence, and whom it would
be so very easy to comfort and cheer and make happy, if
only there were some active pity and wise help provided
for them.
One ofthe many miserable results of all our agricultural
depression and of the wild talk of agrarian empirics is
that even- Philanthropists appear to have given up all
thought of lightening the lot of our village poor. The
poor, I say, for the able-bodied are quite able to take care
of themselves. As long as m.en have votes you may depend
upon it they will not be allowed to starve. But our aged
poor are in evil case indeed. They are handed over to
the tender mercies of the law, and the law decrees that
half-a-crown a week and a stone of flour shall be the
measure of help afforded to our aged couples worn out
with a lifetime of laiour on the land. This is the
pittance from which they are expected to provide them
selves with food and raiment and house rent and fuel,
though coal may be at famine prices and the blanket be
ten years old. And this is called outdoor relief forsooth !
The alternative lies between accepting it without daring
to murmur, or of selling their wedding-rings and their
last rags and all the rickety little furniture thzt reminds

PREFACE. xiii
them of happier days, and tJien to totter into the Work
house at last — to pine and whimper and perish and be
shovelled into the pauper' s grave.
That grim expression relief has a certain suggestive-
ness attached to it, however. Observe it is not called
support or maintenance, // seems that the law does not
pretend to maintain the poor, they are only to be relieved ;
the assumption being that the poor creatures must not look
to the guardians to keep them alive. Indeed their case
would be desperate if it were so. They would perish by
the hundred— perish by famine and cold and nakedness —
if there were not some little charity still left in the world.
But the resources of those in our country villages who
could not bear — who would not dare — to see their suffer
ing neighbours slowly die of want, are steadily falling
short. Money is rapidly going away from the country
and passing into the towns and their suburbs. We in the
villages are all getting more and more straitened year by
year. It makes our hearts almost die in us sometimes
when we reflect that our resources are diminishing while
the claims upon our common humanity are growing and
growing. Meanwhile our labourers can never get rid
of the sight of poverty in its most appealing shape — of
poverty helpless and hopeless — poverty which they know
to be undeserved. Week by week they are haunted by
that little gathering of feeble old men and women watch
ing hungrily for the coming of the relieving officer, and

xiv PREFACE.
in terror lest their allowance should have been stopped
by " the board!' Do you wonder that, with these spectres
fronting them, the labourers say to themselves, " This is
what we must come to in our turn I " or that they are
the victims of a scowling discontent which makes them
impatient for any change which may upset all things
that are ?
Homes for the poor and needy, for the worn out and
broken down in our country villages — homes that they
may call their own, and where they m.ay still enjoy the
blessings of quiet and keep together their little household
gods, and hope to hand them on — homes which their
children and their children's children m,ay help to make
bright and glad and winsome, without a thought that
the aged are dependents upon the young, who may be
having a hard struggle for themselves — such homes the
law and the state can never provide ; they must come
from philanthropists who are not ambitious of doing
things in the grand style, who have no desire to sound a
trumpet before them on the one hand nor to do good by
deputy and send a big cheque to some Society on the
other. Such philanthropists will have to take trouble
and make inquiries, and use their judgment, and be on
tJteir guard against overmuch haste in maturing their
plans. And what they give, they must give with the
gentle, warm, loving, living, not with the cold, bloodless,
and often very cruel, dead hand.

CONTENTS.

I. RANDOM ROAMIXG . I
II. CASTLE ACRE . 46
III. HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC 84
IV. A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON . 122
V. A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 1799. 167
VI. A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS . 194
VII. SOMETHING ABOUT VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES 220

RANDOM ROAMING.

Enjoying the happy privilege of living where the
air is of the purest and the water of the best, I am
in the habit of deriding those who assume that it is
one of the necessities of life that a man should have
an annual " change." Our fathers were not restless
peripatetics, yet they were wise in their generation —
wise and virtuous ; they lived their lives in a dogged,
robust, and useful manner ; they did not live in
vain ; they did not pretend that they were subject to
periodical attacks of lassitude ; they did not pose as
overstrained workers ; they did not lackadaisically
sigh for rest. We are of different stuff- We pretend,
one and all, that we need change of scene and
holidays. It is the fashion of the time and no more.

2 RANDOM ROAMING.
Confess that it is a mere fashion, and I am prepared
to grant that it is a pleasant fashion ; but ask me to
allow that going to the end of the earth is positively
required by the average Briton because the average
Briton is an overworked animal, and I protest
against the hypocrisy of such an assumption, and
obstinately assert that I, for one, am not overworked,
and decline to move until you withdraw your plea
of necessity, which I hold to be untenable and in
sincere. And yet I confess I love seeing strange places, and
visiting half-forgotten places that have always some
thing new to teach, and I know too well how born/
any one becomes who never stirs from home. Only
don't talk to me of the advantage of "change of
air." For to such as we, any change of air is a change
for the worse.
We had been reading Professor Burrows' charm
ing book about the Cinque Ports, and a hankering
came upon me to go and see the old towns with my
own eyes. So we made a beautiful plan, and we
mapped it out day by day, and we had it all set
down in black and white, and we were going to spend
nineteen days in researches of the most interesting
and instructive kind. Canterbury was to be our
base, and all the coast from Reculver to Beachy
Head our land of pilgrimage. What were we

RANDOM ROAMING. 3
not going to do and to see! Let it be confessed
at once that our plans came to nothing: we
did not even get to Dover, and we did not see
Dungeness. Alack I How beautiful plans do fade into nothing
ness ! Something happens — and something happened
with us. I have the great happiness of knowing
two large-hearted brethren. Twins they are and
never parted — great-hearted brethren, and broad-
browed, strong and clear of brain, right manly and
gentle and generous, and of widest sympathies, and
their names are Walt and Vult. Perhaps you have
read of two such brethren in Jean Paul's perplexing
story. I am afraid young men do not read Richter
now. Young men now are not in the mood for any
thing sentimental — they "like incident," so they
tell me, and they " never heard of Walt and Vult.
Richter's pair of brothers are dead, and have been
dead for some two generations at least. But the
brothers Walt and Vult who are my dear friends, are
alive now ; and long may they live to make the
world better and happier by their influence !
One morning, just as we were preparing to carry
out that carefully considered plan of ours, came a
letter from Walt and Vult, saying peremptorily
"We desire to see you, friend. Redeem your
promise and let us know the Lady Shepherd [these

4 RANDOM ROAMING.
were their very words], and we will show you some
thing of Sussex." It is pitiful to think of such
weakness as we exhibited ; but it seemed that some
occult force was acting on us, a wilfulness stronger
than our own wills prevailed, and actually next
morning — yes, within twenty-four hours — we had
thrown up all our plans and had started off without
helm or compass, surrendering ourselves to the
brothers Walt and Vult, When the train stopped,
lo ! we were at about the most prosaic town in the
island of Great Britain ; and the name of that town
is Brighton. Until some ten years ago I had a bigoted aversion
to the very name of Brighton — nay, a rancorous and
vindictive hatred of the place. At four years old I
had the measles — blame me not, ye critics ! I had
no option in the matter — I took the measles, or,
rather, the measles took me, and being weakened by
the malady, I was sent down to Brighton with
my nurse — a very wicked woman — who had strict
orders to give me baths in the sea. There was a
wickeder woman than she, and that last woman
derided me again and again, and resolutely plunged
me in the brine. Dr. Johnson once observed that
he never wished to meet a fool in heaven. What
would he have said to meeting a bathing-woman in
the Islands of the Blest ?

RANDOM ROAMING. S
The recollection of that sea-bathing gave me a
fierce repugnance to Brighton for well-nigh forty
years, until one day accident took me there, and I
found the place better than I had expected — I had
no longer any dread of meeting that bathing-woman
on the shore. Now, as I grasped the hands of Walt
and Vult, I felt that no great harm would come to
me ; I acquiesced in the situation, and was almost
glad. Having arrived at Brighton, it remained to
make the best of our opportunities. We realised at
once that we had begun our holiday.
Wise men take a holiday with two ends in view,
just as they take their meat and drink ; and those
ends are pleasure and profit. For myself, my notion
of holiday-making is the getting of a maximum of
new information and new impressions at the cost of
a minimum of discomfort and fatigue. That means,
that when I set out on a ramble I take it as easily
as I can, and I keep my eyes and my ears open. It
is all very well for young men to set out like Tar-
tarin, bent on staggering across the crevasses and
floundering over the snow. We middle-aged folk
have got beyond that.
Stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak of Darien,

6 RANDOM ROAMING.
did not find his soul satisfied with staring; he
saw an old world behind him and a new world
before. I know not how it is, but some of us in this age
find ourselves possessed by an insatiable yearning
not to speculate upon the future, but to get into
touch with the past. Brighton has no past worth
mentioning, yet it has something to boast of which
the casual visitor rarely hears of, rarely visits. It
has in its Museum perhaps the most complete, and
certainly the most exquisite collection of chalk fossils
in the world, and also a unique collection of pottery
and porcelain. Both one and the other were made
by the brothers Walt and Vult, or rather by brother
Vult — the other brother not objecting. That unique
collection of pottery was " made to illustrate the
principle, or rather in development of the notion,
that the history of a country may be traced in its
homely pottery." I will not presume to describe it ;
but this I do venture to assert, that he who goes to
Brighton without spending an hour or two in looking
at those mugs and plates, and cups and saucers, and
chimney ornaments, and pondering upon their signi
ficance, is not a man to be envied, in fact, he is a
man to be pitied, as all men are who, having a good
chance of learning a new lesson, throw that chance
away. But if there is not much to see at Brighton,

RANDOM ROAMING. 7
there is a great deal to see from Brighton, and for a
week or so Brighton was our base. And what a
joyous base it was ! The talk was a perpetual feast
after a day's expedition — Walt and Vult cutting in
and in with noble entanglements, sometimes the
whimsical brother taking the lead, sometimes the
deep voice of the other vibrating with emotion, rising
with enthusiasm, loud with indignation at some
mention of treachery or wrong. And there was
prattle of children, too, such sweet prattle, and so
clearly articulate withal. And there was so much to
look at — such hoards of wonders in every corner, and
such stories to tell I The treasures of that house
are not guarded by grim lions suggesting terror and
laceration, but by sculptured dogs, emblems of
faithful love and nobleness.
"Cinque Ports?" said brother Vult. "We will
go to Newhaven to-morrow, Newhaven supplanted
one of the Cinque Ports," Not quite that ; but one
of the members of the Cinque Ports. Seaford sent
two representatives to Parliament in 1300, and for
centuries had contributed its quota of ships to the
Royal Navy ; but before the i6th century had come
to an end, the river Ouse, which in its exit to the
sea had made Seaford harbour, was forced by the
movement of the shingle to find for itself another
channel, and a new port arose which assumed the

8 RANDOM ROAMING.
name of Newhaven, where the traffic to Dieppe now
goes on with ever-increasing briskness.
That there could be anything at Newhaven which
was worth going to see was new to me. But where
in this England of ours can you find a place that is
not worth a visit or that has not something to make a
man find out how very ignorant he is and help him
to go home the better for his day's journey ? We
had to stop at Lewes on the way. Lewes is a place
of renown, but its glory is departed. Here William
de Warenne, the great Conqueror's doughty brother-
in-arms and first Earl of Surrey, kept his state after
his fashion, and here it seems he lies buried. Of
the castle I forbear to speak. As to the glorious
priory which the great Earl and Gundrada his wife
founded here to the glory of God and for the further
ance of devotion and the contemplative life — the
greater portion of it lies buried under the railroad.
Only fragments remain. The range of conventual
buildings presented a frontage of about 400 feet, the
church was 25 feet longer than Chichester Cathedral
90 feet longer than the Conqueror's church which he
built for his Abbey of Battle, and exactly the same
length from end to end as Lichfield Cathedral. The
foundation of this priory was an event in English
history, and the story is worth the reading. Read
it, if you can, in Mr. Hope's paper in the Journal of

RANDOM ROAMING. g
the Archceological Institute, and there you will find all
that is ever likely to be known about the fortunes of
the house, its origin, its rise, its growth, and its fall.
It was the first house of the Cluniac order set up in
England. About these Cluniacs there is much to
tell, but who will tell it to us ? rather, perhaps, it
may be asked, who will listen if one should try and
tell it ? But when your guide-book informs you that
this house at Lewes continued to be the only Cluniac
priory in England for the next 150 years after its
foundation ; do as I did to that guide-book, and put
a big note of admiration in the margin of the volume.
Opposite the castle, on the other side of the rail
way, there stands a mound, clearly artificial ; and the
tradition goes that the monks of Lewes erected on
the top of it a cross, and at certain seasons went in
procession by an encircling path up to the top, and
that there were stations here and there where special
prayers were offered, I thought of that frightful
mound in the city of Mexico and the bloody rites
that were carried on there, and I thought of some
other parallels ; and then of the old Winchester
practice of " keeping hills " — only abolished the
other day — and I asked myself, can it be that here
we have the site of some prehistoric cultus, and that
here, ages ago, the conquering cross was planted
upon

IO RANDOM ROAMING.
that opprobrious hill
Where, for the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
The children cried unheard that passed through fire
To that grim idol ?
But Lewes was only on the way : we were bound
for Newhaven. .Despise not Newhaven, my brethren.
It may yet have a future — it certainly has a past.
Despise nothing : le m/pris est le masque oil s'abrite la
nullit/, and very few of us can be " splendidly null,"
Said brother Vult, " You must go and see the
church." Said brother Walt, " We cannot bear you
company : we cannot away with Philistines, clerical
or other — you must go alone," In some perplexity
I obeyed. That church is worth a visit — emphati
cally worth it, for the wondrous little Norman apse
and the beauty of its situation, and for something
more. There is a tombstone there, and on it an
epitaph. It is in memory of an old parishioner who
was, it seems, of a jovial turn, and of whom it is
recorded that he knew his Hudibras by heart. Dis
tinctly Christian in its tone that epitaph can hardly
be said to be ; yet its concluding line is not without
a lesson worth remembering, for it says of the dead
to the living —
Be better, wiser, laugh more if you can,'

' In view of the many perils that threaten the monuments of

RANDOM ROAMING. ii
When I got back to my friends, brother Walt
looked gravely at me ; then it all came out. That
clerical Philistine had actually attempted to remove
that tombstone and utterly abolish it, merely because
it did not express his views. The brethren Walt
and Vult said " No," and they stopped that Philis
tine. See where we are, and what we are coming to I
That any man who is a tenant-for-life of his benefice
should have the power — of course he has not the
right, but that doesn't matter — to cart away any
monument, inside or outside "his" church, on
which there may be expressions at variance with his
the dead, I think it prudent to print this curious inscription.
Here it is :
To the memory of Thomas Tipper, who departed this life
May the ia,th, 1785, aged 54 years.
Reader with kind regret the grave survey,
Nor heedless pass where Tipper's ashes lay.
Honest he was, ingenuous, blunt and kind,
And dared to do what few dare — speak his mind.
Philosophy and history well he knew,
Was versed in physic and in surgery too.
The best old Stingo he both brewed and sold,
Nor did one knavish act to gain his gold.
He played through life a varied comic part
And knew immortal Hudibras by heart.
Reader in real truth such was the man,
ge better, wiser, laugh more if you can,

12 RANDOM ROAMING.
views — is that to be tolerated ? Yes, it is tolerated,
and it is done on the sly every year. Think of what
might happen any day, if some wild-eyed fanatic
should take it into his head to sweep away every
monument in brass or marble or alabaster, on which
he found the horrid legend, Cujus animcs propicietur
deus ; or that other legend. Orate pro anima x or y !
When will a voice be lifted up against this shame —
a voice that can make itself heard ?
That night I forgot all about the Cinque Ports, I
dreamt only of wicked tombstones ; and visions rose
of an infinite procession of monuments passing in
long array from world to world, reaching beyond the
realms of this solar system of ours, and I could not
read the writing upon them ; and a whisper came
to me which said : "Is not our little, our very,
very little planet full of sepulchres, whose story-
such as thou are trying to read, and trying all in
vain ? "

There were five great castles in Sussex — to wit,
Arundel, Bramber, Knapp, Hastings, and Lewes,
and to these we may add Chichester — of which anon.
" To-morrow," said the brethren, " we will go to
Bramber." Thither we went. People go up the
Rhine and chatter about the castles pn the river

RANDOM ROAMING. 13
banks. They are toys to our Sussex castles. Every
one of these five I have named was the home of an
English chieftain for centuries before the mound on
which it stood was crested with a wall of masonry
or crowned with a keep after the Norman pattern.
What we now call Bramber Castle is only the ruined
keep of the great fortress which was constructed to
guard the pass, four miles long by half-a-mile wide,
through which the Adur makes its way to the sea at
Shoreham, The platform rose 120 feet above the
river, and was scarped down the sides so as to form
a rounded area of 560 feet north and south by 280
feet east and west. The ditch at the counterscarp
level was 100 feet broad. Before the invention of gun
powder the place must have been practically im
pregnable by assault. Who threw up this mighty
earthwork ? Who and when ? The Normans found
it where it is. It was a castle when William landed,
and Earl Guerd was its lord in the Confessor's time.
There are, however, no signs of the Romans having
meddled with it or cared for it, though the raised
causeway that crosses the valley, formerly flooded
by the sea, marks the course of a Roman road. It
is probable that the stronghold at Bramber was the
work of the English, as Professor Freeman tells us
we must call those people who came swarming into
this island when the Romans could hold it no

14 RANDOM ROAMING.
longer. The Normans soon occupied the place, and
William de Braose received it among his other
possessions and built there the great keep with its
huge walls of masonry nine feet thick, of which but
a fragment remains. In 1644 Captain Temple stood
a siege there, fighting for the king. When the
parliamentary forces got possession of it they blew
up the place with gunpowder and left it as we see it
now. *****
I have noticed that when a man of average in
telligence once begins to yield to the fascination
of ancient castles and earthworks, it is all over with
him. I do verily believe that every stupendous
earthwork in Dorsetshire, and every barrow in Wilt
shire, and every great castle in Sussex, is haunted,
haunted with myriads of pixies, and syrens, and
gnomes, the ghosts of the men who raised those
wonders. The unwary creature of flesh and blood
goes among these tricksy spirits at his peril. He
is like Endymion, enamoured of the moon. Cynthia
shone upon Endymion with a gleam of promise —
distinct but distant — she was so very far away. Oh !
how he yearned to know her better I
The dark ages of England end, say, with the
coming of Augustine. They stretch back, who shall
say how far? into an illimitable past, ages before

RANDOM ROAMING. 15
the time when Abraham migrated from Ur of the
Chaldees. More light has been thrown upon these
ages than is usually believed. Great men have lived
— are living — among us who have here and there
lifted the veil ; men of genius, gifted with something
more than " scientific imagination " — men who
know how to pursue research and how to teach.
We, the small men, feel we are no more than
fumblers, but a delicious intoxication seizes us when
we stand on the haunted and enchanted ground :
the gnomes come round us, and a wild passion for
fumbling takes possession of us — we cry with Ajax,
foiled and darkened —
'(V Sk tpaEi Kai oKeaaov 'tiri'i vi roi aiaStv ovtoiq.
I confess that the sight of Bramber drove me mad,
Arundel I knew — Lewes had quickened my pulse —
a complication of Roman fever and castle mania with
kindred disasters had clutched me. Nothing was to
be done but to confess myself very ill and make the
best of it.
Next day we found ourselves at the Devil's Dyke
— apparently one of those enormous works which the
Britons (not English this time, if you please) began
to construct before the Christian era, but for some
reason or*other, never finished. Below them stretched
the vast forest of Anderida, north and west and

i6 RANDOM ROAMING.
east ; behind them were their homes. They had
an eye for coigns of vantage ; they knew how to
turn to account the physical features which were
favourable for defence ; the organisation of labour
among them had been brought to astonishing per
fection ; but this island of ours was divided into a
number of petty kingdoms, and Rome was One.
What room for speculating and surmising as one
stands on that plateau ; as one looks down into that
tremendous fissure made by the action of water
issuing from the chalk ; as one thinks of that strip
of coast, say only from Dorchester to Dover, swarm
ing with rich and busy towns " made ready for the
spoil," while yonder over at Boulogne — even then
called Portus Britannicus — there was assembling that
immense invading host, at least 50,ocx5 strong, which
was soon to cross the Channel ; this time not to be
beaten back, as had happened nearly a century
before, *****
" Are there any remains of the castle of Chiches
ter ? " I asked. " Not one stone left upon another,"
was the reply. But the resistless masters of the
world had been there, and thither next went we.
From end to end of that Sussex coast we find the deep
impress of Roman feet, the dent of the Roman heel,
the imperishable work of the Roman hands. The

RANDOM ROAMING. 17
very ocean shrank back before them. Nowhere in
Britain has the coastline undergone such change as
here. Once it seems that the tides came up to those
massive walls which the legionaries raised to guard
the city then called Regnum — a city which doubtless
had been growing for ages with its great earthworks,
its port crowded with ships, its temple or temples,
such as they were, its warriors, its merchants, its
courtiers, its statesmen, its party of home rulers and
its other party of liberal-conservatives, just as men
live now, mutatis mutandis.
Was it here that King Cogidubnus bore sway ? —
he who so soon made his peace with the awful ones,
and whom the gild of the masons and carpenters
of Chichester immortalised in that stone which they
set up when the king gave them leave to build their
temple to the goddess of wisdom and the great god
of the sea, they finding the funds and a Roman
settler giving them the land? That eloquent in
scription may be seen at Goodwood now. The date
of it ? Well ! the experts incline to think it may
have been set up during the first twenty years of the
Roman occupation. If they are right, it follows as
a moral certainty that Cogidubnus, the wary and
politic, must have dined with Vespasian and his son
when they were learning the arts of war during those
long years in England, little Titus in petticoats
3

i8 RANDOM ROAMING.
never having heard as yet of Palestine, or having
any dream of setting up that arch of his at Rome,
where, bitten into the marble, there still front you
the "seven candlesticks" and those other spoils
that came from the holy hill of Zion. My thoughts
were so full of Rome — I had, in fact, so " gone over
to Rome " by this time, and I was so baffled in my
vain attempt to make out what the castle of Chiches
ter could have been like — though the mound, or part
of it on which Roger de Montgomery built his keep,
stands still, en evidence — that I was in a bad humour
when my friendly and most hospitable guide took
me to the cathedral. Chichester seemed to me,
in that ill temper of mine, a poky place. Oh,
friend of the deathless verse ! why should'st thou
cry to us — " . , , prepare
You lovers to know Love a thing of moods :
Not like hard life, of laws,"
It is not love alone that is a thing of moods — all our
conscious life is but a thing of moods ; and lifting
up my eyes to that cathedral spire, and hearing from
an old verger, " the old spire didn't fall, sir ; it sunk
down, and I saw it sink, and it couldn't help it, poor
thing, when they took away the great screen that in
a manner had kept it up for hundreds and hundreds
of years " — I was wroth, and fumed, and held my

RANDOM ROAMING. 19
peace in sullen silence ; but I thought, " Oh, these
restorers ! "
In this perverse mood of mine it seemed to me
that the most interesting object in Chichester was
St. Mary's Hospital — the ancient Domus Dei. One
man has risen up to write its "story." I will not
do him the wrong, nor do myself the wrong, of trying
to make short work of that most instructive nar
rative.^ I cannot dwell upon that subject now, for
life is short and art is long. But, whosoever you be
that make a pilgrimage to Chichester, be sure you
go and pay a visit to St. Mary's Hospital, and try
and learn something about the gentle work that has
been done there in a quiet unpretentious way while
the generations have succeeded one another, and give
your vote with mine that these places may have
some reverence shown them. I might almost plead
for pity, for they cannot help themselves when the
plunderers are strong,
yp y^ f^ * 'I*
" I think you will not do much at the Cinque
Ports this time," said brother Vult, "He ought to
do something better than that," said brother Walt ;
» See "The Story of the ' Domus Dei' of Chichester," , . , by
the Ven, Archdeacon H, P, Wright, , . , Parker & Co., 1885.
With it compare the author's other volumes on the Domus
Dei at Portsmouth and on that at Stamford.

20 RANDOM ROAMING.
"it is the duty of every Englishman to make a
pilgrimage to Pevensey." With characteristic
docility we obeyed, nothing loth, and we found
ourselves at Pevensey. Pevensey is a modern
name. They tell us it means Peofn's Island, and
that some 1,500 years ago a certain Peofn won it
and held it. In earlier ages it was known as
Anderida or Andredecester, and by some such name
it was called when Julius Caesar landed near it in
55 B,c, Then, it seems, there was a stronghold
or fortress on this same rising ground, and the sea
came up to it in long waves crawling at spring tides
over the great estuary, and barely covering the wide
expanse of slime where the water was too shallow to
allow the Roman transports to do anything but run
aground, A century or so later the legions took
it as their own, and turned it into the chief fortress
of the "Saxon shore," Four centuries later the
wretched Britons, left to defend themselves as best
they could, and hard pressed by the new swarms
of " Saxon " invaders, took refuge behind those
tremendous walls, and they fought with desperate
valour. Desperate indeed I Standing out from the
mists of legend and tradition which hang about
the story of that dark time, a single tale of slaughter
has come down to us that could not pass away from
men's memories. It has to do with Pevensey, or

RANDOM ROAMING. 21
as the chronicler calls it, Andredecester, It was in
the year 491 A,D,
In that year, says one, "began the kingdom of
Sussex, which ^Ella held right forcefully for long
, . . With a huge host he beset Andredecester, a
city of most strong defences. There the Britons
were gathered like bees, and day by day and night
by night they beat back their besiegers, , . . But
then at last, exhausted by long famine, they were all
devoured by the edge of the sword, they with their
women and their little ones, insomuch that not one
single one escaped ; and the foreigners destroyed
that city, which was never afterwards rebuilt. Yet
the place, as the site of a once most noble city,
is shown to those that pass it by — a place of
desolation." I love to turn to Henry of Huntingdon for more
reasons than one ; but chiefly because he was a
country parson, and no monk, nor even a canon.
To be sure he exercised archidiaconal functions, but
that's another thing: he was a country parson for
all that. Nevertheless the Rev. Henry was wrong
in saying, "locus tantum ostenditur desolatus." It
is one of those slips of the pen which are frequent
when a writer is quoting from some older document
at his elbow. If he had written ostendebatur he would
have been right. For Pevensey, as we have seen,

22 RANDOM ROAMING.
was not left desolate for long; and when Peofn,
whoever he was, got his island, with its Roman walls
and citadel, he found it something very different
from a dilapidated ruin, and it seems that it continued
to be a place to have and to hold against all
comers. Ah I but that depends upon the comers.
Just a week before I saw this place I had sauntered
into the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, and
there on the counterfeit presentment of the Bayeaux
tapestry which may be seen there, I read out, " Mare
transivit et venit ad Pevensel." Who was it that
came? William, Duke of Normandy, bastard son
of that grim and frantic man whom they called —
and called rightly, it seems — Robert the Devil.
What things had come to pass in those eleven
hundred years since the scared Britons hereabouts
had shrunk back dismayed at the sight of Caesar's
fleet — more than eight hundred ships, he tells us,
were visible at one time — abandoning the fort which
they dared not attempt to hold, and falling back for
refuge upon the high ground behind them. Some
thing of the same sort happened now again. Read
all about it, if you will, in the monumental history
of the Norman Conquest, written once and for ever.
It was not long before Pevensey became once
more a place of strength. It was besieged again
and again. In iioi Henry I, assembled his

RANDOM ROAMING. 23
army here when his brother, Duke Robert, was
preparing for another invasion ; and the Duke had
to look out for a different landing-place. In 1309
it was a neglected ruin. Shortly afterwards it
was looked to by Edward II. In 1399 Lady
Pelham held it against all the force that Sussex,
Kent, and Surrey could bring against her. Twenty
years later, Queen Joanna, widow of Henry IV,,
was shut up in Pevensey — they said she was a
witch — another of the Pelhams keeping guard over
her. What need to go on ? The place is bewilder
ing with its crowd of memories. As I looked down
from these walls I seemed to hear the low ripple
lapping below me, Roman and Saxon and Norman
navies riding at anchor in the bay, and all the
air throbbing with the shock of battle ; and then
came upon me that fine saying of Professor Mait-
land — "the map of England, that most wonderful
of all palimpsests I "
From Pevensey to Herstmonceux. "What a
falling-off was there, my countrymen I " A mere
architectural freak of the 15 th century, a very
splendid freak, I admit — a splendid example of what
may be done in bricks and mortar. As such it is
worth a visit, but it is horribly modern ! It was
built with money that came from across the Channel,
as I gather. For Sir James Fiennes, the first Lord

24 RANDOM ROAMING.
Say and Sele, got his reward for the part he played
when the battle of Agincourt was fought; and
honours — which in those days meant wealth and
huge increase of income — were showered upon him,
and he built this most pretentious palace, which his
posterity found too vast to live in — the family was
over-housed. What care I for a ruin that is hardly
more than 400 years old ? It is a place for picnics,
and not a bad place neither. " Who keeps up the
gardens and grounds ? " quoth I to the damsel who
took my shilling. " We do, sir. We hire it all and
make what we can ! "
What a picture Watteau could have made of a
f^te champitre in that courtyard I Now we are
expected to buy photographs, photographs, photo
graphs ; of which about one in a hundred remotely
suggests a picture. At Herstmonceux the ground-
plan hanging up in the gate-house is worth all the
photographs. Having made our pilgrimage to Pevensey, it
followed as a matter of course that we should go to
Battle. The Duke of Cleveland was there, and the
visit was a disappointment. A youth took us round
— a party of some twenty or so ; and all that he told
us was wrong — a mere jumble got up by rote, after
having invented his absurdities out of his head. He
irritated me ! The man was a kind of embodied

RANDOM ROAMING. 25
whooping-cough, and would not let me look about
me. He went on hacking out his nonsense till it
was quite unbearable. Suddenly I broke forth into
irrepressible laughter, for cleariy, distinctly, there
came upon me the memory of a showman at Horn
fair, whose historic diorama I peeped through in my
childhood, and paid a penny for the sight. I hear
the fellow now : " The parting of Hector and Andro-
mashee ! Him to the right ; her to the left ! And
you see the grand effect which the sun, the moon,
and the stars has upon the face of the waters I "
For sixpence you may buy a very fair little account
of Battle Abbey. What excuse is there for that
young man not getting up his lesson from that?
To have listened to the historian of the Conquest
acting as showman upon that terrace, as I believe
he once did, and as I am sure he could, would have
been an event in one's life, even though the great
man had, metaphorically, stamped upon one's toes
with his iron heel and hammered his fad of " Senlac "
into one with the heavy mallet of stubborn reitera
tion. But when our little guide put himself into
position and in a shrill falsetto cried aloud, " There
Harold set up his standard," he waved his hand and
boxed the compass after a fashion, looking round on
this side and on that with a generous impartiality
and with incomparably less decision than Mr, Bird-

26 RANDOM ROAMING.
o'-Freedom Sawin when — peremptorily bidden by
his dark-skinned lord and master to show him the
Polestar, he —
" Pickt out a middlin' shiney one and told him that was it,''
Somehow we were not in the mood to go into
heroics at Battle, The rain came down, and we
said, " We'll come here another day ! " So we will
when that other fever comes upon us which is sure
to come, and we have to prowl among nunneries
and priories and abbeys. Next day we found our
selves at Hastings ; no Walt and Vult to guide and
order us, and no delightful home to come back to at
eventime, with all its light and leading, and those
merry children to romp with, if only an abominable
catarrh had not forbidden the playing of the noble
game of Great Ogre I
At this point once more I am impelled to utter my
protest against the cant of the professional traveller,
who is never tired of running down our English
hotels and crying up those on the other side of the
Channel. For comfort, for reasonable charges, for
cleanliness, and obligingness [a most convenient
word] — for scrupulous honesty from the dignified
lady behind the window down to the boots — for all
that goes to make a caravansery a traveller's joy,
commend me to our English hotels.

RANDOM ROAMING. 27
We were roamers, as you have seen, and very
random rovers. We hardly knew when we laid our
heads upon the pillow where we should go next ;
but Hastings is still a Cinque Port (though we had
quite cooled down upon that subject by this time),
and Hastings boasts of its castle, and up to it we
climbed. Standing inside the inner ward of what I
must call the old fortress, I felt as I never felt before
how helpless any one is who, without a competent
knowledge of the dynamics of geology, attempts to
read the riddles of the past. No wise man need be
ashamed of his ignorance of most things ; and if a
specialist is arrogant and supercilious, that bump
tious specialist is not a wise man. But it is vexatious
to approach a specialist with a problem which you
have not knowledge enough to state in correct terms ;
and at the edge of that cliff which overlooks the sea,
I fretted myself with a desire to know how the rock
got to be there and how it had acquired the shape
it presents now. If there had been a competent
geologist in sight I would have humbly taken him
by the button ; but there was none, and as I con
tinued "nagging" at the matter all day long, the
very wife of my bosom snubbed me at last, saying
severely, " How foolish you are ! If you could hire
a geologist he would only tell you that you did not
know enough to have the thing explained to you ! "

28 RANDOM ROAMING.
At Hastings, as elsewhere along this romantic land
of Sussex, we are driven back again in thought to the
dark ages. There is, to be sure, no sign of Roman
handiwork; but almost beyond a doubt the great
earthworks, on part of which the castle ruin stands,
were thrown up by those same Britons of whom we
heard before, and thrown up long before the Christian
era. Nay, it 'may be before King Servius built his
walls round Rome.
When Aulus Plautius made his landing in A.D. 43,
he does not seem to have troubled himself about the
Regni and their Sussex kingdom. They seem to have
submitted to the inevitable when the tide of con
quest, that kept moving westward, placed them in a
perilous isolation ; and the vast forest of Anderida,
thirty miles deep, was between them and the nor
thern world. The sea-board they could hardly now
presume to think of calling their own. But four
centuries pass, and the English — ^you may call them
so if it makes you happy — came in, swarm after
swarm. We have heard of them and of their doings
at Pevensey; and a generation or so later we find
them at Hastings — comfortably settled there too, and
coining money. Brother Vult can show you their
coins, as he can show you the coins of Commius,
Caesar's friend, gold coins minted perhaps at this
very Hastings in the century before wise men from

RANDOM ROAMING. 29
the far East came following the star that led them
to the manger at Bethlehem, what time bad Herod
trembled for his throne and slew the little ones. Did
that mint continue all through those centuries? or
was it only one of those queer revivals which history
is for ever startling us with? Be it as it may,
Hastings continued to coin money for another
500 years, from the 7th century down to the
time of Henry I, at least, as the numismatists
assure us ; and they can give us proof positive of
that which they assert. The mound, at an angle of
the inner ward of the castle, is beyond doubt an
English work ; and when great William pushed on
from Pevensey to Hastings in quest of food for his
host he must have set eyes upon that mound, doubt
less loftier then than now, perhaps crowned with a
formidable stockade. The ruined castle, with its
collegiate church, has of course a history, Becket,
the martyred Primate, was Dean of Hastings long
years before he was Primate, and William of Wyke-
ham was one of the canons of this church, which I
suppose may be taken to mean that some part of the
revenues of the Hastings house went to build the
college of Winchester. If you are lucky enough to
be able to buy Professor Freeman's " History of the
Reign of William Rufus," you are sure to find a
great deal there about Hastings : not that I have

30 RANDOM ROAMING.
read the book, for I am not one of the lucky ones —
but because in the nature of things it must be there.
We had started from home intending to spend a
week at Canterbury. That was out of the question
now, but yet we could not leave it quite unvisited.
So at Canterbury we found ourselves. There is no
place or city in these British Islands that can for
a moment be compared with Canterbury in the
memories that it recalls — the heroic and romantic
associations that are inseparably connected with it :
the splendour of its present and its past ; the
magnificent succession of great men who lie there
entombed ; the almost unbroken continuity of its
history. The chronicle of London read side by side
with the memorials of Canterbury is a dull, prosaic,
humdrum record, tame, commonplace, and rather
vulgar. There is only one man living who knows Canterbury
— the all unpaid but not now unhonoured seneschal
of the Cathedral, Dr, Sheppard. It is melancholy
to reflect how much recondite lore, which can never
be amassed again by any single man, must pass
away when this grand enthusiast joins the majority.
Books have been written by the score, and many of
them good books too ; but what are books to the
living teacher's words?
The vergers of our cathedrals, as a rule, are

RANDOM ROAMING. 31
excellent showmen ; they are loyal to the glorious
buildings in which they pass their days ; they get up
their lessons well ; but at Canterbury they are far
superior to the average of their class. They seem to
be notably intelligent, modestly inquiring, curiously
on the alert to pick up any hint or any new piece of
information, as if they expected to be learners even
to the end. The truth is, they are conscious of the
presence among them of a master for whom they
entertain unbounded reverence. All that men know,
he knows it — what he knows not is not knowledge.
Submitting myself humbly to this guide, philosopher,
and friend, through a great vista of light and shadow
there passed before me, all in living reality, a long
drama whose successive scenes were presented with
surpassing vividness. But who could keep hold of it
all ? A kind of despair came upon me as I listened
and as the pageantry moved on before my very eyes.
Those two days were days of sheer bewilderment,
and what I heard and what I learnt and what I
dreamt was sometimes present, and sometimes it was
as if it had been, and sometimes as if it belonged to
another world — a world not realised. In sheer per
plexity, when I found myself alone and tried to
bring back only a little, a very little, of what the
gifted seer had been bringing before me, I threw
myself back into the days when there was no

32 RANDOM ROAMING.
Canterbury, and actually a sense of relief came upon
me when the symptoms of my Roman fever returned.
For Christian Canterbury you may go to that beauti
ful prose poem by our great prose poet, and in
following Dean Stanley's " Memorials " you will find
enough to make the " mother of all the bishoprics "
a place to sojourn in and find a joy in for many
delightful days.
But there was a time when there was no Canter
bury — I mean when it was a very different place,
and called by a very different name. If, as seems
the fact, Caesar's first landing-place was somewhere
in Pevensey Bay, it was a strategic mistake, and he
learnt his lesson from it. When he came next, it
seems that it was in Kent, not Sussex, that he
landed. In those days there was a British road
that crossed the Stour by a ford, and at this point
there stood an ancient British " city " which went
by the name of Durovernum. There is some reason
for believing that even before the Christian era — it
may be centuries before — the place had been the
seat of some now forgotten form of worship — a
sacred city, in fact, where men offered sacrifices and
had their mystic rites, and after their fashion praised
and prayed. The Danejon is undoubtedly a British
work, and round about it there might still be noted,
two centuries ago, other mounds or barrows which

RANDOM ROAMING. 33
may have been the sepulchres of dead ancestors, or
may have been such " high places " as we read of
again and again in the most ancient records. By
and by, when the Romans had won the land, at
least three great roads converged at Durovernum
issuing from the three mighty fortresses on the
coast — Richborough, Dover, and Lymne, for we
will call them by their modern names, Durovernum
itself was but a kind of outpost or dep6t, from which
the road ran straight as a line to London, At that
outpost some of the greatest of the world's great
ones halted or sojourned. Caesar, on his march to
the westward ; Claudius, a century later, as he
pushed forward to win the laurels that had been
plucked for him by another ; and, in the same year,
or the next, Vespasian, needy then, and bent on
plunder, a rising general thirty-four years old, and
with him Titus, his little son, born just three years
before. When Agricola accomplished that memo
rable circumnavigation of the island in A.D. 84,
Richborough, some twelve miles from Durovernum,
was his landing-place too ; and when, as we are
told he did, Agricola put his soldiers into winter
quarters, do you think he did not ride into Du
rovernum to inspect the "statio" through which he
must have passed many a time before ?
When, at the beginning of the 4th century, the
4

34 RANDOM ROAMING.
Emperor Constantius Chlorus was organising his
last campaign against the Picts, his son, the great
Constantine, joined him at Boulogne, and together
they sailed across the channel, and together they
must needs have taken the road through Durover
num ; and through it again the son must have
hastened to take possession of the empire after his
father's death at York (July, A,D, 306),
Before the century came to an end, the swarms of
Saxons and Angles had poured in upon the Kentish
people, and a cry arose for help ; for the legions, it
seems, were not as they had been, and the discipline
of the army in Britain was weakened by continual
drafts to supply the lack of men in the other provinces
of the empire. For the last time Rome found a really
able general to send to Britain, in the person of
Theodosius, and at Richborough he too landed in
367 A,D,, and with him came his son Theodosius,
afterwards emperor ; and on the road to London —
can it have been under the very walls of Durover
num ? — they smote the heathen with a great slaughter,
and rid the land of them for a little while, I say
he smote the heathen, for father and son were
both Christians, and the son is he in whose days
Christianity became in effect the established religion
of the Roman Empire. Is it anything less than
probable that in that very church which two centuries

RANDOM ROAMING. 35
later Ethelbert gave to Augustine— that church
which Bede expressly says had been built in old
times, after the ancient fashion of the Roman Chris
tians — Theodosius himself may have offered up his
prayers to the God of battles as he made ready for
the onslaught? Think of it! The south-western
tower of Canterbury actually stands upon a portion
of the Roman wall ; and that old Roman church
remains to this day the core, if I may say so, of the
most magnificent and the most inspiring of Eng
land's great cathedrals. In the meantime, however,
Durovernum had got to be called by another name
— it was now known as " Cantwarabyrig " — the strong
hold of the men of Kent, peradventure memorable as
the place where these Kentish men made another of
those last desperate stands, and where the end was
the same as at Pevensey — a wholesale and remorse
less slaughter.
" Who can understand his errors ? " says the
Psalmist, I confess I cannot account for mine.
When I ought to have been leaving all these Roman
emperors and their heathen surroundings quite out
of view and out of remembrance, and only thinking
of Canterbury as the holy place of Christian saints
and sages, I must needs go on talking about the ages
further back, as if I were a pagan or a Heathen
Chinee ! But what could I do ? For two days had

36 RANDOM ROAMING.
I been sitting at the feet of a great master, trying
to follow him as he poured forth from his vast
treasure-house of knowledge that stream of romantic
truth — so much more romantic and entrancing than
any fiction ; and it was as if I had been blinded by
excess of light, as if I must needs retire into the
darkness for a while if so be there might be any
hope of attaining to clear vision of anything again,
*****
From Canterbury to Portsmouth — that was our
next move. We found ourselves in another world.
It is not the ecclesiastical world ; but Portsmouth,
too, has its splendid traditions, and heroes have
gone forth from thence at whose names nations
have trembled, and tyrants, as they heard them,
gnashed their teeth with rage that was all idle.
If here again we should be inclined to transport
ourselves to Roman days, they tell me that even
at Portsmouth we shall find traces of their auda
cious engineering enterprises : but I know not — I
know not.
While we rowed about that wonderful harbour —
rowed, observe ! just as the old admirals did — as
Nelson did — not panting and puffing and fuming
and smoking in a rickety steam-launch, as if we had
been in an ignorant hurry and only wanted to get
done with it — as we rowed leisurely along, our boat-

RANDOM ROAMING. 37
man, familiar with every mast and every buoy, and
garrulously saving us even the trouble of asking
questions, we were perfectly sure that the lotus-
eaters had never known such conscious bliss as
ours. They ehaunted querulously ; we were silent.
In that delicious October sunshine, with never a
breath to disturb the quiet air, and never a ruffle on
the gently heaving water, we gave ourselves up to
the impressions of the moment. Imagination, even
while we rowed bareheaded under the Victory's bows,
refused to rise to the occasion : she claimed, and she
took, a holiday.
An attitude of somewhat haughty modernism
characterises Portsmouth. There people have little
taste for retrospection ; all that has been is worth
thinking of only so far as it may have led up to what
is and what shall be. As to the great ironclads and
the monster guns, and the vast dockyard, et hoc genus
omne, there is no need to speak of them ; but there
are two modern buildings, the one civil, the other
ecclesiastical, which no visitor of Portsmouth should
leave without inspecting. There are many public
edifices elsewhere which are larger and more pre
tentious ; but for its admirable and carefully con
sidered plan, its splendid site, its superb fa5ade, and
the surprisingly small cost at which it has been
completed in a short four years, the Town Hall of

38 RANDOM ROAMING.
Portsmouth may be safely pronounced to be the
most successful municipal building erected in Eng
land during our time. And make what deductions
you please for a tower which is a fiasco, and a
chancel which needs much lengthening, the evil
spirit of detraction will be startled out of you if you
find yourself one Sunday morning standing up to
praise God with the immense congregation ; the
grandeur and magnificence of all the surroundings
will impress you with the conviction that, take it all
in all, Portsea Church is among the stateliest of our
19th century churches ; and you will think that
man is to be envied to whom that great church
owes so much of its splendour. Men like he may
try in their modesty to conceal their names, but
gratitude and pride in such a glorious possession as
this will not suffer those who now gather within its
walls to keep his secret.
Being, as you see, mere random roamers, it was
not very wonderful that, having got so far, we should
take Winchester on our way home. If Canterbury
stands first among English cities for the inspiring
memories that it awakens, I think we must give the
second place to Winchester. Here, again, we find
ourselves driven back into a past that has to do with
ages long before the Christian era. The Romans
came and made the place their own ; they called it

RANDOM ROAMING. 39
Venta Belgarum. And after them the Saxons came
and made it the " capital " of Wessex, and they
called it Wintanceastre ; and here King K^nwealh
caused "the old church" to be built in A.D, 643,
The Danes came in, about 200 years after that
building of the old church, and they took the place
by storm, and then for a while it was Danish
ground. And then — and then — and then : what
need to go on ? There are traces of all these suc
cessive waves that have swept over Winchester if
we have but eyes to see, and ears to listen, and
hearts to understand. " Brains, you mean ! " No,
my erudite and too algebraical critic ! I do not
mean brains. I mean what I say. My England !
my England ! who can know thee or understand thy
glory or thy greatness if he lack the patriot's love
for thee, and the patriot's burning loyalty ?
In the old times, from which you may perceive
that I find it hard to get away, a great Roman road
ran from ancient Chichester to Southampton, and
hence, making a new departure, it started off in a
straight line to Winchester, and thence went on to
St. Albans (?), But at Winchester several Roman
roads converged, and one of them, crossing the
other at an angle, went through the country of the
Atrebates, and, twenty-two Roman miles from Win
chester, it reached their chief city, which then was

40 RANDOM ROAMING.
known as Calleva Atrebatum, and now is known as
the village of Silchester. The whole parish, I believe,
belongs to the Duke of Wellington, and about the
middle of it stands a farm of a hundred acres sur
rounded by a stupendous Roman wall ten feet in
thickness and in some parts still twenty-five feet
high. Outside this wall, on the north and west,
there ran a tremendous ditch serving as a defence
to a mighty outwork, and the great walls were
pierced by four awful gates, each with its guard
house, and through one of these the great road to
London led. The place had been once a great
British fortress or oppidum ; the Romans recognised
its strategical importance, and they made it into a
city, as, for convenience, we call such places now.
For fourteen hundred years this mysterious Calleva
remained forsaken — sometimes the haunt of wild
beasts, sometimes a quarry out of which church-
builders got their stone, and then at last, when corn
was dear and farming was profitable, it was brought
under the plough ! A hundred acres ! Two-thirds
the area of Pompeii, not to mention the cemeteries
and the amphitheatre outside the walls, and the
suburbs, whatever they were and whatever may here
after be found to have stood upon them, Five-and-
twenty years ago the late Mr, Joyce, then rector of
Strathfieldsaye, became consumed by the desire to

RANDOM ROAMING. 41
lay bare some portion of the foundations of the
city, and at his own expense he set to work in
earnest. No one man can to any purpose uncover
the foundations of a city that extends over a hundred
acres of ground, Mr. Joyce, however, made a great
beginning ; and first and foremost he opened out the
whole area of the great basilica of Silchester, and
left it as you may see it there to-day.
What is a basilica ? Accept this as an answer.
The basilica was the town hall of a city. That is
enough for all practical purposes ; and if my alge
braical critic tells you that a basilica was something
more, never mind what he -says. The Town Hall of
Portsmouth is a basilica ; so is St, George's Hall at
Liverpool. At Rome there were a dozen and more
of them, just as in London there are a dozen and
more town halls ; and the time came when the
Emperor Constantine turned several of these basilicce
into Christian churches, and for anything I know to
the contrary, he or his successors may have done
the like with some of the basilicce in England ; and
he might very easily have done worse. The basilica
of Silchester followed the almost invariable plan in
its construction ; that is to say, it was a quadrangular
building with a semicircular apse at each end. The
length of the main building was usually about double
its breadth, and it consisted of a nave with two

42 RANDOM ROAMING.
aisles. The basilica at Silchester was 285 feet long ;
almost exactly the same length as the nave of York
Cathedral I
This is that Silchester which the Society of Anti
quaries has taken in hand to lay bare for us, if only
we will find the funds. One royal-hearted gentle
man has, for the last ten years or so, been devoting
himself to throw light upon village life in Britain
during the Roman domination, and most strange and
instructive are the results arrived at. But there is
not to be found, all the world over, another so heroic
an antiquary as General Pitt-Rivers. You might as
well look for a second Newton, Such men stand
alone : they must stand alone. What is wanted now is
that we should pursue our researches into the life of
the British towns in Roman times ; and in this long-
buried city we have all the materials lying ready for
intelligent investigation. What may we expect to
find at Silchester ? Money ? Yes ! even money.
In the great Chronicle under the year 418, there
stands the following very curious entry : " In this
year the Romans gathered together all the gold
hoards that were in Britain ; and some they hid in
the earth that none might hereafter find them, and
some they carried with them into Gaul." The late
Mr. Joyce was no worshipper of Mammon, nor in
his digging did he go very far ; but he tells us that

RANDOM ROAMING. 43
the number of the coins he found in the course of his
researches was " perfectly surprising." They dated
as far back as Caligula (A.D, 37), and they went on
in an unbroken series for nearly four centuries, down
to the time of Arcadius, when the Romans abandoned
the island. That is a tempting bait for the sons of
cupidity ; but I am not so very, very sure that trea
sure-hunting would be found a paying quest ; and if
we seek for our reward in coin or coins, I fear we
shall not be able to show a satisfactory balance-
sheet. No ; we must expect to find something
better than that.
We shall find that those British folk, though they
built houses and theatres and baths, and a great
deal else, did not quite adopt the fashions of their
masters ; that their houses were not as they were in
the warmer climate of the south ; that they had their
own methods of making themselves comfortable ;
that they had to provide for the long winters ; that
they did not live so much in the open air ; that per
haps they did not affect the public baths so much as
people did at Rome ; and it may be, too, that they
had temples and religious rites of their own, which
were dying out and being replaced by the better way.
Mr. Joyce found a seal and a ring which indi
cate that the Christian faith was not unknown at
Calleva; and what if it should turn out that a

44 RANDOM ROAMING.
Christian church was standing there when the
Teuton Longheads dashed in with a yell through
the gate that proved too weak to resist their terrible
assault, and the doomed city from end to end reeked
with carnage ? ^ But the work has only begun, and
it must needs go on slowly, or had better be left
alone. Happily it is in the very best hands. Mr.
Hope is, of course, the commander-in-chief; but
with him is associated Mr. G. E. Fox, a past-master
in Roman-British lore, chivalrous, sagacious, inde
fatigable, a perfect draughtsman, and one, too, who
can wield the scholar's pen.
It is impossible to conjecture, as yet, what a revo
lution may be wrought during the next few years in
many of our views of the civilisation of Britain
during the third and fourth centuries. As we stepped
from stone to stone, walked along the pavements
that had been buried for ages, saw the heaps of
pottery, fragments of glass, broken tools and imple
ments and weapons, which had been tossed aside as
not worth preserving in the little museum — all the
mere refuse of a few months' or weeks' careful labour
— and as we stopped at this point and at that, while
our accomplished guides led us on and on, the hours
passed away ; and when the time came for us to
' Since the above was written, the remains of a Christian
church actually have been uncovered at Silchester.

RANDOM ROAMING. 45
leave this city of the dead, eye and brain were
fairly exhausted by the long tension at which
they had been kept, though it was very hard to say
good-bye !
There still remained two or three hours of day
light. We took the train to Reading, and came
upon new surprises, I had got it into my foolish
head that of that great Abbey there had been utter
obliteration. Some good angel took me to the door
of the vicar of St, Lawrence, and in a moment the
spell of an enchanter's wand was upon me once
more. But if you think that I am going to let my
pen run on about Reading, you judge me harshly.
Under that magician's influence, after humbly learn
ing from him for many an hour and many a day —
after some patient tutelage — perhaps I could a tale
unfold — but not yet, not now.

II.
CASTLE ACRE.

Dr. O. Wendell Holmes has somewhere said that
" England is one vast museum." That is, that there
is hardly a town or village in the land that does not
contain some historic monument worth looking at,
some interesting record of a remote past, some unique
specimen of ancient art, or some spot where great
deeds have been done, or some great man whose
name is a household -word has lived and toiled and
played the hero's part, or been laid to rest at last
with some monument to indicate the place of his
sepulchre. This is eminently true of our old towns,
whose corporate existence dates back centuries, and
in which, though much obliteration has gone on,
and sometimes much wanton destruction, yet there
usually survives some picturesque building — or mere
fragment of masonry or gate or mound or rampart —
46

CASTLE ACRE. 47
round which old traditions hover, and the sight of
which revives memories of great deeds. The neces
sity of carefully examining the history of our towns,
if we hope to understand the history of England, its
people and its institutions, has been forcibly impressed
upon us of late, and it is surprising and disappointing
to be told that the valuable series projected five or
six years ago by Professor Freeman and Mr. Hunt,
and now in course of publication, has not received
that measure of acceptance and that extensive sale
which it so well deserves.^ The object of the
series was to set forth the history of our more im
portant English towns in a convenient form for the
instruction of intelligent readers, and at a price
accessible to all. The volumes are generally well
written and the facts carefully — in some cases admir
ably — put together. To the occasional visitor^
knowing little or nothing of the neighbourhood but
anxious to acquire some trustworthy information,
these little books are an immense improvement upon
the trumpery handbooks which we waste shillings
upon in our travels ; while to the resident — often as
ignorant of a city's past as if it existed only in the
moon — they will furnish satisfactory interpretations
of many of those problems which press upon the
1 " Historic Towns." Edited by E. A, Freeman and Rev,
William Hunt, (Longmans,)

48 CASTLE ACRE.
perplexed stroller in the streets, and for which he
would be glad to find a solution.
It is very rarely that any laborious study of the
smaller area of a country parish can repay the long
microscopic research which it involves, or that the
chronicles of a country village can prove of much
interest to any but the local few, with an inborn
taste for antiquarianism. The events or the persons
which have here and there made a village famous
can hardly be other than few. The rustic leads his
quiet life without expecting to be startled by the
presence of a hero, a genius, or even an abnormal
villain, as often as once in a century. There is no
attraction about him, except when he has a vote to
cast into the ballot box ; and when the rival candi
dates or their agents canvass him they are always
bristling with promises to be redeemed in the future :
of the past they know no more than he does, and
they care as little. We have no history, in the
sense of our having any sequence of events worth
recording. If we try to construct our chronicles, we
have often to pass on by great strides from one
stepping stone to another standing out above the
surface of the stream of time that goes faintly bab
bling through our borders ; our tiny grains of sand
get carried down into the great sea of oblivion — there
they sink if they do not perish, It js otherwise with

CASTLE ACRE. 49
the towns. There, there has been a greater bulk of
life, if I may so express it ; there men have had a
constant succession of conflicts ; there, there have
grown up slowly institutions, associations, corpora
tions, implying the war of parties, the loud or the
low roar of discussion, the strife of tongues and the
stubborn, conscious endeavour to attain to some high
ideal. Thus it comes about that the annals of our
historic towns have nothing like the same wide breaks
in them which curious people in our country villages
complain of when they attempt to construct the story
of their humble birthplace. The great cities have
few blanks in their history ; they can usually appeal
to some original documentary records deposited in
their archives ; they have always played some part in
the great movements and struggles of the people ;
they can boast of a long continuity of busy and
eventful life, with only here and there a break in their
annals. It is because this continuity in our village
life is so very rarely to be made out that our village
chronicles are generally found to be not only petty
and trifling but dry, fragmentary, and consequently,
as a rule, rather hard reading.
It is, however, not always so,
*****
In the western division of the county of Norfolk
there is an irregular stretch of upland about twenty
S

50 CASTLE ACRE.
miles in length from north to south, and never more
than ten miles broad, whose northern limit is the
low range of sandhills that extend from Ringstead
to the Burnhams, and its southern boundary is the
valley of the Nar, Through its whole length, and
traversing it diagonally, there runs a mysterious and
very ancient trackway known as the Peddar's Way,
Straight as a ruler it may be traced from Hunstanton
till it crosses the Nar at Castle Acre, and thence
travels on, with hardly a swerve, into regions of deso
lation and dulness with which for the present we have
no concern.
Who laid down this ancient road ? Antiquaries
are at issue upon the point. Some say the Romans
made it. Some say they found it where it is and used
it for their own purposes. If it be a Roman road,
how is it that all along those first twenty miles
so very few coins or vestiges of anything that may
be called Roman has ever been found ? And how is
it that it strikes the coast a good five miles from the
once tremendous fortress at Brancaster, whose walls,
we are told, were eleven feet thick, and where a
force of Dalmatian horse kept watch and ward in
the third century of our era, prepared to dash down
upon the pirate rogues who came to plunder and
slay? There was a legend or tradition which the

CASTLE ACRE. 51
chronicler Stowe treated as if it were veritable
history, and which told that when Edmund, the
martyred king of East Anglia, came from across the
sea to take his kingdom, in the year 855 A,D,, he
landed somewhat near Hunstanton and " built a
royal town there" and kept his court there for a
whole year, for he was prosperous then. We may
accept the story for what it is worth ; but, true or
not, there is a value in the details of any fabrication,
and this story points back to a time when there was
a port or landing-place in this neighbourhood — a
port which the shifting of the coast line has oblite
rated long, long ago, but — which was the harbour
that the Peddar's Way led to from the interior ages
back, how far back it is impossible to say with confi
dence and idle to conjecture. In a matter where we
can only theorise one man's opinion is as good as
another's, and for my part I incline to maintain that
the Peddar's Way was an ancient road long before
the Christian era, and that this mysterious trackway
ran its course from the coast to the Nar without
crossing a single brook or tiny rivulet in all those
twenty miles. It passed over an open country of
heath and sandy hillock and rolling downs on which
the flocks and herds of a pastoral people wandered
to and fro, a people answering the description which
Caesar gives of the " men of the interior " in Britain

52 CASTLE ACRE.
during the century before Christ, "who for the
most," he says, "grow no corn, but live on milk
and flesh, and clothe themselves with skins " [of the
animals they tended]. But the valley of the Nar
makes a somewhat deep depression across this stretch
of upland, and the spot at which the Peddar's Way
crossed the river must always have been a " coign of
vantage " of enormous strategical importance, giving
as it did the command not only of the road, which
traversed almost the whole length of East Anglia,
but the command also of the stream, which was
navigable for small flat-bottomed barges nearly as
far as Castle Acre itself, little more than a century
ago. The utter defeat of Boadicea and the Iceni in A,D,
62 was almost the most important incident in the
history of the Roman conquest of Britain. The
country of the Iceni was bounded on the west by the
vast fenland of Cambridgeshire, on the south by the
Stour, on the north and east by the sea. It was a
kingdom apart, and its king Prasutagus ruled over
his people as an ally or tributary of the Romans much
as our native princes in India administer their several
principalities under the protection of the British
Crown. When in the year A,D, 61 Prasutagus died
and bequeathed the reversion of his dominions to the
emperor Nero, subject to the life interest of his wife

CASTLE ACRE. 53
Boadicea, the beginning of the end had come and
the speedy annexation of the little realm was inevit
able. The immediate effect of the annexation appears
to have been the establishment of the great fortified
camp at Caistor about three miles to the south of
what is now the city of Norwich, and some four
miles to the north of what appears to have been the
great stronghold or " capital " of the Iceni on the
high ground overlooking the little river Tas.
If on the heights overlooking the Nar there was
another Icenian fortress close to the ford where the
Peddar's Way crossed the stream, it would have
been almost an absolute necessity to dismantle it — if
we may use so grand a term — or to replace it by
another fortified camp which would of course be con
structed in conformity with the Roman methods of
warfare. And this appears to have been exactly what
happened. It was at Castle Acre that the Roman
engineers threw up the entrenched camp whose
mighty ramparts still tell their tale and testify to the
audacious foresight of a conquering people whose
military genius, if nothing else, fitted them to be the
masters of the world. If the estimate is to be relied
on which assures us that the camp at Caistor was
capable of receiving within its area a force of 6,500
men, the camp at Castle Acre must have been able to
take in at least 3,000 or 4,000, The great rampart

54 CASTLE ACRE.
of this camp which runs north and south for almost
300 yards, whose height from the bottom of the great
ditch, after all the abrasion and wear of the elements
during 1,500 years, is still some forty feet high, and
must have made the fortress impregnable on that
side ; while on the south another rampart ran, less
formidable, because less necessary, inasmuch as
here the Nar, broadening out into an impassable
morass, served as the best natural defence for a force
that on this side had very little to fear from attack.
There stands the great Roman camp to this day, the
life all gone out of it, but even now bearing on its
dead face something that looks like a menacing
scowl. East Anglia was subject to Roman domination
just 350 years. At the end of that time the legions
marched out as they had come in, crossed the
Channel, and left the land and its people to take care
of themselves. East Anglia got home rule, and I
dare say there were a great many Britons who were
very proud and delighted at their newly acquired
liberty. But during those three centuries a prodigious
change had come over the Roman world and its
subject people. When Aulus Plautius carried his
invading hosts into Britain in A,D, 43, the world was
a pagan world. When the legions left the Britons

CASTLE ACRE. 55
to take care of themselves, Christianity was the
established religion of the empire, and the Christian
Church, if not everywhere supreme, was rapidly
becoming dominant. It is noticeable that in many
places where Roman camps exist a church is to be
found in close proximity to the rampart ; sometimes,
as at Caistor near Norwich, we find it actually within
the enclosure of the vallum. Of course, the earlier
churches have long since disappeared, but the pre
sumption is a reasonable one that the later churches
stand upon the site of a far more ancient Christian
temple. At Castle Acre the noble fourteenth-century
church is situated within a stone's throw of the great
western rampart of the Roman station and separated
from it only by the huge ditch out of which the
materials of that rampart were dug, I hold that
where that stately parish church now stands once
stood a humbler sanctuary dedicated to the worship
of the Most High, in which the Christian faith was
taught and preached, and prayer and praise was
offered up according to the prevailing ritual of that
age. When already as early as A.D. 314 the Bishops
of London, York, and Caerleon attended the
Council of Aries, and during the next hundred years
the conquering Cross was everywhere extending its
sway, and the pagans were in their turn put upon
the defensive and pleading for no more than tolera-

S6 CASTLE ACRE.
tion, which was denied them, it seems to me that
then East Anglia must have been a Christian land
or nothing. Then came her baptism of blood.
From the lands to the northward of the Rhine and
the Yssel — lands into which the sound of the Gospel
of Christ had never travelled — a stream of pagan
warriors, fierce and pitiless, came pouring in upon
the Norfolk coast, forcing their way up every little
inlet and carrying all before them, blotting out the
civilisation and the religion which the Romans had
fostered, and under which the Britons had prospered,
and step by step getting a firm footing in the old
kingdom of the Iceni, and calling the land after
their own name. The realm of Prasutagus became
the kingdom of the East Angles, and there for
another 400 years they held their own. But they,
too, were threatened by another stream of invaders,
who in due time made good their landing and dis
persed the others in their turn. But in the mean
while these Angles or Saxons — call them which you
will — got to learn that it was needful to make good
their conquest by raising up other fortresses to serve
as defences against the new invaders.
Abandoning the great Roman camp of Caistor
they reared that stupendous earthwork on which the
castle of Norwich now stands, and they planted it
on the banks of the Wensum to check the advance

CASTLE ACRE. 57
of the marauders who might strive to sail up that
important waterway into the heart of the country.
Leaving the mighty walled station of Brancaster to
its fate, they constructed another huge fortress at
Castle Rising. But they found that the position that
the Romans had occupied at Castle Acre could not
be improved upon, and so they utilised the mighty
ramparts which they found there, and out of them
they built up their great burh, which as long as
they could succeed in holding it gave them, as it
had formerly given the Roman conquerors, the com
mand of the Nar.
But the tactics of these Teutonic conquerors were
very different from those of Rome. The *camp of
the Roman legion was always quadrilateral, and for
the most part lay hard by a river's bank, with easy
access to the water for the horses and the cattle that
might chance to be within the lines of defence. It
was a camp of occupation, the home and the d/pSt of a
force which was meant to be permanently settled in
a province, and intended to serve as at once a garri
son town and a base of operations if it were neces
sary at any time to make a forward movement upon
an enemy on the march. The Saxon camp was
something very different. It was little more than a
place of refuge in the event of attack ; it was rather
a citadel than a fortress ; a stronghold in which a

S8 CASTLE ACRE.
stand might be made when the foe was too powerful
to cope with in the field ; it was never meant to be
permanently garrisoned ; it was "a place to flee unto"
rather than a base from which to issue forth on great
military operations. The Saxons would never have
dreamt of shutting themselves within the four great
ramparts of the Roman castrum ; they had a system of
fortification of their own. It consisted in piling up
a huge circular mound surrounded by a deep ditch,
and flanking this ditch with an outer line of " horse
shoe " earthworks, each supporting the other, and
each affording a place of retreat if the attacking
force had been strong enough to dislodge the de
fenders from their position. The central mound was
called the burh ; the plateau on the summit was the
last refuge for the besieged ; it was surrounded by a
strong stockade, and might be held by a small force
of brave men against an army.
When the Saxons found it necessary to throw up
such a stronghold as this at Castle Acre they planted
it on the north-east corner of the Roman castrum,
and they utilised the eastern rampart from the
materials of which they piled up their burh and
the flanking earthworks which surrounded it. There
to this day the two systems of fortification may be
seen in wonderful preservation in. immediate juxta
position. At Burgh, near Yarmouth, you may see a

CASTLE ACRE. 59
Roman camp, its gigantic walls still standing ; at
Caistor on the Tas you may see another camp, with
its huge rampart still almost perfect on all the four
sides. At Castle Rising you may see an almost
perfect specimen of a Saxon burh with its horseshoe
earthworks. But at Castle Acre you have the two
systems of ancient fortification side by side, the one
actually having grovm out of the other, and the very
materials of the more ancient line of defence having
served for the construction of the more modern but
more barbaric earthworks.
Barbarians these Angles undoubtedly were at their
first coming, and in East Anglia they were, from all
that appears, behind their kinsfolk outside their
own borders in culture and civilisation. The great
monasteries in the Fenland seem to have had more
affinity with the West than the East, They were
all outside the East Anglian diocese when the con
version of the Angles was effected, and submitted
themselves to the spiritual guidance of bishops of
their own. Of architecture they knew nothing.
Even to the last almost their only weapon and their
most effective tool was the axe ; with that they
cleared the forest, shaped the beams, and latterly
hacked the very blocks of stone which they learnt
so slowly and, as it seems, reluctantly to utilise for
building purposes. Their art was confined to the

6o CASTLE ACRE.
rude adornment of their sepulchral urns, to the
scratching of simple patterns upon rings and cups,
and the combs of the women. Once settled upon the
land in small communities they wandered but little :
the band or clan or family which had won a tiny
territory were chiefly concerned in keeping it to
themselves, and they call it their tun, or their home.
Walled towns they abhorred. Like gipsies, they
shrank from the thought of being imprisoned in the
streets. Even late in the seventh century, and when
they had become Christianised — after a fashion
— their moral perceptions and sentiments were
hideously chaotic. In their quarrels they dropped
the bludgeon and took to the knife, and they valued
life so little that they compounded for murder
according to a differential tariff. They burnt their
dead and collected the calcined bones into urns of
incomparably inferior make to the pottery of the
Romans. They buried these cinerary urns in ceme
teries outside the vill where their habitations were
clustered. It is the only indication that we have
of their having any feeling of reverence. Even
when, much later, every settlement had its church
and its priest, it was necessary to forbid them by
ecclesiastical authority from using the timbers of
the church for fuel to save themselves the trouble of
going further afield when there was a scarcity of logs

CASTLE ACRE. 6i
for the hearth. It was not till 571 that the East
Anglians chose, or submitted to, a king to reign over
them ; before that time we may presume that some
thing like anarchy prevailed, and every man did that
which was right in his own eyes.
Such were the people who appear to have had
a settlement of considerable importance at Castle
Acre ; and the great earthworks which they raised
when a common danger forced them to unite and co
operate in the face of the foe are not by any means
the only remains which the district supplies, and
which speak to us with an eloquence of their own.
During the course of the year 1892 Mr, Henry
Willett, of Brighton, with characteristic generosity,
supplied thewhole funds for exploring an early Anglian
cemetery at Castle Acre which can hardly have been
used after the sixth century. About half an acre of
land was explored ; the place of sepulture has for some
few generations been under the plough and the urns are
never much more than a foot below the surface of the
soil ; the modern tillage and our heavier agricultural
machinery, furrowing much deeper than aforetime,
has crushed and destroyed the sepulchral urns which
at one time must have been deposited in this burial
place by the hundred ; still, " though much is taken
much abides," and the results of the exploration are
not without their significance. Upon this branch

62 CASTLE ACRE.
of the subject, however, I do not think it necessary
to dwell. *****
When the little East Anglian kingdom had
lasted some 300 years, and had slowly been learn
ing some of the arts of peace, and enjoying some
of its blessings — not without the influence of the
Church, which became more and more potent for
good — the Norsemen came down upon the land,
and there was long war and pillage and carnage.
The invasion began in 838 ; that seems to have been
no more than a plundering raid by a Viking fleet
that came for booty. Twenty-eight years later Ivan
the Boneless, with a mighty host, landed on the
East Anglian coast, and soon showed that he meant
to stay. Where did he land ? There is no answer
forthcoming. But if it were on the northern shore,
then peradventure he and his marched down the
Peddar's Way and traversed the upland where the
flocks and herds were roaming, and where it may be
that he saw the droves of horses which next year he
seized for his march towards the north. If he sailed
up the Nar his first great fight would be at Castle
Acre; that stronghold would be too formidable a
gathering place for the tribes to allow the invader
leaving it in his rear. Did he storm that terrible
burh? Did he harry the country round with fire

CASTLE ACRE. 63
and sword ? Did he give the villages to the flames ?
Of the ruthless character of the invasion we have
dreadful testimony. Of the line of his march we
have but vague notices, and conjecture is but waste
of time. But I suspect — I only suspect — that there
are traces of a Danish entrenched camp five miles
from Castle Acre which may have been thrown up
by the Boneless One ; and this is certain, that in
the long period of warfare during which the East
Anglian land was frightfully devastated by the new
hordes of heathen invaders, all the old Saxon for
tresses shared the same fate. The Norsemen came
and stayed as conquerors, and for the next 200 years
East Anglia was a Danish province.
The Danes came in among us as pagans, and they
did their best to blot out the Christianity which they
found in East Anglia, but the Cross triumphed after
all. Cedant arma togce is the great law of progress.
When Guthrum in 880 received baptism, and the
great Alfred was his sponsor at the font, a begin
ning was made in the conversion of the fierce
marauders ; East Anglia, left to settle its own
affairs, slowly recovered itself from the havoc that
had been wrought; and Christianity became the
religion of the new people.
Then came another conquest, and William of
Normandy burst in resistless and carried all before

64 CASTLE ACRE.
him, he won the crown of England, and divided
all the land as seemed good to him.
In Norfolk — for we must speak of Norfolk now by
her modern name — the Conqueror bestowed 139
manors upon one of his sturdiest followers, William
de Warenne, and of these Castle Acre was by far
the most considerable and important. It was the
Capital manor of his great Norfolk possessions, and
though there is little evidence that he made it any
thing else but an occasional place of residence, yet
it is inconceivable that the great fortress on the
Nar should have been left ungarrisoned, or that it
should have been allowed to go out of repair. But
during the lifetime of the first Earl of Surrey — by
which title William de Warenne became known —
it seems more than probable that the defences of
the burh remained pretty much as they had been —
huge timber fences — stockades and palisades in
closing the wooden dwellings of the soldiery and
their officers ; the seneschal of the fortress probably
occupying an important position upon the plateau of
the great mound. Of stone walls and masonry there
was none. It was reserved for the second earl, who
succeeded his father in 1089, to make Castle Acre a
place of far greater magnificence than it had ever
been before.

CASTLE ACRE. 65
As the eleventh century was drawing to a close
a tremendous cyclone of religious excitement — its
centre nowhere, its circumference everywhere — was
moving with an awful force over Europe. All ranks
and all classes were affected by it ; the upper ranks
of society indeed more powerfully, or at least more
conspicViously than the rest. Reprobates to whom
conscience had been a word without a meaning
through all their lives of vice and crime, found
themselves shuddering with unaccountable spasms
of remorse for sins they had felt no compunction
in committing, and had till now well-nigh forgotten.
Rugged warriors, coarse and relentless, to whom
bloodshed and pillage had been a merry game and
the clash of battle a kind of rapture, clutched at
their heartstrings by a mysterious agony, shrieked
aloud with uncontrollable horror at the prospect of
judgment to come. Kings and queens, and nobles,
men and maidens, careless, luxurious, gay, frivolous,
sensual or debauched, awoke us out of sleep to the
consciousness that their lives had been no better
than a ghastly dream, and found themselves over
whelmed by an unbearable sense of emptiness, and
an ecstasy of yearning and aspiration after spiritual
exaltation and nearness to God. The emotional
storm did not exhaust itself in the languor of
mysticism, it translated itself into action, and
6

66 CASTLE ACRE.
sacrifice, and good works. The history of that
amazing and awful Religious Revival in the
eleventh century has never yet been written.
When it comes to be studied and thoughtfully
dealt with, it will, I feel confident, be found to
have originated in the famous Burgundian abbey
of Clugny. There the fire kindled, and thence
for well-nigh two centuries the warmth and the
flame of the movement continued to be supplied.
Just ten years after the great William had landed
at Pevensey, and not till then, his work of bring
ing the realm under his sway was completed, and
his kingdom was finally consolidated by the sup
pression of the formidable rebellion of Ralph of
Norfolk. That attempt at revolt collapsed at the
beginning of 1076. When the Castle of Norwich
surrendered it was committed to the custody of
William of Warenne, It seems that during that
same year, the earl and his wife Gundrada set out
on a pilgrimage to Rome, Years afterwards it
became necessary that the earl should set down
the story of that Continental tour, and this is
what he tells us about it : —
" , . . I William de Warenne and Gundrada my
wife wishing to make a pilgrimage to St, Peter in
Rome, went on our way stopping at many monas-
tries which are to be found in France and Burgundy,

CASTLE ACRE. 67
and there we offered up our prayers. And when we
had reached Burgundy we learnt that we could not
safely go further because of the war which was
going on then, between the Pope and the Emperor,
Thereupon we took up our abode at the monastery
of Clugny, a great and holy abbey built in honour
of St. Peter. . . . And because we found there such
great sanctity and devotion and Christian charity,
and moreover so much honour shown us by the good
Prior and all the convent — who received us into
their society and fraternity — we began to regard that
Order and that House with love and devout regard
above all other Religious Houses that we had seen.
But Sir Hugh their holy Abbot was not then at
home. And because a long time before — and now
more than ever — my wife and I had it in our purpose
and wish, by the counsel of Lanfranc the Lord Arch
bishop, to raise up some Religious House for our
sins and for the salvation of our souls, it seemed to
us then, that we should not be willing to found it
of any other Order so gladly as of the Cluniac Order.
And therefore we sent and requested of Sir Hugh
the Abbot and of the whole sacred congregation,
that they would grant to us two or three or four
monks of their flock on whom we would bestow
the Church hard by our Castle of Lewes, which in
ancient times had existed in honour of St. Pancras,

68 CASTLE ACRE.
and which we, from being a wooden church, had
converted into one of stone,i And at starting we
were prepared to surrender as much land and cattle
and goods as might suffice for the support of twelve
monks. But the holy Abbot was at first very averse
to listen to our petition because of our foreign land
being so long a distance off, and especially because
of the passage by sea. But after that we had
procured a licence to introduce Cluniac Monks into
the land of England from our lord King William ;
and that the Abbot on his part had been certified of
the king's will ; then at last he granted and sent to
us four of his Monks, to wit Sir Lanzo and three
associates, on whom at the outset we bestowed all
the things which we had promised, and we con
firmed the same by a writing which we sent to the
Abbot and convent of Clugny, because they were
unwilling to send their monks till this had been
done. And thus it was granted to me and to my
wife to bring the Cluniac Monks into our English
land." This was the first introduction of the Cluniac
Order into England, but this was not alL When
the great earl drew up the record of his first founda
tion, ten years had past since he and his wife had
' Compare the story of the foundation of Horsham St.
Faith's. Blomefield, vol. x. p. 439.

CASTLE ACRE. 69
resolved on the course they were prepared to follow.
In those ten years the Conqueror had died, and the
Queen Matilda and the lady Gundrada too, and
William the Earl was drawing near his end. It
is clear that the original intention of founding a
monastery of prior and twelve monks at Lewes
had developed into a much more ambitious scheme.
The husband and wife seem to have kept residence
sometimes at Lewes and sometimes at Castle Acre ;
for it was at the latter place that Gundrada died
in childbed in 1085. Wherefore it seemed good
to them that Castle Acre should not be treated
worse than Lewes, and as there was a monastery
provided for the one, so should the other be blessed
with the presence of the Cluniacs in like manner.
During the first earl's lifetime, however, this in
tention was not carried out though a beginning was
made. It appears that within the defences of the
castle, which, as we have seen, were surmounted
by the formidable stockades, a church or chapel,
probably of wood, had existed before the Conquest
and dedicated to St, Mary. To keep up the daily
service in this church two or three monks, perhaps
draughted from Lewes, were housed within the
precincts, keeping up their cloister life in temporary
shelters (as we know was done elsewhere while
a monastery was building) and keeping to their

70 CASTLE ACRE.
" Rule " as strictly as circumstances would permit.
But when the earl died in 1088, his son the second
William de Warenne lost no time in carrying out
his parent's wishes, and as early as 1089, accord
ing to one authority,^ he confirmed his father's
charter of foundation, and he appears to have
intended to make the capital manor of his Norfolk
estates no unworthy rival of the great Sussex castle
and the great Sussex monastery. As for the castle,
the timber stockades were replaced by huge walls
of flints, which may be easily traced along its whole
circuit and which must have involved in its con
struction a prodigious expenditure of labour. The
central mound or citadel of the Saxon fortress was
crowned with an enormous shell keep as the technical
term is : That is, the plateau on the summit of
the Saxon burh was surrounded by a mighty wall
of rubble, the outer side faced with masonry and
strengthened at intervals by great buttresses. While
radiating from the great shell itself five other lofty
walls were carried right across the deep Saxon ditch
to prevent the possibility of a besieging force con
centrating itself in a combined attack upon any
single point of the defences. Moreover, the base
court, as it is called — that is the area into which
the Saxon tribesmen would drive their wives and
^F lores Hisforiarum, sub anno,

CASTLE ACRE. 71
children for defence when the Danes were pillaging
and burning and slaying — this base court was no
longer left to be defended after the old fashion by
a timber stockade. That would not suit the im
proved tactics of Norman warfare. The Norman
came not to plunder and carry his booty across the
sea, not to ravage and move on. He came to win
the land and hold it, and he meant to keep down the
subject people with an iron hand. So the whole area
of the base court was girdled with its frowning wall,
that too following the line of the Saxon rampart and
running along its summit ; and the inclosure which
had once been the base court of the Saxon fortress
became the inner ward of the castle of the Warennes,
But it seems that during the thousand years or so
that had passed since the Romans threw up their
tremendous camp guarding the ford across the Nar,
a considerable change had come about in the stretch
of lowland to the south. In Roman times, as we
have seen, this was a wide and impassable morass,
so impassable that the Romans made their southern
rampart much less strong than on any other side ;
the defence of the position here was comparatively
easy. If the old road, as seems probable, crossed
this morass by a causeway, that causeway would
in the lapse of ages help very powerfully to bring
about a gradual silting up of the little river ; ancl _

72 CASTLE ACRE.
as time went on the land hereabout would slowly
rise and the marsh ground would no longer be as
treacherous as before. Accordingly when the Saxon
base court was turned into the Norman Inner Ward,
it was found necessary to defend the approaches
from the south far more carefully than the Roman
had thought it necessary to defend his camp on this
side. So the wall of the Inner Ward is found to be
at its highest on the south, as though by this time
the southern line was most open to attack though in
Roman days that line had been least assailable,
*****
And all this is to be seen " with half an eye " by
any one who likes to look about him at Castle Acre
and trace the course of those changes which have
left their ineffaceable memorials in the Norfolk
village, which was never anything more than a
village, never even rising to the dignity of becom
ing a market town as we understand that term
now. Of any grand residence of the Warennes within
the line of circumvallation there is not a vestige
remaining, I doubt whether the second earl ever
carried out the buildings he contemplated at the
castle. He had quite enough upon his hands else
where. He died in 1138, and his son the third earl,
from anything that appears, was never at Castle

CASTLE ACRE. 73
Acre at all. The chroniclers say he escaped some
how from the battle of Lincoln in 1 140 — and that he
died in the Holy Land ten years after his father.
With him the Warennes in the male line came to an
end, and during the next hundred years at least the
Castle appears to have been occupied by the bailiffs
of the non-resident earls, and there is quite enough
in the complaints recorded in the Hundred Rolls to
show that these bailiffs were no better than they
should be, and were a bullying grasping extortionate
set, grinding the faces of the poor under pretext of
looking after the interests of their lord ; and when
the day of reckoning came shielding themselves by
putting him before themselves as their defence.
So it appears that the shell keep and its stern
walls as they startle us to-day when we turn the
corner into the Norfolk village and come upon them
without a warning — " multiform, manifold, and
menacing" — were all built up in the lifetime of a
single Norman earl ; that they could not have been
begun much before the twelfth century had set in ;
that nothing was added to them after 11 38 except
perhaps the somewhat imposing Edwardian gateway
which I suspect was erected by one of the bailiff
class to keep things snug within the liberties of the
castle, those " liberties " having step by step grown
into a little town which kept on stealthily creeping

74 CASTLE ACRE.
up in the area included between the Roman ramparts
and the great western ditch of the Saxon earthworks.
Meanwhile, all along the Roman Vallum on the
north a steady and resolute invasion was going on
by a new horde of barbarians ; and their name was
— The Squatters, I doubt whether any village or
town in England can be found in which such auda
cious and continued appropriation of little plots of
land has been going on for ages, as may be seen at
Castle Acre, The temptation to settle here was
irresistible. There was a wide extent of ground
which was valueless. Not even sheep, much less
cattle, could be safely left to feed upon the earth
works and the mighty ditches, and the supply of
building materials which the walls and ramparts
afforded was practically inexhaustible. So the
Squatters picked out the giant flints, and tore down
the stone which had been brought by the sea and up
the river from the Lincolnshire quarries, and they
found their lime ready to hand, and they erected
good substantial dwellings on the sites they chose
and which they soon converted into their own free
holds. They had no need to square the stone — all
they had to do was to square the bailiff. To this
very day the people dig into the Roman Vallum for
chalk and flints, and seem to think the great earth
works are no man's land. The great Saxon Burh is

CASTLE ACRE.

75

waste, and the huge Norman walls could only be
protected at a heavy annual cost, and though the
whole place possesses for the antiquarian a unique
and absorbing interest, who is to keep off from it the
hand of the spoiler, say for another thousand years ?
We can only make an appeal to sentiment ; but
sentiment is an expensive luxury, and the Philistines
and the Squatters laugh the sentimentalists to scorn.
We are a practical people, a very practical people.
We cannot tolerate fads. At any rate we say we
cannot. We are almost angry and quite con
temptuous when we hear that on the other side of
the Channel the French government goes the length
of protecting even the Cyclopean monolith avenues
of the Morbihan, and at some considerable charge to
the revenue actually puts pre-historic monuments
under the supervision of the police. That's not our
way. We go in for useful knowledge, horribly use
ful ! We are for letting the dead bury their dead,
and if they have not buried them deep enough, we
set to work to dig them up again — be they cats or
men ; and we provide pianofortes for elementary
schools, and encourage strumming and dactyllic
volubility. What more can we be expected to do?
*****
While the second Earl Warenne was taking away
the wooden walls of the old castle and replacing

76 CASTLE ACRE.
them with masonry and stone, was he busy at the
other end of the parish?
Abutting upon the western ditch of the Roman
camp stood the church of St, Peter with a triangular
strip of land belonging to it. One side of the tri
angle extended all along the western rampart; another
side continued the line of the northern rampart for
about loo yards ; and the third side, which joined
the first at its southernmost extremity, abutted on
an old road which led down to the ancient ford
across the Nar, The Warennes left the parish
church where they found it and appear to have done
nothing to it. The inhabitants might be trusted to
take care of their own place of worship, and in those
days men were much more in the habit of paying for
their religion than is commonly believed. What
sort of place St, Peter's church at Castle Acre was
in the I2th century we have no means of knowing,
but we have only to look at it as it stands now
shorn of much of its old splendour though grandly
"restored" some five-and-twenty years ago, to form
some idea of what a noble church it became in the
14th century, even though it is pretty certain that it
owed very little of its magnificence to the later Earls
Warenne and much less to the Cluniac monks who
had their own church to keep up on the other side
of the road,

CASTLE ACRE. 77
And this brings us to that which most visitors look
upon as the real glory and boast of Castle Acre, to
wit the Cluniac Priory.
How soon after his father's death in 1089 the
second earl set about the project of carrying his
parent's intentions into effect we have no means of
knowing. He had a great deal on his hands ; and
the presumption is that he did not begin upon the
Norfolk capital manor till the castle and the
monastery at Lewes had been brought to something
like completion. And as the great church at St,
Pancras at Lewes was not consecrated till quite late
in the reign of William Rufus, it seems probable,
and the conjecture is confirmed by the internal
evidence which the architectural features afford, that
the works at Castle Acre were not begun till the
reign of Henry I., and indeed not till more than
half that reign was over. Into the early history of
the monastery, however, I have no intention of
entering here further than to hazard a conjecture
that the Priory, not begun till the death of the
first earl in 1089, was not completed till after
the death of the second earl in 11 38. In other
words it took more than fifty years before the
original intention of the first earl was carried out,
and the church opened with the usual pomp and
ceremony. During these fifty years the popularity

78 CASTLE ACRE.
of the Cluniacs did not increase ; they were eclipsed
in austerity by the Cistercians and quite surpassed
in mere popularity by the Augustine Canons, Yet
for all that it must not be forgotten that the Cluniacs
were the first great reformers of the Benedictine
order and that the founding of the Monastery of St.
Pancras at Lewes was an event in English history ;
while the building of the Priory or dependent house
at Castle Acre, though its completion was deferred
till another generation, was but a continuance of the
first design. It gave importance to a movement in
favour of making the religious houses on our side of
the channel more strict in their discipline, and it
helped in giving a decided impetus to the desire after
a higher tone in the social life of the country at
large. Taking the first meridian west of Greenwich as a
convenient dividing line, I doubt whether to the east
of that line and south of the Humber there is a
monastic ruin in England that can compare with
Castle Acre for the extent and condition of its still
existing remains and for the facility with which its
ground plan can be made out, even in minute
details. If such an extensive ruin had existed any
where except in a remote village, it must have been
carted away bodily centuries ago. As it is, it has
simply fallen into decay. It has been a quarry from

CASTLE ACRE. 79
which all the beautifully carved work has been
industriously removed, but there was a far more
convenient quarry in the Castle and its walls for the
squatters and anyone else who wanted stone or lime,
than the more distant monastery afforded. Other
protective influences have contributed as a check
upon unlimited spoliation. The grand Tudor gate
way appears to have been used as a dwelling a long
time after the suppression — and there are consider
able fragments of the residences of some of the office
bearers in the monastery which have never ceased to
be inhabited to the present time. Large portions of
the pavement of the church have been uncovered for
the first time during the last few years ; the walls
of the cloister garth are still standing ; the refectory
remains as it was when the roof fell in. Anyone
who likes may climb the dormitory stairs which
the monks went up and down for more than four
centuries. The boundary wall may be traced with
ease from the great gateway to the ancient mill that
abutted upon the ford over the Nar, Four at least
of the altars at which mass was said for centuries in
the church are still in situ ; only their slabs of marble
having been torn away. In the chapel of the cel
larer's lodgings the frescoes at the east end are still
to be seen— faint, of course, but distinctly traceable,
I believe that the prior's house is buried in its own

8o CASTLE ACRE.
ruins ;- the arrangements of the infirmary and its
members might be mapped out with certainty. As
for the matchless west front of the church with its
two towers supporting it — one of which has survived
— if it had not been for the swaggering improvers of
the 14th century, who must needs insert a bragga
docio " perpendicular '' window in the place of the
Norman lights, and in doing so hacked away a
portion of the lovely arcading which still puts them
to shame — the west front, I say, might have remained
till now the most sumptuous specimen of Norman
work in East Anglia,
In fact, the Norman work has outlasted all the
additions that the later men erected. They pulled
down the apse and built up an ambitious Lady
Chapel, of which no more than the foundations
remain ; from two other chapels, one on the north
and another on the south, the altars have never been
removed, though their roofs and windows have
perished. The piers of the central tower are still
standing ; but about their bases are the immense
masses of masonry that came crashing down some
day or night a couple of centuries or so ago. There
they lie for little boys and girls to climb and dance
upon while they scream out little nursery rhymes
about the monks of old ! Quietly browsing through
the old aisles or cropping the sweet grass that grows

CASTLE ACRE. 8i
in the old cloister, the sheep wander and grow fat.
As you stroll — quite unconscious of where you are —
across the Convent Cemetery, where for centuries the
Cluniac fathers gently laid their brethren to rest,
each one shrouded in his monastic habit — the cattle
chewing the cud of bovine reflection stare at you with
their mild eyes
Little heeding the past — bent on pasture alone.
It is not because Castle Acre can boast of a Roman
Camp, nor because it contains a Saxon Cemetery,
nor because its great earthworks are a wonder and
astonishment to the passer-by, nor because the Nor
man Castle has a tale of its own to tell, nor because
its parish church is a noble specimen of 14th century
architecture — nor even because the Cluniac Priory is
so splendid and interesting a monument of bygone
greatness, that this out-of-the-way Norfolk village is
so well worth a visit ; but because all these things
are to be seen in so small an area, and all may be
inspected in a few hours. In their aggregate they
make up such a continuous series of historic — and
almost pre-historic — records as perhaps could hardly
be paralleled in any English village of the same size.
Happily the whole parish, with the exception of the
small holdings, which have come down from the
hordes of squatters, belongs to a single noble owner,
7

82 CASTLE ACRE.
who is not likely to let things get worse than they
are. On the ruined Priory a good beginning has
already been made by clearing away an immense
mass of the dSris which had accumulated, arresting
the progress of decay, and protecting what is worth^
preserving. The Priory Church has been opened
out from end to end under the able supervision of
Mr. Hope, who has also cleared the walks of the
cloister. The refectory still remains to be dealt
with. The undercroft supporting the dormitory
with the latrines, &c,, have been uncovered, Mr,
Willett again having contributed handsomely to the
cost of that part of the work. Much more than this,
however, still remains to be done, and in the mean
time a caretaker has been appointed to keep the
ground — to admit visitors at a trifling charge, and
to warn off ragamuffins with a talent for pilfering.
Lord Leicester is not likely to stop at that point,
but it is too much to expect that the noble owner
should provide a playground for the world at large
unless they who are interested in the preservation of
our ancient monuments are prepared to support any
efforts that may be made to arrest the progress of
decay. Hitherto the remoteness of the locality has
protected it from being overrun by any very large
number of mischievous visitors ; but our facilities of
locomotion are steadily increasing, and the danger

CASTLE ACRE. 83
becomes greater, from year to year, of Castle Acre
being overrun by a new horde of invaders — not now
of Romans or Angles or Normans or even Squatters
— but an invasion this time of Trippers, who will
leave no traces of their existence behind them except
their crumpled paper, their broken bottles, and their
offensive names scribbled upon every wall or cut
upon every accessible tree. Other conquerors have
each and all come here to build up — such invaders
as these come only to destroy.

Ill,
HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.

Among all my acquaintances above the lower
middle class I know no man of forty — except he be
a country parson — who has not written a book, or
who has not an account at a bank. We all write
books, and we all keep a banking book. Yet there
was a time when human beings did neither the one
nor the other. Also there was a time when books
were common, much written, much read, and when
bankers were not common. Nevertheless in those
days money changed hands — money in lumps with a
stamp upon it, money by weight that was the price
of lands and cattle and men's lives, and things much
more precious than even these. The world had
grown quite an old world when Pasion — the Roths
child of Athens — turned over the leaves of his ledger
8,

tilLL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 85
to find out how Lycon of Heraclea stood in his
books. It was a much older one when Julius Caesar
persuaded the bankers at Rome to make those heavy
advances to him as he was preparing for the pillage
of Gaul. But a thousand years after Caesar's time
Europe had clean forgotten all about the finance of
the earlier ages, and banking, as we understand the
word, was a thing unknown. Yet men traded, and
bargained, and got gain, and some grew rich, and
some grew poor, and some were thriftless and some
were grasping — as it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be.
In process of time the art of money-making
advanced again. Great capitalists rose up, fortunes
were made, estates changed hands. The great men
doubtless had their own methods of managing their
money matters. The Jews, the Carausini (who
bought out the Jews), and other such financiers,
made their accounts and negotiated loans with kings
and potentates, and throve surprisingly as a rule,
though by no means invariably.
That was all very well for the big men embarked
in important speculations ; but what was the small
man to do — the man who went about from village to
village and from fair to fair with a pack on his back —
the man of the market whom people called indif
ferently John le Marchant, or Johannes Mercator, or

86 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
Jack the Pedlar, and whose gains counted by groats,
not by shillings?
What did he do? To tell the plain truth he
found his money— his hard cash — somewhat of an
incumbrance to him as he travelled about from place
to place. It is hard, very hard, for us to realise in
our time the difficulty of finding investments for
capital in the middle ages. The merchant princes
of Venice or Genoa and many another thriving mart
built their palaces and got rid of a great deal of their
ready money by indulging in their taste for splen
dour. But the "low man adding one to one," to
whom fifty pounds was a fortune, if he could not
hear of some neighbour in difficulties who wanted to
sell house and land on a small scale, must have been,
and often was, sorely put to it to know where to
dispose his gains. Sometimes he made an advance
to the landlord out at elbows, sometimes a neigh
bouring monastery was badly in want of money for
carrying on those everlasting building operations
which ambitious abbots or priors were never tired
undertaking. Sometimes there was a speculation in
shipbuilding to tempt him when half a dozen small
adventurers made up a joint-stock partnership, each
contributing his quota ; but as often as not, when a
small capitalist had a good round sum in his money
bag there was no opportunity of putting it out at

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 87
use,i and the poor man had literally to carry it about
on his person and take his chance. Timid men and
women shrank from such a risk, and then the alter
natives which presented themselves were few. If
there was a religious house which bore a high
character in the neighbourhood the spare cash was
left in the custody of one or other of the Obedi
entiaries, the depositor receiving an acknowledg
ment which took the form of an obligation — i.e. a
promise to pay by a certain date. In the meanwhile
the lender in most cases received no interest — for
was not the taking of usury a deadly sin, or some
thing very like it? — the security of his deposit was
reckoned a sufficient equivalent for any advantage
which the borrower derived from the use of the
capital, andj the money so lent lay not " at call " but
invariably " on deposit."
In the case of a small trader who required a
certain amount of floating capital for the purposes of
his business, these monastery banks were of very
little use. As the time approached for the holding
of one of the great annual fairs, where the merchant
laid in his stock for the year and paid ready money
for it, it was needful that he should call in his small
debts and gather his dues. That must have been a
' " Having money out at use " — i.e., at interest — ^is still a
common expression in Norfolk,

88 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
very nervous time for Jack the Pedlar. The nights
were long and very dark ; folks said that a band of
landless rogues were skulking in the copses down in
the hollow yonder ; that two pilgrims coming home
from Walsingham had been stripped of their all ;
that there was a hue and cry for some ruffian who
had killed his mistress and was supposed to be
hiding, hungry and desperate, the Lord knew
where ; that in Black Robin's Alehouse on the moor
there had been much talk of Jack the Pedlar's
wealth, and grim Jem and cock-eyed Peter had
darkly hinted with some savagery that the pedlar
was a grasping knave whom it would be a good
deed to lighten of his burden.
Oh Jack I Jack ! How you must have quaked !
Was it wonderful that Jack and Jill and many a
score of the thrifty ones who had laid by their tiny
hoards against a rainy day should have been driven
to think of a cache as the only possible way out of
the difficulty, and that hiding money in the earth
should have been a very common practice up and
down the land in the old days when security for life
and property was a very different thing from what
we now understand by the words ?
But,  what am I thinking about? Did not
Achan, the son of Zerah, feel himself to be in
the same difficulty when he purloined that wedge

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGJC. 89
of gold and the fifty shekels of silver and all that
perfectly irresistible accumulation which dazzled
his eyes among the spoils of Jericho ? Did he not
hide it in his tent, dig a hole there and bury it,
the accursed thing? Verily a capacious receptacle,
wherein that goodly Babylonish garment had a
place among other objects of vertu. How blind
avarice is ! The son of Zerah must have been
distraught in his wits when he persuaded himself
that he could remain for long one of that noble
army of the favoured few who are not found out.
Ages before Achan there had been buriers, the thing
has always gone on. Why our dogs — our very dogs —
practise the virtue or the vice, and Tip and Toby
and Nick and Gyp — confound them ! — can never be
cured of hiding their stolen mutton-bones in the
flower-beds and returning to them in the dead of
night to scratch up the nauseous relics. It is a
survival of some instinct or other, say the wise men.
So we cannot cure our dogs of it, and we cannot
eradicate it from the hearts of our fellow men. All
literature is full of it — yes, and all law.
In the Digest, in the Institutes, the law of treasure
trove is elaborately handled ; the law varied from
time to time.i Constantine (A.D, 315) claimed half
of all treasure trove for the crown ; Gratian in 380
' See, too, " Roger de Hoveden," vol, ii, p, 224,

90 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
surrendered all claim upon any share of the spoi
but assigned a fourth to the owner of the land ;
Valentinian ten years after this decreed that the
finder of treasure should keep all that he found.
It is evident from all this legislation that in the
Roman world the practice of burying valuables must
have been very common. Can we wonder at it?
Between the death of Septimius Severus in A.D. 211
and the accession of Constantine in 305, no less than
twenty-seven names appear upon the Fasti, of pre
tenders to, or wearers of, the purple. Twenty-seven
Emperors of Rome in less than a century! Mere
names do you say ?
Distinguished names ! — but 'twas somehow,
As if they played at being names
Still more distinguished, like the games
Of children.
Ay, that was just the worst of it. There was no
saying any day who was or who might be king over
us. Of course men lost all sense of security. Men
with the best intentions could not be trusted. These
must have been the days of old stockings and of
literally hiding talents in the earth.
But our concern just now is not with other lands.
We have only to look at home ; and here, " within
the four seas," I am inclined to think that we in
East Anglia have been at all times more addicted

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 91
to the hoarding and hiding mania than elsewhere.
There are innumerable stories of men and women
digging up money and getting suddenly rich by a
great find. Sometimes you are assured that old
Hakes, who amassed such vast wealth that he was
able to buy a farm of fifty acres without a mortgage,
began by finding an old teapot full of golden guineas
up the chimney ; or that Joe Pymer dug up a pot of
money in his cabbage-bed ; or that Mr, Dixe, " him
as is the builder now," what time he was a mere
well-sinker came upon " a sight o' old gold cups and
things," when he was making a well at a fabulous
depth. Sometimes, too, the prevalent belief receives
a startling confirmation in an undoubted discovery,
as when some few years ago, in clearing out a moat
at Bradenham, a silver jug was actually picked up ;
and then it was remembered that some fifty years
before there had been a robbery of plate at Letton
Hall, and the report was that the thieves were hard
pressed and had to drop their booty,
I was myself once present at a very remarkable
function. Evidence had been adduced, so positive
and precise as to defy contradiction, that a certain
magnate at Ladon had been buried in the family
vault and the family jewels had been buried with
him. An application was actually made to the con
stituted authorities for a licence to disinter the

92 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGtC.
corpse and open the coffin. The thing was done.
Then the real explanation of the story that had
got abroad revealed itself. When the arrange
ments for the funeral were approaching comple
tion it was found that, by some mistake, the leaden
coffin had been made too large for the oaken shell
that was placed within it, and it became necessary
to make use of something to serve in the place of
wedges to prevent the inner receptacle from shifting
when the bearers had to carry it to the vault. The
undertaker's men were equal to the occasion ; they
picked up a couple of old books which they found
ready at hand ; the one was a battered old French
dictionary, the other was, I believe, " The Whole
Duty of Man." The fellows made no secret of
the matter, and two volumes were wedged in accord
ingly. It would have been all one to them if they
had been a couple of Caxtons or Wynkyn de Wordes,
But the story got wind. Two books soon became
changed into two boxes, and the two boxes became
caskets of inestimable value, till it ended by people
loudly proclaiming that the family jewels had been
buried with the dead, and a cry arose and grew
strong that " something must be done." It was to
me a very memorable day, for I had the French
dictionary in my hands, and, inasmuch as I had a
very smart new coat on and " looked the character,"

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 93
I was much flattered by being mistaken for the
bishop of the diocese, and being addressed as " my
lord " !
But the widespread belief in the existence of large
sums of money being concealed in the ground, and
which wait only for the sagacious explorer to dis
cover them, has really a basis of truth to support it.
Such hoards of valuables have indeed been turning
up continuously from the very earliest times, and
they turn up still much more frequently than might
be supposed. In 1855 a workman came upon a
collection of nearly 500 silver pennies, of the reigns
of Henry II, and Henry III,, at Hockwold, in
Norfolk, They had been hidden by some poor
creature six hundred years ago, probably under his
own doorpost. The house may have been burnt or
tumbled down — who knows ? — ages had passed, and
the ploughman had drawn his furrow over the place
from year to year, and the corn had sprung up, been
reaped and garnered, and then one day the nine
teenth-century man with a patent improved share
had driven it in a few inches deeper than any plough
had ever gone before, and lo ! there rolled out before
his delighted but hardly astonished eyes the sum
total of that other poor miser's lifelong savings,
scraped together in the times when every penny
stood for at least a whole day's wages, laid by so

94 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
painfully, watched so very anxiously, gloated over so
ravenously, but. all saved in vain for another to
gather ! Had the poor wretch some dream of buying
his freedom or getting his only boy made a priest, or
making himself master of that other strip of earth
that marched with his own tiny patch ? How easy
it is to find a pathos in some mysterious relic of the
past! In 1852, again, upjvards of 300 British coins were
found in a field at Weston, We may be sure it had
not been an open field when they were hidden there :
they are said to have been coins of the Iceni — struck,
it may be, in some rude mint of the great Queen
Boadicea, hidden away for a purpose when money
was very scarce and a little would go a very long
way, meant to be dug up all in good time by the
hider, who thereupon went into the battle with the
Roman legionaries, fought and fell, and took his
secret with him.
It was in the year 1887 that the largest find
of all was made. Ten to fourteen thousand Roman
coins, mostly of the reign of Postumus, were dis
covered at Baconsthorpe, where it seems a Roman
station once was. There they had lain for fifteen
centuries, and cunning scholars will have it that
some bold band of Britons made a raid one day upon
the weak Roman garrison, slew them to a man,

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 95
pillaged the station, burnt and rioted, but missed the
treasure, which the legionaries, in view of the peril
grown imminent, had buried so deep and meant to
return for when the foe should have been repulsed or
annihilated. Those legionaries never came back.
How far did they get ? And then those others who
were waiting for their pay — waxing mutinous — and
the commissary-general with a deficit of 14,000
pieces of silver lying in a hole in a gigantic earthen
pot, and destined to lie there for ages — what did they
do ? And yet people will write fiction and think it
is a mark of genius to be able to invent a story.
Would not telling one do as well ?
Gentlemen of the shires will perhaps tell me that
they too had much treasure buried in holes among
themselves. I deny it not, but I protest that incom
parably more finds have been made among us in the
east than among you in the west and the midlands.
Moreover, there is a reason for this : a man thinks
twice before he begins to pick a hole in the
limestone or the granite. Such a hole would very
soon betray itself if he did. Nor does he like to
bury his hoard in a marsh or a river bank — your
sloppy swamp is not adapted for concealment. But
the dry and light soil on which most of our Norfolk
villages were planted, and the old banks raised in
primaeval times for defence or for the enclosure of

96 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
cattle, and the old walls of cobble, sometimes three
or four feet thick, of which many of our humbler
dwellings and almost all our barns and byres were
made before the times came back when people set
to work to burn bricks again and build houses with
them — all these were exactly the spots which afforded
easy hiding-places for the small man's savings.
Even to this day such places are utilised by our
local misers.
Nevertheless, I do not want to hurt the feelings of
the gentlemen of the shires, I know that it was
somewhere between Wycombe and Onhandande-
decruche {there is a name to be proud of!) that
William Attelythe in the year 1 290 was said to have
found a hoard of twenty pounds, the which he was
said maliciose concelasse, and that by favour of the
king he was pardoned his offence, whether he had
committed one or not.
Also I know that a hundred years after this Robert
atte Mulle and Alice his wife were put upon their
trial on the charge of having appropriated seven
hundred pounds d'aunciem temps mussez sous la terre
at Guildford in Surrey, and that the unhappy couple
were prosecuted and worried for years by Sir Thomas
Camoys ; though it seems clear that the charge was
utterly false, and after seven years of shameful
exactions it was practically withdrawn and master

MILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 97
Robert restored to what was left of his houses and
lands and goods and chattels, which during all this
time had been left in the hands of the spoilers.
So, too, in the year 1335 a decree went forth from
the great King, who was at Carlisle at the time,
directing that an inquiry should be made regarding
a hoard of unknown value which certain rogues had
succeeded in unearthing in the garden of Henry
Earl of Lancaster, in the parish of St. Clement
Danes, outside Temple Bar. They found the treasure
in the said garden under a pear-tree, and they dug it
up and carried it off; and for all that appears they
escaped with their booty, and none knew what became
of it or them.
* * * =;: *
How did these rogues find that money in the Earl
of Lancaster's garden under the pear-tree? How
did it get there ? The Earl (he was not yet Duke)
was one of the greatest potentates in England. If
his house was not his castle, whose should be ? We
cannot help thinking that the hoard must have lain
there from a very distant time — it may be that it had
been there for ages. How did the rogues find it?
Why didn't the gardener dig it up ? It was not his,
and he knew nothing about it. It certainly was not
found by mere chance, for there was a recognised
term in use for describing such finds. In the formal
8

98 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
documents they are spoken of as subito inventum ; as
in the case of that sum of gold and silver which
William Whethereld of Brokford in Suffolk fished
up from a well infra mansionem ipsius Willielmi in
the year 1425, and about which due inquiry was
made — the jury declare expressly that it was subito
inventum ; or that other hoard of money, which on
the Monday after All Saints' Day, three years after
this, John Sowter, alias John Richerd, of Bury St.
Edmunds, cordwainer, came upon at Thurleston, in
the same county, under a certain stone. That, too,
was a mere chance find, and that, too, is set down as
subito inventum. So, t6o, some finds were mere
thefts, as when the Rev. Edmund Welles, parson of
Lound, who had hidden away in a secret place in
the church of Lound his little pile of seven pounds
and saw it safe there on the ist of April, 1465, and
when he came to look at it again on St, Laurence's
Day, the loth of August, found it was gone, and by-
and-by 40s, thereof was proved to be in the hands
of Robert Prymour, a noted receiver of stolen goods.
It was clear enough that some one had watched the
reverend gentleman, peradventure through the leper's
window, one dark night as he went to trim the lamp
over the altar, and could not keep himself from
having one more look at his savings, just to see if
they were there in their hiding-place.

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 99
But when it came to such a hoard of treasure as
Beatrix Cornwallis and Thelba de Creketon— -two
lone women, observe — dug up at Thetford, in the
year 1340, and which was worth at least one hundred
pounds, which they could not in the joy of their
proud hearts hold their tongues about, which they
forthwith began to spend in riotous fashion, so that
mere guzzling seems to have been the death of
Beatrix — which, too, when Reginald of Kylverston
and his brother Henry and another rogue got wind
of they came upon the two women and despoiled
them of ; which, moreover, was the death of Reginald
also and the ruin of all the rest, none could tell how ;
— when, I say, it came to this kind of thing, you
must not hope to . persuade any but the most feebly
credulous that that was all a haphazard business, or
that there were no occult powers enlisted in so
awful and terrible a business as that. What ! are
we going to be persuaded that only the nineteenth
century has anything to tell us about spirit-rapping
and bogies ?
* * >;< >|i *
I will not intrude into the province of these pro
found philosophers, whose business it is, and their
delight, to trace the origins and development of
religion. Hand equidem invideo : miror magis.

100 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
Only this I know, that there does seem to exist
a stage in the progress of human beliefs, when
the orthodox and universally accepted creed of the
children of men may be summed up in the brief
formula —
There are gods above, there are fiends below.
That seems to have been the creed of the earliest
men who had any creed at all. What the gods
could do, or would do, people were very vague about ;
for men learn very slowly to believe in the power of
goodness and in the possibility of a Divine love,
personal, mild, and beneficent. These things are
matters not of experience but of a higher faith.
Even the gentler and the more earnest find it hard
to keep their hold of these. They are for ever
tending to slip away from us ; but there is no
difficulty at all in believing in cruelty and hate
and malignity. These things are very nigh to us,
rneeting us wherever we turn.
There may be heaven, there must be hell,
was not a dogma first formulated in our days.
Heaven for the gods, there might be ; but earth,
and all that was below the earth, that was the evil
demon's own domain. The demons were essentially
earth spirits. The deeper you went below the outer

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. loi
crust of this world of ours, the nearer you got to the
homes of the dark and grisly beings who spoil and
poison and blight and blast— 'the angry ones who
only curse and hate, and work us pain and woe.
All that is of the earth earthy belongs to them.
Wilt thou hide thy treasure in the earth ? Then it
becomes the property of the foul fiend. Didst thou
trust it to him to keep ? Then he will keep it.
"Never may I meddle with such treasure as one
hath hidden away in the earth," says Plato in the
eleventh book of the Laws, " nor ever pray to find it.
No ! nor may I ever have dealings with the so-called
wizards, who somehow or other (afiaxryeTrcasf) counsel
one to take up that which has been committed to
the earth ; for I shall never gain as much as I shall
lose ! " It was already, you perceive, an established
practice. The wizards that peep and that mutter,
the " cunning men " that dealt with familiar spirits,
have been an institution time out of mind. " O ! if
Hercules would but be so good," says the man in
Persius.i " and I could hear the click of a pot full of
cash under that harrow of mine ! "
Hermes was he who bestowed the lucky find ; but
Hercules — ^who was he but the earth spirit who
claimed his dues?
When the witch of Endor, to her own amazement,
' " Sat." ii, lo,

102 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
had summoned the shade of the dead prophet to
commune with the doomed king, the wicked old
woman cried out in . her horror, " I saw gods as
cending out of the earth." Under the earth were the
powers of darkness that could be dealt with some
how, and there were witches and wizards — who
could doubt it? — possessed of awful secrets and
versed in occult practices, who somehow or other
(afiaxTyeiro)';) exercised a hideous sway over the
fiends below, and used them for their own ends.
Has the race died out? Have the awful secrets
been lost? Are there no more specimens of the
real genuine article? Have all the railway tunnels
and other audacious devices of our time let too much
light and too much air into the bowels of the earth,
so that the very demons have been expelled, or
retired deep and deeper down towards the centre
of our planet, where the everlasting fires burn, and
whence sometimes they burst forth?
I am always finding that I know nothing of the
present, I find it so hard to understand ; it is so
very near ; it cramps a man with its close pressure.
The past you can form a fair and impartial estimate
of, and of the past you can know something — ^just a
little but still something ; the present wriggles so.
This I know, that ages ago there were wizards, and
potent wizards, too, who had dealings with imps

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 103
and fiends and goblins, and lived with those beings
upon familiar terms, and called them by their several
names, and compelled them to do sei-vice. Surely
this candid, truth-loving, sagacious, and most im
partial nineteenth century is not going to resist and
set itself against the crushing force of cumulative
evidence. -jS- -Jp- ^ -*- -)it
In the year of grace one thousand five hundred
and twenty-one — that is, in the twelfth year of King
Henry VIII. — a license was given to one Sir Robert
Curzon, commonly called Lord Curzon, to search for
hidden treasure within the counties of Norfolk and
Suffolk. The noble lord, like the unjust steward,
could not dig himself, but he could find others who
would act as his deputies and agents. Accordingly,
he made choice of three rogues, who were styled
his servants, William Smyth, William Tady, and
one Amylyon, whose Christian name, if ever he had
one, does not appear, and the worthy trio made
their headquarters at Norwich and began to look
about them. It was discouraging to hear sundry
rumours that they had been forestalled. Others had
been at work before them. There might be a doubt
whether or not they could discover hidden treasure ;
there could be no doubt that if they flourished their
commission in poor men's faces they might easily

104 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
succeed in levying blackmail from the suspected.
They lost no time in pouncing down upon four un
lucky victims. From three of these they managed
to extort sundry small sums, amounting in the
aggregate to two or three pounds, together with a
crystal stone and certain books, which, being duly
delivered up, an engagement was given that the
culprits should be " troubled " no more. The offence
committed by these poor fellows, and for which they
compounded, was that they had been all hill diggers ;
and though it does not appear that they had been
by any means successful in their searches, yet digging
of hills was, it appears, an amusement not to be in
dulged in by any but the privileged few.
Encouraged by this first success, the three went
about trumping up accusations against any one of
whom they could hear any vague story, and in the
course of their inquiries they singled out one William
Goodred of Great Melton, a village about seven
miles from Norwich, whom they found ploughing iff
his field ; and, forthwith charging him with being a
hill digger, they took him off to the village alehouse
and " examined the said Goodred upon hill-digging."
But Goodred was a stout knave and obstinate; he
had never been a hill digger — not he — and, more
over, the squire of the parish, Thomas Downes,
happened by good luck to be in the alehouse when

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 105
the rogues took their man there, and Goodred threw
himself upon the protection of Mr. Downes, who
offered to give bail to the extent of one hundred
pounds. It was a very indiscreet offer, and Smyth
and the others waxed all the more exacting when
they heard of so great a sum. They dragged poor
Goodred to Norwich, he protesting all the way that
he would give them never a farthing. But when
they came in sight of Norwich Castle the man's
heart sank within him, and he came to terms. He
promised to pay twenty shillings " to have no furder
trouble," and when it was all paid, Amylyon, acting
for the others, gave him a regular receipt, or, as the
deposition has it, " made to the said Goodred a bill
of his own hand." The rascals had gone too far this
time, for Mr. Downes, angered at the treatment
which he himself had received, and indignant at the
abominable extortion, managed to get an inquiry set
on foot as to the character and proceedings of the
fraternity, and then it came out that they had already
begun their operations, not without the help of the
black art.
It appears that they themselves knew nothing of
the real methods of hill-digging, and the first requisite
for ensuring success was to find somebody who knew
what he was about. Accordingly they made advances
to one George Dowsing, a schoolmaster dwelling at

io6 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
St. Faith's, a village three or four miles from Nor
wich, who they heard say " should be seen in astro
nomy " ; and having opened up negotiations with
him he engaged to co-operate with them, but he
seems to have made his own terms. He would not
go alone — other skilled experts should go with him ;
and it was agreed that they should commence opera
tions " at a ground lying besides Butter Hills within
the walls of the city " of Norwich. There, ac
cordingly, between two and three o'clock in the
morning, a fortnight after Easter, the company
assembled — the three servants of Lord Curzon, the
Parish Priest of St, Gregory's Church, Norwich, the
Rev. Robert Cromer of Melton aforesaid, and other
priests who were strangers to the deponent. Before
starting, a solemn council assembled and the ne
cessary ceremonial was rehearsed " at Saunders'
house in the market at Norwich," and then the
schoolmaster " raised a spirit or two in a glass,"
and the parson of St. Gregory's "held the glass
in his hand," Mr, Dowsing was not the only nor
the most expeditious hierophant present, for the
Rev. Robert Cromer "began and raised a spirit
first." When the fellow Amylyon was examined on
the subject he declared that when the Rev. Robert
Cromer " held up a stone, he could not perceive any
thing thereby, but , , . that George Dowsing did

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 107
areyse in a glass a little thing of the length of an
inch or thereabout, but whether it was a spirit or a
shadow he cannot tell, but . . . George said it was a
spirit!' The astonishing feature in this business is the
prominent part which was taken in it by the parish
priests. It is clear that among people of some
culture there was a very widespread belief in the
powers of magic, or whatever we may choose to call
it, and that the black art was practised systematically
and on a large scale.
In the first volume of the " Norfolk Archaeology "
there is a most curious and minute account of the
doings of a certain worthy named William Stapleton,
who had been a monk at the great abbey of St.
Benet's Hulme in Norfolk, had misconducted himself,
and, having been punished for his sins, had in conse
quence run away from the monastery and set up
as a practiser of magic. The rascal was a stupid
bungler, but in the course of his career he was
brought into relations with all sorts of people, among
others with Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More.
His chief confederates, however, were half-a-dozen
parish priests in Norfolk, who had awful dealings with
familiar spirits, spirits that came at call and knew
their names. The most notable of these fiends
were Oberion, Inchubus and Andrew Mdlchus — a surly

io8 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
and uncertain demon — and also a singular and
peculiar being which Stapleton describes as "a
Shower" and whom they call Anthony Fulcar,
" which said spirit I had after myself," he assures
us. All these spirits and their priestly confederates
were engaged in hill-digging. I regret that I cannot
report a single success, though it is certain that they
were not idle. They were intensely serious in their
proceedings, and seem to have made very little
secret of them. No one seems to have thought any
the worse of them for the converse with the fiends,
and only one instance is mentioned of their being at
all interfered with in their hill-digging. This instance
is, however, a remarkable one. In the course of
their rambles they got information that there was a
very promising digging place at Syderstone, a parish
not far from Houghton, where at the manor house
lived the widow of Sir Terry Robsart, a person of
some consideration. She was the grandmother of
Amy Robsart, and it is more than probable that in
this manor house Amy herself was born. The old
lady no sooner heard of the hill diggers than she had
them all brought before her, examined them strictly,
and told them plainly she would have no digging in
her domain ; " she forbade us meddling on her said
ground, and so we departed thence and meddled no
further." There was at any rate one v^'oman of

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 109
sense who could deal with the cunning men and
their "Shower."
But what did all these people mean by talking
about hill-digging so often ?
I must defer answering this question for a little
longer, until I have dealt with one more story of hill-
digging which is much more complete than any of
the preceding, and has, moreover, never yet, as far
as I know, appeared before the eye of those who read
only what is displayed upon a printed page,
*****
On Saturday, being the Feast of St. Clement, in
the fifth year of King Edward IV. — that is, on the
23rd of November, 1465 — an inquiry was held at
Long Stratton, in the county of Norfolk, before
Edward Clere, Esq,, Escheater of the king's
majesty in the county aforesaid, and a jury of
thirteen persons of some consideration in the neigh
bourhood, with a view to examine into the case of
John Cans, late of Bunwell, and others implicated
by common report in the finding of certain treasure
in the county of Norfolk, and to report accordingly.
The jury being duly sworn, and having examined
witnesses and received their depositions, did so
report, and this is what they found.
John Cans, late of Bunwell, and Robert Hikkes,
late of Forncett, worsted-weaver, during divers years

no HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
past, on divers occasions and in various places in the
same county, had been wont to avail themselves of
the arts of magic and darkness and invocations of
disembodied spirits of the damned, and had most
wickedly been in the habit of making sacrifices and
offerings to the same spirits. By means of which
arts and sacrifices they had incited many persons
unknown — being his majesty's subjects — to idolatry
and to the practice of hill-digging and other disturb
ances and unlawful acts in the county aforesaid \ad
fodiciones montium et ad alias riottas et illicitd\.
Especially, too, they had made assemblies of such
persons at night-time again and again \scepius'\ for
the finding of treasures concealed in the said hills.
Moreover that the same John Cans and Robert
Hikkes, having assembled to themselves many
persons unknown on the night of Sunday before the
Feast of St. Bartholomew in the fifth year of the
king aforesaid [i8th of August, 1465], they did cause
to appear before the same disorderly persons, practis
ing the same unlawful arts, a certain accursed dis
embodied spirit \spiritum aerialem] at Bunwell afore
said, and did promise and covenant that they would
sacrifice, give, and make a burnt offering to the self
same spirit, of the [dead] body of a Christian man, if
so be that the aforesaid spirit there and then would
show and make known to the said disorderly persons

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.

HI

in some place then unknown within the county afore
said, so as that a treasure therein lying might come
to the hands of them.
Whereupon the said spirit, under promise of the
sacrifice to be made, did show to them by the help of
a certain crystal a vast treasure hidden in a certain
hill \in quodam monte} at Forncett, in the county afore
said, called Nonmete Hill, Upon the which dis
covery the same John Cans and Robert Hikkes and
many more unknown to the jurors, in return for the
aforesaid treasure so found and to be applied to their
own use, did then seize upon a certain fowl called a
cock at Bunwell aforesaid, and there and then in the
presence of their fathers and mothers, baptise the
said cock in holy water, and gave to the said cock a
Christian name, and slew the same cock so named,
and did offer it as a whole burnt offering as a Chris
tian carcass to the accursed spirit, according to cove
nant. Which being done, the said John Cans and
Robert Hikkes and the other unknown persons
assembled at Bunwell aforesaid did proceed to
Forncett along with the said accursed spirit and did
dig in the hill called Nonmete Hill and made an
entry into the said hill, insomuch that there and then
they found to the value of more than a hundred
shillings in coined money in the said hill. For all
which they shall make answer to our lord the king,

112 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
inasmuch as the said treasure they did appropriate
to their own use and do still retain.
We have come upon our real magician at last —
one who knows how to use a crystal, who knows how
to summon a spirit from the vasty deep and make
him appear, who can carry the foul fiend along with
him, make him tell his secrets, disclose the treasure
that had been hidden in the bowels of the earth, at
any rate in the hills, and, to crown all, a magician
who can outwit the foul fiend, which is grandest
of all.
For it is plain and evident that the accursed spirit
intended to have the body of a Christian man handed
over to him with all due formalities as an equivalent
for the filthy lucre which he was to surrender. Some
one was to be sacrificed to the powers of darkness,
whose soul should be the property of the evil one for
ever and ever ; and John Cans did manage the matter
so shrewdly that, instead of a human carcass, only a
certain fowl commonly called a cock \quoddam volatile
vocatum unum Galium"] did duty for the human victim
demanded. But where did they get the holy water? The
Reverend Thomas Larke was rector of Bunwell at
this time, having been presented to the living some
twenty years before by William Grey of Merton,
ancestor of Lord Walsingham. Did the rector con-

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 113
nive at the proceedings? Did he provide the holy
water for the occasion ? I really am afraid he did ;
for the craze of hunting for treasure had been endemic
in that neighbourhood for several years past; and
fifteen years before this time another worthy, named
John Yongeman, with other hill diggers, had dug up
a hidden treasure said to be worth one hundred pounds
at Carleton Rode, which is a parish contiguous to
Bunwell ; and if the parish priests were delirious
with hankerings after crystals and familiar spirits in
1520, they certainly were not less so seventy years
before that time.
There remains little more than to speak of the hills.
* * * , * *
In East Anglia it is to be noted that we are not
rich in sepulchral barrows. I do not mean that we
have not some instances of these prehistoric struc
tures, but that we have nothing to be compared to
the numbers which remain in Wiltshire or the York
shire Wolds. We have them, but they are not very
common. They were, of course, the burial-places of
great chieftains who may or may not have provided
for their sepulchres before they died, just as we know
the Pharaohs built their own pyramids and Mr,
Browning's bishop made his preparations for his
tomb in St. Praxed's Church, Were those sepul
chral mounds on Salisbury Plain our British sur-
9

114 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
vivals of the earlier Egyptian pyramids ? Or were
they even earlier structures ? — and did those great
men of Egypt learn the trick of heaping much earth
over their dead of our primeval British forebears,
learn and perfect the art as the ages rolled? I
would not be too sure if I were you, Mr. Dryasdust.
One of the greatest of English ethnologists was bold
enough years ago to, express a doubt whether the
migration of the Aryan race had certainly moved from
east to west, and ventured to suggest that it might
be proved hereafter that it was otherwise. Be it
as it may, though our sepulchral barrows do not
swarm in Norfolk as they do elsewhere, we have a
sprinkling of them. It is unquestionable that when
some great man was buried in his earthen tumulus,
his arms, his golden torque, his brooches and what
not, were, as a rule, buried with him. In some cases
these would constitute a really valuable find. For
ages these buried great men were protected from
disturbance by the superstitious awe that haunted
the resting-places of the dead. For generations they
were left alone. Tradition well-nigh perished with
regard to them. But there came a day when a vague
curiosity which makes diggers of us all and
the lust of gain in the spirit of Cain
began to work, and some one said, " Let us search
and see what lies there in yonder earthy pyramid L "

HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 115
Then they made a hole into the mysterious barrow
that none had meddled with for a millennium, arid
lo ! there was something to pay them for the toil.
It is easy to see that no sooner had a single success
crowned the search of an excavationist than a mania
would speedily spread. That it did spread we have
proof positive, for I do not remember a single instance
of a sepulchral mound in Norfolk having been opened
in the memory of man which did not afford unmistak
able proof of having been entered and disturbed at
some previous time. Our Norfolk barrows have all
been explored and rifled. The hill diggers of the
fifteenth century did their work most effectually:
they left nothing for that rabid band of monomaniacs
of our own time who with sacrilegious^ hands have
been burrowing into dead men's graves elsewhere,
and, in defiance of the curse fulminated upon such
as disturb a great man's bones, are prouder of
nothing so much as of having unearthed a herb's
vertebra, his skull, his eye-teeth, or the boss of his
once massive shield. No dread of the foul fiend
with these gentlemen, and no taste for familiarities
with Oberion and Andrew Malchus !
With regard to this particular hill at Forncett,
when first the case of John Cans became known to
me, an unexpected difficulty presented itself. The
country hereabouts, if not flat as a board, is at any

xi6 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
rate almost as flat as the palm of your hand, and the
little stream called the Tase goes crawling in tor
tuous fashion through the only depression that there
is in the general level of the landscape, and nothing
like a hill, or even a mound or tumulus, could be dis
covered, though a careful survey of the parish and
neighbourhood was made. Had any one heard of
Nonmete Hill ? No, " Never heerd tell of no such
place ! " We were baffled, till by good luck the
oldest inhabitant, as usual, came to our rescue.
It was James Balls — aged nearly ninety-three
years, parish clerk at Forncett St. Peter, who on
Sunday, November 28, 1886, took his place at his
desk as usual and gave out the responses in a full
sonorous voice, as he had done every Sunday for
more than forty years — who found for us the clue.
"Nonmete Hill?" No, he had never heard the
name. Mound? No. "A hill that folks had dug
into one day and foun4,something there ? " suggested
some wise one, " Oh ! lawk ! ah ! You must mean
Old Groggrams I " We had got it at last. The
fifteenth-century name had long since passed away,
and had been superseded by the name of the familiar
spirit conjured up by John Cans four hundred years
ago. But where was " Old Groggrams " ? From the
recesses of James Balls' memory there rose up

MILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 117
straightway clear and distinct the scenes and inci
dents of his childhood and boyhood, and then he
told us in picturesque language, not without a certain
lively dramatic power, how when he was a boy there
stood on the edge of what were then the unenclosed,
open fields, in a somewhat conspicuous position, and
where four ways met, a slight artificial mound of
earth where the lads were wont to assemble and
practise horseplay. They used to slide down the
sides of Old Groggrams when the time was favourable,
and our informant had taken part in such glissades
now and then, though he was only " a little un,"
Then came the enclosure of the parish ; this was in
1809. (I wonder if in the Act of Parliament there is
any mention of Old Groggrams ?) James Balls was
then a lad of sixteen, and he remembers " the piece of
work there was." Old Groggrams appears to have
been a source of disagreement, and it was finally
determined that the mound of earth should be levelled
and carted away for the benefit of the parish. Balls'
father had some patches of land " near by," and he
actually employed his horse and cart to carry off
sundry loads of the mound and spread it on his own
little field.
Earth to earth ! This was the end of Old Groggrams.
But was this mound one of the many sepulchral
tumuli of which we have already heard ? And did

Ii8 HILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC.
John Cans really find a treasure there, value five
pounds and more in coined money? I think not.
For the buried money, which appears to have been
made up of silver pennies for the most part [centum
solidos et ultra in denariis numeratis\ I can hardly
doubt but that it was deposited there by Mr, Cans
himself, or his confederate, in preparation for the
great unearthing that came in due course ; but that
anything else was ever hidden away in Nonmete
Hill, even a hero's skeleton, I should find it very
hard to believe.
What, then, was the artificial eminence, which
undoubtedly did exist from very ancient times, and
was only removed in the memory of a man still
living? I believe it was the place of assembly for
the old open-air hundred court of the Hundred of
Depwade, for which the parishes of Forncett St,
Peter and Forncett St. Mary constitute a geographi
cal area most convenient because most central, and
of these parishes this very spot where the old mound
stood when our friend James Balls was a boy, is
almost exactly the centre or omphalos. On the sub
ject of these open-air courts I will not presume to
speak. One man in England has made that subject
his own,i and at the feet of such a teacher I sit
' See "Primitive Folk-Moots or Open-Air Assemblies in
Britain," by George Lawrence Gomme, F,S,A, London :
Sampson Low. 1880. Comp. Chroii. Abb, Reculviarius
(Macray), Preface xxxix,, pp, 214, 266,

MILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 119
humbly as an inquirer and learner. But I am
strongly inclined to believe that a few years of
research will discover for us the site and the remains
of many another ancient meeting-place of those
assemblies, I believe that if Mr. Gomme, or some
expert whose eye he may have trained to see what
others are blind to, would pay a visit to the little
parish of Runton, in the neighbourhood of Cromer, he
would pronounce that curious circular protuberance
on the hillside, which is called in the ordnance map
"The Moat," to be another instance; nor should I
be surprised if even the tumulus contiguous to the
churchyard of Hunstanton should turn out to be
not a burial-place at all, but the site of another
ancient open-air assembly. In such " hills " all
the diggers that ever dealt with familiar spirits since
the world began would never find more than they
themselves thought fit to conceal. Furthermore, if
other experts — experts in linguistics — should further
suggest that the very name None-;«^^e-hill may
indicate, even by the help of etymology, comparative
philology, umlaut, vowel scales, dynamic change and
all the rest of it, that there was once a time when
Old Groggrams was actually called the Moot Hill,
I can have no possible objection, but, as we say here
in the east, " That I must lave ! "

120 MILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC,
But what has all this clatter about open-air courts
and the like got to do with magic and magicians?
To that only too severe question I can but answer
that I never did, never do, and never will promise in
handling a subject of this kind to attempt a solution
of all the difficulties that may suggest themselves to
my readers, or to fetter myself by any such limita
tions as would keep me strictly to any one point.
If, however, my "readers are not satisfied, I must
refer them again to the experts of the Psycho-*
logical Society and other inquirers into the regions
of Transcendentalism. I commend to them a study
of " Mr. Sludge, the Medium," and of another large
literature which may be purchased without much
difficulty — a literature which will make it clear and
plain and evident that John Cans and Thomas
Stapleton and their fellows have not passed away
without leaving competent successors behind them,
and that Oberion and Inchubus and Anthony Fulcar,
being spirits, are not dead, but are as ready as ever
they were to come at call, if only you can find the
crystal, or it may be even the planchette.
Only one caution would I venture to offer to all
who are inclined to practise the black art in our
days : Let them remember that a malignant spirit
is not likely to be outwitted twice on the same lines,
and that if, having been duly summoned, and duly

MILL-DIGGING AND MAGIC. 121
put in an appearance, he should once again make
his bargain for a Christian corpse, the adept in
necromancy must beware how he tries to circumvent
him a second time, even by the help of the baptismal
font and holy water, with so poor a substitute as
"a certain fowl called a cock," Terrible, I ween,
might be the raging wrath of Old Groggrams, Who
shall imagine what he might do in an outburst of
malignant vengeance and pent-up rage ? He might
turn again and rend you !

IV,

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.

It is about thirty years ago since readers of history
— I do not mean historians — began to be consciously
tired of the details of campaigns and battles. We
had become a peace-loving generation, a generation
that was averse to having its feelings harrowed, a
generation that had begun to doubt whether martial
glory was the only glory, a generation that had set
itself to ask whether the uneventful humdrum life of
the present was not after all worth living, and then
went on to ask, rather hazily, whether there was
anything like it in the past. So a new school of
historians rose up, whose teachers began to investi
gate the origin, growth, and development of our
institutions ; and one of them, John Richard Green,

A FOURTEENTH-CENTtiRY PARSON. 123
struck out a line of his own when he began and
brought to completion that work of real genius and
original . research, the " Short History of the English
People." When a man strikes out a new idea he may have
reason to complain that others appropriate it and
claim it as their own, but he certainly will not be
able to keep it to himself. The good seed with a
living germ in it is sure to spring up he knoweth not
how. And so it has come to pass that the people
have become curious to know how the people lived in
ages past, and feel only a languid interest in the
exploits of kings and great captains, or armies and
navies, and champions and conquerors. There is a
voice which is calling out from the hearts of the
very ordinary folk inhabiting these islands, and which
seems to be saying to those who know, " Tell us
something about ourselves in the past by telling
us how such as we lived, and thought, and struggled
in the old days," It is not easy to supply the
demand for this sort of information which has arisen
of late among us. In the first place, we have to
begin by combating the immense mass of gratuitous
assumptions and contemptuous prejudices which
have held the field so long ; we have to prove that a
great deal that we learn of our accredited teachers
was wrong, and to attempt to gain confidence in our

1^4 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
own conclusions by showing that such as were before
us were by no means infallible, and sometimes com
mitted themselves to quite untenable theories. Of
course, when men venture upon this line they are
sure to appear presumptuous, and something more.
But that is not all. The saying, "Blessed is the
land that has no history," is a very pregnant saying,
and part of its meaning is that when people lead a
quiet and prosperous life, without much ambition
and without great calamities or violent changes, the
records of their lives and proceedings are apt to
appear dull and uninteresting to those that come
after, and so they are often without compunction
consigned to the dust-bin, the rag-bag, or the flames.
Only here and there does an eccentric nondescript,
with a bee in his bonnet, find himself possessed by
a mania for scrutinising the most useless documents
that come in his way, and employ himself in
deciphering parish papers, bailiffs' accounts, and
other such lumber, and the older they are the
happier he is to meet with them and transcribe
them. It is a very curious and wholly irrepressible
and incurable monomania ; but, I grieve to say — for
by my confession I shall be sure to incur the ridicule
and scornful pity of my fellow-creatures — I grieve to
say that I am one who suffers from this form of
madness.

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 125
When I am too weary to sleep, or to read, or to
talk, or to think, or to listen, I have, for many years
past, found a soothing and healthful recreation in
simply copying something which has never been
printed and is never likely to be, something which
not everybody can read, and very few would care to
read, if they could make it out, I "draw the line
somewhere," I draw the line for the most part at
the fifteenth century. Everything that comes to my
hands before that time I fasten upon and set to work
at ; but when a document is less than five hundred
years old it is a little too modern for my taste. But
when I get a roll, or even a conveyance, of the four
teenth century, or better — a great deal better — of the
thirteenth, or sometimes even of the twelfth, I am a
happy man, and I copy patiently on, and the result
is — virtue rewarded.
Lest the reader should do me the injustice of
supposing that this kind of employment is the busi
ness of my life, I must needs inform him that I
spend only my leisure moments in this foolish diver
sion. It is the amusement of my odd minutes and
odd half-hours; but I am sometimes amazed at
myself when I see how my collection of miscel
laneous transcripts has grown. Nevertheless, it is
a subject of constant regret, and of no little per
plexity, to observe how very rarely I come upon any

126 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
documents which throw light upon the daily life
and social status of the country clergy during this
early time. My lamented friend, Mr. Cadaverous,
used to say that we knew quite as much about them
as was good for us ; but this was one of his contra
dictious sayings, and of a piece with another saying
of his that the English clergy and the English
monasteries were deteriorated and corrupted by the
rise of the universities, and by the fashion of young
men seeking that sort of learning abroad which they
could have found just as well, or better, at home,
and that the clergy ceased to be interesting by
reason of their being overgoverned, and cowed, and
snubbed by the bishops and other overbearing
functionaries, when the Academics began to lift up
their heads on high and to walk with a proud look.
This odd position of his he would take up with
some vehemence at times, but I noticed that, like
many other dogmatists, he was wont to support it
less by evidence adduced than by unhesitating asser
tion. Peace be with him ! I intend to publish the
cream of his note-books some day. When they
appear, the world will know that there has been a
prophet among them.
Among the many old manuscripts which I have
copied verbatim and literatim, one of the most
curious and precious is what we should now call a

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 127
balance sheet, or account of receipts and expendi
ture of a certain bailiff, or clerk, or managing man
who was in the employment of the Rev. John de
Gurnay, Rector of Harpley, in the county of Norfolk,
for the year ending Michaelmas, 1306. Harpley
is about seven or eight miles from Sandringham,
two from Houghton, and twelve from Lynn, Here
the Gurnays had a house of some pretension as
early as the reign of Henry the Second, and I dare
say even earlier, and they were the lords of a
small manor, which was called after them Gurnay's
Manor. My friend the Rev. John was almost certainly the
son of a certain Sir John de Gurnay, and almost as
certainly a younger son, or he would not have taken
holy orders and accepted the family living as he did,
apparently before the reign of Edward the First
was much more than half over. Now, it came to
pass that his elder brother died leaving no issue,
and, for anything that appears to the contrary,
unmarried, and the Rev. John succeeded to the
family estates, which were not inconsiderable, and
for the most part lying about in three or four
parishes in the neighbourhood. Bailiffs' accounts of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are to be met
with by the thousand all over England; they are
npt very exciting reading — they are, in fact, caviare

128 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
to the general. I have handled many hundreds of
them, I have copied or analysed many scores ; but
accounts of the thirteenth century are at least com
paratively rare; and of anything like a balance
sheet rendered to a country clergyman by his factor
during the reign of Edward the First, I have never
before met with or heard of an example, except this
one that lies before me.
*****
It will be seen that this unique document furnishes
us with a great deal of very curious and minute
information regarding the rector's way of life, habits,
social status, and other matters, as could only be
gleaned from such a source as this. If we have
now and then to read between the lines and draw our
inferences from slight indications, this is only what
we are always compelled to do in studying the past
For the past must be studied, or it can never be known.
I hesitated at first where I should b^in — but
after consideration it seems to me best to say a
word about the house in which this worthy clergy
man lived, and to show my readers what sort of
a house it was. In that part of Norfolk where
Harpley is situated stone is scarce and dear; the
making of bricks was an art which had almost
perished among us, and even if it had existed here
abouts, brick earth, such as our ancestors would

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 129
have thought it worth their while to bake into
bricks, was not to be found. Moreover, the rights
of the homagers of every manor to "turbary" and
collecting of furze, and lopping and topping of trees
growing in certain parts of the manor — that is, the
right of providing themselves with fuel in one form
or another — was very jealously watched, and whereas
in Harpley there were two or three manors whose
territories overlapped or ran into one another, the
attempt to appropriate any large portion of the com
mon stock of fuel for the purpose of burning brick
would have been resented with great indignation, and
something like a rebellion ; certainly a succession
of ugly riots would have been the inevitable result
of such an invasion of the common rights of the
inhabitants. On the other hand, there was a great
deal more timber grown and standing all over the
island, and especially over Norfolk, than is now to
be found, and much more importance was attachet!
to the woods of a mano.r than some good people are
inclined to suppose. Timber was by far the most
important building material used in East Anglia.
But it was not the only one. The dwellings of the
working classes were made almost exclusively of
what we call " clay lump " in our part of the world
but the houses of the gentry and well-to-do were
either constructed wholly of timber, or more fre-
10

ISO A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
quently they were built, partly of timber and partly
of clay lump, as the old stud-work houses were built,
of which some very interesting specimens may still
be found in Cheshire and Shropshire, and, in fact,
everywhere where timber was comparatively plentiful
and stone was costly or scarce.
So it was in the case of Mr. Gurnay's house. He
had some substantial repairs to carry out this year
upon his Harpley property, and chiefly upon a house
which I suspect had recently been burnt down, for
the house is spoken of as ^^ formerly the house of
David Faber," and it looks as if this house had been
rebuilt from the ground. I think, too, that the great
barn or "grange" adjoining the manor house had
been seriously injured by the fire, and the rectory
house itself had not escaped unscathed. Therefore
it became necessary to provide timber and rafters
and scantlings and beams, and several hundred
weight of nails and bolts and clamps and other iron
"fixings," for the new work. But the expense did
not end there. In the account there are entries for
digging clay and for the cartage thereof, and inas
much as water was scarce — and it seems to haVe
been very scarce — some expense was incurred in
carting water for mixing with the clay, i.e. for
making the clay lump of which the walls of the
houses were in part built, while the barn seems to

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 131
have been made exclusively of this material, and
after it was finished the outside was daubed all
over with pitch some time in the autumn.
Unfortunately, I have no means of estimating
even approximately the real cost of all this re
building and repairs, because the worthy bailiff tells
us that the rector had himself paid for the timber
(which he had bought at Lynn), and also it is clear
that he had done the same in the case of the iron
work, and that all that the bailiff had to do with the
matter was to pay certain small amounts which
were still due upon the articles delivered, and which
were paid only when it should be found on examina
tion that the quantities agreed with the invoice.
The same is true of the cost of the labour. The
rector had paid the heavier part of the outlay,
leaving the bailiff to discharge a few smaller pay
ments out of the "petty cash" left in his hands.
As for the rectory house, it was covered with reed ;
one of the rooms appears to have been panelled with
pitch pine, and it had a somewhat costly door studded
with iron nails.
I incline to think that the rector did not live in
the rectory house, but left it for the use of his
curates or "chaplains." He himself, I infer, lived
at the manor house, and lived there in some state,
as a man of his means was entitled to do. If a

132 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
gentleman in those days had two manor houses — to
go no further — it was at once his interest and his
duty to spend a portion of the year at each of them.
It was his interest because by his presence among
his people he " kept things together," as we say, in
more ways than one ; it was his duty because he
was responsible for the little community over which
he was, to some extent, a petty king, and to some
extent morally a paterfamilias. A non-resident lord
could indeed save himself a good deal of trouble by
staying away and taking his rents and his dues, such
as they were ; but the non-resident was not only in
the hands of his agent and bailiff, but he left the
poor people too very much at the man's mercy to
grind their faces and to extort from them all he
could get by fair means or by foul.
Mr, Gurnay had another good house at South
Wooton, Wooton, as everybody knows, is the first
station on the railroad from Lynn to Hunstanton,
Sir John de Gurnay had been lord of the manor of
Wooton, and thereby hangs a tale, which I am not
going to tell, because I am not in funds upon that
matter ; but I have my suspicion that his son
somehow recovered the ancestral manor of which
his father had been deprived, and that here, too,
at the manor house the Rector of Harpley spent
almost half his time every year.

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 133
In the year 1305-6, he spent twenty-one weeks at
Wooton, and thirty-one at Harpley.
Before I proceed to treat of the way in which the
Rev, John lived, I must needs say a word about the
church, Harpley church as it now stands is quite
the handsomest ecclesiastical edifice in this part of
the country. The chancel is about half a century
older than the nave, and its east window is said to
be identical with one in the vestry of Merton College
Chapel, Oxford, which is known to be of the date
1 3 10. The inference is that this chancel was built
about the same time, probably a few years later,
I am not going to weary my readers with archi
tectural details ; it will be sufficient to refer them
to a paper upon the church contributed by Mrs,
Herbert Jones to the eighth volume of the " Norfolk
and Norwich Archaeologia," ^
This, however, can admit of no doubt, viz,, that
the present church is a very different building from
that which existed in the year with which our
• If people when they stay at Hunstanton, with nothing to
do, find their time hang somewhat hea-vily on their hands, I
venture to advise them to spend a day in going to see Harpley,
where the church wiU very well repay them for their trouble ;
and if they can bring pressure to bear upon the rector and
churchwardens to remove that organ from the south aisle,
where it is flagrantly out of place, to the north aisle where it
ought to be, they will do a good work.

134 A FOURTEENTH -CENTURY PARsON.
bailiff's account is concerned. To begin with, the
old church was covered with thatch and reed, and
the bailiff enters on his debit side a payment for reed
for the roof But this is not all. It appears that
the church, too, was built of clay lump or stud work.
For, as in the case of the house, which we have
seen was repaired and rebuilt this year, a certain
expense was incurred in carting water for mixing
with the clay, so also was it necessary to pay for
cartage of water to the church for the same purpose ;
and there are twO other charges, one for some iron
work, possibly for the door, and another for two
gates, which can only have been to protect the
approaches to the churchyard. The rector can
hardly have been yet in a position to build the
beautiful chancel in which his body was laid some
twenty-five years later, for he had only recently
come into possession of the family estates, and his
first duty was to erect a handsome tomb to his
father, which accordingly he did erect at Lynn, as
we find from an entry for the expenses of a certain
John de Chewyngton, who appears to have been
commissioned to look after the aforesaid tomb, and
was sent to Lynn ad imaginem patris domini. Some
years later the rector undoubtedly did build the
chancel of Harpley Church much as we have it now,
and it is a noble monument of the good man's

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 135
large-hearted liberality, and of his cultured taste,
and of his zeal " for the houses of God in the land,"
It appears that the rector farmed some 800 acres
of land, including the pasture, the sheep walk and
meadows. The account shows that he sowed a
total of 1 83 J acres, of which 43^ acres were in
wheat, 55 in barley, 21 in oats, and the rest in peas
(22 acres), beans (ij acres), and the coarse grain
known as siligo (20J acres). The peas, we find,
were chiefly used for porridge, as some quarters of
oats were, and the barley was chiefly used for beer.
The beans, it seems, were given to the poor, except
a single bushel which went to the stable. There
had been two great barley stacks standing when the
year began : one had yielded over 92 quarters, and
the other a little over 19 quarters ; the allowance for
barley seeds was three bushels an acre, and if we
may assume that the same number of acres were
laid down in barley in 1305 as were sown in 1306,
we must conclude that the yield on the barley crop
was more than six times the seed, and the yield
per acre something over two quarters. But such
calculations are very likely to mislead us ; we really
have not sufficient data to go upon, and I should
not have ventured to touch upon this problem, if I
were not strongly persuaded that the late Mr.
Thorold Rogers very much underrated the yield of

1-36 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
the arable land of the country in the middle ages,
I do not for a moment suppose that the soil was
adequately tilled, or that the maximum crop upon
any farm was to be compared with that which was
raised among us in the " roaring times," or is raised
by good farmers now ; but it is not conceivable that
the cultivation of any land could have been carried
on for a succession of years if the harvest yielded no
more than three or four times the quantity of seed
sown ; the margin of profit would not have sufficed
to maintain the labourers.
The Rector of Harpley, or his father before him,
was a man who was in advance of his time ; for
whereas there were at the beginning of the fourteenth
century many manors on which the personal services
— or enforced labour — of the tenants were still
exacted (the tenants being compelled to give so
many days' labour in the year to the cultivation of
the lord's domain, and to assist with their cattle in
ploughing, harrowing, and carting over the acres the
lord kept in his hand), it appears by this account
that these services had been compounded for by a
money payment before this date. The tenants of
the manor had been relieved of their most burden
some imposts.
Taking the manor as a little domain which com
prehended a geographical area of limited extent.

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 137
with so many acres under cultivation and so many
more of waste, woodland, and heath, the greater
portion in the hands of the tenants and scattered
over the open fields, but the compact central farm,
as it may be called, in the hands of the lord, and
cultivated for his behoof — the most noticeable
feature of the village community is its self-
supporting character. The corn grown on the land
was ground at the manorial mill ; the wool was
spun into thread, and the thread woven where it
grew. The cattle were slaughtered where they were
bred, when they had been used for a year or two to
drag the plough or the cart. Then their hides were
dried and prepared to be made into harness, and a
large portion of their flesh was salted down for
winter consumption.
Adjoining the manor house was a garden in which
vegetables were grown, and some garden seeds were
distributed to the poor, gratis. There are few
subjects over which so much obscurity still hangs
as the subject of mediaeval horticulture ; and in the
account with which we are dealing, the only vege
table named is the leek, which our forefathers
appear to have loved extremely and to have culti
vated universally. The gardeners' rolls of the priory
at Norwich form, perhaps, the most important series
of such rolls during the fifteenth century which could

138 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
anywhere be found in England, and they deserve
to be printed for the benefit of students ; but we
must wait for better times before we can hope for
their publication. The bailiff at Harpley includes
all his ¦ vegetables under the single designation of
Olera. Besides the garden there was an orchard,
and the crop this year was a large one ; for, after
using all that were needed in the house, many
bushels of apples were sold by the bailiff. The late
Mr. Thorold Rogers, though he had frequently met
with mention of hemp as cultivated in England, said
that he had " never seen any entry of payment for
such kind of labour" as the manufacture of ropes
("Hist, of Prices," i. 28). It is plain that at Har
pley, as in many other places, there was a hempland,
and this year the bailiff brings into his account two
payments for the manufacture of hemp into traces,
head-stalls, and ropes.
There are indications that the Rector of Harpley
was rather a "high farmer." His implements, such
as they were, had a good deal spent upon them, and
whereas at this time wheeled carts were in Norfolk
by no means universally used, Mr. Gurnay's carts
appear to have been all not only furnished with
wheels, but the wheels had iron tyres, or the next
best substitute for tyres, to witj thick iron plates,
called strakes, attached to the fellies by long spikes

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 139
which were riveted on the inner surface of the
woodwork. The sheepfold, too, was apparently
constructed with exceptional care, and afforded
much more protection and warmth for the lambs
than was customary in Norfolk, even fifty years
ago, among any but the leading sheep breeders of
the county.
At the beginning of this century it was not un
common for the Norfolk farmers and resident gentry
to let out their herds of cows at so much a head for
the " season." The owner had to feed the cattle
and house them, and if a cow chanced to die, he
had to supply her place with another of equal value.
When a cow became dry the owner took her back
and the calf was his ; the hirer took all the milk
and made his profit by it if he could. This practice
still survives extensively in Dorsetshire, and the
payment for the hire of the cows is very high — so
high that it is said to amount to as much as two-
thirds the market value of the animal for the mere
annual hire. The Rector of Harpley in 1306 let out
his herd by the year in this way, reserving three
cows for the requirements of his own large house
hold, and his dairymaid's name was Emma. The
three cows reserved were apparently not more than
enough to supply the milk for the porridge : the
servants were very liberally supplied with oatmeal ;

140 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
also, they had rations of cheese, which, however,
was not made in the dairy, but was bought perhaps
from the hirer of the other cows. Goats are very
rarely met with in our Norfolk records ; but Mr.
Gurnay had a flock of goaits at Wooton, which
he let out in the same way as he did his herd of
cows. I rather suspect he did not like a bevy of
women about him and his household ; and milking
and butter-making he therefore would have nothing
to do with. Let others milk the cows and the goats,
and make their profit of the dairy business if they
could — that should be their affair.
I have said that when a cow or bullock was
slaughtered the hide was turned into leather, if
leather was needed, for the harness room or other
purposes. Sixty years ago — I am told by old men
who can look back so far — in every considerable
village in Norfolk there was a tan vat, where the
farmers took their hides to be cured. It appears
to have been a very long and a very nauseous
process ; but, of course, the laudatores temporis acti
assure me that there is no such leather now as they
used to have when they were boys.
" That was more juicy like ! There was more
suppleness and heart to the old leather. Why, Lor'
bless you, I never remember my father with more
than one pair o' leather breeches all his life. You

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 141
couldn't wear that leather out. My father 'd think
nothing of riding fifty miles in they breeches, and
going to church in 'em o' Sunday ! "
In the account we are dealing with, I find a pay
ment entered for making tallow into dip candles.
Here again I have met with some curious explana
tion of this entry in the reminiscences of our
reverend seniors. Sixty years ago, on a substantial
farm, the dip candles were almost always bought
of the tallow chandlers, by whom they were made
on a large scale ; but the mould candles were always
made in the house, and generally by the mistress of
the establishment. The mould was nothing more
than a tin tube which was set upright on a dish,
half full of moist sand, to keep the tallow from
escaping. There was a great deal of knack and
dexterity required in working the cotton-wick (the
housewife used to buy this in balls of the travelling
pedlars) into the middle of the tallow, which was
poured hot into the tube ; and my informant told
me, with some pride, that his mother was noted as
the best candle maker in the neighbourhood, her
wicks were always "straight and stretched as they
ought to be."
There are two or three omissions in the account
which are a little puzzling. There is no mention of
butter, eggs, or honey directly or indirectly. As to

142 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
the butter, it is just possible, but very improbable,
that none was used in the household, but it is
hardly conceivable that there should have been no
beehives, and no careful storing of the produce, and
quite inconceivable that no account was kept of the
eggs. In the thirteenth century — and it must be
remembered that we are now only six years out of
that century — I doubt whether it would be possible
to produce a rent roll of any Norfolk estate which
does not enter the rent paid by the tenants in eggs,
as well as the other portion paid in oats, in addition
to the mere money payment. In this balance sheet
the bailiff sets down — (i) the payment in compo
sition of personal services ; (2) the number of
bushels of oats ; (3) the money rent ; and all this
very minutely, but not a word about the eggs,
which, in a manor of this pretension, would amount
to many hundreds and probably thousands. Another
significant omission is all mention of any tithes,
except the tithe of lambs or offerings paid to Mr.
Gurnay as rector of the parish ; although his
payments of tithes due from himself at Wooton
and elsewhere are duly entered. I can only ex
plain the difficulty by conjecturing that another
functionary had to keep account of such small
matters as the eggs, honey, hemp, flax, and perhaps
garden produce, and that this account, with the

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 143
tallies, was rendered to the stevi^ard of the house
hold probably at the same time as the farm bailiff
presented his account, viz., at the Michaelmas audit.
The state kept up by the Rector of Harpley during
his thirty-one weeks' residence at the manor house,
fairly staggers us when we come to analyse it. He
resided there during the winter months only. During
this time two horses were kept in the home stable
for domestic as distinct from farming purposes, and
they had the liberal allowance of about half a peck
of oats a day. The rector had besides his " palfrey,"
and during the whole period of thirty-one weeks the
account shows that there was an average of seven
other riding horses belonging to the guests, and at
least two more belonging to one Simon Tripping,
who, I think, must have been the great man's
huntsman. The allowance of oats for porridge in the kitchen
was about a bushel a week. There were about no
quarters of barley and malt made into beer, which,
reckoning an average of two bushels to the barrel
for the strong beer and at least as much more for
the small, gives us certainly not less than 1,000
barrels for the year's consumption.
But the consumption of food was enormous : 3 1
swine, i.e., a hog a week, 11 sheep, 4 piglings, 113
head of poultry, and no less than 86 geese, were

144 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
consumed by the household, and no less than 52
quarters of wheat — not to speak of the inferior sorts
of " bread stuffs," which I suspect were largely
distributed as maintenance allowance for the de
pendents on the estate. Making all due allowance
for the great feast to which we shall come by and
by, I can hardly estimate the number of persons
eating the Rector's bread — and by that I mean
eating the white bread he ate himself — during his
winter residence at Harpley at less than fifty or
sixty persons. It is a startling view of the way of
life which a rich man led in those days — but it must
be remembered that he stayed at home and that he
had no luxuries — absolutely none. There is indeed
one payment made to Stephen the Jeweller at Lynne,
but it was a payment not in money but in corn ;
the good man received four bushels of wheat ad
oblacionem, which I suspect means a present, and
I further suspect that it was in return for work
bestowed on Sir John Gurnay's tomb.
After all, " it's the hoffle weemen as takes it out
of yur," as an old misogynist of my acquaintance,
long since dead, used to delight in asseverating.
Men can do without luxuries, and only begin to crave
for them when the enticements of ladies' society
makes them effeminate and dandiacal. There would
be no peacocks with the dazzling plumage if there

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 145
were no peahens. And the Rev, John Gurnay had
no milliners' bills to keep him awake at night ; no
drawing-room which had to be " done up " periodi
cally ; no ball dresses to provide for wife or daughter;
no school bills to pay for the boys ; no nurserymaids
or governesses ; no wife to worry him with her
extravagance. No ! Nothing of this sort. That's
one side of the picture — and every picture has two
sides, the front and the back — and you may take
your choice which you prefer if you can't have
both. The Rector of Harpley could not marry if he
wished, and when he was admitted to Holy Orders
— and, let us hope, received them with a view to
doing his duty according to his light as a country
parson in the Norfolk village — he gave up all dreams
of wife and children. The joy of wedded love and
the serene happiness of what we understand by
domestic life were not for him. So it is not to be
wondered at that in his bailiff's account we have the
name of only one woman — Emma, the dairy woman,
who milked the cows, presided over that brewery
which had so much to answer for in those thirty-
one weeks of the rector's residence, looked after the
poultry, and had her hands full ; but it is almost
certain that she was married and had perhaps a
family, for the account shows that she had her
II

146 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
rations of corn supplied her, which she of course
took home and dealt with as she pleased. In the
manor kitchen there would be just as many women
cooks as there are in a college kitchen ; that is,
there were none at all.
How did the rector spend his time from one
week's end to another? Well, he may have spent
it in various ways. In the first place, I suspect that
he spent a great deal more of his time in his church
than some country parsons do now. We have seen
that he rebuilt a portion (and that the most sacred
and important portion, as it was then esteemed) of
his church within a few years of the time that we
are dealing with — and in any case it was much more
the habit of clergymen then to worship God in the
church itself than it is now.
As the services of his church required his atten
dance, and the elaborate ritual in that church,
varying with every saint's day or festival, gave him
always something to prepare for, something to
interest him in the actual conduct of divine wor
ship, so the claims of his parishioners were in those
days much more defined and much more imperative
than we quite realise now. The people may have
been very ignorant, and they may have been very
superstitious ; but they were very scrupulous, even
the worst of them, in their religious observances.

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 147
The Sacraments they had a right to, and the parish
priest who was not ready at the call of the penitent
to listen to the cry of remorse and to give the awful
absolution to such as were agonised with a horror
of sin, would have had to answer for his cruel
negligence and suffer severely for the wrong. At
any moment of the day or night the call might
come that the angel of death was knocking at some
lowly door ; and the priest must needs go forth to
touch with the holy oil the frail body that had
almost done its work, carrying with him the Host,
and standing by the bed of the dying while the
passing bell was tolling. In the stormy moonless
night, before he had laid his head upon his pillow,
he had to be sure that the lamp over the altar,
which it was sacrilege to neglect, was burning
brightly and duly fed — and there was work to be
done for the dead as well as for the living — the
masses to be said for the souls of the departed, and
the commemorations which had been imposed upon
the ministers of the sanctuary, and which they
neglected at their peril. It was not an age of
mothers' meetings and tract distributing and dis
trict visiting, as we do these things now ; but we
mistake it very much indeed if we assume that the
absolutely necessary daily duties of a village priest
in the first half of the fourteenth century were as

148 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
few in number as those of our modern country
parson. Moreover, the way in which he was looked after
by his superior would make us feel very uncomfort
able now. Twice a year he had to present himself
at the Synods held in Norwich Cathedral, and to
give an account of himself; and although it maybe
true that, if he sent up his fees by deputy not much
was said about his absence, yet in theory he was
bound to be in his place, and might be called upon
to answer for his non-attendance. Every year, too,
the Archdeacon, who was a very formidable personage
with very real power at his back, held his courts and
made inquiries, and irregularities and neglect were
looked into, and sometimes grave charges were
brought against the parson which might involve
serious consequences if they were not disproved.
The machinery of ecclesiastical discipline in these
times was incomparably more powerful than we
have any acquaintance with in this nineteenth
century, and if it was not always employed effec
tively, and if it tended to fall out of use and to be
well nigh forgotten, it could be put in motion at any
moment when occasion served ; let but the fires be
lighted and the wheels would "grind exceeding
small." I do not mean to imply that in the thirteenth

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON, 149
century any Norfolk parish was left to only a single
ministering priest. So far from this, I suspect that
no one man could have done all that was expected
of the parson of any considerable village then. As a
fact, I believe it would have been difficult, perhaps
impossible, to find a Norfolk village in which there
were not two or more ministering clergy, the un
beneficed " chaplains " as they were called, who
constituted a very numerous class. These " chap
lains" were the will-makers and conveyancers, the
accountants, " men of business," and the school
masters of the villages : in fact, the educated class
and the educators of the country folk, while they
were always ready to take the heavy work off the
shoulders of their more fortunate brethren, whose
income was certain and their position secure. Yet,
after making all reasonable abatements, it is certain
that the resident Rector of Harpley had a good deal
more on his hands, and was responsible for a great
deal more pastoral work than the present rector of
the parish, and if he did not do it all himself he had
to provide that it should be done.
But the Rev. John Gurnay was not only Rector of
Harpley, and so responsible for the religious life of
the parish as an ecclesiastical territory, he was
besides this a man of considerable landed property.
As such he had other duties and responsibilities

I50 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
than those which fell upon him as a beneficed
clergyman. Periodically — probably at intervals of
two months — he had to adjudicate upon the disputes
and serious quarrels of the people who were his sub
jects in the little domain — to safeguard his own and
their interests against any invasion of their rights,
to inflict punishment upon the unruly, to arbitrate
between man and man, to be the general referee in
matters great and small in a hundred different ways.
A busy man and an energetic one, he was also a man
before his age. He was before his age in archi
tectural taste and knowledge, for the specimens of
church building of the Decorated period are rare in
Norfolk. The rage for church building in the county
began at least half a century later,
¦# # # ^- ?
We have seen that he was a hospitable gentleman,
who entertained his friends in a bountiful way.
Everybody hunted in those days — even bishops and
abbots and monks and country parsons hunted.
The foxes and the badgers and the weasels and such
like vermin had to be kept down, and, moreover,
their skins were worth money. The hares and the
rabbits had skins too, and their flesh was good for
food, and the big bustard was a dainty dish to set
before a king, and the dogs could run them down if
you kept them up to the mark. But they had to be

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 151
hunted with care and skill. Even nowadays it is
not everybody who is fit for an M. F. H., and the
care of the kennels calls for brains. In this very
year, 1 306, some of those Harpley hounds had mis
behaved themselves. Mr. Bulur sternly records the
fact that they had killed two of the geese — the
curs I — mangled them so that they were not fit to
send into the kitchen. Oh ! Don and Juno, and Tig
and Ponto, and Samson and Stormaway ! How you
did catch it for those geese ! Don't think the
worse, I pray you, of Mr, Gurnay if he were a
hunting parson. Men have been that before now,
and yet have had the fear of the Lord before their
eyes, and have been no unfaithful or unfeeling
pastors of their little flocks, nor neglected the poor
and needy, the sick, the sad, or the dying.
But, as I have said, and I must needs say it
again, the Rector of Harpley had other duties and
interests besides those which his parish and his
people imposed upon him. He was clearly a very
busy man.
It may safely be affirmed as a general rule, that
the less a man has to do the less you can depend
upon him for doing that. If you want to get a job
done in a hurry, beware of looking to the man of
leisure to do it for you. It is the man who has all
his time employed and who has not a minute in the

152 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
day to spare, who is the man who can always find a
minute to help a lame dog over a stile. The Rev.
John Gurnay was one of these restless energetic men —
with a head upon his shoulders and a full allowance
of brains inside that head — and I am now going to
tell you what the worthy gentleman did and what he
brought about in this year 1 306 — that is, well nigh
six hundred years ago.
If you look at an old map of Norfolk — not one of
your modern ugly things all seamed and scarred
with the tracks of those odious railways which are
the great obliterators of so much that is picturesque
and romantic and peaceful and humanising on the
face of the earth ; but if you look at an old map, say
of a hundred years ago — or, if you can get it, earlier
— you will see that there really was only one way of
entering the county from the west, and that way
was by Lynn. Lynn was the key to Norfolk from
the west and north, if you wanted to get into it by
land. I am not going into the physical geography
of the matter, and I am not going to prove my
point — . . . the proof is complete
If only I've stated it thrice.
During the long reign of Edward the First, which
was now drawing to a close, the trade and com-

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 153
merce of the county had been going on increasing
hugely, and from Norfolk there was a large export
trade of wool and fells and hideS. That means that
Norfolk had become a land of flocks and herds more
than it had ever been before, and the time was
coming when men would begin to grumble loudly
that so much land which had grown corn in their
fathers' days was now turned into sheep-walk. But
at present the cry was for more sheep and larger
herds. Where were they to be got? Wherever
there is a demand, there the supply will follow ; and,
as the Norfolk men could not breed the sheep and
cattle 'fast enough, they looked about them for a
source of supply. It came. From the dreary high
lands of the Pennine range, from the Yorkshire
moors and wolds, from the Cheviots — for Scotland
by this time was^for Scotland — peaceable and tame
— the sheep and stunted cattle were driven slowly
along ; and Lynn became naturally in the fourteenth
century what it is at this moment, by far the largest
cattle market in the east of England. Our Norfolk
dealers persist that it is " the largest out of London,"
The more the trade grew the more apparent it must
have become that Lynn itself was ill adapted for any
great assemblage of the shepherds and their flocks.
In the rich meadows and marshes the cattle might
do very well ; a few days of such pasture for the

IS4 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
sheep would be ruinous — they would die by the
hundred. It occurred to the Rector of Harpley that
he might make a great coup for himself, and in doing
that might be an immense benefactor to his neigh
bours, and indeed to the whole county in which he
was born. So he made his advances in due form to
his lord the king, and he made out his point so well,
and managed his diplomacy so adroitly, that in
this year 1306 he received the royal licence for
holding a fair annually on his own estate at Harpley,
and inasmuch as Harpley Church was dedicated to
St, Lawrence, the fair was to be held on St, Law
rence's Day — that is, the 1 0th of August. There
was good reason for fixing this date, for it is
just the time of the year when the sheep-breeders
"make up their flocks," in preparation for the
next lambing season, and it is just the time when
the drovers who have more hoggets than they can
keep during the winter are glad to turn them into
money. St. Lawrence's Day fell on a Wednesday in this
year 1306, and since the feeling against Sunday
trading had been steadily growing for well nigh a
hundred years, from the time when Eustace de Flay
had gone about from place to place preaching against
the desecration of the Lord's Day, I assume that the
king's writ had ordered that the Harpley Fair should

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 155
be held in future on the first Wednesday after St.
Lawrence's Day. And on that day the fair continued
to be held for more than five hundred years, and
there are scores, and perhaps hundreds, of living
men who remembered it, and have even attended it.
There was a stretch of open heath in Harpley
which extended from a spot called Harpley Dam
to a place called Kipton Ash, where still grows a
clump of ash trees — trees that are the successors or
descendants of some venerable and conspicuous old
tree which stood as a landmark in the days of old ;
and here the drovers and flockmasters used to
assemble, and here the fair was held. At the begin
ning of this century the fair was far and away the
largest sheep fair in the country. Old men, and men
hardly yet old, remember the strange look of the
Scotch shepherds, with their bare legs and their
plaids, stalking about and bargaining ; remember
the booths and stalls and the impossibility of finding
any shelter for their horses, ridden or driven a score
or two of miles in the heat ; remember the crowds,
and the noise, and the fights and the drunkenness,
and, above all, the dreadful difficulty of getting
water, which in the morning was to be bought for
a penny a pail, and at night was not to be had for
love or money. There is some conflict in the reports
that have reached me, but this is certain, that the

iS6 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
fair was called Kipton Ash Fair, and to this day men
talk of the very mixed quality of the animals that
were brought there ; and to this day when a • Norfolk
dealer wishes to commend a horse, he calls it a
" Hyde-parker " ; but if he wishes to express his
contempt of the broken-down old beast, he bursts
forth into what in Norfolk serves for poetry, and
says — That there hoss be a Kip'n Esh,
High in the bone and loW in the flesh !
Kipton Ash Fair had a sudden and tragical end.
About fifty years ago, when the flocks were assembled
in the old place, a frightful form of what my in
formants assure me was small-pox broke out among
the sheep, and they died by hundreds. There was
dismay amounting to despair among the drovers,
there was panic unspeakable among the dealers and
the farmers. Of course there were high words, and
of course everybody explained the calamity after a
theory of his own. But there was one theory which
prevailed extensively among the chief sufferers. That
year there had been an enormous number of starlings
observed in this district, and, as most people know,
starlings like nothing better than to settle on the
back of a sheep and hunt for ticks and other parasites
that are to be found in the fleece. Where there are

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 157
sheep there are sure to be stariings. This year the
shepherds were appalled by the number of the star
lings, and they swore that the starlings inoculated
the sheep, and that the Norfolk farmers had caused
the plague by not keeping down the starlings. But
any way the poor dead sheep had to be buried where
they dropped, and the area which a few days before
had been one living mass of flocks and herds and
human beings became, at the end of a week or so,
a vast breadth of land which had been turned up
to hide the carcases, and it was as if a great blight
and curse had swept over the sweltering heath, and
the sickening stench of the half-covered mass of
putrefaction was horrible. Then the farmers round
about said they would have no more fairs at Kipton
Ash, and they posted great bills and notices on the
barns and gates along the roads for miles round
about, and the annual gathering came to an end ;
until after a year or two the need of a fair had made
itself felt as a very pressing one ; and then — the
terror of the plague being still upon them — the
farmers agreed to remove it to another spot, and
since then it has been held a mile or two off, at
Hempton Green.
But I did not sit down to write the history of
Harpley great fair. If I had, I should have taken
more pains to find out accurate information about its

158 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
death and burial, as we may call it. My business
is with the Rev, John Gurnay who started the fair.
What does this shrivelled bit of vellum, with Adam
Bulur's account upon it, say about the fair ? It says
a great deal, though, of course, it says much less
than some of us would wish to find there. What
is told us is set down in a very simple and stolid
way, and the bailiff has no notes of admiration in
his manuscript. One has to read the whole thing
through and pick out the several items which are
to be found under very different heads. Having done
that, this is what comes out as clear as daylight,
Mr, Gurnay was mightily pleased that he had
gained his object, and there was just the least little
shadow of anxiety as to whether the king's license
would arrive in time. It did come in time, how
ever ; and when the official who carried it produced
it to the rector, he was so pleased that he there
and then tipped that official's boy who had come
with him. It was not a very heavy tip, but then
such tips were not the rule in those days, and the
boy, you may be quite sure, had as much victuals
and drink as he could carry ; and I am not sure that
this tip was anything more than the earnest of some
thing more substantial, but it was all that Mr, Bulur
had to account for on the audit day. You would like
to know what the amount of that tip was, I dare say>

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 159
but I am not going to tell you. When the rector
had got his license, and due notice of the fair was
published far and wide, the least the good man could
do was to prepare for a great feast, and it should be
a real feast too. The neighbours came from all the
country round ; the Mayor of Lynn I doubt not was
there ; and Stephen Astley, the great man of Melton
Constable ; and Sir Richard de Rokele, who had
only lately acquired the manor of Sandringham ;
and peradventure Sir Hamo le Strange from Hun
stanton ; and Sir Thomas de Ingoldesthorpe from
Rainham, what time the Townshends were but very
small folk there, though their time would come a
century and a half later ; and Sir Henry de Walpole,
too, from Houghton. His brother Ralph had ceased
to be Bishop of Norwich some seven years before,
and was now Bishop of Ely, and he himself had got
his foot upon the ladder — not the lowest rung of that
ladder either — and many another whose posterity
English history would remember in the after time.
But why dwell upon the possible or probable guests
at the Harpley manor house? I know it was a
grand feast, and I know that all the servants of the
guests could not be accommodated ; for Mr, Bulur
had to pay for the lodging and expenses of some of
them even on the Sunday before. But when the
Tuesday came — i.e. the Vigil of St. Lawrence, being

i6o A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
a Tuesday, remember, and therefore by no means a
fast day^there was a little special dinner for a
favoured few, at which they had fish, and actually
wine! Fish was a very dear luxury in the middle
ages, no food was dearer. By fish I do not mean
herrings, though they too were dear, but I mean
fresh fish, such as we serve up as an adjunct to our
dinners now. On Tuesday the 9th of August, 1 306,
the rector provided herrings galore, but he pro
vided some plaice also, and some other fish which
the bailiff does not give us the name of; and I make
no doubt that the good man had to send for it to
Lynn, as many a worthy rector has done hundreds
of times since those days and will do again. As to
the wine, that too must have come from Lynn, for
the rector had no wine cellar and only indulged
in such prodigality as this on very, very, very rare
occasions. But when the next day came and the fair was
opened, and the king's letter read, and the people
shouted, and the buying and selling began, then
indeed there was a real feast ! Fish ? I should
think there was fish ! There was fish enough to
come to at least ;^is of our money, but the guests
appear to have gobbled it all up, so that the rector
actually had to give an order for an extra allowance
of herrings to be bought for the servants the day

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. i6i
after the feast, and he sent a man to Lynn, as it
seems, to buy the herrings and bring back the bill,
and that man was Adam the Harper. What ! should
there not be "a taking down the fiddle and
the bow"? Should there not be minstrelsy and
song? Though Mr. Gurnay had the good of his people
and of the neighbourhood and of the whole county
at heart in obtaining the king's licence for holding
this fair, and though it proved for several centuries
a real boon and a solid advantage and a very im
portant matter for the agriculturists of Norfolk, it
is not to be supposed that it did not bring profit to
the lord of the manor and the landowners in the
neighbourhood. Of course the hundreds of people
who gathered together would want meat and drink,
and these had to be supplied on the spot. Living
men remember the booths and stalls at Harpley
Fair. Accordingly there came in a very respectable
amount from the rents of the stalls and the dues that
were levied, and these are set down in Adam Bulur's
account. Moreover, it appears that the rector was
not above having a stall of his own, at which bread
was sold and what else I cannot tell ; and though I
do not find any record of his buying any sheep or
cattle, yet I do find that he bought a horse with
some formalities, and the witness to the trans-
12

i62 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
action i was Mr. Henry Spendlove, who was, I think,
the rector's agent and steward and friend and right-
hand man, and whose name is mentioned more than
once by Adam Bulur, with a certain sort of respect.
We have a word to say about Mr. Spendlove before
we have done,
*****
But all things come to an end. — Debemur morti nos
nostraque. The fair came to an end as we have seen, but it
outlasted the founder more than five hundred years.
He must have been in the prime of life in 1 306, and
he lived twenty-five years after that date. He had
a younger brother, as it seems, who died young ;
and when he had finished building the chancel of
Harpley Church, he bethought him that life was
uncertain, and that he had duties to those who
should come after. So he made over his manor
of Harpley and other property hereabouts to two
trustees, who, I am pretty sure, were members of
the Astley family, of which the Marquis of Hastings
' On this subject some readers will be glad to be referred to
the " First Report of the Royal Commission on Market Rights
and Tolls," p. 15. That and the " Final Report " issued in 1891
exhaust the subject. It is obvious that this splendid risumi of
an enormous body of evidence must have been the work of a
single hand, and that a master's hand, however many signa
tures it may bear at the end,

A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON. 163
is the present representative : one of them was
Rector of the adjoining rectory of Little Massing-
ham, and the other was Lord of the Manor of Burgh
Parva, a mile or two from Melton Constable; and
he settled the estates upon his nephew John and
his heirs, with remainder in tail to his two other
nephews, William and Edward, and this settlement
was made in the ninth year of King Edward II,, i.e.
in the year of our Lord 13 16, ten years after the
Harpley fair had been established, and he himself
was little more, I take it, than forty years old. It
is pretty certain that the nephews were still but
boys, for the eldest of them did not marry till eight
years later, and their uncle survived that event nine
years, and then his summons came and he passed
away some time in December, 1331, and was laid in
his own church, and they raised for him a costly
tomb, and they laid upon him a marble slab, and on
it they carved his unpretending epitaph :
HIC : lACET : CORPVS : lOHlS ; DE : GVRNAY :
QVONDAM : RECTORIS : PATRONI ; HVIVS :
ECLESIE :
¦ CVIVS : ANIME : PROPICIETVR : DEVS : AMEN.
There the good man lay undisturbed for 498 years.
But in the year 1829 they opened that tomb and
they " displaced " the roof thereof.

i64 A FOURTEENTH -CENTURY PARSON.
And underneath, about a foot and a half from the surface, a
figure was revealed, clad in a silk priest's robe [query, a cope ?],
and holding in its hand a sacramental cup, from which the
stillness of five hundred years had only stolen silently the flesh
from the bones and the gilding from the cup ; all else remained
unimpaired. What became of that plundered cope and that
precious chalice? Did they find their way to
Wardour Street ?
There is one more little fact that comes to light,
and to my mind it is a very eloquent and pathetic
fact as I read it.
Henry Spendlove, who had been, as it seems, the
lifelong trusted friend and steward of the rector,
had, I think, a son, and his name was Thomas.
When the rector died and the living fell vacant,
Thomas Spendlove was a lad at Cambridge, but he
had already been admitted to minor Orders. In
those days it was never safe to keep a benefice open
an hour longer than was absolutely necessary, and it
so happened that the Bishop of Norwich, William de
Ayremine, was away in foreign parts at the time the
living of Harpley fell vacant. The Bishop had, how
ever, left his brother Adam as his commissary, in
charge of his diocese. Adam de Ayremine was a
great don at Cambridge, though what his position
in the University was I have never been able to
discover. Before him, on the 2nd of January, 1332,

A FOURTEENTH -CENTURY PARSON. 165
young Thomas Spendlove presented himself armed
with the necessary legal instrument, and by him he
was instituted in due form, as Rector of Harpley, on
the presentation of "John de Gurnay the younger,
then lawful patron of the benefice."
And here my story ends. But I have my day
dreams as I walk through the lanes and fields of
Arcady ; and I have my visions in the night as I lay
my head upon my pillow, and at times there rise up
before me scenes and sights and sounds, words and
men and women so vividly present, that I find it hard
to believe them other than real. I find myself stand
ing beside the deathbed of the old parish priest of
the Norfolk village, and there are others round him,
and one of them is John de Gurnay the younger,
who is holding his uncle's hand. And I hear the
dying man speak low but clearly ; and this is what
he says : " Nephew mine ! I am passing away and
going home, I have lived my life and I have not
lived in vain. They that come after will have no
bad report to make of me and of my doings, and
that which I have done may He within Himself
make pure! You I have in no wise wronged, you
are my heir. But have a thought for the young
man whose father was my friend, and let him take
my place and follow me as shepherd of the little flock
whose pastor I have been for thirty years and more,"

i66 A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PARSON.
And then a young man's voice breaks in, and there
is a promise given, and the dying villsige parson
sinks back and there is silence ; till somehow there
comes up the sound of many voices chanting loud
and sweet, and their song is
O all ye priests of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise Him
ind magnify Him for ever.
And there are other voices that make answer again,
and their song is like unto the first : —
O all ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord :
praise Him and magnify Him for ever.
Do not try to persuade me that all this was no
more than such stuff as dreams are made of

NOTE ON PAGE 164.
On the 3rd December, 1892, I was favoured with a letter
from the Dowager Lady Buxton, of Colne House, Cromer, in
which her ladyship assured me that " she remembers the in
terest of the opening of the tomb. A small piece of the silk
garment (about two inches) was given to her in 1833, which
she still has in her possession,"
This lady is the daughter of the late Samuel Gurney, and
niece of the late Daniel Gurney, Esq,, of Runcton Hall,

V,
1799-
A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.

I HAVE long intended to write the annals of my
country parish, "Good intentions," however, as
Dr. South puts it, " are no warrant for good
actions," and "one of these days" never comes.
The difficulty lies in determining at what point to
begin. I could not start at an epoch less than ten
thousand years ago at the very latest, and to bring
the history down to our own time would occupy me
— according to a calculation which I recently
elaborated — during a period of at least a century
and a half. I shrink from this protracted labour.
Most men desire to be at rest a little after they
have attained their ninetieth year. Accordingly, my
167

i68 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
projected opus magnum seems to be vanishing from
my hope of execution. I am losing
— the dreams of doing, and the other dream of done.
What if I take a single year, and see how it will
look? I was asking myself this question the other day,
when a lady-friend of mine put into my hands a lock
of hair. It was a thick, straight lock ; the hair was
very fine, not now silky ; indeed, it was very dry,
very straight, about nine inches long, and auburn in
colour. It was wrapped up in a bit of brown paper
of ancient manufacture, probably quite a century
old. The hair was much older. On the paper there
was an inscription dated 1799. I will tell you more
about it by and by.
As I meditated, a desire came strongly upon me to
know what was going on in this Arcadian paradise
when this lock of hair was found, and I could find
no rest till I had gone some way towards recon
structing the little community and bringing it to life
again. But it is idle and foolish to give the reins to
Imagination unless Fact acts as charioteer and holds
the ribbons. So I went to my documents, and the
past came back at my call, gradually peopled with
living forms that rose about me, the dry bones stir-

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 169
ring, " bone to his bone," and the flesh mysteriously
growing round the skeletons, and men and women
standing up and staring at me, " a very great army."
In Skeorn's Inga in the year 1799 there were just
434 inhabitants. Yes, that was the exact number.
There was a census held in 1801, as every one
knows, and this is the return : " We find four
hundred and thirty-nine Persons, including children
of every age, of whom two hundred and twenty are
males, and two hundred and nineteen are females.
Most of our males, except children, are employed
in Agriculture ; but we have one Blacksmith, one
Wheelwright, and one tailor. We have fifty-five
inhabited houses, occupied by seventy-five families, and
two houses uninhabited," To this there ought to
have been added, as there was added ten years later :
" There is one School Master, who employs one
Usher to teach the Parish Children Gratis, one
Publican, and one Bricklayer [who keeps a beer
house]." But during the two previous years there had been
fourteen births and nine deaths, leaving the actual
population 434 in the year 1799.
Before we go on, let us pause to notice the ghastly
fact that there were in the whole parish no more
than fifty-five houses all told, and that in those fifty-
five houses there were living seventy-five families.

170 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
Exclude from these fifty-five houses those that were
occupied by the farmers and others who were above
the labouring-class, of whom I could tell you more
than you would, care to listen to, and the conviction
is forced upon me that in the year 1799 there was
an average of at least two families living in every
labourer's dwelling in the parish, and the consequent
average of illegitimate births was at least three a
year, as shown by the registers, I for one have been
loud in denouncing the shameful condition of our
cottages in Arcady, and in lifting up my voice
against the abominable hovels in which our peasantry
are allowed to bring up their families. But it is fair
to say that the state of things disclosed by this
dreadful return for the year 1799 has passed away.
We have no such shocking record as this against
us. The world does move on, for all our grumbling.
Here things are not as they ought to be, but
they are surely better than they were, and, with a
population increased in a century by more than
one-half, we have three times as many houses as
we had ; and as for two families occupying one
house, the thing is hardly tolerated.
The return quoted above is by no means a satis
factory one, for it tells us nothing about the aristocracy
of the parish, among whom I happen to know that
there were in the year 1799 no fewer than three

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 171
clergymen, of whom the schoolmaster was one,
and his " usher " another. But let us descend to
particulars. In the first place, there was Christopher Andrews
Girling, Esq,, J,P,, who took up his residence in the
parish in this year — 1799. That of itself was an
event ; for it had been a long time since any one of
his degree had lived at Skeorn's Inga, and he stood
alone. He lived in what is still sometimes called
the " Gentleman's House " ; and such as it was, so
it has remained, substantially unaltered for a century.
It had only recently been erected, and I think it
must have been built for Mr. Girling, as it certainly
was upon his small property, and was within a
stone's-throw of a farmhouse which his posterity
own at the present moment. " A mansion," do you
ask ? That depends upon what your notion of a
mansion is. It was and is an eight-roomed house,
with an appendix consisting of a larder and a dairy,
and two small chambers over them. There was a
dining-room and a drawing-room on the ground-floor.
Behind the drawing-room there was the study and
business-room of the worthy magistrate ; behind the
dining-room, the kitchen ; and there was only a
single staircase.
Please to note that our grandfathers of the gentry
class in our country villages, as late as 100 years

172 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
ago, were not all spoiled by the march of luxury ;
they stood upon their rank and recognised position ;
they did not think that gentility is nothing without
a princely income. They had still the foolish super
stition, now almost extinct among us, that "gentle
is as gentle does." We had grades in those days,
and distinctions in social grade were acknowledged
as realities ; they stood for something that was
behind, but they implied something that would
display itself in the outward bearing too. When
a man has some deference shown him by his neigh
bours who are as rich or richer than himself, it may
increase his arrogance and conceit if he is at bottom
a vulgarian, but it will tend infallibly to increase his
self-respect if he is not only of gentle birth, but of
gentle nature too, Mr, Girling was a gentleman,
and it came quite easy to him to live in an eight-
roomed house with no back staircase and no back
kitchen. You, Mr, Gigadibs, would resent being
invited to eat your mutton in such a mean domicile ;
and yet, it may be, it may be, that the door of our
gentleman's house would not have been thrown open
to such as you a century back ; and if you had
had the audacity to slap the J,P. upon the back, and
address him as " Old Fellow ! " you would have
suffered rather surprisingly and very promptly for
your presumption and impertinence.

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 173
There was another gentleman's house in Skeorn's
Inga in the year 1799, to wit, the Rectory; but that
was a more pretentious edifice. To begin with, it
had once been surrounded by a wide and deep moat,
over which a drawbridge led from the rectory to the
church, which stood to the north of it. The moat
had, however, been filled up long before this time,
though it is easy to see the traces of it to this day ;
and the high-road, which in old times had gone
curling and meandering round the little fields here
about in the most fantastic fashion, had at some
time or other been tyrannically carried straight
across the northern side of the parson's moat, and
the carriers' waggons had been saved a long d/tour,
and the parson's house had been thereby separated
from his church by the aforesaid high-road. A
grievance, doubtless, to the reverend gentleman,
who peradventure had grumbled not a little, and
fretted and fumed, and said to his neighbours, " It's
always the way! The parson is always made the
scapegoat, and if some one's land has to be taken,
it's always the parson who has to suffer ! " All
which is perfectly true, as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be ! And yet, why should
I not take the other view ? Is not it just as probable
that when the road wanted altering — and wanted it
badly — it was the parson who suggested the im-

174 'i RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
provement ; and that it was he who took the
initiative, and offered to give up his old moat, and
gave it to the parish, and took all the trouble, and
bore the chief burden of it, and was worried by the
people for his proposal, and yet somehow managed
to carry it through at last ? For that, too, is " always
the way," and if in our country parishes some one
has to make a sacrifice for the public convenience, it
really is always the parson who shows the example ;
and I am happy to know it is almost always the case
that he is the last man who is " backward in coming
forward," Be it as it may, in the year 1799 there stood the
old rectory, with its garden and its meadow, as it
had stood for centuries, in the very centre of the
parish. Six or seven roads from all the points of the
compass seemed to start from this spot, where the
church and the rectory stood side by side ; and, now
that the moat was gone, the parson's house and bit
of glebe were surrounded on all sides by a road from
which the others branched off. All the little world
of Skeorn's Inga wanted the parson in those days,
couldn't do without him, knocked at his door day
and night, and found him at home ; for it so happens
that during the last seven or eight hundred years a
non-resident rector of this parish has hardly been
heard of. Here they have lived, as a rule; here

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 175
they have died. If we have not been among the
best of the clerical order, we have not been the
worst — in fact, we have been a very fair average lot
on the whole, I am not ashamed of my predecessors,
though I am bound to confess that the best of them
was not he who was the last occupant of the old
rectory, Alas ! of that old rectory there is not a
stone left except the wall that protects the mouth of
the old well, which is still a dangerous abyss for
calves and colts and lambkins ; and the old meadow
no longer belongs to the benefice, and several of the
old roads have been thrown into the adjoining fields
— and things are not as they were.
In the year 1799 the rector pf Skeorn's Inga was
a personage still : he had another living, which he
served by a curate, A man can't be in two places at
once, you know, and if a man has two houses and
two estates, he makes his choice for the most part,
and he lives in one and he puts a housekeeper in the
other ; unless, indeed, he can let it to a tenant who
will pay him rent for the convenience. That was
the way in which our grandfathers looked at the
matter, whether the estates in question were ecclesi
astical or lay ; and I am not so very certain that the
day may not come when the noble army of the
have-nots will begin to denounce pluralities among
the laity in the same way that they denounced

176 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
pluralities among the clergy a generation back.
But I shall be dead before that comes to pass, and
I do not think that by the time such gabble begins
to be riotous My dust will hear it, and beat.
When I've lain for a century dead !
*****
Those stars mean that I have left out an immense
mass of the most delightful and deeply interesting
information which — because I do not think that
many of my readers will estimate at its true worth
— I omit with a sigh, I may, however, at this
point tell you who the rector was, even though I tell
you as yet nothing more than his name. He was
the Rev. John Beevor, and he had been rector here
ten years in 1799. His curate at Scarning was the
schoolmaster mentioned in the Census return. Do
not make the mistake of supposing that this school
master was one of your certificated elementary
gentlemen, employed in screwing up small boys and
girls to pass their standards in the three R's. The
dignified personage who acted as schoolmaster here
left that work to the usher, whom he paid a pittance
" to teach Parish Children Gratis." He himself flew
at higher game.
Mr, Priest was the Senior Wrangler of his year
in 1780, and was elected master of Scarning School

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 177
in 1789. His predecessor was the Rev, Robert
Potter, the first translator of ^Eschylus and of
Euripides into English verse ; and if you super
ciliously assume that they were but indifferent
performances, it is only because you don't know
what you are talking about. Scarning School was
a famous school under Mr. Potter ; and under Mr.
Priest it was not [likely to go down in public esti
mation. Mr, Priest had a good house, warranted
to hold twenty-four borders, and he enlarged it
after a fashion, and took a great many more than
the twenty-four. They say that he was the real
author of " Valpy's Greek Grammar," and I believe
the fact is so. At any rate, he published a great
deal else ; and he was a leading agriculturist too,
and a man of various accomplishments ; and he held
two or three livings while he kept on his school ;
nevertheless he continued to reside in the school-
house, and to act as curate of the parish, which had
for him a strange attraction, till his death. He was
a man of tastes, and therefore of expensive habits ;
but there was " a rift in the lute," which, as this is
not a Scandalous Chronicle, I am not going to tell
you about. One thing is certain, that he died in
solvent, though his wife bore him no children, and
though he must, all his life, have enjoyed a much
larger income than his neighbour, Mr, Girling, who
13

178 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
lived within his means and made a liberal provision
for his family.
I cannot refrain at this point from putting on
record certain traditions that were still handed
about, only a few years ago, regarding the once
famous school at Skeorn's Inga ; they have almost
faded from memory now, and some of them will die
out altogether when I pass out of remembrance.
The school was founded by a certain William Seckar,
a thriving yeoman, who lived all his life in the parish,
and died there at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. The good man left the bulk of his pro
perty, consisting of a house and an estate in land,
now extending to about one hundred acres, to his
wife Alice for life, and after her death " for the main
tenance of one free school, to be kept for ever in the
said house, while the world endure, in Scarning."
Mistress Alice was a prize, and a prize not hard to
win neither. Her first husband died on the ist of
November, 1604, and Alice married her second on
the 3rd of December following. This second hus
band was buried on the 6th of December, 1608, and
Alice married her third husband on the 7th of
January following. A month and a day was re
garded by this buxom widow as a reasonable interval
to lapse between " the funeral-baked meats " and
"the marriage-tables." When, however, she was

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 179
left a widow for the third time in 1622, no fourth
aspirant for her hand came forward, and she died,
lonely and neglected, in 1638, and our school was
forthwith started. Then followed seven or eight
years of abominable jobbery and robbery and litiga
tion as the natural consequence, and the school was
only brought into actual working order about forty
years after the founder's death, and ten or twelve
years after his relict had joined the majority. At
last, however, it did begin to work in earnest, and
the usual precedent was followed : The sons of the
labourers were by no means allowed to contaminate
the children of the yeomanry and the farmers. These
latter were taught by the master himself. And they
were taught well and carefully and successfully too.
The school for more than a century had a sur
prisingly good record at the University of Cambridge,
The labourers' children were taught by an " usher,"
whose time was given to teach the three R's, while
in the evenings his business was with the master's
boarders, who came from all parts of Norfolk and
Suffolk, and were the sons of the gentry great and
small. Two grandsons of Roger North of Rougham
were educated at Scarning, and I have a note some
where which says that one of these boys twice —
actually twice ! — set the school-house on fire, and
was not tried for arson ; because, I suppose, the fire

i8o A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
was put out in time, and because his father was an
important person in the county. Later on the
future Lord Thurlow was at the school ; and the
tone of the place was not likely to have been raised
by the influence of that coarse and boisterous Lord
Chancellor in posse. Peter Routh, the father of the
venerable Master of Magdalen College, Oxford, was
one of Thurlow's schoolfellows, and many another
who need not be named. Lord Thurlow seems to have
had some sort of sneaking regard for his old school ;
for when he became Lord Chancellor he promoted
Mr. Potter to a prebendal stall in Norwich ; though
that was but a poor recognition of the literary
labours of a scholar who was the first translator of
the Greek dramatists into the English language.
But consider how things have changed. Note
that we have found a county magistrate living, in a
little out-of-the-way village, in an eight-roomed house
with a lean-to. A school which had a high academic
reputation, though it never could have had fifty boys
in it, with a Senior Wrangler as its master — he, too,
a beneficed clergyman, and yet acting as curate of
the parish for the resident rector ; and a third clergy
man, usher of the school, itinerating through a rather
large circuit of adjoining parishes, where there were
no parsons to look after the poor sheep, and no par
sonage houses for the vicars or rectors to live in, if

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, i8i
they had been so inclined. Another noticeable indi
cation of the frugal manner of life which prevailed
among the lesser gentry in Norfolk, and elsewhere
too, a hundred years ago, is afforded by one tradition
that has often been repeated to me. Here it is.
" I've heard grandfather say that when Mr. Priest
was at his best there was scores o' young gents as
used to come to school as day-boys, 'cause there was
no room for 'em to board ; and they used to come on
dickies [donkeys], and some on 'em used to have
a dickie for two — ride and tie like, I've heard
grandfather say he's seen a good dozen of 'em turned
out on Podmoor — that wasn't inclosed in those days
— ^^and the mischeevious boys as didn't like the young
gents, and used to fight 'em pretty hard when they
got a chance, would take and hunt them dickies a
mile or two off on to Daffy Green, so as the young
gents when they came out o' school had a rare dance
to get their dickies ! " Poor little weary urchins !
" But why didn't they come in dor^ey-carts ? " My
benevolent and commiserating friend, what an inno
cent you must be to think that there was a spring
donkey-cart in Norfolk a hnndred years ago, or a
parish road in Norfolk over which a donkey could
drag a cart with a couple of lads in it for, say, a
couple of miles, when the ruts were three feet deep !
Mr. Priest had a comfortable house enough, but I

i82 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
gather that his boarders did not live with him, but in
a range of squalid, rickety buildings, of which some
portion still remains. They must have been wretched
places, for the best part of them are now turned into
four miserable and disgraceful hovels, where four
families still continue to "pig" it after a fashion,
and where no human beings ought to be allowed to
live. I suspect that young North's soul revolted at
the accommodation provided for him and his school
fellows, and that in righteous indignation he applied
the torch ; or it may be that he only wanted to burn
that luckless usher in his bed, and to roast him
alive for acting his part as gaoler over " the young
gents," But this outbreak of virtuous indignation
(assuming it to be such — and you know we ought to
make the best of our fellow-creatures' little pecca
dilloes) happened long before 1799, though of course
at that time it was one of the well-worn traditions of
the school.
Among the " young gents " who were Mr. Priest's
boarders at Skeorn's Inga a few years later than
the time I am writing of, was a small boy named
Edward Hall Alderson. His father was Recorder of
Norwich, and the son was an infant prodigy. Unlike
many another infant prodigy, he lived to justify, and
more than justify, all the great expectations that
were formed of him in his childhood ; for at Cam-

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 183
bridge he was the last man who ever won the
Chancellor's Medal for classical scholarship after
being declared Senior Wrangler, not to mention
other distinctions, which make his academical
career the most brilliant on record ; and he ended
by being raised to the Exchequer Court, as Baron
Alderson, in 1834, retaining that high position till
his death in 1857, I assume that it was Mr. Priest's
reputation as an eminent mathematician which led
the Recorder of Norwich to send his promising son
to be grounded at our school. The boy remained
here some two or three years, and then he was
removed to Bury St, Edmunds, But Mr, Priest
ought in justice to have some credit for the great
lawyer's early training ; and if the pupil was Senior
Wrangler of his year, it should be remembered that
the master was Senior Wrangler of his, I have
known one of his schoolfellows who remembered
little Alderson here ; but my aged friend was a big
boy when young Alderson was a little one, and
between the big boys and the little boys in a school,
except in cases where the younger is the elder's
fag, there is a very broad distinction, whatever the
difference may be,
I think you have had enough about our school,
though not nearly as much as my inveterate garrulity
would give you, if you were worthy of it, I must

i84 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
get back to the rector of Skeorn's Inga in 1799.
The Rev, John Beevor was presented to this rectory
by Sir John Lombe, the patron, in 1789, and he held
the living for nineteen years. He had not been
many years in residence before the good folk in
Norwich all went wild about a young painter who
had become the fashion, and who was now rising in
estimation every day. He managed to win a very
beautiful and accomplished bride in the person of
Amelia Alderson — a cousin, I think, of the future
Baron of the Exchequer; and among other people
who gave Mr. Opie a commission was the rector of
Skeorn's Inga, When the present writer first took
root in this neighbourhood, this picture of the Rev.
John Beevor was still hanging up in the little dining-
room. It was very far from being a good specimen
of the artist's workmanship, and so when, ten or
eleven years ago, somebody laid claim to it as his
property, I let him have it without weeping, though
for old tradition's sake it might better have been left
where it was, I like to think that young Alderson
saw that picture painted here — going in and out
while his beautiful and gifted cousin watched the lad,
not without many curious speculations as to whether
he would turn out all she and other of his kindred
hoped and expected he would develop into. As
to Mr. Beevor, the best thing I know about him

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 185
is that he gave Opie one of his earliest commis
sions. He was a big, burly, sloppy sort of a man. They
tell how he had an enormous appetite, and could
never get enough to eat at home. There was, and
still is, a second-rate inn at the adjoining town of
Dereham, where some of the coaches used to change
horses and the carriers put up their vans. Here a
good deal of eating and drinking went on. The
people say that when the parson had devoured all he
could find at the rectory — and in those days people
used rarely to dine later than four — ^he would be
driven down to the " George " ; and, as one of my
old people put it, "there Parson Beevor'd George
hisself—Xeastwise, that was what I've heard 'em
say ! " He had married a lady of some fortune, and
the rustics had a strong regard for her ; but their
affection seems to have been mixed with pity. " I've
heard my mother say as she used to come and call
in sometimes, and talk won'ful quick-like and kindly,
for five minutes at a time ; and then she'd sit still
and say nothing for ever so long, only look wistful-
like at the children, and take and pat 'em, and say
nothing, only pat 'em and pat 'em. Sometimes the
little 'uns 'd get scared, and she'd get up and go
away, and say nothing, only look wistful-like," It
was just as well the poor woman had no family, as
things turned out.

i86 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
The Rev, John was a masterful sort of a person.
There were oak benches in the nave of the church
in those days — they were all " restored " off the face
of the earth some thirty years ago ; but I cannot
hear that there were any in the chancel. So the
Rev. John took it into his head that he would put
up two pews in the chancel ; one for himself and the
wistful lady and his family, whoever they might be,
and one for his servants. But Sir John Lombe was
a masterful man too, and, moreover, he too was
Rector of Scarning, For this benefice consists of
two medieties ; one is of necessity held by the
clergyman of the parish, the other may be held by
anybody, male or female. When the Rev. John
took it into his head to put up two pews in the
chancel. Sir John Lombe, as lay-rector, intervened,
and reminded his clerical better-half that he too
owned the chancel, and was rector of the benefice,
and inasmuch as Mr. Beevor had thought fit to erect
two pews without consulting his colleague in the
preferment, he. Sir John, claimed one of the pews
as his — and he appropriated it accordingly. What
happened I cannot tell. But that the masterful
baronet ever actually did come and take his seat in
the rectorial pew, and thereby assert his right, I
never heard, though there are strong reasons for
suspecting that he did come to Skeorn's Inga now

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT. 187
and then. But thereby hangs a tale, and a romance
too, which I am not going to tell, though I am
prepared to sell it at a price to any distinguished
and competent novelist who wants a plot and cannot
invent one.
Now it came to pass that on the 28th of April,
1799, Elizabeth, wife of the Rev, John Beevor,
died aged forty-five years, and she was buried on
the 5th of May, The wistful lady laid her down
and slept. At last her earthly yearnings and dreams
and regrets were all over. In those days, it must be
remembered that the place of dignity for the parson
and his belongings to be buried in was the chancel,
and in the chancel accordingly they prepared to find
a place for all that was left of the wistful lady. But
the chancel was very very full of the mortal remains
of Skeorn Inga's rectors, not to speak of all the
small gentry who had been laid there in large
number for centuries. It would never have done to
disturb the grave of any man whose representatives
were still living in the parish. That would have
resulted in such a revolt from authority as would
have been frightful to contemplate. But about a
hundred years before this time there had been a
certain Mr, Blackball living in Skeorn's Inga, who
was one of the gentry of the place ; the family had
long ago been extinct, and the name almost forgotten

i88 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
in the parish. It would have been altogether for
gotten but for certain rather handsome ledgerstones
that were lying in the chancel. One of these covered
the mortal remains of a little daughter who had
survived her two sisters, and who, just as she had
entered on her thirteenth year, had been taken away
from the grieving parents. There were no Blackballs
now to enter a protest, and so, when the Rev. John
Beevor wanted to find a place for the wistful lady,
he bethought him of the little damsel's place of
burial, and he resolved that there his late partner
should be laid. So the great stone was raised and
the old grave was opened, and there lay the little
damsel, or all that was left of her. The coffin fell
to pieces, and in it, lo ! there was the skeleton of a
little girl, all shrouded in long auburn hair, which
had grown in great profusion apparently for years
after she had been entombed ; and as they looked
there was a change, and the muddy vesture of decay
crumbled, but the long hair remained ; and first one
and then another cut off a lock, and it is one of
these locks that I have had in my hand.
I know there are many authorities who stoutly deny
that the thing is possible.^ I know that an accom-
' "The church of Great Ouseburn [in Herefordshire] for
merly possessed some interest for antiquarians, , , , but it was
rebuilt in 1824, , , , During the rebuilding it became necessary

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 189
plished friend of mine, who is one of the aristocrats
of the world of science, smiled the chilling smile of
incredulity when I told him what I had heard, and
what I had seen, and how I had held that lock of
hair in my hand. But I know, too, that facts are
stubborn things, though we all do resolutely accept
such facts as square with our pet theories, and
bravely reject such facts as go against our views of
what the laws of the universe are. Also, I know of
one eminent man of science, who was a burning and
shining light in his day, who had one magnificent
saying, which stood him in good slead many a time
and oft, which I seriously commend to the notice of
all sceptics and Philistines of every sort and degree.
They are welcome to it. " Give me theories, sir ! I
can understand them ; but confound facts ! I don't
believe them ! "
*****
There is a sequel to this my account of the year
1799 in Skeorn's Inga. The Rev. John laid his wife
in her grave, and he went home from that funeral a
lonely widower on the Sth of May, and he found
absolutely nothing to eat in his house. There is
to remove some of the bodies, and the writer has been told, by
one who remembers the incidents, that on opening the grave
of a young lady her hair was found to have grown thickly
through the crevices in the coffin." — Weekly Paper.

190 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT,
a ghastly tradition that he was seized with fierce
spasms of hunger, and that he found the kitchen-
fire out, and nothing but dry bread upon the premises.
Decency would have suggested that he should fast ;
the dreadful sense of emptiness drove him to the
" George.'' When the sun arose on the next May
morning his appetite had returned ; to his dismay,
he found nothing to satisfy his cravings but the
driest of dry bread. It was terrible ! Then his
cook demanded an interview, and, in reply to his
complaints and inquiries, she announced that she
was going to go. Why people should ever declare
that they are going to go, instead of simply going, it
is difficult to understand ; but this is the way that
some people have when they signify their resolve to
proceed on a certain course of action. The Rev.
John was at his wits' end. Starvation stared him in
the face. He had never engaged a servant in his
life ; if this woman should desert him he was a lost
man. To die of starvation in his own house was a
fate too tragical to contemplate. There was only
one way out of it. Would that cook be induced to
stay ? Wages should not part them. What would
secure her services? She smiled contemptuously,
but only too significantly. Slowly came the ulti
matum. On one condition, and one only, would she
continue to act as the provider for that unhappy

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 19!
widower, and that condition was — marriage ! The
bargain was struck, and on the 6th of July, two
months and a day after the wistful lady was laid in
her grave, "John Beevor of this Parish, Clerk,
Widower," says the Register, "and Bridget Lee of
this Parish, likewise Widow, were married in this
Church by License , , . by me, Samuel Horsfall,
Minister," and the book was signed by John Beevor
and by Bridget Lee, X her mark. The woman could
not write her name !
Did the happy pair start upon their honeymoon ?
Did they stay where they were ? What did the
neighbours say? How did such a disgraceful and
disgusting mesalliance turn out ? Only this much I
know, that the reverend gentleman from this day
simply dropped out. He appears never again to
have officiated in the church. The rectory was soon
let to a gentleman of independent means, of whom
nothing is known, and who possibly may have settled
in the parish for the sake of such advantages as the
school in those days afforded. The church was
served, and the pastoral visitation of the people,
such as it was, was carried on by Mr. Priest and
his usher ; and Mr. Beevor took up his abode at
Norwich, in the principial street of the city, and
made himself conspicuous there by affixing to his
front door an enormous brass plate, on which was

192 A RUSTIC RETROSPECT.
inscribed in huge letters his name and title, " Rector
of Scarning."
There is one tradition, however, or there was one
a very few years ago, which reflects some credit upon
the rank-and-file of the peasantry here a hundred
years ago. However much the neighbouring clergy
and others of their degree might have been willing to
condone this indecent marriage, and however much
the farmers might be ready to hold their tongues and
say nothing when there was nothing to gain and
something to lose by protesting, the labouring class
were indignant, and did not hold their peace. In
their rough way they retained some regard and affec
tion for the wistful lady who had patted their little
ones, talked with their wives, sat down in their poor
hovels, and somewhat shyly and awkwardly had done
them many a kind service. They resented the wrong
done and the disrespect shown to their only gentle
friend. The lady was gone, and in her place had
come a common woman, to whom they gave such
names as suited their humour — and they did not
spare her. Then they hooted the Rev. John if he
showed himself outside his own gate. They watched
for him on his way to and from the little inn, where
he still would go " to George hisself," and the place
became too hot for the rector and his mate. In fact,
the people hunted him out of the parish, and he went
his way, and was heard of no more.

A RUSTIC RETROSPECT, 193
And thus it was that this year 1799 proved to be
the annus mirabilis of Skeorn's Inga — now ninety-five
years ago.
All whose fathers had any stories to tell about that
time have gone from us. Now we live a mere hum
drum life ; though, who knows but that, a century
hence, some gossiping antiquarian chronicler may
fish up here and there a scrap of old-world scandal,
and hold it up to the light for our posterity to smile
or wonder at when distance lends enchantment to
the view. Who can tell what that line of beauty is
which separates the sublime from the ridiculous, or
how infinitely subtle are the distinctions which make
almost the very same incidents mean and vulgar or
tender and heroic as they emerge from the mists of
the past ?
I sometimes wonder what the chronicler of the
future will have to say of me and my concerns if, by
some queer chance, he finds a fragment of my person
ality intruding itself upon his notice in ages to come
— say in the year 3000 A.D. What a huge accumu
lation of mythus will have grown up by that time
concerning the habits and status and belief and
character of the country parsons of England ! By
that time, will there be anything picturesque in the
world ? Who shall say ?

14

VI.
A SCHEME FOR CLERGY
PENSIONS.

When a man has the audacity to propose any im
portant reform in the management of property which
has for ages been left in the hands of administrators
who have dealt with it as their own, he must be pre
pared to be denounced as a dangerous fellow with a
bee in his bonnet. His scheme is proclaimed by
some to be a veiled plot for introducing wholesale
robbery ; by others he is denounced as an idle
dreamer ; by the majority, who have never thought
at all about the matter, his proposals are confidently
declared to be impracticable. I have lived long
enough to see too many " impracticable " measures
become legislative enactments to the enormous
194

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS, 195
advantage of the community, to be frightened by a
sounding word, even though it be an adjective of five
syllables ; and I have read enough history to convince
me that any scheme which has the merit of striking
at the root of great evils, and has in it the germ of
such reform as insures healthy growth for a great
social or religious organism, is quite safe to work its
way to acceptance sooner or later. Also, I have ob
served that the author of such schemes very rarely
receive what men usually understand by reward.
Why should they ? They are not labouring for that.
The man who would fain be the bringer-in of new
things has to suffer for his temerity. The Philistines
protest that he is stealing their weapons, and invad
ing a territory where they have planted their flag.
The Have-nots shriek at him as a traitor in league
with the Haves, and as only anxious to keep off the
hands of the People from their own. Timid spokes
men of the orderly and well-to-do classes, whose
temptation is to mistake indolent inaction for a
policy of defence, earnestly advise prudent reticence,
and warn him with mournful insistence, Quieta non
movere. That chilling maxim — the wet-blanket of enthu
siasm — has its good or its bad side, according to the
point of view of him who uses it. If there be real
quiet — the quietness and assurance of living energy,

19^ A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIOt^S,
the quietness that results from stable equilibrium —
no wise man will wish to disturb it. But if there
be no security and no stability, then to let things
be is to let them fall without an effort to avert
catastrophe. Every sincere and loyal churchman — be he lay
man or cleric — must needs be ad hoc a Conservative.
But there are three kinds of Conservatives. The
Retrospective Conservative, who is for ever whimper
ing for the days that are gone, and is for ever trying
to put back the clock. He knows so little of history
that he believes he can restore the past by dressing
up the present in antique costume, and returning to
plate armour and bows and arrows. He and I are
one in this, that I too love the past, and have
lived in it, perhaps a little more than most men,
but my eyes are not in the back of my head as
his are. For me and those who are of my way
of thinking " Our path is onward — onward into
light." Secondly, there is the Retardative Conservative,
whose mission is to keep down the pace of progress,
to put the drag on, even when we are travelling
up hill, to prophesy ruin as the certain consequence
of any meddling with things as they are. With him,
too, I sympathise often enough to make myself
uncomfortable. Meddling and muddling somehow

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS, 197
do seem to be near akin, and the late Mr, Lowell was
quite right when he wrote —
Change just for change is like them big hotels
Where they shift plates and let you Uve on smells.
But this earth of ours will go on spinning about
its axis and wheel in its orbit round the central sun
though you hang on with all your weight to the
pendulum that swings in Greenwich Observatory,
You can no more stop the great clock that keeps on
" marking centuries with the minute finger " than you
can put it back.
Lastly, there are the Progressive Conservatives,
These are they who cling with a grateful love to all in
the past that is still instinct with life and force and
energy, and still full of promise of abundant fruitful-
ness. They are more, much more, than merely
Liberal Conservatives, for there is a certain ring of
condescension in the sound of those very ambiguous
words ; they are Radical Conservatives, in that they
look to the root of things, and if it comes to root-
pruning of a living institution, they will not shrink
even from that at the last resort,
I shrink not from avowing myself one of these
Radical or Progressive Conservatives, In my love for
the Church of my baptism I yield to none, nor in my
loyalty to her as an institution whose history ought to

igS A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
be the pride of every Englishman ; but in our Church
polity I see there are some things that call for change
— change for the better, that the future may not be
less glorious than the past. Change for the better,
that is true reform, but it must go to the root of evils
that call for remedy, or it is a spurious reform —
mere political quackery or something worse.
* » * * *
We talk of this Church of England of ours as the
Established Church, It seems to some of us that that
is exactly what it is not. As a divine society, the
Church is a body with which I am for the present not
concerned. But in the lower sense, as a society
holding property, and recognised as such in the body
politic, it seems to me that the Church exists on
sufferance only, tolerated ad interim, and if allowed
to hold its own as an institution, yet with very hard
measure dealt out to it ; an institution or society
restricted in its action, crippled in its natural growth,
fettered in its liberty. Call this Church the non-
Established Church, and you call it by a name which
may truly describe it.
This anomalous polyp is a very big something,
which in one form or another makes itself seen and
heard wherever we move. It is so bulky that it
is felt to be a power whose formidable mass compels
politicians of all shades of opinion to reckon with it,

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. igy
It is so huge a mass that they know not how to deal
with it.
There are those who would destroy it by pillaging
it — who would despoil it of its resources, and so
deprive it of its means of material activity. These
men are for a'?jestablishment — that is, they demand
that the Church, as an institution recognised by the
State, shall cease to exist ; that its property shall be
confiscated ; and that the clergy, if any remain, and
the churches, if any be left standing, shall be sup
ported, as the hospitals are, by holding round collect
ing-boxes in the streets.
There are others, again, who plead that it is no
more than fair and just that the Church should be
put upon a footing of equality with every other great
corporation. They demand that the Church shall
be allowed to " live of her own," to frame for herself
a reasonable constitution, to govern herself accord
ing to some intelligible principles, to exercise her
functions, whatever they are, without fear of external
dictation, and to manage her property without
menace of periodical plundering. They who claim
this are they who, in very truth, are asking that the
Church shall be established.
Lastly, there are those who call upon us to let well
alone. These are they who are content with the
Church being not established. They are content with

200 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
the position of the Church as an institution which is
just tolerated ; they tell us that she may last as long
as she is harmless. Too much activity, any semblance
of an aggressive movement upon the vices or the
supineness of the " classes,'' or any sign that she is
acquiring a preponderating influence over the
" masses," would be the signal for withdrawing even
the measure of toleration at present vouchsafed to her,
not to speak of the haughty protection and support
of the politicians.
That things should be allowed to go on as they are,
and that the Church should be left for another gene
ration without being subject to some organic changes,
or, failing these, should continue even to be tolerated
as a political institution, seems to some of us an
assumption entirely untenable, Quieta non movere
will not do. There are only two ways of escape from
the present position of the Church : we must either
boldly embark upon some statesmanlike experiments
in the direction of reform, or we must make up our
minds to submit to extinction.
Because I believe that this latter alternative would
be found to be the heaviest calamity that- could
befall this country, and because I believe that the
keeping up the existing old-world regime on its
present footing is impossible, I have already ventured
to mark out the lines on which I humbly conceived

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 201
some constitutional reform in the Church should be
carried out. I believe they are such reforms as are
imperatively called for, without, of course, being so
presumptuous as to hope that any proposal for
conservative reconstruction would ever be accepted
in its entirety. Reform of our political institutions
in every department has been accepted by the nation
during the last half-century. It was felt to be
inevitable, and our national life has become in
calculably more vigorous by the great changes that
have been effected. Reform of our ecclesiastical
polity must follow.
Assuming that some important changes in the
tenure of Church property in England and in its
administration are inevitable, common prudence
suggests that we should all endeavour to take an
intelligent view of the outlook, and prepare ourselves
for what is coming. No question is pressing itself
more upon the attention of churchmen at the present
moment than this, how provision may be made for
aged and disabled clergy, and something like a
maintenance fund may be raised for their widows
and families. The initial difficulty suggests a pain
ful reflection. Every other profession is going up,
the clerical profession alone is going down. It may
be, as it is, saddening to confess the fact — to deny it
is impossible,

202 A .SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
A great economist of the last century is reported
to have said that "the clergy of the Church of
England bring more into their benefices than they
take out of them." I believe there never has been
a time when, in the ranks of the beneficed clergy of
this country, there was not a considerable number
of men who had " private means," from which their
professional incomes were supplemented. In the
times before the Reformation we are perpetually
coming upon such instances. In the century that
followed we find the pages of Walker in his
" Sufferings of the Clergy " full of bitter complaints,
not only that the dispossessed clergy under the
Commonwealth were ejected from their livings, but
that their " temporal estates " were sequestered also.
When Goldsmith wrote his "Vicar of Wakefield,"
he made a great deal of the interest of his beautiful
story turn upon the good man's loss of his private
fortune ; and down to our own time it may be said to
have been the rule that the country clergy have had
resources outside their clerical incomes. Unhappily,
the number of clergymen who are in any sense men
of fortune is diminishing year by year, and their
place is being supplied more and more by men who
look to live by their benefices, and by them alone.
Meanwhile, we have begun to provide for the mainte
nance of such clergymen as are no longer able to

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 203
discharge their duties, and who are anxious to resign
their livings — not to speak of the compulsory retire
ment of others, which is advocated as a needful
measure of reform by not a few of our magnates.
According to our recent legislation, it has been laid
down that whatever pension is to be awarded to the
superannuated or retiring clergyman is to come out
of the income of the benefice which his successor is
presented to. In the same proportion that the retired
officer is thus provided for — in that proportion is the
new man's income diminished, and the parish suffers
by the withdrawal of the funds supplied for the
maintenance of the superannuated, who, as a rule,
removes from the scene of his earlier labours. The
method adopted is not unlike that which prevailed
under the purchase system in the Army. An officer
paid for his step, and sacrificed the income derivable
from the sum paid down, receiving in return an
increase of pay and a higher rank in his regiment.
If he were fortunate, he recouped himself sooner or
later ; if the reverse, he might lose all.
But in the case of the retiring rector, his pension
becomes a first charge upon the living he vacates ;
or, in other words, the benefice becomes less in value
as long as the pensioner lives. During all his term
of service this pensioner may have contributed
nothing to any pension fund — he has not been called

204 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
upon to make any provision for old age ; as far as
his benefice is concerned, he has lived from hand to
mouth, the pension he enjoys has cost him no
sacrifice of income during the term of his in
cumbency ; it is paid by his successor, and by him
alone. Surely this is hardly fair to the working man, who
takes over all the duties and responsibilities of his
new charge. As a financial arrangement it is open
to very grave objections ; on higher grounds it is
even less defensible. Whether a better scheme
might not have been proposed and a better arrange
ment been formulated it is hardly worth while just
now to discuss, and the less so because no attempt
to deal with the problem before us should stop at
considering the claims which any one class of the
clergy may put forward. It is a problem in the
solution of which all the clergy, beneficed or un
beneficed, are interested. When this matter is
discussed people seem to forget that the numbers
of the unbeneficed are steadily increasing upon the
others, and that curates, too, grow old, and, as time
goes on, become less fit for the discharge of their
exhausting labours.
Why should we begin to make provision for old
age only when old age has begun ? Why should
they who are in their full vigour be excused from

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS, 205
sacrificing any of the comforts and luxuries of life in
preparation for a time when they will need them
more than now ?
If the clergy of the Church of England were
indeed an organised body, subject to real, and
not merely nominal, discipline ; if they were
really doing their duty in some sort of subordi
nation to their commanding officers ; and if the
same sort of solidarity existed between the clergy
of every diocese and their bishop as does exist
between the officers of every regiment in the
Queen's army and their colonel — it would be a
matter of no difficulty to insist upon a certan quota
of every man's pay being stopped, and invested
as an insurance fund, accumulating at compound
interest, and payable only on the retirement or the
death of the contributor. Nor would there be any
difficulty in so taxing the clergy for the benefit
of themselves and their families if the clergy were,
as some pretend they are, a department of the
public service. It is because they are neither the
one nor the other that any proposal for introducing
compulsory life assurance among the clergy of all
grades is denounced by some as impracticable,
and by others as a scheme flagrantly Erastian in
its character. As long as the clergy continue to
hold their livings on their present tenure — i.e., as

2o6 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSION ,
long as a man's benefice is his freehold for life,
with, practically, no trustee responsible for im
peachment of waste, and no tenant in tail who
can interpose to prevent mismanagement — so long
will any scheme be impracticable which contem
plates the taxation of an incumbent, even for his
own benefit, or which interferes with his liberty
of spending the income of his benefice exactly
according to his own pleasure, and without any
regard for the interests of those who may come
after him in his cure, or of those whom he may have
brought into the world.
It was stated in the Convocation of Canterbury
the other day that the numbers of the unbeneficed
clergy at this moment stand to the beneficed clergy
in the proportion of more than two to one, and,
therefore, that not more than one clergyman in three
can ever hope to receive any but a subordinate
charge. Meanwhile, it was added, these latter are
marrying in the most reckless fashion, and bring
ing large families into the world, who, as a rule,
are "dragged up," no one knows how. In other
words, a class of pauper clergy is rapidly increasing
upon us, and the hat is being held round every
week for the support of those who find themselves
left absolutely unprovided for. They cannot dig ;
to beg they are not ashamed. It is a scandal and

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PEMSIONS, 207
a reproach to somebody. The question is — to whom
does the reproach belong ?
The enforcement of clerical celibacy is not to be
thought of Can nothing else be enforced ? Granted
that they who preach the Gospel have a right to
live of the Gospel ; yet it surely is too much to
claim that they who preach the Gospel have any
right to expect that their widows and families
should be supported and advanced in life out of
the alms of the laity indefinitely. It is a discipline
of finance that we want, and we want it grievously.
As for those who are already ordained, and have
been so for years, they must, I suppose, be left
to take their chance. As for those who are ad
mitted into the clerical body in the future, they
ought to be protected from themselves, in the
interest of the community at large. Let us begin
at the beginning.
It is not too much to assume that the average
stipend which the deacon expects when he enters
upon his first cure is ;^ioo a year. As a rule he
is then twenty-three years of age. The sum is not
large, but somehow the young men live upon
it ; they very rarely get into debt, which proves
that they can and do live upon it. Let this
stipend be charged at starting with an abatement
of 10 per cent., for which the paymaster, not the

2o8 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIOHS.
payee, is liable. Let this abaternent be placed to
the credit of the payee, as a premium upon a
policy of insurance standing in his name — a policy
not transferable, and not negotiable in any way.
That is, let it be impossible for the assured to
mortgage his policy, or borrow money upon it, or
deal with it in any way as property which he can
dispose of except by will, and even so let his
power of appointment over it be limited by reason
able restrictions. Let the premium be at once
invested by some board, or commission, or other
duly-authorised body, incorporated ad hoc, and let
the interest as it accrues be added to the premium
in the ordinary course. Let this be done year by
year, the annual premium in all cases increcising
by compound interest, and the capital growing
continually, in which the clergyman or his repre
sentatives have a reversionary interest. Assume
that our young curate never gets more than his
original £\<Xi a year, and is therefore never called
upon to pay more than his annual £\o — a very
unusual case ; and assume, further, that the
premiums accruing are invested at only 2j per
cent. Even so, the aggregate standing to the
credit of this account after forty years will be
something over ;^690, the clergyman being then
only sixty-three years of age. Or let the process

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 209
go on for another ten years at only the original
rate of payment, and instead of ;^690 there will be
a very little short of ;^i,ooo to the credit of the
account, though the aggregate of annual payments
hjis amounted to no more than ;£"soo, and the
clergyman is no more than seventy-three. At this
age many a man has still some vigour, and is far
from unfit for the discharge of his clerical duties.
But this example puts the case at its worst, and
applies to those who never get more than ,^100 a
year all their lives. Moreover, it assumes that the
premiums are invested annually, at no more than
the low rate soon to be the normal rate of interest
of Consols. It assumes, further, that the premiums
are always invested at par. But it is very seldom
that a man's clerical income remains at ;^ioo a
year during his life. If he chooses to take one of
those " small livings " which yield him a mere
nominal income, the presumption is that he has
some private means from which he supplements
his professional stipend. In such cases — and they
will be very few — the annual abatement of 10 per
cent, upon his net clerical income will be less than
;^io, the amount to his credit will go on increasing
more slowly than before, and the aggregate at the
end of thirty or forty years will be proportionately
less than in the previous instance. But in this
IS

2IO A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
case the presumption is that there will be less need
for making provision for a family than before, and
less chance of the wife and children being left
destitute. But take a more frequent case. Our curate who
starts with ;^ioo a year at twenty-three, finds him
self with ;^i5o a year at twenty-six, gets a living
of ;if300 a year at thirty, is promoted to one of
;^500 at forty, and at fifty is advanced to the dis
charge of archidiaconal functions, with an increase
of income corresponding to the lofty title to which
he has succeeded. Then, at every step up the
ladder of preferment the lO per cent, abatement
increases at the same rate as before ; every suc
cessive increment goes on at compound interest to
swell the aggregate that stands in his name ; till
in the case of that favoured few who are born to
succeed in their profession, and who do succeed in
carrying off the prizes, their credit balance in the
end will count, not by hundreds, but by thousands
— the increase of the fund going on automatically,
the annual premium rising as the man's income
rises, and at the same rate at which this latter
grows. But other cases will present themselves for special
consideration. Many men are admitted to Holy
Orders without any stipend. Assistant masters in

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 211
our endowed schools are very frequently ordained
in some dioceses — and I wish with all my heart
this were the practice in all dioceses, and that
many more were so admitted to the ministry of
the Church ; such men do excellent work as kindly
helpers to their clerical brethren, and are among
the most valuable of those clerical volunteers who,
to the parochial clergy, are their best friends — their
friends in need. Such men, it may be said, have
no clerical income that can be dealt with as stipends
can, but they continue to be members of the clerical
profession ; they are eligible at any moment for
preferment, and, for the most part, they look to
obtain such preferment sooner or later; they are
not at all anxious to renounce their Orders.
These men, being (as they undoubtedly are) by
far the most cultured and learned of the clerical
body, and having acquired, by their long training,
habits of business and the faculty of making the
most of their time, make very good working clergy
when they take to pastoral work ; while, on the
other hand, during those years that they pass in,
what I may call, the reserve, they are usually
making a larger income than they ever make after
wards when they join the ranks of the town or
country parsons.
It is almost certain that such men would willingly

212 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
contribute their annual payments to their own
assurance accounts ; no pressure would be required
in their case. But if there were any reluctance,
and if some should object, and if in their case
compulsion were objected to, might it not well be
insisted that any clergyman whose name did not
appear upon the register of the assured should be
considered as having retired from the profession,
and should therefore be considered as no longer
eligible for preferment by means of his having so
retired ?
And this brings us to another aspect of the
scheme proposed. The annual payment, which I
have hitherto treated as an assurance premium
only, would really be something more: it would
be an annual levy upon the members of the clerical
profession. It would be a fee which all the members
of the profession would be called upon to pay.
Just as every graduate of Cambridge or Oxford
who has not withdrawn his name from his college
books ; or every barrister, whether practising or
not, who still continues to be a member of his inn ;
or every solicitor whose name remains upon the
rolls — is called upon to pay his annual fees for the
privilege of belonging to a learned corporation or
a profession of which he is a member, so should
every clergyman be compelled to pay his annual

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS, 213
fee ; though in his case such fee would be, not only
a payment in the nature of a tax upon him as a
member of the clerical profession, but ¦ it would be
also the principal of a fund which would be accumu
lating for his own benefit, and standing to his credit
against the time of his death or voluntary retirement.
That word "retirement" introduces another
question : What is to prevent any clergyman
retiring from the profession at any moment and
claiming his savings?
(i) In the first place, it will have been seen
that the annual abatement, or fee, or subscription —
call it what you will — is not to be regarded or
treated as an insurance premium and nothing more.
It is also the annual fee which a man pays as an
equivalent for his continuing to be a member of
the clerical profession. Of course, he may retire
from his profession if he chooses ; but would it be
equitable that, on his retirement, he could claim,
not only all the principal sum which he has been
called upon to contribute, but the compound interest
as well ?
Without venturing at this stage to go into details,
it seems to me that in some cases it would be wise
and equitable, in others it would not. Every case
VTOuld have to be dealt with on its merits. At the
worst, there would be the case of the clerical scamp

214 ^ SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
whose career as a clergyman is practically closed,
who could never again hope to make any profes
sional income. At the other end of the scale there
would be the hopelessly disabled man, who could
no longer continue to pay his fees, and whose
future in this world was a blank. In the one case
there should be reserved the right to withhold at
least the accumulated interest ; in the other, it
might easily be provided — sometimes that the
annual fee should be remitted, sometimes that the
whole of the fund standing to his credit should be
handed over to him without conditions, sometimes
that a portion of the accumulated interest should
be reserved for his family in the event of his death.
Where a clergyman deserted his profession — either
because he was practically compelled to resign, or
because he was tired of it, or because he was in
debt, or from any other unworthy motive — it might
be provided that a certain discretion should be left
in the hands of the body in whom the management
of the fund was vested ; and where, in their judg
ment, the retiring cleric could not make out a
good case for himself, the accumulated interest at
least might be withheld, such interest being paid
over to a general fund, which might go to swell
the resources of the corporation, and thus become
a bonus fund for the benefit of the assured.

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS, 215
(2) Very different from the cases of clergy retiring
from the profession on insufficient grounds, from
caprice, or because of some moral pressure brought
to bear upon them, would be the cases of those who
were really past work and past hope of professional
usefulness, (i,) In the case of the disabled clergyman still
retaining a benefice, I incline to think that, as a rule,
he should not have control over the sum standing
to his credit during his lifetime. On the other hand,
he might be relieved from all compulsory subscrip
tions at the age, say, of sixty-five. If he chose to
go on adding to his accumulations, he could, of
course, do so.
(ii.) In the case of the clergyman retiring with a
pension paid out of his former benefice (always sup
posing that this vicious practice should be allowed
to continue), it would certainly be advisable that
any sum for which he was liable for dilapidations
might be paid out of the accumulations standing
to his credit ; but, inasmuch as he would be still
receiving some income from his profession, it would
be advisable that the balance should be paid over
only to his representatives at his death,
(iii.) In the case of the unbeneficed there might be,
and there would be sure to be, instances where a
poor man would find himself without employment

2i6 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS,
for months at a time, and even for longer periods.
Would it not be hard to compel him to pay even the
minimum annual fee when he was earning nothing ?
Observe that here, again, it would be no harder than
it is for a lawyer to pay his annual subscription
while earning nothing by his profession. But there
always is, and there always would be, so much
sympathy among the laity for the unbeneficed clergy
that there would be very rarely any difficulty in pro
viding for the minimum annual professional charge.
There would be sure to spring up societies and
associations for arranging this ; and, moreover, it
would be found pretty certain that, as time went on,
the financial position of the assurance fund itself
would be such as to allow of the annual increment
being placed to the credit of many needy clergy,
whose cases might be considered and dealt with
from time to time.
What would be the effect of a clergyman's retiring
and claiming a return of his money? He would
cease to be a member of the clerical profession, and
be incapable of accepting preferment or officiating as
a licensed curate.
But might he not again return to work if he
returned to a better mind ? Clearly a locus pcenitentcB
should be allowed in all cases which admitted of
being satisfactorily explained. On the other hand.

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 217
it would be impossible to allow of a man's withdraw
ing from his profession (and so withdrawing from all
restraints of discipline and responsibility) for as long
as he pleased, and yet to give him the option of
coming back to it at any moment, and being pre
sented to a benefice, without passing through some
period of probation, or being subject to a searching
inquiry as to how he had been spending his time
and as to his present fitness to resume professional
duties. It may be said that the minimum annual payment
to be required of the clergy under this scheme is too
large. In the first place, it may be answered that such
payments are not to be levied from the receivers of
stipends in the case of the unbeneficed, but from
their paymasters, whoever they may be. The curate
would not be called upon to pay back anything that
he had received. It would be his rector or vicar who
would be chargeable.
In the case of the beneficed clergy, again, the
annual payment would be a first charge upon the
income of his living; and in accepting preferment
the incumbent would take this annual charge into
account in making his calculations, just as he now
takes into account the amount of land-tax for which
he is liable, or the interest upon any mortgage

21 8 A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS.
effected through the Governors of Queen Anne's
Bounty. Thus far but little has been said on that part of
the problem before us which is concerned with the
pensioning of the aged clergy. We have assumed
that they will I;ave families behind them, and for
them our scheme aims at making some provision.
But suppose the reverend gentleman has never
married — what then ? Then, on his retirement
after loyally serving his time in the ranks, and
finding himself, say, with a thousand or two pounds
standing to his credit, two courses would be open
to him : he might either withdraw his capital, and
so withdraw from the profession ; or he might com
pound for a life annuity, surrendering all claim upon
the principal and interest due to him. If he declined
to accept either of these alternatives, a middle course
would be at his option whether married or not,
whether a celibate or the father of a family : he
might leave his capital where it was ; but instead
of adding to it he might, on superannuation, be
entitled to receive interest upon it during his life.
This would be his pension. At his death his family
would receive whatever sum stood to his credit at
the moment of his retirement.
In putting forth a proposal like this, which aims
at dealing with a great and acknowledged evil, an

A SCHEME FOR CLERGY PENSIONS. 219
evil which is rapidly growing to the proportions of
a scandal, I repeat that I am not so presumptuous
as to expect that it will be received without
objections more or less reasonable, wrathful, or
contemptuous. This generation is very strong in
criticism ; we all have to run the gauntlet of that —
we get quite as much of that as is good for us.
What we really do want, however, is not such
criticism as goes no further than pointing out faults,
but such as may help forward the cause of reform
wherever reform is urgently needed. This scheme
may be as crude as you please. The present writer
may be a mere country parson, as ignorant and silly
as — of course — they all are ; but he does not speak
without having long and honestly thought over the
measure he advocates. He has at length felt him
self compelled to say his say in all earnestness, and
with the deep conviction that in this matter the time
for taking action has come.

VII,
SOMETHING ABOUT VILLAGE
ALMSHOUSES.

I AM informed on good authority that my grand
father's grandfather ended his days in a picturesque
retreat for decayed gentlemen, somewhere in the
West Riding of Yorkshire, I sometimes think that
my grandfather's grandson will be a lucky man if
nothing worse happens to him in his old age than
that he should close his career in a similar asylum
for destitute gentility. When this thought presents
itself to my mind, so base and abject is my nature
that I contemplate the prospect with a strange
equanimity. I believe I could resign myself to a
chamber in the Charterhouse, or a tiny cabin at St,
Cross, without repining, if only my companions were

SOMETHING ABOUT VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 221
not profane, my allowance of soap were not limited,
and my linen were tolerably clean. All
Life needs for life is possible to will, —
says the great laureate, which being interpreted
means, as I take it, that if a man be wise enough
to accommodate his requirements to his circum
stances he becomes master of the situation, whatever
the situation may be. And yet there is a limit even
to this. I frankly confess I shrink from " coming to
the workhouse," as the phrase is. I was for some
time a kind of volunteer chaplain to a union work
house, and I have visited more than one, I do not
think they improve upon acquaintance ; they are
not savoury — of course they are not gay — but they
are not savoury. I know only one that is beautiful
to look at — or rather it was beautiful to look at
thirty years ago — I mean the union house of Fal
mouth in Cornwall. But to look at a workhouse is
one thing, and to look into it is another ; and to live
in it and die in it, that I shrink from. That be far
from me !
I used to be told that my respected progenitor,
whom I have alluded to above, had shown an alto
gether mean and vulgar spirit in extreme old age,
inasmuch as he resolutely refused to leave the retreat
provided for him by the gracious bounty of some

222 SOMETHING ABOUT
dead benefactor, rather than make a home with his
grandson, who had risen to something like affluence
by his own energy and steadfast continuance in well
doing. The elder gentleman persisted in saying that
he preferred to be independent rather than live on
the generosity of his children's children, whom by
his earlier imprudence he had wronged. He died in
that almshouse accordingly, more than a hundred
years ago.
Many years after that event I remember hearing
some one say that my grandfather had never been
able to get over the distress which his grandfather
had caused him by refusing to come out of the alms
house, and as I listened to them talking the subject
over, I had great discussions with myself in my
small mind, and debated the matter again and
again. I came to the conclusion that the old man
was right, and I got to reverence his nobleness, and
often and often I have said to myself, " If I am ever
a grandfather and have to live in an almshouse,
I shall be proud to entertain my grandson with
suitable hospitality, but I will not permit him to
patronise me ! "
I mentioned the Charterhouse just now. Who
can think of it without thinking of Colonel New-
come? I went there the other day, and I am sorry
I went. There was no one there remotely resembling

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 223
Colonel Newcome, The place is fusty, shabby,
sulky, frowsy — sweetness and light nowhere. The
very air the old gentlemen breathe is stale, their
very potatoes must be sodden, they talk of things
gone by, they are specimens of a bygone era, and, all
around them there are things of the past and of the
past only ; and that not a living past, but a dead
one, dead, stagnant, and profitless, with no lessons,
and out of all touch with the present, let alone the
future, I spoke to this one and to that, and the
tone was that of the dreary refrain —
I know not ! What avails to know ?
I would rather not die there among the brethren
of the Charterhouse, and as one of them. No !
Somehow the old gentlemen are out of place there,
and I cannot but believe that if Master Sutton were
to rise up from his grave and make a visitation of
the place as it now is, even at its best, the founder
would say : " This is not as I would have had it.
This is no place for such as these ! "
But a while ago I was at the Hospital of St.
Cross, It was an autumn afternoon. The leaves
were still upon the trees, but they were changing
from green to ruddy gold. Each leaf as it trembled
in the gentle breeze seemed to whisper, "Thank
God for life, the life upon the kindly earth. And

224 SOMETHING ABOUT
thank God that the earthly life does not last for ever.
We have lived through our fresh greenery, and the
golden days have come, and are passing. Thank
God for life, thank God for death!" That was
the whisper that came to me from the leaves that
fluttered and laughed upon the boughs. Through
the rich meadows the little Itchen flowed quietly;
yonder rose the cathedral tower, and a sound of bells
came softly to my ears — not riotous with too much
mirth, not telling of sadness or suggesting parting.
I went to that beautiful church within the gates —
there was a certain atmosphere of joy about it. The
richness was not the splendour of proud display ; it
seemed to tell of mere thankfulness, and one old
gentleman was sitting there far down in the aisle —
sitting, not kneeling — and looking upwards ; looking,
not I think praising or praying, but taking in a calm
delight, as if there was a serene enjoyment in idly
gazing at that luxury of colour and form. He rose
as we entered, and passed out, as if we had disturbed
him. I hope he did not resent our intrusion, for
what right had we there, we who came only as
chance visitors, while he was at home ?
I asked where B. was to be found. They showed
me where his chambers were. The rich red creepers
had climbed to the very roof. The little window
was bowered in leafage. The sun was going down

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 225
but the casement was opened, and as it faced the
west the diamond panes gleamed with an evening
glory. B. was drawing at the window. He looked
up, knew me, and smiled a gentle recognition. The
last time I had seen him was at my own house,
where he had come professionally, when he had
charmed me by his wide knowledge, his refined
taste, and his attractive conversational powers. We
talked for long ; he told me much about the history
and the architecture of the hospital. He had only
one regret, that was that he could not move about
without inconvenience or pain, " But was he not
straitened ? " He appreciated the delicacy with
which the subject was approached, but he waived it
off, " Thank God ! you see my pencil and my brush
are not quite idle. They have always been a source
of happiness to me, and though I have not prospered
as well as some, I cannot reproach myself, nor will
they who alone have any right to do so reproach me.
I am happier here than I have been for many a long
day, because I have learnt to acquiesce, I know the
worst now. There was a time when I used to think
it would be dreadful, I find it what you see. Isn't
it a very peaceful and beautiful retreat for a man
who aimed just a little too high, and failed ? "
Yes ! It is this, and much more than this. It is
just what such a refuge for the unsuccessful in the
16

226 SOMETHING ABOUT
great battle of life should be — quiet, orderly, not
without discipline. The roar of a great city very far
removed. Nature all around smiling in her serious
fashion — even the very semblance of her wrath kept
away from those bowed heads, sheltered as they are
from the storms that must needs rage elsewhere. As
I passed out I asked myself: Is it always autumn
at St, Cross — golden autumn, with its glowing
leafage, its lush meadows and their placid kine, and
the gentle river too content to hurry on its way ? Is
the sun always sinking in the west there, and always
streaming forth a gleam of hope and promise for
the day that dawns after the lengthening of the
shadows ? "
Why are there not more resting-places as St,
Cross for such as have run their race and have run
it bravely, have done their work and toiled manfully
and yet have not where to lay their heads? Such
retreats were numerous enough once upon a time,
They called them " hospitals " in the old days, but
they were all swept away ruthlessly, savagely,
horribly — all but some very few, and I know not
how those few were spared. How is it that they
have never been revived ? There was one I wot of
in this county of Norfolk once. It lived on for some-
four hundred years at Coxford, and when the suppres
sion of the religious houses came it was blotted out,

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 227
and the thirteen poor men who cowered and huddled
tremblingly round the cruel visitors were turned
out in the cold, "Sir John Mendham, Pryst of y'
Hospitall," received ten shillings to comfort himself
with, and seven servants of the Priory got thirteen
shillings and fourpence each for their "wages and
lyverys " ; but those thirteen old creatures were left
to beg their bread, the doors of their old home being
shut against them for ever on that bitter 22nd of
January, 1537. Their autumn had lasted all too
long. They had to face the winter now.
Aye ! Why are there not more such resting-places
as St, Cross ? Is our age an age of genuine pity ?
I have no doubts. It is pre-eminently an age of
bustle and fuss and fidget, but I think we are lacking
in tenderness. We are all for organising ; we sub
scribe guineas, we get up societies for the extinction
of poverty, and publish reams of statistics. Then we
hold up our heads and pull down our waistcoats, and
comfort ourselves with the reflection that we have
done as much as a certain widow at the treasury.
She gave her mite and so have we given ours.
Blessed are the givers of mites ! Amen,
I confess I do not love to see an almshouse in a
crowded thoroughfare. There is one — or was till
very lately — in Gray's Inn Road, a dreary, dismal-
looking place, suggestive of rats. There is another

228 SOMETHING ABOUT
in the city of Norwich, six feet below the level of
the street. I went down to it the other day and
shuddered. Faugh! it should clearly not be there.
And yet in that same city of Norwich there is the
magnificent " Old Man's Hospital," which I hold to
be the glory of our East Anglian metropolis. Yes ;
for it is one of the best managed eleemosynary
institutions in the kingdom, if we estimate its
efficiency by the sum of happiness which is to be
found within those walls, and the cost at which that
happiness is provided. The poor old souls, I admit,
live disgracefully long ; I have seen them go in
skeletons, and, in a year, they have grown as sleek
as brewers' dray-horses. I have known a man go in
there with every line in his face telling of chronic
bitterness of spirit, and in a little while I have seen
him sitting on a long bench in the sunshine spinning
yarns and laughing like a clown. "What, Dolly,
you here ? " I said one day to a worthy old laundress
whom I had known for long and often wished she
were there. " Yes ! bless the Lord, I'm here, and
all I've got to do now, sir, is to live as long as I can.
I don't want to die till I'm ahundred, and that'll
give me thirty years of joy here, and everlasting
glory — you know where, sir?"
The Great Hospital of Norwich is one of the very
few survivals of those many refuges for the aged

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 229
poor which existed in considerable numbers down to
the time when the detestable oligarchy which made
havoc of the land in the name of King Edward the
Sixth swept them all away. It owes its preservation
from the general pillage to an accident — the accident
of its " foundation " being attributed to the boy
King, though in truth its " new scheme," as we
should call it nowadays, had been drafted before the
death of Henry the Eighth, People talk as if the
spoliation of the monasteries were the monster act
of robbery of that bad time. We are perpetually
assured that that measure dealt a crushing blow to the
labouring population, as if they were the great losers
— the great sufferers, I am by no means sure that
it was so. It was the pillage of the hospitals that
was the first great wrong done to the poor ; but it
was the infamous confiscation of the funds belonging
to the guilds that wrought immeasurably greater
mischief It has been calculated that five hundred
hospitals — let us call them almshouses, for they
were that, and little else but that — were plundered.
Poor old men and old women lost their homes and
their maintenance, and were turned out into the
roads to beg their bread. That was bad enough ;
but there were more than thirty thousand guilds that
were stripped of their all by a sweep of the pen.
The guilds answered partly to our trades union

230 SOMETHING ABOUT
societies, partly to benefit clubs. Some of them had
existed for centuries; some had large accumulated
funds, the savings of generations of penurious thrift,
grown habitual to those poor toilers by the discipline
of long training in the duty of providing for the
future. There was not a village in the land that
was not ruthlessly despoiled of its little hoards.
The guilds were absolutely looted : they lost every
farthing they possessed, every rag and cup and
platter. The gangs of ruffians did their work so
thoroughly among the frightened villagers, that not
only were they beggared, but the whole machinery
of self-help which had been at work from time im
memorial was absolutely extinguished. Our modern
trades unions and benefit clubs are things of yester
day. For more than two centuries after that hideous
spoliation Englishmen of the working classes never
rose to the conception that they could help them
selves. They belonged to the parish and the
parish belonged to them ; the parish bred them as
the parish bred the owls and the polecats ; the
parish used them till they were past work, then the
parish put them into the poor-house, where the idiots
drivelled, and the palsied mumbled, and the halt and
the blind howled and cursed and raved ; and there
they huddled, gaunt and stolidly desperate till they

VILLAGE AIMSHOUSES. 231
died, like rats in their holes ; and then they were
tumbled into their graves, sometimes two or three
at a time, the sexton taking care not to go too deep,
for decent burial couldn't be done at the money.
Ah ! my masters, you must live in an open parish
where there hasn't been a gentleman's house for
centuries, where the land is owned by eighty or
ninety proprietors, and where the parson was looked
at askance as an intruder " arter no good " had he
dared to show his face on any day except a Sunday,
if you want to know what was going on in some
favoured spots in merry England less than a hundred
years aga
Happily it was not as bad as this everywhere.
God never leaves Himself without witnesses even in
the worst times. To be sure, the labouring classes
never had the heart to try and help themselves
again for many and many a long day. Poor
wretches ! They had lost all heart, as the phrase is.
There was only a sore where a heart ought to have
been. The guilds had gone, and no man had uttered
a word. Even historians held their peace, and up
to this hour have said almost nothing. But as for
the almshouses, they were no sooner gone than they
began to rise up again. They who had lived for
years among their tenantry and dependents, were
saddened and shocked at the sight of poor old people,

232 SOMETHING ABOUT
who could no longer earn their daily bread, being
reduced to something like beggary in their old age,
with no means of subsistence but the pittance
grudgingly awarded them out of the parish allow
ance ; and here and there kindly and pitiful people
made provision in their wills, or were beforehand
with death, and did their work while they were alive.
These kind people soon began to build new alms
houses as refuges for the poor battered old folk who
had few friends now, had no longer the power of
earning their own living, had seldom had the chance
of laying up in store for the evil days " in which
thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them," and had
not where to lay their heads. The new almshouses
were not as the old ones had been. For the most
part they were very unpretentious and unambitious
institutions ; a row of three or four tiny cottages by
the wayside, such as we see them now. Half a
dozen old creatures housed and little more ; the
endowment provided just enough, and sometimes
barely enough, to keep the dwellings in repair and
to find the aged inmates in food, fuel, and bare
necessaries. The hospitals " of the older founda
tion " had grown up under very different conditions,
and had been, almost always, started on a much
grander scale : they were in many cases affiliated
to some religious house, or, when this was not the

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 233
case, the poor people who were provided for were
put under the guardianship of some warder and a
chaplain or two, whose duty it was to look after the
other inmates, and far the larger share of the endow
ment went to support the governors of the house, not
the governed. In a large number of cases, as the
income declined — and somehow it almost always did
decline — the poor people suffered first, and their
numbers were not kept up. Sometimes there was
no income for the poor brethren or sisters, and again
and again we read that the houses became ruinous,
or that the revenues were absorbed into those of
some larger foundation. It is an ugly history, and
as we look into it it saddens us. At any rate, it
always saddens me to find that our forefathers were
no better than ourselves for all their professions of
aiming at a higher ideal than we profess to follow.
And yet, if it be indeed true that the human race
is growing slowly upward, what right have we to
expect that our forefathers should have been more
noble and truer, more far-seeking and consistent than
ourselves ?
The new almshouses rose up but slowly, but they
did rise up during the century that passed between
the spoliation of King Henry the Eighth and the
Great Rebellion, When men of pity and generosity
desired to make some permanent provision for the

234 SOMETHING ABOUT
destitute, the way was not easy for them. Million
aires like Allen and Sutton were few and far between,
and their millions were in shillings, not in pounds
sterling ; it was not the time for doing things in the
grand style. As long as any great eleemosynary
institutions were in some sort of working order, they
offered themselves naturally as the accredited recipi
ents of charitable benefactions even of the smallest ;
but for one man who could build up a new asylum
from its foundation and provide for its maintenance,
and draw up a body of statutes for its regulation,
and make all those provisions for the future which
such a considerable undertaking implies, there were
hundreds who would be willing enough to enrich
such an institution after it was once in working
order ; and the aggregate of such smaller benefac
tions contributed by men and women of no great
resources made up the real wealth of the house,
which without such accretions would be pretty sure
to decay. Our modern orphan asylums and dispen
saries and homes and the like would fare very badly
indeed if it were not for the perennial flow of that
stream of benefactions which keep them all going.
But when the " hospital " or the refuge had become
a ruin, roofless and desolate, they who had the wish
to leave or give a hundred or two of pounds or an
acre or two of land for the maintenance of the

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 235
decayed artisan or the housing of the widow, found
themselves in a practical difficulty. Who were they
to leave their legacies to ? How could theii- inten
tions be carried out ? Every donation, subscription,
or bequest helps to keep up a going concern ; but if
there be no going concern — What then ?
The first almshouse built in England as a home
for the aged poor, after the suppression of the
monasteries, is said to have been that founded in
Queen Elizabeth's time at Greenwich by William
Lambard, whom Camden calls " a goodly good
gentleman." The polemics of the Roman persuasion
sneered at the fact that almsgiving had ceased
among us since the Anglican Church had broken off
communion with Rome, and were not slow to remind
us that Lambard " was the first Protestant that built
an hospital." ^ We may let the sneer pass.
I do not know the exact date of the foundation of
Lambard Hospital, at Greenwich, but if it were
started before 1594 his example was very soon
followed ; for in that year Clement Paston, Esq,,
left a considerable estate to certain of his kindred.

' He had, however, been anticipated by Thomas Lewin, who
by his will, dated the 20th of April, 1555, founded an almshoues
in St, Nicholas Olave, Bread Street, which almshouse is, I
believe, still kept up by the Ironmongers' Company, But then
Lewin was not a Protestant by any means.

236 SOMETHING ABOUT
which was to be held by them conditionally upon
their providing six poor men in the parish of Oxnead,
in Norfolk, with house room and a somewhat liberal
maintenance, according to a scale that was carefully
laid down by the testator. If the almshouse was
eventually plundered and the poor men were left to
shift for themselves, that was no fault of Mr. Paston,
and the less said about that piece of iniquity the
better. Three years later, William Cecil, the great
Lord Burghley, founded his almshouses for thirteen
poor men at Stamford, and there they are now.
In this instance, as in many others, the sagacious
statesman took good care that there should be no
mistake about his intentions, for he built and endowed
his hospital during his own lifetime. Two years
later again, Richard Piatt, a London brewer — he
too during his lifetime — founded his almshouses at
Aldenham, in Herts, for six old people, who were
not to be eligible till they were sixty, " except they
be impotent, and therefore thought fit to be relieved
at a lesser age, and such as have been known in
their youth to have lived by their labour." House
room and allowances for fuel, food, and raiment were
provided for them, and careful regulations were
drawn up for maintaining discipline and guarding
against abuses. In this case the estate left was
well husbanded by the Brewers' Company, and the

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 237
establishment is still kept up ; though, as usual, it
is now treated as if it were a mere encumbrance
upon the school, which is also supported out of the
same endowment. And exactly as in mediaeval
times the tendency always was for the monastery to
absorb the income of an hospital affiliated to it, to
treat the property held by it in trust as only part of
the common funds available for the support of the
domus, and to grumble that the bedesmen cost them
so much annually ; just so it has come to pass in
even modern times, that the school, which was more
often but an adjunct to the hospital than the reverse,
loudly complained that its income was seriously
burdened by having so many old impotent folk — of
no use whatever to the community — to support in
idleness. Thus history repeats itself There was a
time when asceticism, or that which passed for the
religious life, was regarded as the one thing needful.
Now we have got to worship education as the god of
our idolatry, I wonder what will be the favourite
interest next.
During the reign of James the First, the fashion
of founding these refuges for the destitute prevailed
-rather widely, William Goddard left rather a large
estate to found the Jesus Hospital for old people
at Bray, in Berks, This was in the year 1609,
Henry, Earl of Northampton, in 1616 built and

238 SOMETHING ABOUT
endowed his almshouses at Castle Rising, in
Norfolk, and Sir Ralph Hare established others
on a smaller scale at Stow Bardolph, in 1622. The
number of these hospitals went on increasing year
by year down to the time of the Rebellion, after
which it is observable that the stream of benefac
tions almost ceases to flow. The earliest and most
considerable instance of any such foundation after
the Restoration was that of Smith's Almshouses at
Maidenhead, In this case, again, the buildings were
completed and the income secured to the inmates
and their successors in 1661, while Mr. Smith was
still living, *****
It is to be noted that, with one or two exceptions,
all the almshouses of the new foundation were set
up after the passing of the famous statute of Queen
Elizabeth in the forty-third year of her reign (i.e.,
A.D. 1 601). There is a very general belief that no
provision was made by the common law of England
for the relief of the poor till this statute was passed,
I am told that this is one of our many popular
delusions. Be it as it may, there can be no doubt
that ever since the Elizabethan time "competent
sums of money" were to be raised by the parishes
for the maintenance of the destitute poor, that such
money was regularly distributed to them, and that

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 239
a list of such as were the recipients of the " alms "
was kept by the officers appointed to give it out. It
is equally certain that where an almshouse was set
up in any locality, it was almost invariably limited
to the inhabitants of a certain area, and that what
ever relief it aimed at affording was supplementary
to such as was provided out of the parish alms ; or,
as we should say, the almshouses came in as an
important assistance to lighten the Poor Rate.
The same holds good of the doles of bread and
money which were left so frequently by testators
with some bowels of compassion. These doles were
to help out the overseers' allowances. Thus, when
Thomas Stretchley, in 1678, left £<> 4s, to the poor
of the parish of Christ Church, he ordered that
the income should be spent in buying "twelve
twopenny loaves, to be set up in the church every
Sunday, and to be distributed by the churchwardens
and overseers to twelve poor helpless men and
women, who take alms of the said parish!' The
principle in both cases was the same. It was
enacted by law that no man or woman should be
allowed to starve, but charity came in where legal
obligation stopped. It was enough in the eye of the
law that the ratepayers should keep people alive, but
it seemed abominable and atrocious to Christian
sentimentalists to reduce the pauper's allowance

240 SOMETHING ABOUT
down to the last straw. Of course, where these doles
increased and multiplied, and no restrictions were
placed upon the distribution, vagrants would crowd
into the parishes, on the one hand, and substantial
people who were in easy circumstances would lay
claim to a share of the spoil on the other. But this
did not prove even that the doles were in their nature
mischievous : it only went some way towards
proving that the " unearned increment " of any
institution, if it exceed a certain reasonable limit,
may require to be administered according to regula
tions better adapted than the old ones were for
carrying out the original object aimed at. Is the
amount of income enjoyed by this or that parish, or
other geographical area, larger than is at all suffi
cient for providing for the aged and destitute whose
characters will bear looking into, and who have been
bond-fide labourers, artisans, or even substantial
tradesmen in their time, but in old age find them
selves destitute? Then extend the area, and let the
advantages of the endowment be extended as far as it
will go. But do not go grovelling before your idol
of education, and proceed to appropriate every scrap
of margin of income that you can pick up, and then
say with much self-gratulation : " Lo ! we have
made ample provision for the poor and needy in
this small corner of the earth, and for the residue,

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 241
we will appropriate it to the sacred cause of culture,
by stimulating boys and girls to spend their days and
nights in getting up books for examination."
Let us take an instance in point. Thomas Cuttell,
by his will dated the 17th of March, 1556, left a
house on St. Dunstan's Hill, which at that time was
let for £y a year, to the churchwardens of St.
Dunstan's-in-the-East, They were to spend £^ 4s,
of the rent yearly to provide a dinner for the poor
prisoners in Newgate, 2s, 6d, in remunerating the
aforesaid churchwardens for their trouble, and 34s,
8d, for providing "two poor women to look after
any persons that should be visited with the plague or
other sickness!' The balance — £\ i8s, lod, — to be
reserved for the cost of any repairs that might be
needed from time to time. I do not know where St.
Dunstan's Hill is, but I suppose it is somewhere near
the Tower. I read, however, that this house was let
in 1829 for ;^S6 a year on a repairing lease, and I
should not be surprised to learn that by this time it
has been turned into a warehouse, and brings in to the
churchwardens ;^S00 a year. There are no prisoners
in Newgate, nor need to feast them now if there
were ; and I can see no sort of objection, and quite
the contrary, to the whole of such an endowment as
this being utilised for the support of a great Nurses'
Institution, the geographical area to enjoy the
17

242 SOMETHING ABOUT
benefits of worthy Mr. Cuttell's endowment being
extended as widely as you please. But I see every
objection to your laying your hands upon half of
that endowment because there are no Newgate
prisoners, and applying it to the founding of scholar
ships in the City of London School.
It may be in consequence of my impenetrable
stupidity, or it may be from some other cause, but
I never have been able to see any rational ground
for accepting that position of certain theorists which
has been repeated so persistently that the world at
large have got to acquiesce in it from mere weariness
— I mean the position that an endowment ought
never to be allowed to save the pockets of the rate
payers. You can't help an endowment benefiting the rate
payers, no matter what the endowment is. You
might just as well try to prevent a border in your
garden from receiving the rain of heaven upon it
when the showers fall, because the pesis want all
the moisture and the potatoes can do without it
Even though you hold up an umbrella over the
potato patch, some of the moisture will be sure to
trickle through to the podgy tubers. If you go the
length of saying, "Better then have no endowments at
all," there is an end of the argument, for that means
that you would rather the poor and needy were left in

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 243
their misery, than that any one except the poor and
needy were the better for any boon bestowed. But
where is the sense of all this cry about not allowing
the ratepayers to benefit directly or indirectly by a
charitable endowment ? Why should not a man be
permitted to leave his money to lighten the burdens
pressing upon his surviving neighbours, and likely
to press more and more heavily upon his and their
children ? In the wills of our forefathers, made not
so very long ago, you may find hundreds of bequests
for all sorts of public objects, such as the mending
of roads, and the reparation of churches, for which
the parishioners were liable, and by these bequests
the ratepayers were gainers to the extent of their
several assessments. When the Rev, Abraham
Colfe in 1656 left his estates to found a school and
almshouses at Lewisham, in Kent, he also left a sum
of money yearly " in working drains out of the high
ways into the ditches and water-courses, and in
amending the footpaths of the parish," Sir Martin
Bowes Knight, an Alderman of London in 1565,
during his life-time provided for a payment of
£6 13s, 4d, to be made annually for the repairing
of the conduits and the conduit-pipes of the city of
London, About the same time Elizabeth Gavener
left her manor of Shabcombe in Devon to be sold,
the money to be "distributed and given away in

244 SOMETHING ABOUT
alms, as well as towards the reparation and amending of
highways." Ought such funds as these to be confis
cated whenever the charge of providing for the roads
is thrown upon the rates? You might with equal
fairness confiscate all the money left for the repair
of churches, because church rates are abolished.
But there is another assumption just as baseless as
the other, namely, that no paupers ought to receive
anything from ancient endowments, inasmuch as
they are already provided for by the ratepayers. It
would be nearer the truth to say that such endow
ments as take the form of doles and almshouses were
only meant for paupers. As we have seen, these
bequests were intended to supplement the minimum
provision which the law compelled the ratepayers to
supply. The statute of Queen Elizabeth enacted
that in every parish house room should be supplied
for the houseless, and the bare means of subsistence
be allowed to the destitute. At this point charity
stepped in and offered better house room for a
favoured few, and additional sustenance to those
who were dependent upon the parish alms. What
the giver of almshouses and doles did not contem
plate was that the " sturdy beggar " and the vagrant
should participate in their bounty. The " sturdy
beggar " was whipped out of the parish if he dared
to show his face in it. Let him go back to where he

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 245
belonged. There was no thought of encouraging the
"casual." In many instances, nay, in most, it was
a condition that no one should be admitted to the
almshouse who had not been known as a bond-fide
labourer or artisan in the parish for a longer or
shorter term of years ; and, as we have seen, none
might lay claim to any share of the doles unless his
name were in the parish books as one of the recog
nised recipients of parish relief If that condition
had been adhered to we should never have heard of
troops of vagrants crowding into a parish a week or
two before the annual " gifts " were distributed, and
scrambling each for his share ; nor for the rent of
fever-dens in a favourite locality reaching an almost
fabulous figure in consideration of the amount of
doles which the inhabitants of the parish had a right
to. The old law of settlement had its evils, but it
had its merits too. In sweeping it away in the
rough-and-tumble fashion you did, you turned the
vagrant from being a criminal into a pauper ; you
turned the poor man who had worked as long as he
could hold a plough or use a flail, from a pauper into
a criminal. You take his very clothes from him
when you admit him in the " house," you dress him
in the pauper uniform, and you tell him that because
he has sunk so low he is not even fit to be admitted
into an almshouse.

246 SOMETHING ABOUT
These are the kind of assumptions which are at
the bottom' of too many of those schemes which have
of late years been launched among us by authority.
Just at the moment when we are told that centralisa
tion is to be minimised, and that counties and cities
and country parishes have arrived at a level of such
high intelligence that they ought to be left to manage
their own affairs, here you have the Charity Com
missioners, dwelling in mysterious isolation — the
veiled prophets whose sentences go forth irrever
sible from their chamber of horrors — saying to many
a community of 100,000 citizens, " You blundering,
ignorant jobbery-mongers, you narrow-minded, pig
headed Tories, You are permitted to manage your
own schools, and highways, and libraries, and
police, your sanitary arrangements, your water,
your gas, and your paupers. But as to your
charitable endowments, those endowments which
your own citizens have in days gone by ex
pressly given you for the benefit of those needy
and stricken and sore broken, who were born and
bred and grew up and toiled and struggled and
dropped out of it under your very eyes, and whose
needs and struggles, and characters and sorrows you
know, and you only can know — these funds you are
not fit to deal with or to administer. These funds
are to be taken out of your control, you are not to

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 247
be trusted with them. In all that concerns your
charitable endowments, you will have to do as we
tell you. It is for us to order, for you to obey ! "
Oh ! these dragons of routine, who go up and down
seeking whom they may devour. Some of us remem
ber the glorious hopes that they raised among us
when they first were introduced to a too sanguine
nation, eager for reforms, and believing in the need of
them. We were all going to have the old trammels
and fetters knocked off, and the governors, and
trustees, and feoffees of the old charities were to be
left with free hands ! What has it all come to ?
Left with free hands ! Nay, our hands are to be
tied behind our backs !
The new Poor Law has done much good during
the last fifty years in educating the nation ; and the
reform of our social organisation has been carried on
earnestly and intelligently wherever we turn our
eyes. What we need now is not restriction, but
liberty of action. We want to be educated now into
a belief in great Principles. You will never educate
men by giving them mere Rules to go by, and telling
them to hold their tongues when they ask the reason
why. The red tape needs no tightening, it wants
cutting, and there is some red tape that will have to
be cut — is bound to be cut some day.
I have said that the new Poor Law has done a

248 SOMETHING ABOUT
great deal for us in the way of educating the masses
— educating them in certain sentiments of indepen
dence, helping theni to the conviction that we are
all bound to try and help ourselves. But there is a
growing belief among some thoughtful philanthro
pists that the new Poor Law has almost done its
work, that the abuses which it swept away are gone
for ever, and can never be tolerated again ; and that
the time has come for starting upon a new depar
ture. To begin with, there is one very mischievous
doctrine which the new Poor Law has been the
means of inculcating among us. It admits of being
stated very simply ; it is held unblushingly by many,
and preached loudly by not a few. It stands thus.
The inhabitants of this world are divided into two
classes. The first class includes all who are pos
sessed of, or who have the power of earning the
means of living without anybody's help except their
own. The second class are they who have no means
and no power of earning a livelihood. The first
class are more than respectable ; they are virtuous,
estimable, exemplary persons. They are good citi
zens ; they are householders — compound or simple ;
they have votes ; they have spotless souls and bodies
— white as the driven snow ; some of them pay
taxes, almost all of them pay rates. The second
class are they who have no means of livelihood.

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 249
These are beasts of prey feeding upon the members
of the first class. Some of them are professional
beggars, some are cadgers, some are tramps, some
are receivers of outdoor relief, some are dwellers in
the Union workhouse, and some are nondescripts.
But be they what they may, as the first class are all
white and glistering, so the second class are all black
as soot — every one of them. This being so, why
should you attempt to make out that the blacka
moors are anything else than blackamoors? Why
set up such a preposterous theory as that there are
shades in black — light black and dark black ? That
is undeniable rank heresy. Away with it !
Men and brethren, take note of it. There is
nothing so catching as talking nonsense — pompous
nonsense. Given the requisite mental constitution
for the due development of the germ, and the period
of efflorescence is almost instantaneously followed by
immense fertility of reproduction, I've known a man
described as a dazzlingly clever fellow, for no other
reason than because he solemnly asserted that to
eat a ham sandwich was a sin. He began with
that, but he ended by founding a sect, and a large
one. Granted that all who have no means of livelihood
are — as some of my severe friends tell me they are —
all blacks, I really cannot see why some of them

250 SOMETHING ABOUT
should not he a great deal blacker than others, and
some in fact be little more than grey.
Looking along the sleeve of my well-worn coat as
I write, I notice that there are very decided differ
ences of shade in the texture of that venerable
garment. Black? Yes! It's black, but observe
the seams. And yet, alas ! there's many a poor
creature who would accept the gift of this old coat
of mine with pathetic gratitude, and count himself
a beau if he had it upon his lean shoulders.
It is just as false to assert that among the " Have
nots " there are no grades as it is to maintain that
among the Masses there are no Classes; and how
false that assumption is I will not stop to illustrate.
Poverty has its aristocracy, such as it is, as well
as its dreadful residuum, and between the two ex
tremes of lonely shabbiness — where men and women
suffer so patiently, so silently, so^ piteously — and
semi-nakedness, where poor wretches have lost all
decency and all semblance of self-respect, there are
almost infinite shadings off.
Was it any fault of yours, sweet Lady Maud
mavourneen ! that all your means of livelihood were
swept away, you scarce can tell us how, and no rent
came from those broad lands in county Kerry which
had given you an ample income, spent in good works
for the most part, even to the time when old age had

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 251
come upon you, and the sunny glow that once was as
a crown upon that noble brow had changed to winter's
rime? Poor gentlewoman ! You too have come to
feel the pinch of penury at last, come to accept the
scanty gifts of others and to bow to the sad inevit
able. Were you to blame, Celsus, of the quick eye
and the iron nerve, because at the outset of a career
that promised so well a frenzied patient sprang upon
you frtDm behind and left you a palsied man, with
your private resources exhausted almost to the last
pound ? Or when my worthy friend John Balls, in
his seventieth year — with a sickly wife for ever ailing
— found himself one morning out of place by the
bankruptcy of the firm which he had served as a
copying clerk for more than half a century? Or
when blindness, sudden and incurable, came upon
that promising young schoolmaster who married
only a year ago ? Or that lone widow whose trustee
appropriated her little all and then vanished ? Or
those others whom the wise and prudent advised to
invest their savings in Dock shares which paid so
well for a time and now pay nothing ? Were each
and all of these criminals, who got no more than they
deserved when they found themselves face to face
with want, not knowing where to turn for the daily
bread? Are you going to lump them all together,
ticket them as paupers, and shut them up with

252 SOMETHING ABOUT
broken-down harlots and tramps and inebriates in
the same ward of a Union workhouse? Are you
prepared to do this and assure us with a simper
that "It can't be helped. We are bound to dis
courage improvidence, and if we once begin to make
class distinctions and differences and to indulge in
sentiment, the consequences will be disastrous and
dreadful to contemplate," My good man ! Are not
the consequences of your cruel and heartless modus
operandi dreadful to contemplate?
*****
There are some men who are born drudges, and
nothing on earth can make them fit for anything else.
As the poet says :
Some men are born for great things.
Some are born for small,
Some — it is not recorded
Why they were born at all.
These last may be content and thankful if they have
drudgery to do. They are the Gibeonites. The
hewers of wood and drawers of water for others, they
can have nothing to expect but bare existence.
Without brains, without physique, without character,
without anything that they can call their own except
a rickety carcass, scrofulous and feebly puffy, com
monly designated a human body, they flopped into
. the world somehow, and there they are. Of course

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 253
they cannot be allowed to starve, nor will they be ;
but they never can make the running in the fierce
competition of our time, and the less ambition they
have the better for themselves. They are below the
average. But for the average man, and for him who
is only a little above the average, let such be taught
early and late that they are bound to have a reason
able ambition. For he who lacks the stimulus of
any future, in this life or the next, must needs wither.
Why should he live at all ?
The question is. What may fairly be called a
reasonable ambition? Leave the residuum out of
account, and come to the working man in the widest
acceptation of the term ; and is it too much to say
that every man who plays the part of a good citizen
may reasonably set before himself the hope of repose
in his old age, when he has ceased to be the man he
was, and when others can do his work better than he
and with less effort ? In some form or another we
all do look forward to " retire " — as the phrase is —
in our old age. Some have a chance of earning their
retirement and make the most of it, some have no
chance, and some throw their chances away.
As to those who have thrown away their chances,
the people who have earned good wages and spent
them as they came, the reckless and the improvident,
the workhouse is the place for them.

254 SOMETHING ABOUT
As to those who have never had a chance of doing
more than earn a bare subsistence — the Gibeonites,
the physically and mentally incompetent — in their
case too I am inclined to think no special favour
should be shown them. All gentle kindness, food
and shelter and raiment should be assured to them,
but more than that it is difficult to see why they
should be encouraged to expect.
As to those who have used their opportunities, and
made provision for their old age in time, they are the
last people in the world to "come upon the rates,"
The joy and pride of their declining years is that they
want no man to help them, that they are possessed
of an independence, or, as we say in Norfolk, that
they " live upright and walk with a stick,"
But there still remain those who have lived all
their lives at a comparative disadvantage. Circum
stances have been against them, or that mysterious
factor which is for ever baffiing our most careful
calculations which scientists with praiseworthy cir
cumlocution deal with as " the personal equation,"
while the vulgar brutally call it luck. There is the
peasant who has had a large family dragging at him
for the last twenty years of his life and longer.
There is the man who suffered from an accident in
his prime, reducing him to something just a trifle
less than an able-bodied workman. There is the

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 255
man who with all his economies and frugality only
managed to scrape together a little hoard of some
three or four score pounds, and had lived too long
and come to the end of it.
There is the man who has invested his all in a row
of cottages, and somehow got into the hands of a
rogue of an attorney, and finds himself just nowhere
when the pinch comes. What need to multiply the
instances ? Observe ! I am not thinking of the
men of the streets. They have their champions and
their friends, God bless them ! who are not likely to
forsake their clients and by no means likely to lack
support. They have rich and earnest philanthropists
at their backs who are not idle just now. I speak of
the men and women in the wilderness. I speak as I
do know.
And this is what I know : that during the last
twenty years or so the agricultural labourer in
Norfolk has become a saving animal. Yes ! Since
drinking has gone out of fashion and drunkenness
has got to be looked upon as disgraceful, the agri
cultural labourer has begun to hoard. The mischief
is, that he is afraid of doing anything more than
hoard. He is afraid of the savings-bank. He is
almost equally afraid of buying little bits of property
near his home, afraid of letting any one know that
he has money laid by, afraid to talk of it, afraid to

256 SOMETHING ABOUT
whisper it, afraid of your suspecting it. How has
this come about ?
The explanation is plain and evident enough to
those who know anything about the facts ; and
here it is. As long as a man is known to possess
a shilling that he can call his own, he is debarred
from receiving any relief from the rates for the
barest necessaries of life. If a poor fellow has
hidden away say ;^20 or ;^50 or ;^ioo — and again,
I say, / speak as I do know — he will hardly let his
own flesh and blood suspect the fact. Be seen in
the post-office with a bank-book ? What ! that he
may be called upon to produce it before the Board ?
Not he ! Buy the house he lives in, though he
could get it cheap? Why, he'd have to pay the
rates on it, and when he wanted to put himself upon
these same rates, '*'I mean to say as that there
chairman would laugh at me ! " What does he do
with his savings, then ? What can he do with
them ? He hides them until such time as they have
grown to inconvenient bulk, and then he slinks about
and seeks for an investment. In point of fact, he
starts as a money-lender on a small scale, under the
secret guidance of Mr. Oily Gammon. I am not
going to betray confidences, and so I will not stop
to explain the methods pursued. It will perhaps be
enough to assure my more knowing readers that I

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 257
could point to one case where, when fourteen acres
of land were sold some six years ago, there were
seven mortgagees to pay off, each of whom, by a
composition, received under eleven shillings in the
pound. Think of the surroundings of an agricultural
labourer, and how he must be at the mercy of
sharpers who can talk qf things he cannot under
stand. You will never be able to protect poor
Hodge from quacks and herbalists, who promise to
cure all his aches and pains and sores ; from touts
who tempt him to take shares in a peripatetic provi
dent society ; from deputations who " stand forth,
sir ! before all the world," as the labourer's friend ;
from his own credulity and cunning, his own sus
picion and self-conceit ; from his ignorance of the
world and his ignorance of the swindler's wiles and
ways. No ! you will never be able to do this, but
you may do something else for him. You have no
right to educate our peasantry into the belief that
all their little savings are looked upon by the well-
to-do as mere pickings and stealings, which they
will have to answer for, when they are past work,
before a board of inquisitors, who will tempt them to
lie and shuffle lest they should suffer for their fru
gality. If, in his old age, the agricultural labourer
has the audacity to come before the guardians asking
18

2S8 SOMETHING ABOUT
for just a little relief, as distinct from support, he is
told, almost in so many words, that he is not starving
yet, and it will be time enough to help him when
it comes to that. But the sot who has lived all his
life spending half his earnings at the pot-house, when
he breaks down at last is treated precisely as the
decent labourer ; and is it to be wondered at that
this latter soon learns the needful lesson, to sham
indigence, to pretend that he is penniless, to protest
before God and man he has never laid by a pound
and that he hasn't a shilling in the world ? It is an
odious and demoralising system and has lasted too
long, *****
Frightful as have been the confiscations of our
charitable endowments during the last thirty years,
and amazing as is the bigoted idolatry of that grisly
phantom, yclept Education, which men have been
making such huge sacrifices to during the same
period, there still remains some funds here and there
in our country villages which have not yet been
taken from the poor. There are still some doles
and coals, still some blankets and cloaks, still some
loaves and flannel distributed in our country parishes,
I am told that it is only a question of time how long
these things shall be allowed to be distributed. I
am told that they will all, sooner or later, be ab-.

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 259
sorbed into educational endowments. For myself, I
hope I shall not live to see that day, and I will say
more — I hope nobody else will live to see it. I do
hope, however, that these funds will, at no distant
day, be turned to better account than they now are.
I am quite ready to admit that there is a foolish
waste in distributing even ;^20 a year in actual
loaves given out to the " poor " of a parish of 700
inhabitants, with the vaguest possible notion of
who the "poor" are. I see, as plainly as any one
else, that in an " open " parish, with fifty or sixty
small owners of land and cottages, the annual gift
of fifty pounds' worth of coal means so much money
into the pockets of the creatures who own those
cottages. The evils of such a state of things are
patent, but the remedy hitherto in vogue has been
almost the clumsiest conceivable. It is a remedy
which has proceeded according to the old plan of
making a desert and calling it peace.
Again and again let it be said : These emoluments
were meant for the poor ; to the -poor they belong ;
they are their birthright. They were left to lighten
the hard lot of the poor ; to take off, if ever so little,
the pinch of poverty ; to shed here and there some
beam of the light of joy even upon the poor man's
life ; to lessen its burden ; to cheer its dreariness.
Here are resources which you actually possess, and

26o SOMETHING ABOUT
which you say you know not how to use except by
taking them away from those for whom they were
meant. Some of us hear talk like this with indig
nation, and a burning blush at the shameful con
fession of helplessness which it is almost impossible
to believe to be sincere. What difficulty can there
be in applying such funds as those referred to to the
building and maintaining of houses for the poor and
needy, who are not, and never have been, of the
lowest and most reckless? Throw the endowments
of half a dozen parishes into a common fund, and
let it be used partly to build almshouses for those
parishes, and the maintenance of those who may be
chosen to dwell in them. Let these live rent free —
with their little gardens to make gay, their little
chambers to keep clean, their little household gods
not all confiscated. There is no need of any very
great weekly allowance. Give the aged couple five
or six shillings a week, and they will manage to live
in comfort after their fashion. Let there be nothing
grand about it all — no largeness, for that frightens
our rustics ; no grand architectural " features," only
some humble homeliness — a resting-place for him or
her, and if it may be so, the house of prayer not far
off, for the end is drawing nigh,
* * « •» *
It is characteristic of all the great schemes put

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES, 261
forth by idealists of past times for the reconstruction
or amelioration of society that they postulate a
human nature other than it is, and -aim at the un
attainable. We of the nineteenth century have
grown to be intolerant of the idealists. We are
proud of being realistic — very ! We demand first
and foremost, " How can this or that be carried
out? Show us how it can be done." The present
writer is no idealist, only a plain man — a practical
man. He is humble in his aims ; he despiseth not
the day of small things ; he does not even dream of
being original ; he contemplates no more than that
which is easily possible ; he starts with a single IF ;
grant him his if, and this is what he means to do,
*****
If God should ever grant me five thousand pounds,
which I may without injustice to others spend in a
lump during my own lifetime, I hereby promise and
vow that I will indulge myself to the extent of the
aforesaid five thousand pounds in giving shape and
form to an old whim or dream.
I will buy half an acre of land, and in it I will
build a humble row of five little houses, each with
its own little garden, and each with its own little
patch of land. There shall be ornamental trees
planted, and there shall be a good fence all round,
and there shall be a frontage to the road, and there

262 SOMETHING ABOUl
shall be at least one well of water, and there shall
be the best possible drainage. To the occupants of
each house there shall be allowed six shillings a
week, and there shall be a surplus income set apart
for repairs and contingencies. There shall be a
board — or a bench — of governors, or managers, or
trustees, to whom the oversight or management of
the said houses shall be entrusted, who shall be tied
and bound by as few hard and fast rules as possible,
consistent with providing for the absolutely neces
sary requirements of health, decency, and cleanli
ness. The area from which the governors shall be
chosen shall be wider than any single parish, and so
shall the area be from which the inmates of the
houses may be elected, and no one shall have the
right to claim priority of election over any one else.
As I will allow of no disqualification for admission
except such as the managers may from time to time
lay down for their own guidance, so I will allow no
one to be irremovable from his or her house in cases
where it shall seem necessary for the managers to
exercise their right and power of dismissal, I will
set down my houses at least three miles from any
market town, emd, if it may be so, not more than a
quarter of a mile from the parish church, whither
the old folk may resort if and when they can and are
so disposed.

VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES. 263
When I think of my model almshouses — as I often
do — I really quite envy those dear old people hobbling
in and out of one another's houses, and gossiping,
and peeping, and sunning themselves, and telling
stories — dreadful stories — and squabbling to their
hearts' content ; of course they will — and be all the
better and happier for their little tiffs. And then I
think, too, of other scenes ; of how the light will
fade and fade in the old eyes, and of the peaceful
sleep in which the spirit will return to God who
gave it, and the little house left empty for a while
till it is made sweet and neat and smiling for the
next comer. And I cannot help saying to myself, as
I think of all this and a great deal more, " Oh, my
dear old Biddy ! we'll always do what we can for
you in our small way : we will try and smooth your
pillow, and come and speak of the great hope, and
make the best of what we have for you, and you
won't doubt us? But I wish — ^yes, I do so very
much wish — you were in an almshouse such as we
talk of and dream of sometimes. Such a one as
should not be very far off, you know, where we
could come and look at you, as we do now, and
have our little talks and little secret communings,
but a little home that might be just a trifle more
bright and smiling than the one we wot of now,
Biddy!"

264 SOMETHING ABOUT VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES.
In the churchyard of the parish of Scarning there
stands a little hooded cross of oak — how vain to try
and make our monuments imperishable! — on which
is inscribed in plain letters that any one can read :
" Here rests all that was mortal of Mary Wright,
who died Jan. 6, 1892, aged 95."
This is our Biddy's epitaph.

UNWIN BROTHEKS, the GRESHAM press, CHILWORTH AND tOND(J,N,

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