The History Of Suffolk

It would perplex the keenest ethnologist to disentangle the ravelled skein of an ordinary East Anglian pedigree. What Defoe says of the Englishman in general lacks no point when applied to the Suffolker: “Fate jumbled them together, Heaven knows how. Whate’er they were, they’re true-born English now”.

Something may be discoverable by craniology, trichology, odontology, or siagonology, which is the science of jawbones, not, however, by the present generation. There is a funny little black-haired, high-cheekboned type existing sporadically in different parts of the county, perhaps rather more abundantly at the north-west comer, which has a suggestion of the Celt, or even of an earlier race. Soil, no doubt, has played, and is still playing, its part in modifications of character, colour and contour. The High Suffolker, to my mind, is like his native clay, comparatively slow and unimpressionable, steadfast in likes and dislikes, loves and hates, hard to be convinced and impossible to be coerced, somewhat given to suspicion, capable of great physical endurance and of acts involving painful self-sacrifice. The men on the lighter soils are also in a way similar to their sands, more excitable, with an evanescence of feeling when the exciting cause ceases to operate, superior in alacrity of body and mind, but more apt to be fickle. The neglect of education in past times has rendered both very liable to be deluded by those who are hardly better informed than themselves, the itinerant apostles of a kind of socialism which, if followed out, would whelm teacher and disciple in a common and undistinguishable ruin. High Predestinarian doctrine, chiefly of the Particular Baptist type, seems to flourish more on the heavy soils, while the sudden conversions of various forms of Methodism have been more frequent on the sands and gravels. This, however, is but a rough estimate. There are many exceptions to the best rules, and these are but tentative.

Surnames will help us somewhat in classification, but we must be very careful as to definite conclusions. Such as we have in common with Wales may be unhesitatingly pronounced to be later importations. A recent theory about the Roman origin of some of our surnames is barely credible, and the names are capable of a much more ready and ignoble derivation than that which would trace their bearers to consuls, praetors and wearers of the imperial purple. To such an extent did one East Anglian ethnologist carry his doctrine, that he spoke of the family of Fabb as descended from the Fabii, tracing to the present day that special quality which made the great Dictator the saviour of his country:

Unus qui nobis cunctando restituit rem

Certain Christian names, female as well as male, are of Roman origin. When an unfortunate child had to be known by his mother’s name in consequence of illegitimate birth, this classical name would become his surname, perhaps with ‘s or son attached to it. In the former case the assumed surname bears a strong, but, as it seems to me, delusive resemblance to the nomen of a Roman gens. We do not find surnames of Roman origin when surnames first crop up in our annals.

The main branches of surnames, local, professional, qualitative, would not be in earlier times of that permanence which in these days pertains to them. At first the local surname told its own story, and the stranger from “down in the shires” appropriately bore the name of the county, town, or village from which he had wandered. But though in many cases these have remained, in many cases they have passed away under the influence of some more potent mark of distinction. Sometimes, too, they merely denote a temporary sojourn in a strange land, the phenomenon of having visited a distant town being quite enough to fix the name of the place on the visitor. Thus, in a Lancashire dale at the beginning of the century there was a man commonly called “London George”, being the only parishioner who had visited the Metropolis. So when we find Kent, Wiltshire, Darby, Boston, Lincoln, Bristow, Rye, Dover, Lancaster, etc., there may have been only a short residence in those places, whereas in the case of some less known-Spalding, Brighton, Wing (Rutland), Littlebury, Fosdike, Leverton, Kingsbury-it may be in greater likelihood a case of actual migration from the special parish. There are undoubted importations from the North – Ettridge, which has passed into Etheridge, Elliott, and others. Where a man’s occupation did not distinguish him from his fellows, these names and the like would be pretty sure to stick, but their light would pale before the brilliancy of a designation which attributed to a man some special skill or knowledge. John Barton, if there were two or three in a parish, would cease to be the name of one who was of note as a scrivener or a parmenter-that is, a preparer of parchments. Thus, local surnames afford but a feeble and uncertain flicker for our guidance. Before passing from them, we may observe that the surnames corresponding to the names of Suffolk villages are very often found about fifteen or twenty miles from those villages.

There is also a large class of minor local names; that is to say, names from special parts of a village. The names Curzon and Cruso, de Crucione, from a cross-way, are rare in Suffolk, if they exist, the common name Cross being the form almost invariably assumed. Church, Churchyard, Chapel (not Nonconformist, of course), Styles, Stokes, Pitt, Deeks, Pinfold, Hills (which in genuine Suffolk of later days for some occult reason assumes a plural form), Briggs, Halls (probably a false plural of Holl, a ditch)-in none of these and the like does there show a gleam of illumination as to origin. The only word for a path in which I can detect anything of an ante-Saxon savour has, singularly enough, no corresponding surname. It is, I regret to say, best known in its present exceedingly debased form, “causeway”, but the vernacular “carnsey” for a raised footway of stones certainly suggests the Celtic cairn.

There are a few local names in the county which are French, pure and simple-De Caux, Duvall, Dupont, etc. So far as one can judge from their absence from lists of fifteenth-century wills, they are importations from France still partly in the sixteenth century, but more in the seventeenth, when for many years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes there had been a constant stream of Huguenot refugees into England. Especially the colonies at Norwich and at Thorney in Cambridgeshire may be mentioned as constantly sending forth offshoots into the adjoining counties. To these names Durrant is an exception, existing before the Huguenot troubles. Such a name as De Bosco would turn into Boys, and so into Boyce, dropping the preposition with the Latin form.

The trade names are even less trustworthy. Of course, a lad very often followed his father’s calling, which he would be taught for nothing. Otherwise the name of his new calling would get hold of him, and thus sometimes we find a man with two surnames, as Foxe’s “John Cook, als Belringer”. I suppose that by the fifteenth century there began to be a greater fixity about trade surnames, and the incongruity of calling a man who was a butcher Richard Barber, because his father was a barber, was less severely felt. There are a few double forms for the same occupation, as Feavier (in multitudinous varieties of spelling) and Smith, Chenery and Ashman. Strowlger (astrologer), which sometimes crosses to the north of the Stour, but is mainly an Essex name, and Wiseman, tell of the mighty powers supposed to be conserved in some village seer. Seaman, Seago, Ship, Botwright, Owner, and Skipper, all belong to the coast, and speak for themselves. The last hails from Holland direct. Entirely overshadowing all these in ethnological importance are Thurkettle in all its varieties, down to “Threadgold”, etc., and Raven, which has remained untouched. The fortunate bearers of these names may claim by constant male descent their antiquity as Danes, though an intimate acquaintance with their invading ancestors would hardly conduce to their gratification. Algar and Godbold have. a good old Saxon ring about them. The earliest form of Aldous which I have found is Eldhous, the contrary of the North-Country Newbiggin. The name has been provokingly allowed to degenerate into Aldis, just as a qualitative name, Laughter¹¹⁸, possibly given to a man who was much on the grin, has turned into Larter, and the trade name Taverner into Tabner.

Such names as Pope and Abbot are common in Suffolk. Cardinall belongs more to Essex. Duke, Earl and Lord, Knight and Squire, Steward, Setchell (a corruption of Seneschall), Bailey, tell in different ways of positions of trust under men of high degree. Arcedeckne was lately a well-known name amongst us, and many Bishops exercise oversight of a more or less ecclesiastical character.

The qualitative names, as I venture to call those which spring from personal peculiarity, must have been very troublesome-before surnames became fixed. A short man might have a tall son, and the father’s name become an annoyance to his descendant, who might be called High, Tall not existing as a surname. Blunt (blond) hardly remains, but the everyday Brown is everywhere, and very often unchanged in colour. Jolly and Sadd may be found, like Joy and Sorrow, separated by a small interval. The names from animals and birds are much the same in Suffolk as elsewhere, and do not present themselves in abundance in the earlier wills. They may have arisen from nicknames which had adhesive power in proportion to their appropriateness.

Dialect is no doubt auxiliary to ethnology, but, like all things human, it is subject to change, and a Suffolk peasant of to-day, an old man, uncontaminated by the grammar of the Elementary School, would be hard set to understand the talk which went on at Bury about Agincourt, or the oral instruction given by a John Saxmundham, for instance, in the destroyed church of St. Peter in Dunwich to his catechumens in the middle of the fifteenth century. The older unsophisticated peasantry are quickly passing away. We who live among them know how they talk, and can fairly reproduce their peculiarities of vowel-sounds, accentuation and inflections; but their talk is one thing and medieval talk is another. In vowel-sounds there is in some respects a remarkable purity and conformity to what is considered standard English, as:

• ă in man, but thrash is trosh.
• ĕ in met, save that men is generally min, and better is butter, connected with bot, boot, etc. This, I fear, is fast dying out.
• ĭ in kill. Mill is in some parts even now an exception. My father used to say that his man Brown, who came out of Risbridge Hundred, would call a mill a mill, a mell and a mull in the course of a few minutes. The last pronunciation is important, as showing the survival of mulne from molina. Shilling is often shullun.
• ŭ in fun. Some few might make ŭ into oo. The negative ŭn is ŏn, and so generally when the syllable begins a word.

There is more trouble with ō, generally written oa, as.it is frequently confounded with oo.- A boat is often a boot; and etymologically no harm is done, as the radical idea is the same, and the Semitico-Aryan root one of constant occurrence. In this pronunciation East Anglia and Holland are at one.

• ā runs to the diphthong ai. Place is plaice. This develops in Essex and Middlesex into
  ī, as all writers of the Cockney dialect know. In very bad cases it becomes oi.
• ē is pronounced ā. Meat is mate.
• ī runs towards oi. Fine is foine, or nearly so.
• ū gets very sharp, just avoiding a fracture-blew, hew, etc.

In the diphthongs –

• oi becomes ī. Oil is ile.
• au is often a dull u, like u in full. Cause is often pronounced in this way cuz.

Ou constitutes the greatest difficulty. Perhaps the spelling adopted in American humorous literature, aou, represents the sound best. In 1879 I had a long sitting over it and other sounds with the late Mr. Alexander J. Ellis, F.R.S., and we agreed that there is no perceptible fracture in the sound in the Suffolk dialect. In Essex the twang is stronger, and in London strongest. A Londoner’s raound abaout, if not fractured, is certainly affected by a perilous crack.

In Suffolk the h is never dropped or wrongly inserted, except when the evil communications of other parts have corrupted our good manners. Contact with the North, famous for its power of “exasperating” the h, or with metropolitan trippers at the watering-places, has sometimes, but happily rarely, affected us.

The simple consonants are normal, as they sound to my ear. The combination thr becomes tr, as in troshinmachine. Through is trou, not troo. The final g in participles is always omitted, and occasionally I have with very old people caught a trace of the departed d.

The plural en remains in housen and naxen (nests). I have never heard the Wessex mousen in East Anglia, the plural being invariably mece. I know not how to account for this use of the Continental i.

In the ordinary verb the tenses are never inflected for persons:

Thou and ye have disappeared from common talk.
The imperfect of the substantive verb as often as not has was for the second person singular, but never in my experience, in a direct clause, were for the third person singular. We find they was in the “Paston Letters”. Have is always pronounced hev. I append the present tense of the verb now and four hundred years ago, as shown in the “Paston Letters”. ¹¹⁹Many of the verbs now termed by grammarians weak belonged to the strong class, and their preterites still exist in the vernacular. “I thought they ew [owed] us five pounds, but it turned out that we ew them ten”. Ought is another preterite for owe, which is used for own –e.g., “Mr. Smith owe that there little farm now, what belonged to Mr. Taylor”. Saved is pronounced seft: “She seft a matter of thirty shulluns time she was in sarvice at Mr. Jackson’s”. Snow, mow, sow, are known to have past forms in ew. The past of sit is very often sot, which has a strange effect in the ears of the uninitiated: “I sot under a sort [number] o’ prachers”. “I sot under the woman what used to prache at – – , but I never,” etc. Can is often pronounced kin, and heard, as in Scotland, turns into hard. Frore and frorn, from freeze, are lingering about in out-of-the-way places. The to in to-day is used also in to-year. Nawn for nothing is dying out. An old woman, whose baptism took place at Rumburgh eight days before the attempted escape of Louis XVI. from France, said to me: “The gentlefolk and the parsons think a dale o’ me; the pore people think nawn o’ me”.The peculiar intonation of the peasantry has often been the subject of remark, “Norfolk and Suffolk sing-song”, as it is sometimes called. The late Archdeacon Ormerod told me that when, as a West-Countryman, he came into these parts to be examining chaplain to Bishop Stanley, he had just returned from a tour in Sweden, and “was at once struck by the great similarity between Scandinavian and East Anglian intonation, especially in- the elevation of the voice at the end of a sentence. A fourth is quite a common interval. In cases of unusual excitement, or when unusual distance demands unusual effort, it may be even a fifth.The vocabulary of East Anglia is replete with words at once expressive and important philologically. “Forby’s Vocabulary” was published in 1830, five years after his decease. He was a Norfolk man in all respects, but unquestionably received much assistance from a brother clergyman who knew Suffolk well, the Rev. W. T. Spurdens, a native of the latter county, who lived the first thirty years of his life amongst its peasantry, having been at one time curate of Wingfield and Laxfield, and afterwards of Beccles and Great Redisham. Indeed, Spurdens claims for Mr. John Deere of Brundall and himself the principal share in the compilation, the fact being that the Rev. George Turner, Rector of Grundisburgh, who edited what Forby had prepared for the press, was not aware of the amount of labour borne by Spurdens. Professor Skeat has edited Spurdens’ “East Anglian Words” for the English Dialect Society¹²⁰. There had been previous workers in the field – the Rev. Sir John Cullum, Bart., F.R.S. and F.S.A., in his “History and Antiquities of Hawsted and Hardwick”, second edition, 1813, and Major Edward Moor, in his “Suffolk Words and Phrases”, 1823; but Forby’s “Vocabulary of East Anglia” was a larger venture, and gave a considerable impetus to word-collecting. From these sources and converse with villagers, much curious matter finds its way to the minds of those who hear no English but “as she is spoke” in the drawing-room.Bogey, in the “Paston Letters”, gives rise to a conjecture. It is used, like budge or badge, to denote lambskin with the wool dressed outwards, as in the case of the ordinance about the hoods of Bachelors of Art in the Universities. Thus, as it seems to me, it may have come to mean something in a white dress, a ghost. It is a stock Suffolk word.Donge, a mattress, passing through the phase of litter for cattle, has come to mean manure.The form heyne, to raise, is in these Letters. It survives quite uninjured.Lambs were hoggys then, as they are hoggets in Suffolk now, and lamb-hogs in Lincolnshire.Joperte, for jeopardy, is remarkable for retaining the t in jeu parti.Kelerys, for keelers, or as the word is now pronounced killers, carries us to Shakespeare’s

Tu-whit, tu-whoo, a merry note
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

A large tub, which would be best emptied by turning it upside down, or keeling it, would be a “grut owd killer”. In such a vessel was a Suffolk farmer placed to cure him of the “lump ager” (lumbago), when, the water being “hot enough to scald a hog”, the sufferer “up and shuck his fist” at his man, asking if he wished to “bile his owd master”.Loveday is a day fixed for settling a dispute.Nonpier is an umpire, the first letter having become attached to the article, as in nadder and napron.Parclose is a pew in church.Somerlay is to keep ground fallow. Summertilth is still a common agricultural word. The verb slump, from the Danish slumpe, to stumble, was applied in many a metaphorical way. Unsuccessful litigants were slumped. ‘” Slumped agin!”‘ says Palmer¹²¹, “was shouted derisively to one who had been a second time unsuccessful”. Forby explains it “to sink suddenly and deep into mud or rotten ground”, and Moor cites, “I come in sich a slump”.One of the best instances I know is that of a boy who was describing in his own language the beautiful Gospel scene on the Sea of Galilee: “Peter was a-goin’ to walk on the water, but he slumped in”.Though gain, as an adjective meaning near or handy, is not now so frequently found, its contrary, ungain, is in constant use, especially of persons of awkward and “contrairy” dispositions. Some poor unsteady boy or girl who is found too troublesome to be employed is described as “a rale ongain one”.Two words connected with hygrometry are in full force, dag for dew, a sweet Danish word, well known in the Christian name Dagmar (Ros marinus, rosemary) of the sister of our Princess of Wales; and raughty, pronounced with the sound of f for the gh, descriptive of thick, misty weather. The common prohibition against smoking, “Nicht geraucht”, brings it home to all travellers. Shakespeare’s “nipping and eager air” is called stingy, with a soft g and obvious origin. Black jaundice is the black sap, terribly expressive, and nettle springe, for nettle-rash, very likely originates in the use of spring for undergrowth or underwood, in this case a nettle-growth under the skin. Among remaining expletives are Dessay! used in surprise, and Sars o’ mine! (if that be the correct spelling), always in grief. I have never heard any explanation of this latter expression. Hibbedy-hobbedy is used for things all in a muddle; sloshins is more correctly soshings or on the sosh, for across, from corner to comer; a bob jolly is the result of leaving things to take care of themselves, and a see-saw is a tittimatorter. By’r lady (billady) has entirely disappeared. Many words which seem of uncouth form are merely peculiar shortened pronunciations of those which are well known; thus a peas-cod is run into a convenient abbreviation, pusket.”That” is much more frequently used than “it”, and the tendency in many languages to designate infants by the neuter gender is observable in East Anglia in the constant application of that “to young children.”That don’t fare no butter to-daa” is the stock description of the condition of a baby sufferer. In this way the troublesome “Jack That” of Addison’s essay becomes painfully iterated in a sentence. On one occasion a lady of sensitive feelings shrank back when she saw a tame bird in a cottage hopping about in dangerous contiguity to a cat, but was reassured by the half-contemptuous laugh of the mistress of the house, followed by, “Lor, miss! that on’t hurt that, that that on’t!”An instance of fare has just occurred. All vocabulary makers have got it, and every East Anglian would stare if it were omitted from a list of provincialisms. It is often used with adverbs, though sometimes with adjectives. Two of the former are purely and good-tidily, the first denoting a thorough condition of health; the latter, though less emphatic, is in many cases nearly equivalent to it.Hould is heard as often as fare with regard to condition of health, but denotes, as might be expected, an unchanged state. “Thank ye, sir, I hould right purely”, or, “She hould very mahderate”. By a kind of meiosis, “moderate” is thus the exponent of an immoderate state of weakness, as in other parts of England a man who is extraordinarily ill is spoken of as wery ornery. This latter term has been adopted largely across the Atlantic.Spurdens quotes boggy for self-important, churlish, and Forby notices a cognate substantive, bogg. The word, as I have heard it both in East and West Suffolk, is botty. It was once used very appropriately of the grandiose manner adopted by sheep if a dog appears not sufficiently aggressive in his conduct to alarm them. “How botty them sheep are!” Mildenhall was once described to me as “a botty little town”, though not marked by phenomenal self-assertion, to the best of my belief.Crickle (Forby) and cruckle (Spurdens) are explained as to sink down, as through faintness or great exhaustion. Quackle is a Suffolk form, but more frequently signifies choking. A person might be “quackled to dead” by bleeding from the throat after an operation. The broader pronunciation of the Suffolk word is followed in dudder, to shake with cold, which Forby gives as didder. His boyhood at Stoke Ferry and Lynn, and his residence at Fincham, stamp his collection with a special West Norfolk brand. Duller (dolour) is a word used of loud monotonous oratory, almost like drant. “Wery good sarmon, shockin’ drant”, was an East Anglian comment on a discourse of no small theological value, delivered by one who was apt to pitch his voice high and neglect the graces of inflection.Dumpling, which occurs in the vocabularies, has a material difference as you pass from the light variety of the North-folk to the more adhesive article of the South.Dutfin, for a bridle, Spurdens regards as exclusively Suffolk.Heap is used for any manner of aggregation -a “hape” of muck, of nonsense, of windmills, of “defference”, of water. Head is pronounced hid, and feet fit, as when the unfortunate victim of “lump ager”,alluded to just now, was put into the “killer’: “Missus took hold of him by the hid and man by the fit”. Thus we get “hidlings” for the Latin, praeceps, which Spurdens cites from the Injunctions of Edward VI. in 1548 to licensed preachers “not to run blindly and hidlings”.Hulver (holie verd), for holly, actually survives in the name of a Suffolk village.A green lane, from which I think that the surname Grimwade comes, is called a loke when it only leads to fields. The boy and girl names, bor and mor, shortened intensely, I feel very uncertain about. I have known a lady called by the former designation, though this may have been the result of accident. When turnips are hard and brittle, as opposed to the “clung” condition, they are said to be spoalty, which William Ellis (1750) spells spalt and Professor Skeat notes as a Cambridgeshire word. The word pulk, for the usual High Suffolk pit for a house supply of water, is quoted by Spurdens as applied to the De la Poles in a contemporary MS.: “Will. at y^e Pulke”. Sele, for season, has bestowed on the county its special epithet, “Sely Suffolk”, observant of the seasons, as may she ever be! Thus we have hay-sele, the sele of the day, a friendly salutation, etc.Forby gives thisn’s for “thus”. Thusn’s is a Suffolk form. Spurdens adds thatna, sona, thisneys, soneys. We must pass from dialect to folk-lore. The East Anglian peasant is not an imaginative person, not a “lively Grecian”, to people localities with nymphs, or the analogous fays and fairies of the North and West. The scenery is not provocative of phantasy, but there are more superstitions in existence than one would think.In the East Anglian¹²² is a highly valuable contribution on this subject from Mr. George Rayson, of Pulham, just over the Norfolk border, which may be taken as referable certainly to North Suffolk:

Charms for the prevention and cure of various kinds of diseases”, says he,”are still practised to a far greater extent than many persons would readily believe, not only by ignorant and illiterate people, but also by those who, from their position and general intelligence, might be supposed to be beyond the influence of such old-world superstitions. A century and a half ago the upper classes of society believed that the touch of a monarch could heal the King’s Evil, and the Office of Healing once formed a part of the Book of Common Prayer; and but a little more than fifty years ago, in my own parish, the owner of the Hall estate was the possessor of some very potent charms for the cure of agues and other diseases, and often practised his art for the benefit of his neighbours. A few weeks ago I was told by an intelligent man that the formula to be used, or the means employed in curing by charms, was of little consequence, as the cure was really effected by a miracle-working faith; but most pretenders to the art lay great stress upon the accuracy with which the formula is observed, and it is generally believed that the power of the operator ceases as soon as he has divulged his secret to another. The secrecy which is maintained by those who practise charms, and the air of mystery which is consequently thrown over their proceedings, have probably contributed in no slight degree to perpetuate the popular belief in them, and particularly amongst those whose early training and habits have rendered them susceptible to the influences of superstition. As specimens of the kind of charms which have been used in this neighbourhood, I send you the following examples, most of which have come under my own observation. I have had some doubts respecting the propriety of making them public, lest they should add to the number of amateur necromancers; but perhaps, when it is seen that these wonderful remedies generally consist of some senseless and unmeaning form, or of some doggrel invocation of the Saviour or of the Trinity, the knowledge of their real character will have a tendency to lessen rather than confirm the faith which they have too often inspired.

To cure Hernia in Young Children. – Split a young ash tree, and pass the child (naked) through it at sunrise three times, each time with the head towards the rising sun; then tie up the tree tightly, so that it may grow together.-Two children of respectable farmers in the parish from which I write were some years since passed through a tree in this manner, and their parents have assured me with complete success.

To bless out Fire from a Burn or Scald. – Wet your middle finger with your spittle, rubbing it over the place burned or scalded, repeating these words three times:

There came two angels from the west;
The one brought fire, the other brought frost.
Out fire, in frost,
In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

In an old manuscript from which the above is taken it is added: “All this is by faith in God.”

To cure Wens or Fleshy Excrescences. – Pass the hand of a dead body over the part affected on three successive days.

To cure Hysteria or Epilepsy in a Young Girl. – Beg a sixpence each from nine unmarried men (but without telling them the purpose for which they are wanted), and make them into a ring, to be worn on the fourth finger of the patient’s left hand.

To Prevent Cramp. – Wear a ring made out of an old coffin-handle on one of the fingers. In my boyhood, the old parish clerk of the village used to preserve the old coffin-handles, which he found in the churchyard, for the purpose of making cramp-rings.

To prevent Cramp in Bed. – Place your stocking by the bedside in the form of a cross. This has probably descended to us from medieval times.

To prevent Swelling from a Thorn. –

Christ was of a virgin born,
And crowned was with a crown of thorns;
He did neither swell nor rebel,
And I hope this never will.

At the same time let the middle finger of the right hand keep in motion round the thorn, and at the end of the words, three times repeated, touch it every time with the tip of your finger, and with God’s blessing you will find no further trouble.

To extract a Thorn from the Flesh. –

Jesus of a maid was born;
He was pricked with nails and thorn;
Neither blains nor boils did fetch at the bone.
No more shall this, by Christ our Lord. Amen.
Lord, bless what I have said. Amen.
So be it unto thee as I have said.

To cure Bleeding at the Nose. – Wear a skein of scarlet silk round the neck; tie with nine knots down the front. If the patient is a male, the silk should be put on and the knots tied by a female, and vice versa.To prevent Toothache. – Always dress and undress the left leg and foot before the right one. I have known this habit adopted and continued through life. Another preventive of toothache is said to be the constant wearing of a cord tied round the loins. Strange as it may seem, I have known a person continue this practice for many years.To cure Rheumatism. – Wear in the pocket the right fore-foot of a female hare. Will it be believed that a tradesman in a neighbouring village was superstitious enough to do this within the last two years ?To stop Bleeding from Arteries cut or bruised. – Repeat these words three times, desiring the blessing of God:

Stand fast; lie as Christ did
When He was crucified upon the cross;
Blood, remain up in the veins
As Christ’s did in all His pains.

To stop Blood miraculously. – Take blue vitriol, bleach it in an earthen pan in the sun all the month of May; let neither rain nor dew come upon it; take (from far or near) a piece of white linen cloth, whereon the patient has bled, have it fresh, rub into the blood some of the vitriol well, wring it up close, and bum it in the fire.To cure Warts upon the Hands. – From the numerous charms for curing warts, which are commonly practiced in almost every town or village, I have selected the following, premising that in all cases the strictest secrecy should be observed :Steal a small piece of beef, and rub all the warts with it; then take a piece of hazel-stick, and cut as many notches upon it as there are warts on the hands; put the stolen meat on the end of the stick, and bury it under the eaves of a house.Or, steal a piece of beef, rub all the warts with it, and bury it.Or, make the sign of the cross with a pin or pebble-stone, and then throw the pin or pebble away.Or, count the number of warts, and take the same number of pieces of straw and bury them. The warts will soon waste away with soreness.Or, take the same number of buds from an alder bush, and bury them.Or, ask the number of warts upon the patient’s hands, and, suppose it to be seven, tell him to look at them again in seven weeks. When alone, cut seven notches in a stick and bury it.Many more charms of a similar kind might easily be added, but the foregoing are quite sufficient to indicate the general character of those which are usually practised, and which have been transmitted to us by oral tradition from our forefathers.Thus far Mr. Rayson.The blood-bead, price ten shillings, was lately mentioned to me as purchased for nasal haemorrhage, but efficacious only when worn with a scarlet thread. The formation of a Blood-bead Company, Limited, should recommend itself to any “promoter” who is seeking work, as the percentage of profit must be by no means despicable. Glimpses have been afforded us from time to time in the foregoing chapter of the social condition of the people of East Anglia. It has not all been a record of “sweetness and light” -; nor will it be found so in the latter part of the last and the earlier part of the present century, when the houses of the peasantry frequently contained but one bedroom, and that on the ground-floor. Like severe seasons, this state of things produced varied results, destroying the morally weak, and developing the strength of the morally strong. Watchfulness, activity, self-restraint, constant and ready attention to sanitary matters, a cheerful recognition of the trite saying that “what cannot be cured must be endured”, were potent factors in the formation of the character of such a noble peasant as Crabbe has sketched in his “Isaac Ashford”, and the type is happily not extinct. On the other hand, the slatternly wife and squalid children, the foul smells, the aching head after an indulgence in “sparkling ales” of multifarious ingredients, combined to engender general discontent, which soon found a special object, very often in the employer, where his character was not of the best. Hence, while the old poor law devoured owner and occupier, the workman found himself ground between two millstones, and turned in blind wrath against the changes which eventually brought him signal benefit.The incorporation of some hundreds for the more effectual and economical relief of the poor, obtained by special Acts of Parliament, received no welcome. For instance, in 1764 the Blything hundred was incorporated for this purpose, and in the course of two years a House of Industry was erected on the field of Bulcamp in the parish of Blythburgh, a historic spot, noted for the battle between Penda and Anna.It was regarded with intense suspicion and dislike by the agricultural labourers, and before its completion the smouldering embers of discontent burst into an active flame, and a furious mob succeeded in effecting its partial destruction. The soldiers had to be sent for; the mob dispersed itself; the buildings were finished, and opened in October, 1766, when fifty-six paupers were admitted.Agricultural machines were another source of disaffection. The wielder of the flail (flagellum), whom many of us can remember as deftly swinging his implement round without touching his head, saw that the demand for his peculiar skill was likely to be diminished. Soon came pot-house oratory, combination, intimidation, terrorism. Gangs of men went about to bring the farmers to submission and to break up the obnoxious engines. In some parish chests may be seen the documents by which farmers bound themselves not to make use of them.In the expiring days of the old poor law, labour had assumed a peculiar phase. A farmer would employ three or four men on his own account, and have as many more sent him by the parish authorities, who paid them on a Saturday night from the rates.The parish poor-house was managed by a governor, appointed by the parish, who in the case of Fressingfield was allowed three shillings a week for a man, half a crown for a woman, and two shillings for a child. Three times a week there was a hot dinner, and there seems to have been little restriction as to amount. The Oliver Twist of that day might have asked for more without exciting that surprise which Charles Dickens has depicted as reigning in the breast of Mr. Bumble. Though, as I am informed, the rate was nominally as high as it is now, practically it brought in much less, the assessment having risen largely in the interim.There was a gap between the end of the old law and the beginning of the new. In the hundred of Hoxne only three of the old parish houses were left: Dennington, Laxfield, and Stradbroke. These were inadequate to the strain put upon them until the new house was ready. Something had to be done, and oakum-picking was resorted to for a time, men coming in for their work from their own houses.Most of the present union workhouses were erected under the new poor law. At one time they were full to overflowing. Their inmates might have been seen about 1843, as Carlyle’s picturesque tourist saw them, “on a day last autumn, sitting on wooden benches in front of their Bastille and within their ring wall and its railings … tall, robust figures, young mostly or of middle age; of honest countenance, many of them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men. They sat there, near by one another; but in a kind of torpor, especially in a silence, which was very striking. In silence: for, alas, what word was to be said? ¹²³ Now things are changed. The house for Hoxne Union is closed, and its inmates are accommodated with the Hartismere people, the two sets by no means overcrowding the one establishment. In parting from the county of my adoption, in which I have spent so many happy years, I gratefully record the pleasure with which I have laboured in the conservation of some of the wreckage which is cast up from year to year on the shores of Time.Notes:

• At least, this is an older register version of the name. It may be itself a corruption.
• 3 II. 251, etc.
• I. Series B, No. 20; 2. Series B, No. 21; Trübner and Co.
• “Perlustration of Great Yarmouth”, ii. 260.
• O.S., iii. 154.
• “Past and Present” ch. i.

To trace the history of agricultural improvement and agricultural depression in Suffolk would be a task only suited for an expert with ample space for unfolding his subject. We will note, firstly, the conversion of many hundred acres of heath-land into arable in the south-east of the county by the application of crag by way of manure. Kirby, treating of the parish of Levington, tells us that though this method had been long known in the west, it was accidentally discovered there by Edmund Edwards, about 1718. Later on, when corn fetched a price, much old pasture was broken up, and to such an extent that the practice had to be generally checked in leases. Things are sadly changed now, and were it not for the delay in forming grass-lands, the reverse process would be taking place all over the country. Hop-growing, though Bullein, in his “Bulwarke of Defence”, speaks of it as at Bruisyard in particular, and says that in many places they brew with hops growing on their own grounds, has declined nearly to vanishing-point. A Kentish traveller passing by Stowmarket may for a few minutes fancy himself in his own county; but with the exception of about ten acres at Rushmere, near Ipswich, which had a reputation for fine hops in the early part of this century, it would be hard to find another instance. Flax was cultivated on a broad slip of soil, about twenty-five miles by ten, from Eye to Beccles. The exhausting character of the crop has no doubt operated as a cause for its disuse, but there is something more potent in the reign of King Cotton.

Arthur Young, of Bradfield Combust, though as a farmer practically unsuccessful, was able by his writings to bring agriculture under the notice of the more refined classes, and thus deserves a few grateful words. His father was a Prebendary of Canterbury, and Rector of Bradfield Combust. Of all his works, the “Farmer’s Tour through the East of England” (1771) of course concerns us most. But it occupies four volumes, and must be read to be appreciated. About ten years after its appearance, which ominously coincided with his own failure in an Essex farm, he is found farming in Bradfield, and in 1787 he made the first of those French tours by which he is best known. One scene, in which he talked with a poor woman, not twenty-eight, but looking sixty, as he walked uphill, bridle in hand, who told him that she had heard somewhere, in some manner, something is to be done for the poor, is quoted in Carlyle’s “French Revolution”, in the chapter so appropriately entitled “The General Overturn”. Shortly after his French tours a Board of Agriculture was established, and Mr. Young was its first secretary. He became blind in 1811, died in London in 1820, and lies in Bradfield Church.

In later political history the most prominent Suffolk figures are Charles, Marquis Cornwallis, and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton. The former family was settled at Brome very early in the fifteenth century, when the male issue of Robert Buckton, lord of that manor, failed, and the heiress married the son of Thomas Cornwaleys, a London merchant. Our previous chapters have given glimpses of this household at Brome. In addition may be named Sir Frederick, first Baronet of the name in 1627, and created Baron Cornwallis of Eye in 1661, who rescued Lord Wilmot at Cropredy Bridge; and his son Charles, who, though a Tory, adhered to the Revolution and became Lord-Lieutenant of the county. Then came the first Earl, and then the second Earl and first Marquis, of whom we speak. He was born in London, was returned for the family borough of Eye while a young man, but seems to have been opposed to the extreme views entertained by many of his party with regard to the American question. Yet he accepted a command against the colonists, defeated Gates at Camden in 1780, and successfully resisted Greene at Guilford in 1781. His surrender at York Town, Virginia, in the following October, resulted in no censure to him, though it was the overthrow of the Imperial cause in the War of Independence. After five years’ comparative retirement he became Governor-General of India, in which office he continued seven years; and his administration was marked by the crushing of Tippoo Saib’s power, and constant efforts for the amelioration of the lot of the vast population intrusted to British care. After an interval he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and in 1798 suppressed the French-Irish rebellion at Ballinamuck. He showed more ability in the subsequent settlement of Ireland than in the diplomacy which resulted in the peace of Amiens. Shortly after resuming the Governor-Generalship of India he died in Ghazipur, in 1805.

The Duke of Grafton does not pose in the letters of Junius as an eminently estimable character, but those invectives require a deduction. He was in office under Governments acting on different principles, and for some time during the illness of the Earl of Chatham was practically Prime Minister. In 1783 he retired from the cares of office, and died at Euston in 1811. The soft tints and gentle undulations of the Stour Valley have found transmission to canvas by the genius of Gainsborough, born at Sudbury in 1727, and Constable; for though the former is best known as a portrait-painter, and Mr. Ruskin calls his landscapes “rather motives of feeling and colour than earnest studies”, yet in this very respect they are in themselves important, and may be regarded as the forerunners of the landscapes of Constable.

The latter was only a boy, twelve years of age, when Gainsborough, who was attending the trial of Warren Hastings at Westminster Hall, in the spring of 1788, caught a severe chill from an open window, which ended in his death in the August of that year. Constable, whose father was a miller and yeoman at East Bergbolt, attributes his love of art to his native scenery. “I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour: those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful”. Proud of his district, he remarked on its beauty to a fellow-traveller as they were crossing the valley in the old coaching-days. “Yes, sir”, replied the stranger, “this is Constable’s country”. In order that the conversation should not produce embarrassing results, Constable disclosed his personality. “The Valley Farm”,”The Cornfield”, and “The Hay Wain” in the National Gallery may be considered as inferior to none in artistic power, and to us possessed of the highest local interest. He died in full work over Arundel Mill and Castle in 1837.

George Crabbe, who was a native of Aldeburgh, began his schooling at Bungay and finished it at Stowmarket, was apprenticed in surgeries at Wickham Brook and Woodbridge, held his first curacy in his native town, and for thirteen years lived sometimes at Parham, sometimes at Rendham, and sometimes at Great Glemham.

No wonder that his poems are Suffolk-tinted in landscape and character-drawing. Of the former,

Where the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil

of the latter,

Though my clerk agreed,
If fate should call him, Ashford might succeed,

will never lose their place in the discerning mind.
Capel Lofft, of Troston Hall, is called by Byron, in the “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”, “the Maecenas of Shoemakers, and Preface-writer-General to distressed Versemen”, etc. He greatly befriended the two Bloomfields, Robert and Nathaniel, of whom the former wrote the “Farmer’s Boy”, and many similar pieces, and the latter the “ode, elegy, or whateverhe or anyone else chooses to call it, on the enclosure of 11 ‘Honington Green’ “.

Among other literary names connected with Suffolk are those of Giles Fletcher, Rector of Alderton-unappreciated there in the days of James I., but valued in the Victorian era; the placid Bernard Barton, who ended his forty years’ residence at Woodbridge in 1849; his son-in-law, Edward Fitzgerald of Boulge, essayist and translator, the friend of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle; and Jean Ingelow, some of whose young life was spent at Ipswich.

Of naval celebrities our best-known names are those of the circumnavigator, Thomas Cavendish, of Trimley St Martin, whose freebooting expeditions terminated in his death in the Atlantic before he was forty; the popular Admiral Vernon, who took Porto Bello with six ships only, and spent his latter days at Orwell Park, where he died in 1757; Sir Edward Hughes, who served in the East Indies under much discouragement; and Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke, a native of Nacton, whose portrait adorns Ipswich Town-hall. His courage in the action of the Shannon and the Chesapeake, off Boston, June 1, 1813, is the subject of a spirited song, a great favourite at school suppers.

I reserve a short space for the two regiments of foot which have borne the name of the county-the – Twelfth or East Suffolk, and the Sixty-third or West Suffolk. The former took its rise at the Restoration, after the reconstruction of the disbanded army of the Commonwealth. One company was embodied for a guard to Windsor Castle, under the command of Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk. When the Duke of Monmouth raised his rebellion in 1685, this company was joined with several others newly formed, and the whole constituted into a regiment called the Twelfth. The date of the Duke of Norfolk’s commission as Colonel is June 20, 1685. The scene on Hounslow Heath in 1688, when the King addressed the regiment on the subject of his Declaration of Indulgence, and asked those who were not of his mind to lay down their arms, with the disappointing sequel that nearly the whole of them did so, is well known to all students of the Revolution period. In the Irish wars under William III., the Twelfth bore its full share: just balked of storming Carrickfergus by the surrender of the garrison, with Wolseley at the action between Belturbet and Cavan, in the main body at the battle of the Boyne, occupied in harassing service against the Rapparees, and dislodging the troops of James II. from Athlone and Aghrim. After the capitulation of Limerick the regiment served in Belgium. At Dettingen in 1743 and Fontenoy in 1745 it distinguished itself, and was recalled to England in the autumn. When the Highlanders attempted to hold Carlisle, it formed part of the investing force, but, being withdrawn from the North, it did not participate in the defeat of Falkirk or in the victory of Culloden.

The next active service was in the Seven Years’ War. The regiment landed in Germany in 1758, and in the following year, on August 1, earned the glory of sharing with five other English infantry regiments the great traditions of Minden. A rough piece of fighting that day in a rose-garden is still commemorated by decorating the colours and adorning the helmets with garlands of roses on the anniversary of the battle. Twenty years later the gallant Twelfth won yet another notable honour. They were present throughout the siege of Gibraltar, participating with much distinction in the sortie of November 26, 1781, when the besieging works of the Spaniards were almost completely destroyed. For their arduous services the regiment received the thanks of the Sovereign and of Parliament, and the honour of wearing “Gibraltar” on the colours with the “castle and key”, and the motto “Montis insignia Calpe”. During the siege the regiments of infantry received the titles of different counties. For some reason the Twelfth was in 1783 designated the East Suffolk Regiment, and arrangements were made to facilitate the recruiting of the battalion from that part of our county. Regiments, like individuals, derive reputation from honourable failure as from victory, and many an East Suffolk lad perished in the privations in the Dutch campaigns of 1794 and 1795 under the Duke of York. At the close of the century the Twelfth was experiencing active service in Southern India. The regiment formed a part of the force assembled under Lieutenant-General Harris for the subjugation of Tippoo Saib. Hard fighting against the Mysorean cavalry took place at Malleville; and a sharp affair called “Shaw’s Post”, with the final assault on Seringapatam, will ever testify to the valour of the “Old Dozen”, who led the attack on the fortress. The regiment did not return to Europe until 1817, and during its twenty-two years’ service in the East further participated in the arduous campaigns against the Raja of Travancore and in the capture of the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius in :1810. For its later services the colours bear the honours of “South Africa”, “New Zealand”, and “Afghanistan, 1878-80”. In the latter campaigns, owing to its being chiefly employed on the lines of communication, it saw a good deal of desultory fighting and underwent great hardships on convoy duty, losing a large number of men killed, wounded, and from cholera. Since 1881 the 12th Foot has become The Suffolk Regiment, of which the county is justly proud.

The Sixty-third was constituted from the second battalion of General Wolfe’s 8th Foot in 1758, and received its designation as the West Suffolk Regiment in 1783. The records of the regiment had to be abandoned in the disastrous evacuation of Holland in 1795, but from the Annual Register and other sources we can still read of its achievements in the double capture of Martinique and Guadaloupe in 1759, and in 1809-10; under Lord Cornwallis in the American War of Independence, in the Crimea, and in Afghanistan, 1880.

During the campaigns in the Southern States a portion of the 63rd Regiment was mounted, and acted as cavalry under the command of Colonel Tarleton, and the records show that the 63rd Foot, whether mounted or as infantry, were in the thickest of the battles.

Eutaw Springs, an action fought by Colonel Stewart against General Greene, was an example of obstinate hard fighting; and earlier, in the year 1781, the West Suffolk Regiment was present at the attack by Lord Rawdon on Hobkirk’s Hill. After nineteen years’ service in the Australian colonies and in India, the Sixty-third returned to England in 1847. When the Crimean War broke out, the Sixty-third were stationed in Dublin. The regiment was twice called upon for volunteers for other regiments ordered to the East, and so hearty was the response that the battalion lost many of its best soldiers. However, when the invasion of the Crimea actually took place, the 63rd Foot were present, having embarked in the previous July for Turkey. The regiment received the three usual honours, “Alma”, “Inkerman”, “Sevastopol”, for its services during the campaigns. As a matter of fact, it was not present at the Alma, as it formed part of the force left at Kamishlu under Colonel Torrens to clear the beach, and it only arrived at the scene of battle on the evening of September 20, after a forced march. But six weeks later it had its full share of hard fighting. Twice at critical moments at Inkerman did the Sixty-third, aligned with a wing of the 21st Fusiliers, execute gallant charges on the Russian infantry. On the second occasion no less than nine officers were stricken down, either dead or wounded; among the number was Colonel Swyny, in command. It was a hard lot for our poor fellows in the awful winter of forty years ago, of which we have just had a gentle reminder, to suffer more from the roguery of English contractors than from the enemy. In the History of the regiment, by Major James Slack, the ladies of West Suffolk, as well as those of Ireland and the Vale of Grasmere, are mentioned as having endeavoured to supplement the want caused by this iniquity. Their presents were received by the men with hearts too full for utterance. This is indeed a link between the Sixtythird and that part of our county from which it took its name. In 1881, through changes by no means welcome either to officers or men, the Sixty-third lost its number and its county designation, and is now the 1st Battalion, Manchester Regiment”.

The improved navigation in the north of the county by the opening up of direct communication between Lowestoft and Norwich originated with an alderman of that city, Crisp Brown, in the earlier years of this century. A cut to the south of Breydon was first proposed, but the opposition of the Yarmouth Corporation to this or any other alteration in waterways only led to the adoption of a cut of two miles and a half from Reedham to the Waveney, the widening and deepening of Oulton Dyke, and the carrying of the canal to Lowestoft by Oulton Broad and Lake Lathing. After much opposition, this scheme was carried out, the Act of Parliament coming into operation July 3, 1827, two months after which date the first spadeful of earth was raised by Alderman Brown.

Railway communication has, of course, much lessened the importance of this enterprise, but railway history still belongs to the memory of the living, and the space devoted to earlier times has proved too much to allow of a sketch of the Great Eastern lines, which as yet have not covered all East Anglia with their network.

We must not tarry over local rejoicings; on account of the Revolution, but glance at an event in Ipswich in the middle of March, 1689, when Louis XIV. had declared war against the Dutch, and William, according to the treaty of Nimeguen, was sending troops to help them. Among those chosen for this service was that which is now the First of the Line, consisting largely of Scotchmen, punctilious as to any slight offered to their country. No act of the Estates at Edinburgh had as yet absolved them from their duty to James II. The service was in itself disliked, and when they learned that Schomberg was to be their Colonel, their temper grew worse. Sullenly they marched as far as Ipswich, to be embarked at Harwich for Holland. At this point mutiny broke out, concerted, it seems, by two Jacobite captains. After a brief period of disorder, in which the other officers were disarmed, the malcontents got the regiment, consisting of about 800 men, on the march. With four pieces of cannon, and, what was of equal importance, the military chest, they took their course northward by the old turnpike (I assume) through Claydon, Needham Market, Stowmarket, Haughley, Woolpit, and Bury, passing out of our county at Kentford into Cambridgeshire, the condition of which district at that time Macaulay seems to me to have depicted as far worse than it really was. They finally surrendered near Sleaford, and the incident ends in the conviction of some of the ringleaders for high treason at the next Bury Assizes, William, with his usual politic clemency, sparing their lives. The Irish troubles at that time brought into the east of England Dr. Rowland Davies, Dean of Cork, whose diary has been printed by the Camden Society. He sailed from that city on March 8, 1689, landed at Minehead on the 11th, and was in London at the time of the Ipswich mutiny, which, however, be does not mention. A fellow exile with him was Barry Love, from the same county, the ancestor of a family which has yet its representatives in Norfolk and Suffolk, who eventually became Minister of Yarmouth. It was to that town that Dean Davies betook himself, armed with introductions to Bishop Lloyd (not yet deprived), to Dean Sharp (afterwards Archbishop of York), and to many Yarmouth citizens. We are concerned with his journeyings rather than with his residence, for they show the manner of travelling. On July 1, at half-past three a.m., he took the coach for Yarmouth, at the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate Street, where he had slept, and at noon they had actually reached Bishop’s Stortford, where they dined. The distance is a little over thirty miles, which, being divided by eight and a half, gives a velocity not sufficient (to use the words of Dickens’s flyman) to render surrounding objects invisible, namely, about three and a half miles per hour. However the pace must have improved, for in the course of the day the vehicle had passed Newmarket, and reached Bury in time for the Dean to see St. Edmund’s Abbey before he went to sleep. Next day he came on (by Ixworth, Botesdale and Scole Inn) to “the place where we dined”, and so reached Yarmouth by half-past seven at night. When the Diary was edited in 1857, Mr. Caulfield, the editor, notes that the journey, which then took two days, could be performed in five hours. The Great Eastern Railway has reduced this to three hours and twenty minutes. The Dean’s residence at Yarmouth was not exactly what we should expect from a mourning exile, and the abundant good cheer provided by his hospitable friends appears to have produced sundry corporal disorders, which he could by no means trace to their origin. He gives a very lively account of the “Water Frolic” at St. Olave’s Bridge. At Burgh Castle he vexed not his soul with antiquarian inquiries, but “viewed that pool of water which is on the top of one of the flankers”. In October be returned to London. The coach left Yarmouth at five a.m. In four hours they reached Broome (Norfolk), where Sir William Cook gave the travellers a glass of sherry as he joined the party. They dined at Harleston, at the cost of a shilling, and at six o’clock reached Botesdale, where, doubtless at the Crown, they supped at the cost of two shillings. Next morning they went on to Bury, where they “changed a horse”, and so by Bishop’s Stortford into Epping Forest by the persuasion of the coachman, where they stuck fast, but afterwards by hard driving reached “London at seven o’clock. Returning in November to Yarmouth, he says: “16th.-We eat in the morning at Scole Inn”. This hostelry still stands just over the Norfolk boundary, the White Hart, though its old glory has vanished. It was built by James Peck, merchant, of Norwich, in 1655, and engravings may still be obtained which portray “the noblest signe post in England”, which reached across the road, and bore, among other objects, the Yarmouth arms supported by a lion. In 1690 the Dean left Yarmouth finally, travelling to London by the same route. His after history belongs to Ireland. He died at Dawstown, co. Cork, in 1721.

Another Suffolk traveller shortly after Dean Davies was Celia Fiennes, who rode through England on a sidesaddle. Her Diary was published in 1889 ¹¹⁵.1 As became her name, this lady was a thorough Whig, and deplores the adherence of “Beckle” to the exiled monarch. Here, we find, was “a pretty bigg market Cross and a great Market kept. There is a handsome stone built Church, and a very good publick Minister, whose name is Armstrong: he preaches very well they say, notwithstanding the town is sad Jacobitish town. This chooses no parliam^t men. … The ordinary people both in Suffolk and Norfolk knit much and spin, some w^th y^e Rock and fusoe as the French does, others at their wheeles out in the Streete and Lanes as one passes”.

Ipswich seems to have presented a very decayed appearance. She was here “on Satturday, w^ch is .their market day, and saw they sold their Butter by y^e pinte, 20 ounces for 6 pence, and often for 5d or 4d;they make it up in a mold just the shape of a pint pot, and so sell it. … There is but 3 or 4 good houses in y^e town, the town Looks a Little disregarded, and by enquiry found it to be thro’ pride and sloth, for tho’ the sea would bear a ship of 300 tun quite to y^e Key, and y^e ships of y^e first Rate can Ride wth in two mile of the town, yet they make no advantage thereof by any sort of manufacture. … They have a Little dock, where formerly they built ships of 2 or 3 tun, but now Little or Nothing is minded save a Little ffishing for y^e supply of y^e town”.

Bury pleased her better. Here, she says,

“Ye Market Cross has a dyal and Lanthorn on y^e top, there being another house pretty close to it high built w^th such a tower and lanthorn also. This high house is an Apothecarys-at least 60 stepps up from the ground. … He is esteemed a very Rich man. He showed me a Curiosity a Herball all written out w^th every sort of tree and herb dryed and Cut out and pasted on the Leaves; it was a doctor of Physick’s work that lefted him a Legacy at his Death, it was a fine thing and would have delighted me severall days but I was passant”.

Archbishop Sancroft’s non-jurancy took him back to his native Fressingfield in August, 1691. After Mary, as Regent, had ejected him from Lambeth, he existed for some six weeks in obscure lodgings in London., where he was cruelly interviewed by some tempter, probably Jacobite agent, possibly Whig spy, with the object of drawing him into a plot. To this man he answered that he was very unfit to enter into any such business, and that he had resolved to “go almost one hundred miles off into y^e deepest Retirem^t I could find”. Three days’ journey brought him to the house, called Ufford Hall, where he first drew breath. He refused the services of Henry Wharton, who wished to be his chaplain, and if one may judge from his letters, he enjoyed his retirement. We read of him as punning in the winter on Fressingfield, which he calls Freezingfield, or rather Frozenfield, campus geJidus, velpotius gelatus, describing dryly his escape from Palsgrave Court in the Temple, receiving the visits of his neighbours, and soothing his troubled spirits in the shades of his ancestral elms. He never entered the parish church, of which he was then the patron, for he could not bear to hear the names of William and Mary in the service.

A very short time before his death he found in a Prayer-Book of the smallest print the Commendatory Prayer, and ordered it to be read. Many are the visitors who come to gaze on his monument outside the church, and read the text selected by himself, speaking of the lightning-like Second Advent, and the epitaph, still existing in manuscript in the Lambeth Library, which records his chequered life in noble and simple words, ending:

THE LORD GAVE AND THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY (AS THE LORD PLEASETH SO COME THINGS TO PASS); BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD.

With him and others, William Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich, was ejected. His successor, Dr. John Moore, prebendary of the cathedral and Rector of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, met with a cold reception from many of the Tory country gentlemen. In the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library is the mass of Sancroft’s correspondence, sold by his nephews to the well-known Chancellor of Norwich. One letter from W. Glover, of Frostenden, throws some on the state of feeling in Suffolk. He asks the Archbishop to confirm his daughter in the private chapel in Fressingfield, for he cannot bear the thought of her being confirmed by the intruding Bishop of Norwich. But it must not be supposed that this feeling was general. A sublime indifference prevailed amongst the mass of small freeholders. Yet one day in Fressingfield I picked up a plaster statuette of “Dutch Billy”, which seems to have been a highly-valued treasure in the house of some tenant-farmer or small owner under the nose of the ex-Primate himself. Even the heads of the Tory party accepted the inevitable, as Sir Robert Davers, Member for Bury, and in Queen Anne’s reign Knight of the Shire, of whom Gipps says that he was never known to give one wrong vote.

The name of Rookwood, hitherto associated with Recusancy, is now found in connection with the Jacobite Plot in 1696, of which Sir Robert Barclay was the head. It does not appear what the precise position was which Brigadier General Ambrose Rookwood held in the family. The conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, bearing the same name, left a son Robert, who was knighted by James I., in 1624, and of whose sons two fell in the Parliamentary War – Robert, at Oxford, and William, at Alresford. The Jacobite Ambrose, though regarded as an honourable and courageous man, bad no scruple in engaging in the work of assassination. He was told off to head some nine or ten men in an attack on one flank of William’s body-guards, while others attacked on the other flank and in the rear, and Barclay’s own group committed the murder. The plot failed, by information, as usual. Ambrose Rookwood was among the first arrested, and the last executed. At Tyburn he delivered to the Sheriff this his last dying speech and confession:

I do with all truth and sincerity declare and avow I never knew, saw, or heard, of any order or commission from King James, for the assassination of the Prince of Orange, and attacking his guards; but. I am certainly informed he had rejected proposals of that nature when made unto him. Nor do I think he knew the least of the particular design for attacking the guards at his landing, in which I was engaged as a soldier, by my immediate commander (much against my judgment); but his soldier I was, and as such I was to obey and act. Near twelve years I have served my true King and master, King James, and freely now lay down my life in his cause. I ever abhorr’d a treacherous action to an enemy. If it be a guilt to have complied with what I thought, and still think to have been my duty, I am guilty. No other guilt do I own. As I beg of all to forgive me, so I forgive all from my heart, even the Prince of Orange, who, as a soldier, ought to have considered my case before he signed the warrant for my death. I pray God to open his eyes, and render him sensible of the much blood, from all parts, crying out against him, so to prevent a heavier execution hanging over his head, than what he inflicts on me.

The sole Rockwood heiress having married John Gage of Hengrave, the Rookwood property passed into that family, but the double name was not assumed till the fourth generation, in 1799. The death of Robert Gage Rokewode, first of the double name, without issue, brought the estates to his brother, John Gage Rokewode, often quoted in these pages, historian of Hengrave and of the hundred of Thingoe.

In Anne’s reign Sacheverell had many Suffolk admirers, especially Leman of Charsfield, who has perpetuated the name of that turbulent divine on one of the church bells, cast in 1710. The peace of Utrecht, the death of Queen Anne, the rebellion of 1715, were unable to rouse the mind of Suffolk.

When George in pudding-time came in,
And moderate men looked big, sirs,

a dull, gross contentment spread itself more and more over the land, and once more we have recourse to a diary for instruction.

What life really was in the houses of the smaller gentry about the beginning of the last century is shown in the Diary of Mr. William Coe, who resided at West Row, in the parish of Mildenhall. This singular record begins in 1693, and is continued nearly to his death in 1729. The book came to my former pupil, Mr. O. F. Read, solicitor, of Mildenhall, from my old friend, his grandfather. Psychologically it is a melancholy exhibition of good intentions marred by infirmity of purpose. The writing is scholarly, and there are excellent quotations from St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and later divines, such as Jeremy Taylor and Cradock. Hallelujah and Amen are more than once written in Hebrew characters. Coe, however, to judge from the general tone of his remarks, must have been rather a laughing-stock among his acquaintance, and probably the time spent at cards, which he constantly deplores and as constantly continues to waste, brought a penalty in losses.

Donna fleo rerum sed plus fleo damna dierum is written in conspicuous places in this little volume. In his morbid introspection and retrospection he mentions his ill-conduct to his grandmother, and “when I went to school at Bardwell I ledd a poor blind man out of his way into the water att Bardwell”. His account is kept in opposite pages, mercies received on one side, and broken vows on the other. Horses seem to have been possessed with unusual propensities for kicking at him, and the number of pins nearly swallowed by his family would be hardly credible, but for each such event being dated to the day. One entry sets before us the perils of travelling by land and water: “Janrii 29 169⅞ my wife ¹¹⁶, should have gone to Lynn by the stage coach, but (God be thanked) there was noe room for it was overthrown in the water att Barton & the passengers very narrowly escaped drowning the water being very high a great flood”. Mrs. Coe must have crossed the Lark at West Row Ferry, where the fall is not so sharp as at Barton, and found the coach too full when her “chariot” reached the coachroad on the west side of Barton Hill. The day of the week, Thursday, shows better accommodation for access to Lynn than there was in. my childhood, when on Tuesdays only could people travel from West Suffolk into South Lincolnshire, taking the Bury coach to Lynn, and going out by the Boston coach in the afternoon. A safe summer journey to Groton and back soon afterwards is thankfully recorded, as well as a deliverance from swallowing a large spider which had got into the beer. In 1710 Mr. Coe’s private coach got into difficulties at Barton water, though not this time from floods. The catastrophe of 1693 had apparently led to some bridge-building. “1710, Apr. 10 Wee dined att Tuddenham & as my wife & daughters came home in the Coach the footboard fell down just att the new River Bridge att Barton Mills & frighted the horses, who runn away over the white bridge & through the little bridge water (the man all this tyme hanging upon the pole) but the water stopped their speed so that the man recovered himself (tho’ almost stifled in the water) & gott better hold of the reines, & stopped them so soon as they came out of ye water & by God’s great mercy there was no mischief done. In the Coach was my wife, my Daughters Judith, Ann, & Sarah & Mr Thompson. They all came walking from that place to Milden ¹¹⁷ this way ab^t 9 oClock att night. Mr Thompson creaped out att one of the foreglasses & gott hold of the reines”.

The boys went to school, two of them, on a hobby probably to Mildenhall. On one occasion they were pitched off, without injury. As they grew up they made themselves useful on the farm. As to the daughters, they are best known by a pretty poem which appeared in All the Year Round, about their hair being cut to supply their father with a new wig, which, by the way, I do not find in the Diary among mercies received:

Flat is the shire of the southern folk,
And its streams are sluggish, very,
And they say you seldom hear a joke
In the town of Saint Edmund’s Bury;
But that’s a story too absurd
To satisfy psychologists,
And I guess that numerous jokes were heard
In the days of the archaeologists,
When light was thrown on topics dark
Beside the lazy river Lark.

A golden shire of plenteous corn,
Which in August-tide grows yellow,
And for jolly squires that wheat is shorn,
Who love old ale and mellow.
But from ancient habits well men know
In these times we vastly vary:
And where’s Squire Coe, of fair West Row,
In the days of William and Mary?
The Squire who with punch defied all care,
And who made a wig of his daughters’ hair.

Lo I there they sit, those maidens three,
A sight for all beholders,
With viol or book upon shapely knee,
Long locks over fair white shoulders:
No trace of grief in their mien appears,
And they look demurely merry,
Though they wait, alas! for the fatal shears
Which will come with the barber from Bury.
No fairer Anglians e’er drew breath
Than Judith, Anne, Elizabeth.

Ah I what would say the Suffolk girl,
In these days of advanced opinion,
If asked to surrender one bright curl
That veils her voluminous chignon?
What Suffolk squire, though never a hair
His sterile scalp would harbour,
To shear his daughter’s tresses, dare
Send for the Bury barber?
‘Tis well Squire Coe in the mould lies low,
Since this is a world he scarce would know”.

The viol and the book are not mentioned by Mr. Coe, but the girls were plucky, if not entirely successful, horsewomen. The family had friends, it seems, at Holme Hale, near Watton, and the midsummer weather of 1721 witnesses a mishap to Miss Sarah, an “unprotected female”, whose escape is thankfully recorded:

“June 19 my Daughter Sarah comeing from Watton upon my Grey Hobby she fell down w^th her upon Brand heath & threw her upon her head, but, God be praysed, she got noe hurt”.

In 1724 a more exciting adventure comes before us:

“Apr: 23. My sister Davies & Daughter Ann returned from Holm & as they ab^t Wangford Grang, they were persued by a foot padd & were forced to Gallop almost to Eriswel to escape. Sister Davies was behind her man & Daughter Nanny single, & nobody else to assist them, he pursued them till they came near 2 shepherds, they bad been robbed if not strippd or murthered”.

Among Mr. Coe’s personal hair-breadth escapes was that at the funeral of the Duke of Grafton, February 15, 1722:

“Feb. 15- I was at the D^e of Grafton’s funerall at Euston Church & as I was going over the vault (where all that family are deposited) to read the Lord Arlington’s inscription on white marble against the wall, the corner of a seat catched my clothes & put me suddenly back, & if I had not catched hold of the seat I had fallen backward down the vault (a great steep) w^ch must inevitably have done me a great mischief”.

It would be impossible to publish the Diary in extensor, but this selection by no means exhausts the attractive items. An equally characteristic representative of the times is William Broome, Rector of Sturston and Oakley, in Hartismere Hundred, whose verses are printed, in a washy but not everlasting flood, in Bell’s “Poets”. They are of the usual Celia and Delia type, of which the world is quite weary and nearly worthy. Machinery for turning off decasyllabics was in great request in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and Alexander Pope had undertaken more than even his metrical powers could carry through. Hence the “Odyssey” had to be sub-contracted, and a large portion of it entrusted to Broome and his friend Elijah Fenton. The latter was a firm Jacobite, but not so bigoted as to shun intercourse with those of his acquaintance who accepted the Hanoverian yoke. Hence in the Pope correspondence-for the publication of which we are indebted to the labours; of John Wilson Croker and Whitwell Elwin – we find Fenton paying visits to Sturston and enjoying himself thoroughly in the society of the district. Eight books of the metrical translation of the “Odyssey” were written by Broome at Sturston, and many, no doubt, of the miscellaneous verses which even in his own day excited but little notice. He comes out well under a temptation put in his way by Pope’s enemy, Curll, who wanted to get possession of any letters of Pope’s, in order to expose his evasion and perfidy. Broome returned Curll no answer, but transmitted his letter to Pope, though he does not appear to have owed that crooked, gifted man a very deep debt of gratitude. His words to Pope convey a modest sense of the failure of his literary efforts: “But adieu, henceforth, to all pretension to poetry. I am as willing as any man in England to have it forgot, and, indeed, the world seems pretty ready to oblige me. However, to be a bad poet is no sin; it may be a folly. If it be a sin, I have heartily repented of it, and, whatever the critics may have done, I am sure heaven has forgiven it. I am out of the world, regardless of its praise or censure”.

Orator Henley’s distich on his Homeric labours has done much to perpetuate his name:

“Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say Broome went before and kindly swept the way”.

He is buried in the abbey church in Bath, in which city he died in 1745-

No better picture of the county as it was in the days of George I. can be found than in Defoe’s “Particular and Diverting Account of whatever is Curious and worth Observation”, which was published in 1724, and has been reprinted in a cheap form, with an Introduction by Professor Henry Morley. He travelled through the eastern counties in 1722. Having reached Harwich, he sent his horses “round by Manningtree, where there is a timber bridge over the Stour, called Cataway Bridge, and took a boat up the river Orwell for Ipswich”, which he had known from childhood. Here he deplores the falling off of business since “the late Dutch wars”, before which it was the greatest town in England for building large colliers employed between Newcastle and London. They built “so prodigious strong, that it was an ordinary thing for an Ipswich collier, if no disaster happened to him (sic), to reign (as seamen call it) forty or fifty years, or more.”

Here the masters of the colliers dwelt and brought up their families, till the trade took a new turn. “Dutch flyboats, taken in the war, and made free ships by Act of Parliament, thrust themselves into the coal trade for the interest of the captors, such as the Yarmouth and London merchants and others; and the Ipswich men gradually dropped out of it, being discouraged by those Dutch fly-boats. These Dutch vessels, which cost nothing but the caption, were bought cheap, carried great burthens, and the Ipswich building fell off for want of price, and so the trade decayed, and the town with it.” In the wintertime, while the ships were laid up, he reckons that there were a thousand men – mates, boatswains, carpenters, etc. – more in the town than in the summer; and he contrasts the meagre appearance of “scarce forty sail of good colliers” in the harbour, when he wrote his account, with the agreeable prospect which the harbour presented to the eye of his childhood, when he sailed up from Harwich thirty-five years before.

In confirmation of the tonnage of individual ships he appeals to the Ipswich colliers (those few that remain), if several ships were not built then, carrying seventeen score of coals, which must be 400 tons, and affirms that at John’s Ness, within a mile and a half of the town itself, ships of any burthen may be built and launched even at neap-tides.

After recommending the port to the South Sea Company as a centre for the Greenland fishing trade, and the town as an agreeable residence for families who have suffered “in our late calamities of stocks and bubbles”, he notices Christ Church part – “a great addition to the pleasantness of this town, the inhabitants being allowed to divert themselves there with walking, bowling”, etc. He praises the government by two bailiffs, as affording an opportunity of allaying party strife, and mentions Sir William Thompson, Recorder of London, and Colonel Negus, Deputy Master of the Horse to the King, as the Members of Parliament for the borough; also Dr. Beeston’s collection of exotic plants, and the chamber of rarities formed by the eminent surgeon, Mr. White, containing a sea-horse, carefully preserved, two Roman cinerary urns, and a great many valuable coins.

Passing Hadleigh, where he visited Rowland Taylor’s stone, he speaks next of Sudbury as “very populous and very poor. They have a great manufacture of says and perpetuanes, and multitudes of poor people are employed in working them; but the number of the poor is almost ready to eat up the rich”. Thence, by Long Melford and Lenham (Lavenham), he went to Bury, a town “crowded with nobility and gentry, and all sorts of the most agreeable company”, and as pleasant in situation as in society. One tragical and almost unheard-of barbarity he relates, “when Arundel Coke, Esq., a barrister-at-law, of a very ancient family, attempted, with the assistance of a barbarous assassin, to murder in cold blood, and in the arms of hospitality, Edward Crisp, Esq., his brother-in-law, leading him out from his own house, where he had invited him, his wife and children, to supper; I say, leading him out in the night, on pretence of going to see some friend that was known to them both; but in this churchyard, giving a signal to the assassin he had hired, he attacked him with a hedge-bill, and cut him, as one might say, almost in pieces; and when they did not doubt of his being dead, they left him. His head and face was so mangled, that it may be said to be next a miracle that he was not quite killed; yet so Providence directed for the exemplary punishment of the assassins, that the gentleman recovered to detect them, who (though he outlived the assault) were both executed as they deserved, and Mr. Crisp is yet alive. They were condemned on the statute for defacing and dismembering, called the Coventry Act”.

With much indignation Defoe scourges a writer of his day who had insinuated that the ladies round the country who appeared “mighty gay and agreeable” at Bury Fair were sent thither as to a matrimonial market. The gentry, by the expense of their families and equipages, are the cause of the trade of the town, there being hardly any manufacturing. “They have but a very small river, or rather but a very small branch of a small river, at this town, which runs from hence to Milden Hall, on the edge of the fens. However, the town and gentlemen about have been at the charge, or have so encouraged the engineer who was at the charge, that they have made this river a navigable dyke, called Milden Hall Drain, which goes into the River Ouse, and so to Lynn; so that all their coal and wine, iron, lead, and other heavy goods, are brought by water from Lynn, or from London, by the way of Lynn, to the great ease of the tradesmen”.

From Bury he returned by Stowmarket and Needham to Ipswich, and thence took his course to Woodbridge, where, he says, “begins that part which is ordinarily called High Suffolk, which, being a rich soil, is for a long tract of ground wholly employed in dairies, and they, again, famous for the best butter, and perhaps the worst cheese, in England. The butter is barrelled, or often pickled up in small casks, and sold, not in London only, but I have known a firkin of Suffolk butter sent to the West Indies, and brought back to England again, and has been perfectly good and sweet, as at first”. Orford is decaying, but Aldborough thrives on its decay. About Dunwich he quotes the lines:

By numerous examples we may see
That towns and cities die as well as we.

After some reflections on Carthage, Nineveh and other cities, he proceeds: “Yet Dunwich, however ruined, retains some share of trade, as particularly for the shipping of butter, cheese, and corn, which is so great a business in this county, that it employs a great many people and ships also; and this port lies right against the particular part of the county for butter, as Framlingham, Halstead (Halesworth), etc”.

He adverts also to corn bought up hereabout for the London market, and coarse cheese, used chiefly for the King’s ships. Sprats are cured here and at “Swole, or Southole”, the next seaport, in the same way as herrings are cured at Yarmouth. “Speaking in their own language, they make red sprats; or, to speak good English, they make sprats red”. The trade is by “Walderswick, a little town near Swole”, the ruins of Dunwich having made the shore there unsafe for boats; and he quotes a “rude verse of their own using, and, I suppose, of their own making, as follows :”

Swoul and Dunwich, and Walderswick,
All go in at one lousie creek.

At this point he gets a smart hit at “our late famous atlas-maker”, who called the place a good harbour for ships, and a rendezvous of the royal navy.

At Southwold, on a Sunday, he found in that church, which he estimated as capable of receiving five or six thousand people, only twenty-seven worshippers, besides the parson and the clerk, while the meeting-house of the Dissenters was full to the very doors. Once he visited the place in October, and found the leads of the church and the roofs of the houses covered with swallows, weather-bound, the wind being on shore. In the night it shifted to the north-west, and next day not a swallow was left.

A few words suffice for Beccles, Bungay, Halesworth, Saxmundbam, Debenham, and Aye, or Eye. The experiment of feeding cattle and sheep on turnips was first made in these parts. People fancied that there would be a flavour in the meat, as in butter from turnip-fed cows, but they were entirely mistaken. Turkeys were bred to a very large extent, and driven to London to be killed. A person living at Stratford St. Mary had counted in one season 300 droves of turkeys passing over the Stour, which, at an average of 500 to a drove, amounted to 150,000 in all. Yet this, says Defoe, was one of the least passages, many more travelling by Newmarket, Sudbury, and Clare. Geese from Norfolk and. Suffolk were also brought up in droves, but not later than October, when the roads were too stiff for their webbed feet. To get the advantage of the later markets, a goose-cart was invented, four stories high, and for more comfortable travelling driven “with two horses abreast, like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that thus ride”. So with change of horses they would go some-times 100 miles in a day and night.

Though in many points of detail Defoe makes slips, yet his shrewd observations, as that “the pleasure of West Suffolk is much of it supported by the wealth of High Suffolk”, makes this reprint a grand threepenny-worth. His last Suffolk note is on the “most exquisite monument” of Chief Justice Holt, at Redgrave.

Though the events of the ’15 and the ’45 lie far away from our parts, one of the principal actors in the melancholy scene at Culloden was well known for a little while in North Suffolk. William, Duke of Cumberland, visited his secretary, Mr. Windham, at Earsham Hall, just across the border, hunted over the Suffolk side, gave Windham the Portugal laurels for the walks at the Hall, which were cut up in the severe frost of December 24, 1860, and (if I am not mistaken) is yet named on tavern signs.

1. By Messrs. Field and Tuer, The Leadenhall Press.
2. His second wife, Sarah Hatfield, who seems to have come from Tilney.
3. This abbreviated form of Mildenhall is not yet extinct, I believe.

No one ought to expect any pleasure from the annals of the Great Rebellion period. There is sensation enough in this chapter, chiefly the sensation of shame and degradation; records enough, the records of perverted efforts after Reverence, Truth and Righteousness. What is painful in every sense of the word to write can hardly be delectable reading. When men would do good, evil was present with them.

In the fierce heat of their controversy, the subtle aroma of the Teaching which was the Life of the world was evaporated, and the commonplace of regulations remained, changed a little in form, but the same in its inevitable necessity, the Westminster Directory instead of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is true that our local narrative will not set before us the gory battle-fields and blasted verdure of other counties. There is no Chalgrove Field, Cropredy Bridge, or Marston Moor in our bounds. The Suffolk heroes fell in scores and hundreds in these quarrels not their own, dying for God and the King, or for God and the Cause, or in many cases simply for their pay, all over the length and breadth of the land. Their names are irrecoverably gone. Old parchment registers record their baptism, perhaps their marriage, but not their burial. None the less, ay, all the more, for years and years the lonely cottage mourned the day when John or Harry was torn from the home never to be seen again.

Then the ruined manor-houses, the exiled rectors and vicars and their starving families, the desecrated churches on the one hand, and on the other the snipped ears of ecclesiastical convicts, the practical banishment of many a worthy man for conscience’ sake under the severity of episcopal rule, the ejectment of many another on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, present a picture with no tender neutral tints. The working of the devil is as plain through the whole accursed business as it is in the Ten Persecutions or in the funeral rites of the King of Dahomey.

An additional element of discomfort arises from the fact that this misery and disgrace was so largely the work of theologians, and from the apprehension that a theologian in treating of it may perpetuate the evil which he deplores. Yet should the perusal of the Long Parliament period deter any from the eager pursuit of an impossible ideal by the perception of what is inseparably bound up with that pursuit, our work will not be fruitless. Through the clouds the sun shines. The establishment of the British Constitution, the beneficent effect of Imperial England, the great United States of America, spring out of this seeming chaos. Powers of destruction work their dread work and quench themselves. “The remainder of wrath shalt Thou restrain”.

The Scotch had been treating by commissioners with Charles I. for some time before 1640, with the usual negative result when each side is bent on having its own way, and large contributions had been made for the royal service. The smallest were thankfully received, as we find from the Cratfield book, where the moderate sum of sixpence was thrice doled out, on March 28, 1640, to two “gentleman soldiers”, and afterwards to a “gentleman traveller with a pass which had great loss”, and again to three “gentleman soldiers with Sir Thomas Glembam’s hand to their pass”. “Many travellers” sent by Sir Thurston Smyth, on July 10, only bled the parochial authorities of eightpence among the “many”; but warily they handed over £3 to Mr. Eland, the Vicar, thus avoiding responsibility as to the disposal of it. Among the Suffolk names in the Army List of the expedition under the Earl of Northumberland against the Scotch, to join which these gentleman travellers were hasting, we find Peter Gleane, Lieutenant of the 15th Regiment, of the Southelmham family: Captain Thomas Cornewallis, from Brome, of the 18th; and Captain Thomas Pettus, from Chediston, of the 20th. In the autumn these gentlemen soldiers retired before their Presbyterian opponents, and shortly after the election scene under the elm at Ipswich a cessation of arms was agreed upon, and Dewes and Crane, Barnardiston and Parker, the two Bences, and the rest of the Suffolk burgesses, met their fellows from the other shires, cities, and towns of England, and in hot haste that work began which had to be repented of at leisure.

The Ipswich burgesses, John Gurdon of Great Wenham, and William Cage, one of their own portmen, who had a seat at Bungay, and was “reputed a wise man”, as Gipps testifies of him, had experienced some whetting of the anti-prelatical appetite under the episcopate of Matthew Wren, formerly Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who succeeded Bishop Corbet in 1635, and was translated to Ely in 1638. Though it pleased Harbottle Grimston to describe him in opprobrious terms, “the least of all these birds, but one of the most unclean”, after-ages will do him the justice to acknowledge that much that he was striving after was not at all in excess of common decency and propriety, without bringing in the vexed matter of any peculiar reverence due to places set apart for sacred purposes. In many Suffolk churches, which as yet have escaped the ecclesiastical decorative metal standards, there remain the Communion-rails of a well-known balustrade type, set so closely together that no dog should run between them, an arrangement which can hardly fail of commending itself to the unprejudiced mind. His zeal for pulpit cushions will seem a little strange to the admirers of the antependium of the present day. Other matters of greater importance, however, had claimed his episcopal care. No lecture had been held at Ipswich since Mr. Ward’s suspension, which evil might have been avoided by letting that worthy divine alone. Catechizing had fallen through, and, worse than all, half the churches in the town were unserved. Hence had come a commission under Clement Corbet, Doctor of Laws, the Bishop’s Vicar-General, and others, a riot, the hustling of the commissioners, and a bill of the Attorney-General against the bailiffs, burgesses, commonalty of Ipswich, William Cage, Esq., and twenty-one others. The rioters proclaimed that the Bishop’s own conduct had led to the churches being unserved, and that they had never been at such a pass since Queen Mary’s days. It was fever-heat. From high words they soon came to blows. Jonathan Skynner, a learned and conformable minister, being peaceably in the streets, was set upon by Philip Coatnell and others, struck with a cudgel, and threatened with a drawn knife, besides being called drunken parson, base knave, etc., by Thurston Ashley, who challenged him to fight. It was alleged that the authorities were cognizant of all this, and that Cage in particular, who lived close to Bishop Wren’s house, was aware that the house had been entered riotously, and Thomas Kidder-master, Stephen Sheppard, Richard Holland, and divers of his lordship’s servants, had been beaten and wounded; and yet, so far from any notice being taken of these unlawful deeds, there had been open encouragement and secret counsel given to the rabble. This kind of thing had brought about a remarkably unchristian and uncharitable feeling, and when such men as Cage on the one hand, and Sir Robert Crane on the other, met at Westminster, there would be no lack of mutual recrimination. Compliments would pass from one to the other in full-flavoured provincial dialect, not always comprehensible when the disputants came from distant shires; and the fuel being collected in abundance, and the flame already prepared to be applied to it, the grand conflagration came as a matter of course. It is time to lessen, if it may be, the reverence felt for the men of that day. They were in a measure victims to wicked sentiments beyond their control, but to some extent controllable had there been a desire to control them. But as to great virtues and remarkable godliness on either side, those may conscientiously believe in them that really find them, and do not unconsciously fabricate them. The wholesale destruction of peace and goodwill receives but a slender compensation in the occasional blaze o. some noble scene.

“It is well”, says the present Bishop of Peterborough¹⁰⁸, to abandon all illusions about the sixteenth century. There were strong men; there were powerful minds; but there was a dearth of beautiful characters. A time of revolt and upheaval is a time of one-sided energy, of moral uncertainty, of hardness, of unsound argument, of imperfect self-control, of vacillation, of self-seeking. It is difficult in such a time to find heroes, to discover a man whom we can unreservedly admire. The Church of Rome had fortified itself against attack by the Inquisition, and by the passionate zeal of the Society of Jesus, which soon degenerated into unprincipled intrigue. Calvin raised against it a massive system, which bound together the members of his community by an overpowering sense of their direct dependence on God through His particular election of each individual soul. Beside these two great systems all else seemed inconclusive, poor, feeble, and doomed to failure. Yet where in either of them was there place for the aspirations of the devout scholar, of the man who reverenced liberty, who believed in progressive enlightenment, who longed for an intelligent order of things in which the Christian consciousness should seek for spiritual truth? It was not merely by accident that the great scholar Isaac Casaubon ended his days in England, made happy by the society of Andrewes. It is significant of the temper of the times that the Puritans pelted him with stones in the street when they found that he was not a partisan on their side. Still,, despite this, Casaubon, with his vast learning and his wide experience of the Continent, found peace for his soul in England, which he called ” the isle of the blessed”. In it, despite all drawbacks, still lingered a reverence for knowledge, a love of truth, and a sense of the problems of the future”.

Few counties had been more remarkable for beautiful carving than Suffolk, and the churches of the county will long bear the marks of the commission acting by the authority of the Long Parliament, “for the defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altar-wise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments, and reliques of idolatry, out of all churches and chapels”. The Earl of Manchester received his commission as General of the Associated Eastern Counties in 1642, and William Dowsing of Laxfield, one of the visitors employed for this purpose in the following two years, has left his diary behind him. It is worth inquiry whether he was descended from the man of the same name and village who burned Noyes in Mary’s reign. The diary is a witness to the ignorance and conceit of that class of Puritan. Everything appeared superstitious to his narrow, ill-informed mind. The memorials of martyrs of the best-attested records, who had witnessed for the faith in fire and under the edge of the knife when Decius or Diocletian wore the imperial purple, had to perish because silly people in the Middle Ages had invested them with miraculous qualities. Because a bushel of St. Apollonia’s teeth (or, as some of our Roman friends say, teeth which had acquired the healing influence by contact with St. Apollonia’s teeth) had . been found in England at the Reformation, the very memorial of the pious old woman of Alexandria, whose teeth had been beaten out with a club, must perish. The wonder was that a picture in a family Bible, a title-page woodcut, an engraved capital letter,, was allowed to remain. The Saviour’s monogram was thought to be the “Jesuit’s badge”. How Dowsing found “1,000 superstitious pictures at Clare”, and, by a strange coincidence, the same number at King’s College, Cambridge, through which last, happily, he did not throw brickbats, and the rest of his acts, may be found in his own diary. It is really a blessing not to have room for the doings of this portentous clown, of whom the bitterest Puritan of the present day is probably ashamed.

Next comes the commission to inquire about “scandalous ministers”. It was a cruel choice of a day that the Earl of Manchester made (St. Matthias, February 24, 1643) for the appointment of these committees for Lincolnshire, Huntingdon, Essex, and Hertfordshire, though probably he did not notice it. The Suffolk committee followed on March 12. The examples of the Star Chamber and High Commission were followed in all the iniquity of their procedure, and surpassed by bringing into every district the vile office of an informer. “New Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large”. Let any man with the merest suspicion of love for civil and religious liberty, whether he be Conformist, Nonconformist, believer or unbeliever, read the accusations made, and if again he calls the Long Parliament “passionate lovers of liberty”, language will have lost its meaning. They wanted liberty for themselves and coercion for others, and to these ends they worked as eagerly as the most rigorous of the bishops, and far more effectually. A list, by no means perfect, of the ejected is to be found in Walker’s “Sufferings of the Clergy”, from which a few particulars are extracted: Aggas, Rector of Rushbrook, afterwards got his livelihood (such as it was) by his fiddle; Alcock, Rector of Brettenham, spoke lightly of the Parliament and declaimed earnestly against the rebellion; Ambler, Vicar of Wenhaston, refused to take the Covenant or assist in the rebellion; Dr. John Crofts, Rector of Barnham and West Stow, had nothing besides this alleged against him; Dalton, Rector of Dalham, was first driven by the troopers from his parish, and then had his living sequestrated for deserting his cure; Keeble of Ringshall, in addition to remarks about cobblers and tinkers in the pulpit, had in his house pamphlets against the Parliament, but none for it; Mayor of Finningham ridiculed Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, saying that all the speech he made was, “Sirs, shut the doors, lest wee get cold”; Jeremiah Raven, of Chattisham. and Blakenham, was a pluralist, malignant, Arminian, superstitious, and popishly affected. As though these crimes were too few, he was also an ale-househaunter. Dr. Robert Warren, of Long Melford, was turned out, according to Walker’s belief, as early as the latter end of August, 1641, when he was plundered of five very good horses and his household furniture. His case is therefore not to be charged on the Earl of Manchester. Among his offences was the revival of the use of the sanctus-bell, an instrument which was incapable of propagating Arminianism or any other “ism” contrary to Long Parliament theology. As he was returning home after being forced out of his pulpit, one of the party beat a frying-pan before him in derision, saying, “This is your saints’ bell”. As to the accusations about false doctrine, considering the source from which they are derived, they clearly cannot be assumed to be well grounded. Neither, again, can they fairly be dismissed as baseless. Nothing but such knowledge as is impossible for us can enable us to estimate the value of these charges. The same consideration affects the charges of immorality. Among the many cases, few are more remarkable than that of James Buck, B.D., Vicar of Stradbroke, of whom Walker gives the following account:

“About the beginning of the Rebellion, when he had been Vicar here upwards of Twenty Years, he was seized and carried Prisoner to Ipswich Jayl; in which Durance he was for a time allowed part of the Profits of his Vicaridge”. When this ceased he told the gaoler that he must live upon the allowance of the country.”This the jailer told him could never be, for the utmost Allowance was but a Penny per Diem for Bread and Water to drink”. To this he submitted for two months with an admirable result: “For whereas before he was Forty Years old he was so extremely afflicted with the gout that the Physicians did not believe he could live Two Years longer; his Constitution was by this Change of Diet and Abstemiousness so altered, that he never bad the gout after, but enjoyed great Degrees of Health, notwithstanding his being a very hard Student even till after Eighty Years of Age”. Another instance of the “survival of the fittest” is to be found at Ufford, near Woodbridge. The date of the Mandate of the Induction of Richard Lovekin, Clerk, to the rectory of that parish bears date June 2, 1631. It is recorded that in the Great Rebellion he was plundered of all his goods, except one silver spoon, which he hid in his sleeve. Yet he lived through the Commonwealth, renamed to his benefice at the Restoration, and performed his duties to the last, preaching on the Sunday before his death. He was buried September 23, 1678, in the one hundred and eleventh year of his age. In the First Century of Scandalous Ministers appear the following:

To judge from the registers, the new men appointed under the Earl of Manchester’s commission were as scholars far inferior to their predecessors. The fine, precise, clerkly hand generally gives place to an illiterate scrawl, and sometimes for years in large parishes there are very few entries. Births instead of baptisms, contracts of marriages before justices of the peace, and burials, amount to an insignificant number, which rises again when the Commonwealth chaos ends and the old order returns. The gentry of Suffolk were divided not very unequally between King and Cause, as far as I can judge. Sir Thomas Glemham of Little Glemham, belonging to the same family as the Elizabethan sea-rover, Edward Glemham, takes a prominent place among the Cavaliers. Clarendon describes him as of courage and integrity unquestionable, but not of a sufficiently stirring and active nature. The Yorkshire gentlemen procured his appointment as commander in York, and he justified their choice by holding Newcastle against the Scotch in January, 1644. After Marston Moor he had no choice but to surrender York on honourable conditions. “And so”, says Clarendon, “he marched with all his troops to Carlisle, which he afterwards defended with very remarkable circumstances of courage, industry, and patience”. Under which head the making drunk of two Scotch envoys sent to treat about surrender, as related by Tullie ¹⁰⁹, should be classed, is not manifest. Afterwards, though sorely vexed by the grant of the barony of Brandon, where some of his inheritance lay, to Sir Charles Gerrard, he still served his Sovereign faithfully, ruled Oxford for him, went into exile when he had compounded for his estate, and died in Holland in 1649- Colonel Robert Gosnold of Otley, who had married a daughter of Bishop Jegon’s, and Major Naunton of Letheringham, were acting under Glemham at Carlisle. Sir Sackville Glemham was an active Cavalier. Henry Glemham, D.D., survived the troubled times, became Bishop of St. Asaph in 1667, died two years afterwards, and lies in Little Glemham Church with his gallant brother. On the other side, the regicide William Heveningham of Heveningham may be named. The Heveninghams can be traced back far into the Middle Ages, but Gipps, who calls him a “daring monster”, notes with evident satisfaction that soon after the execution of Charles I.”the family wither’d and came to nothing”.

Intense grief was felt at the King’s execution, and that not only among Royalists, though they experienced the sharpest pangs. Francis Sancroft of Fressingfield, father of the Archbishop, died in the course of about three weeks, and his son evidently regarded sorrow as a main cause of the death. The Sunday following the execution was February 4, and the occurrence of Psalms xx. and xxi. in the morning service cheered the hearts of those who, amidst all turns of weal and woe, followed hereditary right. A portrait of the Archbishop, who was then a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was painted the next year, and remains at Gawdy Hall, the residence of John Sancroft Holmes, Esq., the representative of the family. It depicts William Sancroft as holding a Hebrew Bible open in his hand, and in Hebrew characters Tehilim, Caph, Caph Aleph (Psalms xx., xxi) may be clearly seen at the top of the page. Truly, the patience of the defeated party was tried. The events at Dunbar and Worcester put the young King far from them. Yet the hand of the victorious Puritan touched the county lightly in confiscation. There is a great paucity of Suffolk names in those acts. In the third of them, 1652, we find Thomas Webb, son to Roger Webb (of Long Parliament election fame, under the elm at Ipswich) of – – – (Ixworth no doubt fills the blank); Henry Fernes, late of Walderswick (sic); Thomas Allen of Laystuff, mariner (belonging probably to the Somerleyton family); and Anthony Mowsey of Cattam, deceased.

The dreary Commonwealth period passed away, and to do the ruling powers justice, there was a marked absence of that greed which distinguished the reign of Edward VI. Elizabethan church-plate remained unmelted, and bells, though perhaps loved but little, were let alone. In some instances there was recasting, and in one (Stansfield) an entirely new peal. This was in 1652, and the founder was Miles Graye the younger, whose father, of the same name – one of the best bell-founders England has ever seen – died in June, 1649, “weak in body and crased with age, but yet in p’fect mind and memory”. In the previous year the old man had witnessed the burning of his “capitall messuage” below Headgate, in Colchester ¹¹⁰.

A mighty wind arises on September 3, 1658. Tiles and chimney-pots are flying like hail. Trees which had witnessed many a vicissitude in human affairs meet their own great change. The spire of Whepstead Church comes down with a frightful crash, and in this turmoil of things material the iron spirit of Oliver Cromwell passes away. Public-house signs bearing the figure of a man defying the laws of gravitation by tumbling off the world, and designated Tumble-down Dick, still mark the derision which was excited by the collapse of Richard Cromwell. Meanwhile, the friends of Charles II. were actively, though secretly, working for him; and in Henham Hall the following letter to John Rous, shortly afterwards created a Baronet, attests the gratitude of the exiled prince :

Breda, 27 April, 1660

It is no newes to me to heare of your good affection, which I always promised my selfe from your family, yett I was very well pleased with the accounte this bearer brought to me from you, of the activity you have lately vsed for the promoting my interest, in which so many have followed the good example you gave, that I hope I and you and the whole nation shall shortly receave the fruite of it, and that I may give you my thankes in your owne country: in the meane time you may be confident I am, Your affectionate firinde,

CHARLES R.

Then comes the Restoration. The survivors of the gloomy days of Civil War, and subsequent liberty to do the will of the presiding Major-General, return to the old rectories and vicarages. James Fate comes back to Fressingfield, and Lionel Playters to Uggeshall. The registers show the old scholarly handwriting again, and baptisms, marriages, and burials are recorded as in the pre-Mancestrian days. Our acquaintance Buck of Stradbroke becomes Master of the Temple, and remains an everlasting monument of the benefits of total abstinence. The subscribers to the Solemn League and Covenant, as at Dennington, experience no qualms of conscience in expressing the utmost abhorrence of that famous instrument. Effigies of Oliver Cromwell and Hugh Peters, lists of the regicides, the Westminster Directory, the Covenant, and sundry other miscellaneous articles, were burnt by the hangman in a general infection of joy. Bury and Halesworth are prominent in this outburst of feeling.

Bishop Hall, in piety and pleasant wit inferior to no man of that period, after undergoing the afflictions recommended in his “Hard Measure”, had died in 1656, and the see of Norwich was filled by the learned and moderate Edward Reynolds, who died in 1676, and was buried at Norwich on August 9, with great state. To him succeeded Anthony Sparrow, of liturgical fame.

One institution, which remained till my early days, was certainly encouraged, if not set on foot, by Bishop Sparrow. This was the Bury Wednesday Lecture, largely attended by the families of wealthy farmers and others who went in to Bury market. The printed sheet remains at Hardwick Hall, dated 1685, and was published in the East Anglian ¹¹¹ by Mr. G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. The list for the year includes the names of Erasmus Warren, Rector of Worlington, author of “Geologia”; Dr. Battie., of Hitcham; Dr. Trumbull, of Hadleigh; Dr. Bisby, of Melford; Mr. Voyce, of Oakley, of whom Thomas Martin says, “I have his Life written by Mr. Bryars in MS”.; and other beneficed clergymen. It is signed by Thomas Burrough, Mayor; Martin Spensley and Robert Sharpe, Aldermen; Nicholas Clagett and Michael Batt, Ministers, who preached the first and second sermons of the year; and countersigned “Anth. Norw:”

Many have been the opinions as to the operation of the Act of Uniformity of 1662. One thing, however, admits of little dispute – there was no desire to retain the Puritans. The insertion of Bel and the Dragon in the Lectionary is sufficient proof of this, for it is incredible that any admiration should be excited by that graphic Apocryphal story of which we are so happily rid. Of the 2,000 ejected on St. Bartholomew’s Day, about an average number seem to have belonged to Suffolk, and their cases are involved in much obscurity.

Where the incumbent expelled by the Long Parliament was alive, he generally took possession of his old place without question. Otherwise, many difficulties would arise about the ordination and nomination of the Parliamentary incumbent, and some of these difficulties. might be insuperable. It seems strange that any additional complication, even the smallest, should have been introduced, much more Bel and the Dragon, etc.

A solution for the conformity problem was found by William Gurnall, M.A., an Emmanuel man, who held the vicarage of Lavenham, author of the treatise, “The Christian in Compleat Armour”. Unable personally to don the abhorred surplice, he had a curate to whom all surplice work was delegated, while his own ministrations were confined to the pulpit and pastoral visiting. It appears from this book ¹¹² that he had no objection to the ring in marriage.

Immediately after the Restoration a new Order of knighthood of the Royal Oak was instituted by Charles II., which soon fell into abeyance. To the ribbon was to be appended a silver medal, with a device of the King in an oak. There were seventeen Suffolk knights of this Order, Charles Stutteville, Esq., of Dalham, by Newmarket; Captain Bennett, Esq.; Sir Edmund Poley, Knight; John Warner, Esq.; Richard Cooke, Esq.; Joseph Brand, Esq. (of Edwardston, Knight); Edmund Sheppard, Esq.; Clement Higham, Esq.; Roger Kedington, Esq.; John Gibbes, Esq.; John Brookes, Esq.; Richard Style, Esq.; William Barker, Esq.; Randal Williams, Esq.; Henry Warner, Esq.; Robert Crane, Esq. Of these, the first and last had estates of £1,500 a year, and the rest £1,000 a year, except Kedington and Gibbes, who had £800, and Style, Barker and Williams, who had £600.

In 1665 our quarrels with the Dutch, mainly on this Occasion about the African and North American colonies, resulted in war. Our fleet blockaded their ports for a while, but the east wind drove it to sea, and the Dutch came out. A battle ensued off the Suffolk coast, sometimes called the battle of Lowestoft, ending in the defeat of the Dutch. In it Lord Muskerry, of the Deane family, was killed. The Duke of York, a young man of thirty two, nominally commanded. In the course of the next few years he avowed himself a Roman Catholic, and the alliance with France was carried out. It was determined to pick a quarrel with the Dutch, and the withdrawal of Sir William Temple from the Hague afforded a slender opportunity. But the instructions given to the captain of the yacht sent to bring Lady Temple home, offensive as they were, were frustrated by the conciliatory attitude of the Dutch Admiral. After diplomatic iniquity in 1671, and naval violence early in 1672, England declared war, alleging injuries to the Indian Company, disavowed by the company; detention in Surinam of some Englishmen, who declared that they remained of their own accord; the yacht affair; and lastly the existence of a portrait of Cornelius de Wit, at Dort, with burning ships in the background, which were construed to glorify the Dutch in the Medway. The battle of “Sowle” (the common abbreviation of Southwold) Bay, the roar of which was heard throughout the county, took place on May 28 and following days. Cannon-balls are sometimes dredged up off this part of the coast, which probably were fired in the heat of this engagement; and the Red Lion at Martlesham is a figure-head of one of the ships engaged¹¹³.

The reaction came, and the hatred of the nation was turned against Rome and France. To judge from the names of the Suffolk knights and burgesses of the Caroline Parliaments, there was rather a change in the opinions than in the personality of the men returned. Indeed, we find a prominent Suffolk man, Archbishop Sancroft, in 1681, requiring from his suffragans a “wholesome seueritie” against Popish recusants, which would have had the effect of driving out of the kingdom that same Prince for whose cause eight years later the Archbishop was content to depart from Lambeth and end his days in Fressingfield. So hard is it to be consistent!

The death of Archbishop Sheldon in 1677 had taken him by a bound from the deanery of St. Paul’s to the Primacy. He was regarded as a quiet, studious man who would not trouble himself to resist Court abuses, but the detail of his life shows that he had been quite misread. Resistance to Rome was as active a principle in him as resistance to the Covenant. Grave and decorous, a bachelor without a family to keep, and blessed with private means, he remembered Emmanuel, the college of his education, and Fressingfield, his native village, both in life and death. When the Court tried to force the disreputable Leopold Finch into a Fellowship at All Souls’, the Archbishop, as visitor, backed up the college in its opposition, and frustrated the attempt. When the laws and liberties of England were in jeopardy through the illegal Declaration of Indulgence, he headed six of his suffragans in disobedience to the mandate of James II. His connection with the county, however, after the days of his youth is chiefly as a Nonjuror. Euston, once the home of a branch of the Rookwoods, passed to Henry Fitzroy, a natural son of Charles II., by his marriage with Isabella, only child of Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, who had purchased the Hall. He was created in 1672 Baron. of Sudbury, Viscount Ipswich, and Earl of Euston, and three years afterwards Duke of Grafton. Of all Charles’s children he bore the best-regarded name, for whatever his principles or absence of them might have been, there was no question of his courage. He had served in the navy, and had the plain, blunt bearing which marks the sailor’s calling. Of this he gave proof when James II twitted him for his conduct at the Revolution. The Court was all agitation after the landing of William of Orange. Nineteen peers who had signed a petition to the King to call a Parliament brought the petition into his presence. Grafton’s signature stood next to Sancroft’s. James turned on his nephew, asking him how he dared to pretend to have a conscience. Burnet records that he answered that, though he had little conscience, yet he was of a party that had conscience. Bluntness does not always mean sincerity, and Grafton’s protestation of devotion, made a day or two before this scene, was followed by desertion directly afterwards. He was killed by a shot at the siege of Cork in 1690.

In 1682 a truly noble lady, who “went with the century”, died at Cockfield Hall in Yoxford – Lady Elizabeth Brooke, a sister of the Lord Culpepper who was among the best counsellors of Charles I. Her funeral sermon was printed, and a copy remains in the library of Sir Ralph Blois, with a collection of aphorisms taken from her own manuscript. No one can read them without being impressed with the high qualities both of intellect and heart possessed by this remarkable woman, who in all vicissitudes retained her calm trust in her Creator, and amidst exasperating discussions remained unruffled in spirit.

From these family notices we pass to a picture of municipal life in Sudbury presented to us in our county Archaeological Proceedings¹¹⁴.

It is April, 1665, and Mr. John Catesby, the Mayor, the favourer of certain Dissenters who meet in a barn, is about to resign his office. He is robed in scarlet, and the twenty-four burgesses appear in their murrey gowns. After proclamation made, the two serjeants, ceremoniously kissing their maces, deliver them to the Mayor, who repeats the kiss. The Steward then asks the Mayor, having thanked him for his services in the past year, whether he will surrender the maces to the newly-elected Mayor. The old Mayor solemnly answers “Yea”, and delivers the maces, to the Steward, who again kisses them. The new Mayor is then sworn in and takes his seat. Then the petty officers are sworn, amongst whom, not the least important, are the overseers of the poultry market, flesh market, and fish market. Those of the flesh market are to see that butchers do not “sell rotten mutton, measled pork, morryn flesh, or unwholesome meate of any sorte. They are to p’sent all such p’sons as shall kill, or allow to be killed, or offer to selle any bull’s flesh which hath not before been well and sufficiently bayted accordynge to the aunciente orders, decrees, and customs of this Kingdom”. The Hayward, or Hogwarden, and the freemen depasturing cattle on the common lands having been sworn, the court is closed in ancient form; and amongst other improving occupations for the people in the afternoon is the baiting of the bull, for the improvement of his flesh, in spite of the worshippers in the barn, of whom Macaulay rather cruelly said that they objected to bull-baiting, not because it gave the bull pain, but because it gave the spectators pleasure.

Notes:

1. Lecture delivered at All Hallows, Barking, on Laud’s position in the history of the Church of England, January 10, 1895.
2. Ferguson’s “Cumberland”, p. 261.
3. See my “Church Bells of Suffolk”, p. 119.
4. N. S., iii. 188.
5. P. 179.
6. See Chamber’s “Cyclopaedia”, 1892, art.”Signboards”.
7. Vol. viii. 1, etc.

Newmarket, as many of my readers will know, is a town sacred to that animal which is counted but a vain thing to save a man. It is situated partly in Suffolk and partly in Cambridgeshire, the main street being the county boundary. The north parish, St. Mary’s, and the village of Exning, which is possibly the “old market”, form a little Suffolk island in Cambridgeshire. Indeed there is, I believe, one point where this insulated fragment touches the main county. The open country all round it has always made it a great place for sport, and so it was in the days of the first Stuart King, before sport was sullied by that quasi-financial element which has caused gold and silver to flow on the whole less from knaves to fools than from fools to knaves.

James I. loved Newmarket as he loved flattery, theological discussion in which he was bound to win, and much else. On one occasion, hunting the buck, he roamed over the Freckenham-Icklingham-Elveden district till he reached the very parts over which we have just seen William Kemp performing his morrice, and came to Thetford. Royal visits to Suffolk have not been so numerous as to allow us to omit this one, little as there is to be said about it.

Of course, these journeys of royal personages were performed in the most comfortable and luxurious style that the age could afford – very different from the mode of travelling experienced by the King’s subjects. Carriers, whose carts formed the chief means of locomotion, were, in consequence, men of great importance, and well known in districts through which they worked. Besides conveying passengers, delivering parcels and letters, they brought the news from the great metropolis by word of mouth. One can easily imagine groups of men, anxious about political affairs, waiting in the yard of some inn to pick up some scraps of news from the carrier.

No doubt many an otherwise weary hour has been happily spent by passengers on their way to London in discussing the probable state of affairs in the political world on their arrival; or, on the return journey, in airing opinions as to how matters ought to have been carried out.

We may remember Milton’s two monographs on the Cambridge carrier, “Old Hobson, who sickened in the Time of his Vacancy; being forbid to go to London, by reason of the Plague”. The termination of each is full of suggestion:

“Hobson has supt, and’s newly gone to bed.”

And

” His letters am deliverld all and gone,
Only remains this superscription”.

John Taylor, “for the good use of the whole commonwealth”, published in 1637 the “Carrier’s Cosmography”, so that “if a man at Constantinople or some other remote part or region shall chance to send a letter to his parents, master, or friends that dwell at Nottingham, Derby, or any other town in England; then this book shall give instructions where the Carriers do lodge that may convey the said letter, which could not easily be done without it”.

In the whole of Suffolk he mentions but seven places from which carriers start for London, namely, Bury, Coggeshall¹⁰², Hadley, Ipswich, Melford, Sudbury, and Wallingfield.

The Carriers of Bury, or St. Edmund’s Bury, in Suffolk, do lodge at the Dolphin without Bishopsgate Street. They come on Thursdays.

The Waggons of Bury, or Berry, in Suffolk, do come every Thursday to the sign of the Four Swans in Bishopsgate Street.

A Foot Post doth come from the said Bury every Wednesday to the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate Street; by whom letters may be conveyed to and fro.

The Carrier of Coggeshall in Suffolk doth lodge at the Spread Eagle in Gracious Street. He comes and goes on Thursdays and Fridays.

Carriers from Hadley in Suffolk do lodge at the George in Lombard Street. They come on Thursdays.

The Carriers of Ipswich in Suffolk do lodge at the sign of the George in Lombard Street. They do come on Thursdays.

The Post of Ipswich doth lodge at the Cross Keys in Gracious Street. He comes on Thursdays, and goes on Fridays.

The Carriers of Melford in Suffolk do lodge at the Spread Eagle in Gracious Street. They come and go on Thursdays and Fridays.

The Carriers of Sudbury in Suffolk do lodge at the Saracen’s Head in Gracious Street. They do come and go on Thursdays and Fridays.

The Carriers of Wallingfield in Suffolk do lodge at the Spread Eagle in Gracious Street. They come and go on Thursdays and Fridays.

A further direction about Ships, Barks, Hoys and Passage Boats gives the following information: “He that will send to Ipswich in Suffolk, or Lynn in Norfolk, let him go to Dice Key, and there his turn may be served”. John Jegon, D.D., was Bishop of Norwich from 1602 to 1618. He had ruled the unruly spirits at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with something more than persuasion. The union of repair of building and corporal punishment once brought forth this epigram, written on the screen:

Doctor Jegon, Bene’t College Master, Broke the scholars! heads, and gave the walls a plaster;

to which he replied:

Knew I but the lad who writ this verse in bravery,
I’d commend him for his wit, and whip him for his knavery.

Doubtless he was a man qualified to subject recusants., Roman and sectary, and for sixteen years he presided over the diocese. Then came Dr. John Overall, honourably known in relation to the Church Catechism. He died in the year following that of his appointment, when Dr. Samuel Harsnet was translated from Chichester to Norwich.

He was a native of Colchester, and his fine library, preserved in the castle of that town, testifies to his filial regard for his birthplace. From what we can learn of him, he seems to have been a genial, hospitable man, rather given to state and ceremonial, something tedious and extravagant in his eloquence. The fine brass to his memory in Chigwell Church is well known to collectors. He survived James I. about three years.

If the lot of the recusant sectary was hard, he had at least the satisfaction of seeing his deadliest enemy, the Roman recusant, under a harder yoke. In the last chapter we had a glimpse of the two houses of Rookwood, at Coldham Hall in Stanningfield, and at Euston,, and we saw how the scions of the former house were kept well away from home at the time of the inquisition in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. Ambrose, a younger son, must have been a young man at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, but life is not all measured by years. In those evil days the blossom of youth withered early, and men became old in the worst qualities of age before their judgments reached maturity. Such was Ambrose Rookwood’s case, according to his own account of himself. Yet it must not be our function to sit in Pharisaical judgment on the man of gentle birth, exiled from the beautiful home which his father had built, trained to regard as loathsome “heretics” all the authorities in Church and State, associating with men of his own faith rendered desperate by exactions and sufferings, fearing in every stranger some disguised pursuivant or Star Chamber spy, fervent in prayer, and taught to regard himself as a confessor for the Faith, in whose behalf the Virgin Mother of the Saviour was exerting her omnipotent influence. Such was this Stanningfield youth, who fell in with that restless adventurer, Robert Catesby, older than himself, and a participator in Essex’s rebellion.

“He had been neither author nor actor”, said he at his trial, “but only persuaded and drawn in by Catesby, whom he loved above any worldly man; and that he had concealed it, not from any malice to the person of the King or to the State, or for any ambitious prospects of his own, but only drawn from the tender regard and the faithful and dear respect he bore to Mr. Catesby his friend, whom he esteemed more than anything in the world”.

Catesby did not think fit to trust him with the detail of the Gunpowder-Plot at first, the running short of funds being the cause of his drawing in Rookwood, Grant, and Francis Tresham, of whom the last is the well-known divulger of the plot. November 4, 1605, saw Catesby ride off in the afternoon of the “brief November day” for the Midland rendezvous of the conspirators. At midnight Fawkes emerged from his retreat and was arrested. The last of the band to stay in London was Rookwood. His appearance would not be likely to attract attention. He tarried till noon of the memorable 5th, to gather up the latest talk. Then he galloped off by Highgate and Finchley. On that common be picked up Keyes, who parted from him at Turvey. Pursuing his course, he came up with his great ideal, Catesby, at Brickbill, with whom was John Wright. Soon afterwards they overtook Percy and Christopher Wright, and the exhausted five arrived about six o’clock in the evening. Rookwood had actually ridden eighty miles since noon.

On the night of the 7th they were at Holbeach in Warwickshire, where our Suffolk man participated in the agony and terror caused by the explosion of the powder which had been placed before the fire to dry. This catastrophe converted him and some of his companions, who, “perceiving God to be against them, prayed before the picture of Our Lady, and confessed that the act was so bloody, as they desired God to forgive them”. We need not dwell on his execution. The day was January 31, and the place Westminster. Thomas Winter, amongst the most sanguinary; Keyes, amongst the most resolute of the misguided men; Fawkes, the very hand of the conspiracy; and Rookwood, only entering on the prime of life, suffered in the accustomed manner, unworthy of the meanest savages. To this end had reciprocal bigotry brought the boy who had sported with his brothers so often in the new and spacious chambers of Coldharn Hall. Now comes the Emerald Isle into contact with our county, and the red hand of Ulster is seen on the carriage of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Baronet, of Redgrave Hall. Not that the skill of the interpreter could rightly divine its signification. Mr. Rye records that one rural Oedipus of later days had a truly original reading of the riddle, regarding it as a symbol of disgrace because one of that family once flogged a boy to dead. The intent of the new order was to provide for the defence of Ulster, it is hardly necessary to say, and for this purpose each newcreated baronet engaged to support thirty foot soldiers for three years; but this arrangement soon fell through, and at the present day the reasons for granting baronetcies are more than one would care to particularize. Among the earlier creations from the county are Lionel Tollemache of Helmingham, Henry Felton of Playford, Thomas Bishop of Parham, John Barker of Grimston Hall in Trimley, and Thomas Playters of Sotterley. The earldom of Suffolk was revived in 1603 in the person of Thomas, Lord Howard of Walden, and his descendants have held it ever since, not that the title bears with it anything more than the mere name. It is remarkable that the majority of Suffolk people seem sceptical as to its existence. The Puritan troubles arise from causes interlaced the one with the other in a way which seems to defy disentanglement. Government, ceremonial, abstract doctrine, concrete morals, are by no means in themselves simple elements to deal with, and each might require the patience and moderation of several generations to bring about a result which would hold the main body of Christians together.

The Presbyterian objected to diocesan episcopacy, though it is beyond conception what episcopacy without local circumscription could practically mean. Cartwright maintained that archbishops and archdeacons should be abolished, as unscriptural, though it would be hard to find Scriptural authority for the Calvinistic classical presbyteries. As to ceremonial, Oedipus himself, had he been a Theban Christian, would have given up the riddle. The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination was held as absolute truth, and this by the most rigorous Churchmen as well as by the most rugged Nonconformists, by Whitgift as well as by Hacker and Copping.

A better agreement might have been looked for in morals. It will not, however, be found. Among the questions which came to the front and demanded some kind of solution was the manner of observance of the Lord’s Day, the Christian Sabbath.

It was no new difficulty. Dr. Bound, in 1595, had deduced from the injunction of the seventh day’s rest the putting aside of usual studies or worldly business, and the recreations of the week, such as shooting, fencing, and bowling. The Mosaic code simply enjoins rest from labour as the sanctification of the Sabbath; but there is a well-known passage in the prophet Isaiah which bears on the other part of the subject. Bound may have drawn the line too stringently¹⁰³; nevertheless, the experience of after-ages¹⁰⁴ has confirmed much of his teaching, and the quiet cheerfulness of the English Sunday needs no apology here.

However, for weal or for woe, came forth in 1618 “The King’s Majesty’s Declaration to his Subjects concerning Lawful Sports to be used”. He refers to a similar declaration made in Scotland, and to the calumnies which Papists had sown in Lancashire, saying that “no honest mirth or recreation is lawful in our Religion”, whereof came discontent, absence of exercise necessary for those who should be wanted in war, and filthy tipplings, with idle and discontented speeches in alehouses. To remedy this condition of things, a jolly and sportive spirit was enjoined by royal authority, and those who were not of this frame of mind, whether from simple disinclination, or from opinion of the jeopardy of the soul in case of compliance, were informed that they might leave the country if they did not like it – very much the language of a certain member for Sussex at the time of the Reform Bill. It did not seem to occur to James I., or to his really estimable and most unhappy son, that arguments which appeared to them irrefragable could fail to be so to others. Not only the Bishop of the diocese, but the “inferior Churchmen” (parochial clergy), and even the churchwardens, were to instruct the ignorant and reform the misled; failing these methods, to report the incorrigible for pupishment.

The unfortunate precisian was now hit doubly. He had to go to church and hear a priest of Baal, decked in a Popish surplice, read from a book a formal and frigid service, witness the rite of Baptism desecrated by the superstitious use of the cross, and, on occasion, couples married with a ring of some “ethnic and idolatrous” origin. After emerging from these dread scenes, worse was in store for him. Lads and lasses who had been to church were incurring perdition by Sabbath-breaking, and he must either miserably partake of their sins, or be hauled by some unneighbourly churchwarden or constable.

The Roman recusant had only to drink the first half of this cup of misery. The meditative and retiring Churchman of the George Herbert type shared only the second with his Puritan opponent. There was a crass grimness in the regulation which forbade the enjoined sports to the inflexible sectary who could not bring himself to go to church. Let the recreation part of the proclamation speak for itself. Putting its religious aspect aside, it is a monument of that kingcraft on which James I. prided himself:

Our Pleasure is, That after the end of Divine Service, Our good People be not disturbed, letted or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as Dancing (either men or women), Archery for men, Leaping, Vaulting, or any other such harmless recreations; nor from having of May Games, Whitsun Ales, and Morris Danc-es; and the setting up of May Poles, and other Sports therewith used : so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of Divine Service. And, That women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decoying (decorating) of it, according to their old custom. But withal, We do here account still as prohibited, all unlawful games, to be wed upon Sundays only; as Bear and Bull baitings, Interludes : and, at all times, in the meaner sort of people by Law prohibited, Bowling. And, likewise, We bar from this benefit and liberty, all such known Recusants, either men or women, as will abstain from coming to Church or Divine Service: being, therefore, unworthy of any lawful recreation after the said Service, that will not first come to the Church, and serve GOD. Prohibiting, in like sort, the said recreation to any that, though conforme (conformable) in Religion, are not present in the Church, at the Service of GOD, before their going to the said recreations. Our pleasure likewise is, That they to whom it belongeth in Office, shall Present, and sharply punish all such, as its abuse of this Our liberty, will use these exercises before the ends of all Divine Services for that day. And We, likewise, straitly command, That evety Person shall resort to his own Parish Church to hear Divine Service; and each Parish, by itself, to use the said recreation after Divine Service. Prohibiting likewise, Any offensive weapons to be carried or used its the said times of recreation. And, Our Pleasure is, That this Our Declaration shall be Published by order from the Bishop of the diocese, through all the Parish Churches; and that both Our judges of Our Circuit, and Our justices of Our Peace be informed thereof.

Given at Our Manor of Greenwich, the four and twentieth day of May [1618] in the sixteenth year of Our reign of England, France, and Ireland; and of Scotland, the one and fiftieth. God save the King V

The first Parliament of Charles I. passed an Act punishing with fines and the stocks those who frequented these assemblies. In spite of this, the proclamation was again published by royal authority, October 18, 1633, to the general displeasure of the country.
In the diary of John Rous, Rector of Santon Downham, an exceedingly small parish on the heaths between Brandon and Thetford, the second proclamation is recorded without note or comment, and that in spite of his general goodwill to his Sovereign. Somehow the Sunday sports did not altogether die out. Old Mr. James Gower, of the Uplands, Bungay, whom I knew thirty-six years ago as a very old man, told me that his father could remember the football after morning prayer at Alburgh, just over the Norfolk border, the parson coming to look on at the game.

It was a quarrelsome time in truth, but there are signs enough of material prosperity. Houses, rather intended for comfort than for show, sprang up all over the country. Money was spent in considerable amounts over large square pews, for which faculties were obtained in the episcopal courts, wherein the squire could compose himself to slumber should the sermon be prolonged beyond the usual length. Some of the Jacobean and Caroline carving, particularly in pulpits and chimney-pieces, is deservedly noted, and the stacks of chimneys remain in great numbers, indicating much of a wholesome love for home. Very often a double cottage, or even a single one, let to some pauper whose rent is partially discharged by means of a subscription list, headed and written by the Rector, has in its chimneys the decaying memorial of some family of repute in its day. Those names, now unknown in their old districts, are sometimes found flourishing in other parts of England, and still more frequently in the United States of America. Indeed, the bond between East Anglia and the eastern seaboard of North Americas Furdurstrandi, was being constantly strengthened. A trifle sent from Weybread, a mere two shillings, in 11618, is a sign of this. In that year in Virginia there was a great drought, and afterwards “such a cruell storme of haile, which did such spoile both to the Corne and Tobacco, that wee reaped but small profit”. I take this little Weybread item, which I lighted on, as the type of many another. A comforting sum, made up of such small amounts, reached Virginia the next year by the Margarett of Bristol. It is refreshing to find constant traces of the non-polemical side of Christianity.

There is no name more honourably regarded in the early annals of New England than that of Winthrop, a corruption of Winthorpe. Certainly, Adam de Winthorp wag the grantee of the manor of Groton, which had belonged to Bury Abbey, in 1548. The family probably took its name from a village in the Lincolnshire marshes, north of Wainfleet, just about the most easterly extension of that county into the German Ocean. In 1588 John Winthrop was born at Groton. He was educated for the law, and, being a young man of ability and high character, was placed in the commission of the peace when he was only eighteen years of age, in the same year which witnessed the execution of Ambrose Rookwood. Stanningfield and Groton are in different districts, and the young men probably never met. After the Mayflower settlement had become a little consolidated and expanded, under the name of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop was summoned to be their Governor, and he landed in the bay with the first charter in 163o, having sold the Groton property to Thomas Waring. He passes thus from Suffolk, and we can only advert to his “Life and Letters” edited by his esteemed and gifted descendant, Robert Charles Winthrop, LL.D., a prominent Massachusetts politician, who was born at Boston in 1809, and died there in November, 1894, leaving two sons who still represent this Lincoln-Suffolk-New-England house.

Another name not to be passed over is that of Sir Simonds Dewes of Stowlangtoft, the antiquary, and friend of Sir Robert Cotton. He inherited Stow Hall from his father, who purchased the estate in 1614. The family was of good Low Country blood, being descended from the lords of Kessel in Guelderland. Adrian Dewes migrated from the Low Countries to England in troublous times. His son Geerardt, the antiquary’s grandfather, became a printer in Paul’s Churchyard, and acquired the manor of Gains in Upminster. Paul Dewes, father of the antiquary, was one of the six Clerks in Chancery, and married Cecilia, only daughter of Richard Simonds, of Coaxden, in Chardstock, Dorset, which manor, together with other property, Simonds Dewes derived from his grandfather. He was born at Coaxden in 1602, and spent his young childhood there, being schooled successively by the Rev. Richard White, of Chardstock, and one Malaker, of Wambrook, an adjoining village. In 1614 he left the West Country, never to return, and was transferred to the care of one Reynolds, in St. Mary Axe, whose daughter he esteemed more learned than her father, and whom he left after two years for Bury School. In 1618 he went into residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge, as a Fellow commoner, having as his tutor Richard Holdsworth, sometime Gresham Professor of Theology. Throughout his life Simonds Dewes was devoutly, dogmatically religious, much given to the hearing (and even the composition) of sermons, and a very diligent student. During his Cambridge course his mother died, and he himself was within an ace of losing his life by being drawn up in ringing a bell that hung in the gateway of St. John’s. In August, 1620, he became a student of the Middle Temple, having been admitted a member of the Inn nine years before, and was called to the Bar in June, 1623. From the commencement of his law studentship Dewes applied himself diligently to legal studies, tempered liberally with researches into ancient records, which latter pursuit became the passion (if so self-restrained a character could be deemed passionate) of his life, his ample prospects rendering it unnecessary for him to follow up the law as a means of gain. Dewes was twice married, first in 1626 to Anne, daughter of Sir William Clopton, of Liston’s Hall, Essex, and of Kentwell Hall, in Long Melford parish, she being then scarce fourteen years old; and secondly to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir H. Willoughby, of Risley, Derbyshire. He left male issue by his second wife. Dewes was knighted by King Charles I. at Whitehall in 1630, and made a baronet in 1641- On his death in 1650 his son, Willoughby Dewes, succeeded him at Stow Hall. The labours of Dewes’ life had amassed a great and valuable library of papers and manuscripts, to which he made special reference in his will, desiring that it be preserved entire and accessible to “all lovers of learning of known virtue and integrity”. Through the medium of Humphrey Wanley, librarian to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, the library was acquired by that great collector at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “the then owner, a second Sir Simonds Dewes, taking small personal interest in the collection, and believing that his ancestor’s wishes would be satisfied by its finding a home in the Harleian Collection. With the death of Sir Jermyn Dewes in 1731 the Dewes baronetcy became extinct

We possess an intimate account of Dewes’ childhood and early manhood, written. by himself about 1638, and published in 1845 by the late James Orchard Halliwell, from the manuscript in the Harleian Collection, which, besides narrating the passages of his life, great and small, from childish tumbles at Coaxden to matrimonial negotiations conducted in very sober, business-like fashion, contains constant reference to public events, in which he took an active part. He was returned for Sudbury in the year of his shrievalty, with the Cavalier Sir Robert Crane. In politics he might have been described, had the word been then coined, as a steadfast Constitutionalist. He deplored the vice and corruption of the Court, and took a decided view of the illegality of the ship-money exaction. At one time, when grieving for the loss of his then only son, the idea crossed his mind of migrating to America. As the breach between Charles I. and the people widened, Dewes adhered to the Parliamentary side, and signed the Covenant. Yet he both wrote and spoke against extreme dealings with the King, and was turned out of the House in “Pride’s Purge” (December, 1648), soon after which he died.

In religion, Dewes was a Puritan, devout to austerity., addicted to private fasting and self-humiliation, and unfeignedly abhorrent of all that savoured of Popery, though stopping short of the extreme views of many of his day. His character is tersely and not unfairly summed up by Carlyle in these words :

A man of sublime Antiquarian researches, Law-learning, human and divine accomplishments, and generally somewhat Grandisonian in his ways; a man of scrupulous Puritan integrity, of high-flown conscientiousness, exactitude and distinguished perfection; ambitious to be the pink of Christian country-gentlemen and magistrates of counties; really a most spotless man and High sheriff. ¹⁰⁵

From his earliest years Dewes took an assiduous interest in the public events of the day, and his autobiography is replete with his reflections on the times.

Besides three sisters, Dewes had one brother, Richard, younger than himself, to whom he was strongly attached. The letters, etc, which have come down to us concerning Richard Dewes figure him as cast in a more robust mould than his brother. He spent a good deal of his early manhood on the Continent, and joined the King’s forces when the open rupture came. Some of the letters which passed between them about this time are touching in their terms, the younger brother affectionately essaying to induce the elder to follow him, and adhere to the King. Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Dewes was killed by a cannon-shot at Reading.

Sir Edward Coke, too, was not unknown in Suffolk, though a Norfolk man by birth and burial. He was Lord of the Manor of Thorington, and in the register of that parish is a memorandum of the gift of the bell by him and his wife, Bridget (née Paston), in 1598. The bell yet remains, and the inscription on it shows that it was made for Wanstead in Essex two years before that date.

This Bridget Paston was the only child of John Paston, of Sporle, in Norfolk, by Anne Moulton, widow of Nicholas Smith, of Huntingfield Hall, a woman whose bountiful disposition is noted on her monument. During Edward Coke’s first conjugal life, the plague in London in the summer of 1592 drove him from his official duties in town, as Solicitor-General, to seek refuge in Huntingfield. Bridget Coke died in 1598, having become the mother of ten children; and nineteen weeks after her decease, Coke, now Attomey-General, espoused one of Burghley’s sisters, the widow of Sir William Hatton.

East Anglia continued to be a home for jurists for ages. Elizabeth’s “Good judge”, Clench, married the heiress of Almot of Creeting, and settled at Hollesley, where his eldest son, Thomas, dwelt. Another son, Almot Clench, planted large hop-grounds, but it greatly weakened his estate. Thomas Clench was Knight of the Shire with Sir Robert Crane of Chilton in the third Parliament of James I., elected 1620. They succeeded Sir Henry Bedingfeld and Sir Robert Drury, the knights of the shire in the “Addled Parliament” of 1614. Those were the early days of “benevolences”. The men of “Addled” notoriety were sent about their business after two months’ ineffective session, because they questioned this manner of taxation. Their successors were -treated in the same way early in 1622, but the impost continued. The small parish of Cratfield paid in this year £3 “for a Benevolence or Gratuity to the King”, induced thereto, perhaps, by the hope that he would go to war in behalf of his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine. Religion was at the root of most of these troubles, external as well as internal. The very next item in the Cratfield book is £2 towards the relief of poor French Protestants “refuged hither for their conscience”.

There were Puritans and Puritans, of course. Some, zealous for pure doctrine and clean life, regarded government and externals as in comparison of minor moment. Others have been so often described and so often caricatured that the less said about them the better. Among the former was that famous Ipswich preacher, Samuel Ward, whose portrait yet remains in the town-hall. Though thus more constantly brought under public notice, neither he, nor his brothers Nathaniel and John, were regarded as on a par with their father, John Ward, of Haverhill, Writtle in Essex, Bury St. Edmunds, and elsewhere.

Ful.ler says that the sons named “put together would not make up the abilities of their father”, of whom the great Dr. Whitaker, Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, recorded his opinion in the emphatic words, “Give me John Ward for a text”. Cooper ¹⁰⁶ regards the father as identical with one of the name who matriculated at Christ’s College as a Sizar in April, .1579. This is doubted by Mr. John Ward Dean ¹⁰⁷, because the son Samuel must have been born about 1577. It is hardly possible that in Elizabeth’s time a married man should be a Sizar. Though the father was buried at Haverhill, he describes himself in his will as “Preacher of God’s woord in Bury Ste. Edmond”. Samuel Ward was a native of Haverhill, a scholar of St. John’s, and a Fellow of Sidney, Cambridge, vacating his fellowship by marriage with a widow named Bolton, of Isleham, just over the Cambridgeshire border, about which time (1604-5) he was appointed Town Preacher at Ipswich, and shortly afterwards licensed by Bishop Jegon as a preacher throughout the diocese of Norwich. Wodderspoon, in his “Memorials of Ipswich”, gives these particulars as to his office:

Mr. Ward’s stipend as town preacher was a hundred marks, and an allowance of £6 13s- 4d. quarterly for house rent. The terms on which he undertook the office were that, in the event of sickness or absence, he should provide a minister to preach three times a week in the usual place; that he should not be absent above forty days in one year without leave; and that if he should take a pastoral charge, his retainer by the corporation should be void. In 1607 the corporation purchased a house for him, and the next year they increased his salary to £90, and in 1616 they increased it to £100″.

A man he was in whom the “power of the world to come” reigned paramount. In his lifetime his gravestone was prepared and laid where he should rest, inscribed:

Watch, Ward; yet a little while, and he that shall come will come.

Whether it was the Spanish marriage or the drinking customs of his day that roused him, he was no mere academic foe. With caricature as well as pulpit-thunder he carried the war into the enemy’s quarters, heedless of personal risk, a bold man with his heart in the right place, and plenty of brains to keep his tongue in order. Attempts were made to entangle him on points of conformity, for some time unsuccessfully, and Bishop Corbet’s letter to him in 1633 does equal credit to the writer and to the person addressed. Two years afterwards, when Bishop Wren had succeeded Corbet, Ward’s enemies found means to trouble him, the King’s “Book of Sports” being one of the counts in his indictment. He was suspended, enjoined a public recantation, and, on his refusal, committed to prison. Here he wrote an epistle dedicatory to a volume of his sermons, euphemizing his imprisonment as “a little leisure, occasioned against my will”. He died in March, 1639-40, a righteous man, taken away from the evil to come. Like John Winthrop, his name is not extinct, surviving in John Ward Dean, secretary to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

We must revert to Parliaments. In 1623 Sir William Spring of Pakenham, of the Lavenham Clothier family, and Sir Roger North were knights of the shire. Sir Edmund Bacon and Thomas Cornwallis appear in the first Parliament of Charles I., and Sir Robert Naunton and Sir Robert Crane in the second. In the third, Sir William Spring reappears, and with him a name of no good omen to the abettors of royal prerogative, Nathaniel Barnardiston, of Ketton or Kedington, Esquire. Then comes the twelve years’ gap between the third and fourth Parliament, and Barnardiston, now knighted, and Sir Philip Parker of Erwarton and elsewhere, represented the county in the fourth or “Short” Parliament, and sought re-election in the Long Parliament. Meantime, Sir Roger North bad obtained a seat for the borough of Eye; and his son Henry, of the Mildenhall Manor-house, yet remaining in its picturesque beauty, thought fit to stand in the Court interest against the two Puritan knights. The primitive simplicity of the proceedings, under an elm, in Mr. Hambie’s field, which sent up the members to this awful historic Parliament, contrast strangely with the care now taken at the election of parish councillors who may not, perhaps, spend a five-pound note during their tenure of office. The County Court is held at Ipswich by the order of Sir Simonds Dewes, High Sheriff. It is Monday, October 19, an “extreme windy morning”, and at eight o’clock the writ is read. Of the three candidates, only North was present, the others breakfasting at the King’s Head, sign of ill omen for those who should be returned. North was surrounded by a crowd of his party, who chaired him for about half an hour, to show him off. Henry North of Laxfield, and John Clench of Creeting, his uncles, Sir Robert Crane, Mr. John Smith of Cratfield, and Mr. Waldegrave, were there to see fair play for the young man, and some of them thought that Samuel Duncon, Constable of Ipswich, who had been assisting in taking the votes, had been dealing corruptly; nor did one of the party, Mr. Gardiner Webb of Elmswell, son of William Webb, attorney, of Ixworth, and the Gardiner heiress, spare the worshipful High Sheriff, saying that he “had been damnedly base in all his carriage”. Duncon carried this “outrageous and scandalous speech” to Dewes, to whom Webb justified his language, and, in defiance of all Dogberrydom, called the Constable “base rascall and rogue”. It is not to be passed over that women in the heat of the contest tendered themselves to be sworn that their net estate valued clear forty shillings, but had their votes given for Barnardiston and Parker struck out. A riot was imminent between North’s hot-blooded young friends and the sailors, whom they called Water-dogs. However, all passed off without bloodshed, and Parker with 2,240 voices “at the least”, and Barnardiston with 2,140, were triumphantly returned over North, who received only 1,422. We owe Thomas Carlyle thanks for printing these documents. Sir Frederick Cornwallis was Sir Roger North’s colleague at Eye.

The other Suffolk members of the Long Parliament were: for Ipswich, John Gurdon and William Cage; for Dunwich,. Henry Cooke and Anthony Bedingfeld; for Orford, Sir William Playters and Sir Charles le Gros; for Sudbury, Sir Simonds Dewes and Sir Robert Crane, who generally neutralized each other in all likelihood; for Aldborough, two of the Bence family,”Squire” and Alexander; and for Bury St. Edmunds, Thomas Jermyn and Sir William Spring.

1. It is in Essex, though Taylor calls it in Suffolk.
2. So thought Rogers, “On the XXXIX Articles” (Parker Society), p. 319.
3. See especially the evidence of President Harrison and Mr. Gladstone, quoted in a confereuce held at Paris, September, 1889.
4. Carlyle, “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays”, vii. 58.
5. Athenae Cantabrigienses”, ii. 310.
6. In a letter to me, February 9, 1895.

Had Suffolk been polled shortly after Elizabeth’s accession for or against the Reformation, there is reason to believe that there would have been a majority in the negative. So at least thought the author of the “Distresses of the Commonwealth”, whom Froude is inclined to identify with one Armigil Wade, an official of the reign of Henry VIII. The influence of the clergy was still great, and many of the older men had been nominated by abbeys and priories before the Dissolution. More were in some way connected with lords of manors, and by these two classes the Edwardian changes had been sulkily accepted, and the Marian reaction hailed with joy. Sulyerdes, Bedingfelds, Kenes, Rokewodes, and the like, refused to recognise the new order of things, and fared as best they might. In many cases their tenants and dependents felt with them at first, but became more easily reconciled to the inevitable. Much depended on local circumstances. This, however, is pretty clear from the registers: that after a little while children were brought to the font, couples united in matrimony, and corpses buried in undiminished numbers, all being done according to the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. For a year and three-quarters East Anglia was without a bishop. Benefices fell vacant, and so remained. In these vacancies much disorder prevailed. Throughout Suffolk there had been no confirmations and no episcopal visitation. Greedy landowners began to lay their hands on what had been left of Church furniture by official rapacity. The almsgiving of the monasteries had disappeared, in some respects a loss not to be deplored, but to the aged and helpless a great privation. The poor are the first to suffer and the last to gain by change, whether in Church or in State.

Queen Mary died on November 17, 1558 – Cardinal Pole only survived her two days, and before the month was out Bishop Hopton had also left this world. He is spoken of as probably born at Mirfield, Yorkshire¹⁰⁰, but certainly bore the same arms as those of the Suffolk Hoptons. The Dominicans claim him as of their fraternity. When Mary was at Kenninghall in 1549, he was her chaplain, and had proved compliant about the prohibition of the missal. We have seen, however, his severity when in office, and his end was probably accelerated by anticipation of reprisals. In 1560 John Parkhurst, of Merton College, Oxford, a native of Guildford, succeeded to the chair of Felix the Burgundian, Stigand, the saintly Walter de Suffield, and the pugnacious Henry Spencer. As a proof of the chaos in which he found his diocese, Strype says that in the archdeaconry of Suffolk there were in 1561 a hundred and thirty parishes more or less destitute of a resident clergyman. Parkhurst had passed through a severe apprenticeship. During the late reign he was in exile, chiefly at Zurich, where he lived in close intercourse with the Swiss reformers of the day. On his return he became Rector of Bishop’s Cleve, in Gloucestershire, where he seems to have been a little king. Nolo episcopari was with him a genuine sentiment. As the Puritan troubles in Suffolk begin in his time, and must perforce occupy our attention, it becomes necessary for me to preface my notice of them with an avowal of my incapacity to deal with the appalling complication which confronts me and demands some expression of feeling. There ought to be some mean between the barren registration of things said and done and the highly-coloured narrative put together for a purpose which it probably fulfils.

The first requisite is to put aside partisanship, to look as far as possible at Anglican matters from a Puritan point of view, and at Puritan matters from an Anglican point of view. Without at least attempting this, it were better to pass over the period in mute despair. Three long, active, busy centuries have rolled away since the beginning of these troubles, and the battle of opinion rages as hotly as ever. A softened feeling, indeed, prevails to produce toleration and to keep alive the mouldering embers of comprehension, yet the terrible legacy of the awful Church struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is ours in the nineteenth, and will be our children’s in the twentieth. And people read what they wish to read, what they ” like”, what they can painlessly assimilate, and thus see what they wish to see and ignore the rest. No wonder that there is no reciprocal approach when hardly any recognise even that limits exist to confine the highest ideals of government, of ceremonial, of rules for the ordering of daily life, within the range of things possible and practicable in this changeful and uncertain world. Truly, neither of the chief contending parties would have allowed such heretical laxity. Episcopacy and presbytery were each of Divine origin, jure divino.

And in a sense each was right. Oversight is Divine, and counsel is Divine. Continuity, too, has a strong claim on human respect. The intertwining of the three would not have been quickly broken. But in Switzerland there had been severe tension, terminating in a snap, and yet faith had not become extinct. This Parkhurst had witnessed, and his affectionate remembrances of his Zurich friends doubtless generated that dealing with Suffolk disciples of Calvin which brought on him the censure of higher authorities.

“Queen Elizabeth”, says Strype, “was at Ipswich, July 17th, 1561. Here her Majesty took a great dislike to the imprudent behaviour of many of the ministers and readers, there being many weak ones amongst them, and little or no order observed in the public service, and few or none wearing the surplice. And the Bishop of Norwich was thought remiss, and that he winked at schismatics. But more particularly was she offended with the clergy’s marriage; and that in cathedrals and colleges there were so many wives and widows and children seen, which she said was contrary to the intent of the founders, and so much tending to the interruption of the studies of those who were placed there. Therefore she issued an order to all dignitaries, dated August 9th, at Ipswich, to forbid all women to the lodgings of cathedrals or colleges, and that upon pain of losing their ecclesiastical promotions”.

I may be pardoned for pointing out what will have occurred to many who have studied East Anglian peculiarities, that neither oversight nor counsel had shown much of their salutary presence in Suffolk. A huge, unwieldy diocese, not quite rivalling the impossibilities of Lincoln and Lichfield, but extending from Happisburgh to Camps in Cambridgeshire, had caused confirmations to be performed at roadside stoppages, whenever “busshope doe come about country”. That personal contact and dutiful regard which is -the very life and soul of episcopal government was not strengthened, as at Lincoln and Lichfield, by the wholesome institution of local prebendal stalls, whereby somewhat of local want could make itself more readily known to the ecclesiastical authorities in the cathedral city; and thus counsel had not come to the help of the Bishop. Had it not been for action beyond rule, the very name of the Saviour might have become unknown. The Suffolk gentry, many of them, were awake to this, as we find from the case of a preacher named Lawrence, about whom this dutiful letter was written to Archbishop Parker, October 27, 1567:

Sir Robert Wingfield and others to Archbishop Parker.

Our humble commendations and duties remembered unto your grace. Great necessity doth occasion us to write unto you for one Master Lawrence, a late preacher, of whom we have good experience both for his modesty, faultless life, and sound doctrine; who hath been well exercised amongst us this five or six years with great diligence. He commonly preached twice every Sunday; and many times on the working days if there chanced any marriages or funerals: and that he did of his own charge, never taking anything, as his enemies cannot accuse him neither of that nor yet of anything else justly worthy of reproach. And so we testified unto your grace’s visitors, and desired them that he might continue his preaching still, for we knew very well that we should have great need of him. And now we see it more evident, for here is not one preacher in a great circuit, viz., from Blythburgh to Ipswich, which is twenty miles distant and ten miles in breadth along by the seacoast; in the which circuit he was wont to travel.

Thus we have thought good to certify your grace of the necessity of our country, and the diligence and good behaviour of this man, trusting that your grace will either restore him again, or else send us some other in his room, the which we most heartily desire, commending the same to Almighty God, who preserve your grace. Dated the 27th of October, A^o 1567. Your grace’s to command:-

Robert Wingfeld. Wyllyam Canndysh.
Wym Hopton. Thomas Felton.
Thomas Colbyn, of Beckles.
Thomas Playter.

This petition seems to have been more favourably received than most of the same nature, for when Canterbury and Norwich once more experienced simultaneous vacancy, in 1575, Bishop Freke found Mr. Lawrence still an admired preacher, and suspended him for not complying with the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. This time Mr. Calthorp petitioned Burghley, who replied by a little gentle pressure on the Bishop, who referred the Lord Treasurer to the Queen’s letter. This reference was final, and Lawrence remained silenced. These difficulties and the like, serious as they were, did not prevent Church work from thriving. Matters had begun to assume a more settled and healthy aspect during the later years of Parkhurst’s episcopate – -at least, so far as we can judge from written evidence.

We have no record of Confirmations, but if an inference may be drawn from the amount of wine required at the great festivals, there must have been large assemblies of communicants. Preaching, neglected as we have seen it, maintained its importance and its length whenever a preacher’s voice was heard.

Controversy is apt to thrust philanthropy to the wall, and the sad history of a poor little boy on the tramp comes to us from the Metfield register. The nip of winter is probably felt in the post-Lucan October weather. The hand of death is on the child as he comes into the place, and he is hastily buried, not without dread of infection.

The xxj^ti of October for the yere of o^r Lord God 1576 one Nicholas Snowdon of the age of Ayght or x yeres as it is supposed beinge browght to this p’ishe by the inhabitants of mendham by vertue of a passpote (sic) directed from Thomas ffuller and Oliver Tompson cunstables of Harlston to be conducted to Sowthwold where he was borne as he make reporte. And as it appeare by his said passporte, was buried in this p’ishe of Metfeld the xxij^ti daie of the saide month of October, 1576.

Difficulties arose earlier in the towns, from conceit or from enlightenment, according to the view of him who reads the past.

The Prayer-Book was a remnant of Popery; it was stained with superstition and steeped in error, or, to take a less rigorous view, was formal and ineffective. So said and felt the Puritan. On the other hand, the Churchmen deeply resented these imputations. They rebutted the charge of superstition, and showed that, if their use of words was erroneous, it was such as had obtained all along the line of Church history. Formalism and ineffectiveness were things which were not excluded by the abolition of a liturgy. These irreconcilable views brought much heat and little light. Ecclesiastical insolubilities have to engender a still more acute pain in the body politic in the seventeenth century.

Recusancy was a standing cause of danger. Apparitors and constables had a busy time of it, hunting up and down the country for Roman reactionaries as well as vestment-hating progressives. Mrs. Freke, odious as her very existence must have been to the Queen, was shrewdly suspected of conniving at the former. It would have been a fine thing to hear Elizabeth’s opinion of this lady.. But the Bishop had to go forward with his work, whether his wife liked it or not. In 1584 he was translated to Worcester, and succeeded at Norwich by Dr. Edmund Scambler, Bishop of Peterborough, who, having ministered in Mary’s reign, at the hazard of his life, to a little congregation in London, was in greater antagonism to Rome. The rapid course of events-the plots against Elizabeth, the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and, above all, the threatened invasion of England-caused the recusants on the whole to keep as quiet as possible. Many outwardly conformed, no doubt, perhaps by dispensation, perhaps in hope of pardon when the time s should have changed. Many genuinely threw themselves into the martial movement which pervaded the whole of. England when it became clear that to escape the Spanish yoke the nation must rise as one man. Lord Howard of Effingham had many of his, the loyal and patriotic Roman Catholic, type within the borders of our county.

Suffolk was regarded as an especially vulnerable part, and Suffolk was not behindhand in preparation against the day of trial. The nautical and amphibious element abounds in East Suffolk, and no love was lost between this class and the Spaniards. So the parishes cheerfully bore the charges incurred in putting armour in order, drilling and quartering soldiers and the like. We learn from the Cratfield parish-book that there was a great muster at Beccles on February 29 in the Armada year. This little parish paid 23s. 7d. at that time “for part of the charges of the trayned sougers, and other charges for mete and drynke, and for our [the churchwardens’] horse mete”. The caliver cost 16d. to carry to Beccles, and another was bought for 15s. to supply its place. The armour items show that a wholesome desire to turn out the parish soldier in style existed in the parish authorities. Such necessaries as a headpiece for 5s., two long girdles for 11d., and four crampets the transverse guard of a sword for protection to the hand, might have been expected; but ornament was not wanting – red cotton and fringe for pikes, gray thread and”ij yards of yellowe sylke lace”, show that those externals which under all circumstances have a cheering effect on humanity were not omitted. The peculiarity of breeches must not be passed over, for the parish spent 8d. for “a yarde of beryng lynyng”, this “bearing” substance being that which effected the marvellous form of the Elizabethan farthingale, and was here used for an analogous purpose in male attire. Training at Dunwich and “Laystof” cost the village 3s. and 12s. respectively. The constables received £3 10s. 8d. for the soldiers” coats, 18s- 3d.”for the settynge forth of the sowldyers”, and for the charge of them at Snape, 20s. These items may be taken as types of similar ones all over the county, and show us the manner of carrying out the well-known instructions:-

The trained soldiers of those shires, which lay near the sea-coast, had orders to defend those places, and be ready at the alarm to hinder the enemy from landing; but if he did land, then to spoil the country round about that he might find no food; and by continual crying, “Arm! Arm!” give the enemy no rest, but yet should not give battle, till good store of commanders were come together.

When the French Republic, after an interval of two centuries, threatened our isles, Mr. Bruce was directed to search the public records and report on the measures taken by the Queen’s advisers in 1588. It appears that inquiries had been made by Burghley six years earlier with regard to ships, that Ipswich had eight of 100 tons, Orford one of 140 tons, and Southwold three, from 140 to 170 tons. Fourteen more between 100 and 80 tons are registered, six from Ipswich, four from Aldeburgh, two from Southwold, and two from Lowestoft, and of hoys, etc., down to 14 tons, twelve from Ipswich, six from Woodbridge, six from Orford, four from Aldeburgh, ten from Dunwich, five from Walberswick, ten from Southwold, and six from Lowestoft. The masters and men in the county were 98 and 1,184. In 1588 we find from Ipswich the Catharine (Thos. Grymble) and the William (Barnabie Lowe) serving under Lord Henry Seymour. Our county stands well in respect of the loan made to her Majesty in this year, the order being, first Kent, then Sussex, Essex, Yorkshire, Suffolk; and the sums £5,025, £4,535, £4,125, £3,692, £3,625, there being thus only £67 less raised in Suffolk than in the greatest county in England.

Whatever amount of fact may be wanting to Macaulay’s brilliant lines:

From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay,
That time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day,

and the Eschylean description of the war-flame:

Till broad and fierce the star shone forth from Ely’s sacred fame,
And tower and hamlet rose in arms o’er all the boundless plain;

none can fail to appreciate them.

It was on July 29 that the main action took place off Calais and Gravelines, after which disastrous laceration the remnants of the conquered Invincibles betook them to the German Ocean to work their way home, if they might.

Among the State records is a letter addressed to Sir Francis Walsingham, her Majesty’s Principal Secretary, by Sir William Wynter, “written aboard the Vanguard in Harwich Roads, the first of August, 1588, at 7 of the clock at night”. It gives an account of Lord Henry Seymour’s movements while seeking to come up with the Spanish Fleet, and towards the close of the letter occurs the following:

The 31st day we had the wind S.S.W., and we reached as high as Badsey [Bawdsey] Cliff; there we were obliged to anchor in the sea, with very much wind upon the ebb, about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and so continued all that day and the night following. The 1st of August, as we were weighing anchor to windward, the Lord Henry Seymour sent the pinnace called the Delight and ordered us to go round to Harwich to take in our provisions. And about 1 o’clock we anchored at Harwich

The hardy fishermen of the east coast furnished their share of the fighting power of the fleet of Lord Howard of Effingham. Herring fishing records ought not to be passed over, and at this point an opportunity may be given for a word or two about the “lenten stuff”. A rent of herrings was no uncommon thing at the compilation of Domesday Book; and the Abbey of St. Edmund by the time of the Conqueror received 60,000 herrings a year from Beccles. When Dunwich was made a borough in 1199, amongst its yearly charges was one of 2,400 herrings. Ten years later came King John’s charter to Yarmouth, of so wide a character that Gorleston and Little Yarmouth trembled for their very existence, and carried on a struggle against their powerful neighbours, in which they were finally defeated in 1332. Siric, the ferryman at St. Olave’s in 1272, was paid in bread and herrings, and fourteen years later the service for a charter granted by Edward I. for land at Carlton Colville was twenty-four pasties of fresh herrings. Legislation in 1357 fixed the “hundred” of herrings at six score. Five of these made a cade, and this amount in 1464 formed the payment of one of the Dunwich burgesses.

Active as our people were, their vessels were on too small a scale, and about ten years before the Armada appeared a book (1577), as a pamphlet was then called, by Dr. John Dee, of wizard reputation, generally known as “The British Monarchie”. His scheme, mainly -for a volunteer fleet, to be called the Petty Navy Royal, was developed almost simultaneously by a Buckinghamshire man, named Robert Hitchcock, into what he called a “Politic Plat for the honour of the Prince, the great profit of the public State, etc¹⁰¹. He calculates for the building of four hundred fishing ships, not under seventy tons, after the manner of Flemish Busses, showing that the profit arising from Newfoundland business, as well as from herring, will well repay the lenders of the capital. Altogether the sum of £80,000 was to be raised, of which an eighth part was to come from Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, to be delivered to certain chief officers at Yarmouth. Ten ports, of which four were in Suffolk; Ipswich, Dunwich, Orford and Aldborough, were to pay during three years £750, being at the rate of £150 for each of five ships to a port. The rate of interest was to be ten per cent., and the principal repaid in three years.

But the project languished, and in 1615 one E.S., the writer of “Britain’s Buss”, could only speak of one of these larger craft launched, though four more were in a forward condition.

The valuable assistance rendered at the time of the Armada by the eastern counties, apart from the vessels over eighty tons, would seem to have come from the numerous smacks and sloops manned by their tough owners and their families and neighbours.

The effect of the Armada remained for the rest of the reign of Elizabeth, and longer still. After the flush of general rejoicings came the sharper looking-up of recusants. There were plenty of them. The Yaxleys seem to have had a taste for going against the stream. Anthony of Upper Rickinghall, in the days of Bishop Nix, had made observations derogatory to pilgrimages, etc., and recanted at Hoxne. He died just about the time of Elizabeth’s accession; and William, perhaps a son, was reported for recusancy in 1586. Ten years afterwards we find John Yaxley in Norwich Castle under an inquisition certified to Chief Justice Popham, at which time there was a general turn out of the disaffected, their estates, degrees, sources of livelihood, abodes if they had any, being recorded, as well as the offers of conference made to them, and any previous convictions. The inquisition dates from December 1, 1595- In Thingoe Hundred there are but three recusants: Thomas Olyver, alias Stone, a physician, his wife Joan, and Robert Tebald, glazier, all of Bury. In Stanningfield there was a more important centre, viz., at Coldham Hall in that parish, a fine old house yet standing, where abode the Rookwoods. Here are reported Robert Rookwood, Esq., his wife Dorothy, his daughter Susan, and his servants “William Tyner, Hosbondman, and Anne Ludbrooke, singlewooman”. Of more consequence it is to note that of the four sons Henry was beyond seas, and of the three others, Ambrose (a wellknown name in the next reign), Christopher, and Robert, it is said that they “be brought vpp, but in what Religion it is not knowne, neyther are they remaineinge w^th ther ffather Rob^t Rookewood”.

Coldham Hall, a truly noble specimen of Elizabethan red brickwork, was built by this Robert Rookwood in 1574. The family was old and honoured. The earliest notice of the name is at Acton in the time of Edward I., and from that time members of the house of Rookwood had discharged the ordinary duties of country gentlemen. A younger branch was established at Euston. Edward Rookwood, of that place, joined with other Roman Catholic gentlemen of the county in protesting their loyalty, and abjuring the Papal power of deposing sovereigns, and received the Queen with all respect during her progress in 1578. In Lodge’s “Illustrations of British History” may be found an account of the remarkable ingratitude of Elizabeth to her entertainer, reminding one strongly of her grandfather’s treatment of the Earl of Oxford. The unhappy man endured divers insults, was fined a large sum, ruined in estate, and imprisoned in Bury Gaol, where he died. Euston was then sold to keep his family from starvation. With this history to encourage him in loyalty, it is not wonderful to find Ambrose Rookwood in a conspicuous place in the next chapter.

At that truly desolate spot, Wangford near Brandon, Mrs. Drewell, wife of Robert Drewell, gent., is named; at Haughley, the Syllyards; at Mellis, the wives of Thomas and Christopher Toftewood; and at Redlingfield, “John Bedingfield, gent., and M’garet hys wyffe, he hath no free Lands, and is of small valewe; he is imprisoned at Ippiswiche, and his goods wer extended to her ma^tie for a C^li“.

Of well-known names, the Martyns of Long Melford, the Mannockes of Stoke-by-Nayland, and the Everards of Linstead may be mentioned. A familiar name occurs at Barking:”Stephen Childerston, al’s Chosen, yeoman, and Agnes his wyffe, verye poore folkes”. This surname, pronounced Chisson, was common enough at Mildenhall in my boyhood.

Dennington was more prolific of recusants than most places, whereas at Bungay and Ipswich there was but one apiece – Anne, wife of Robert Grene, gent., and John Dune, gent. Occasional nameless- personages, distinguished as “vagrants”,” reteyners”,” sudyonners”, give a faint flavour of Jesuits in a concealment more effectual, perchance, than chambers behind panelling or between double walls would have been.

Bishop Scambler died the year before this inquisition, which was carried out by his successor, Dr. William Redman, a native of Great Shelford, in Cambridgeshire, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Archdeacon of Canterbury. He was not behindhand in routing out recusant sectaries, of whom only twenty appear in the official lists. Perhaps apparitors and pursuivants were not so keen as their chiefs. Otherwise it is marvellous that all this cumbrous and extravagant machinery should have been put into action on account of the opinions of seven men and thirteen women in Bury, Occold, Framsden, Chattisham, Holbrook, Kenton, Bungay, and Lowestoft. But conformity, like nonconformity, is apt to go off its head. John Thirketell, of Bungay, had gone beyond seas, and Robert Hall, of Kenton, lay in prison at Ipswich, their wives remaining to bear testimony for their opinions, whatever they were worth. That the Queen’s Council, whose agents the bishops had made themselves or had been made, became bewildered at the results of their attempts after unity is manifest. As an eminent Churchman of after-days said, it might become “Unity of opinion in the bond of ignorance, and unity of profession in the bond of hypocrisy”. The good sense of the Suffolk justices revolted at marshalling with the worst malefactors – who would have been ready to subscribe to thirty-nine or any other number of articles – worthy men who had scruples about a ceremony; and their prayer to the Council produced a circular letter to the bishops to moderate the action which the Lords themselves had unduly incited. Notwithstanding this perplexing change of front, two Brownist (or, as they would now be called, Congregational) ministers had been hanged at Bury in 1582 – Mr. Thacker and Mr. Copping. Yet, as we have just seen, their opinions were not extinct three years afterwards.

It is an infinitely weary business, and the world owes but slender gratitude to the worshippers of the Definite, who would punish in this world and hereafter those who are imperfect “in their theory of irregular verbs”, as Carlyle puts it.

Let us end the chapter with something recreative, to wit, William Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder (an expression which has become proverbial) performed in a dance from London to Norwich, in February and March, 1600. He started on the first Monday in Lent, February 11, stayed two days at Romford, took his second and third days consecutively to Ingatestone and Chelmsford, got to Braintree a week after his start, and entered Suffolk at Sudbury on Wednesday, February 20. Here a very kind gentleman, Master Foskew (Fortescue?), who had once walked from London to Berwick, gave him good advice about his diet and company, and a lusty tall fellow, a butcher, offered to morrice with him as far as Bury. In a short time the challenger gave in amidst derisive cries from the spectators, a country lass calling out:”Faint-hearted lout! If I had begun to dance, I would have held out one mile, though it had cost my life”. ,At which words many laughed. ” Nay”, saith she, “if the dancer will lend me a leash of his bells, I’ll venture to head one mile with him myself”. And so she did, to Melford, being a mile, in a “piteous heat”, at the end thereof. Kemp’s narrative, as might be expected, is more forcible than elegant, and some “immortal verse” by a”good fellow, my friend” is quite on a par with Kemp’s unvarnished prose. Master Colts, a very kind and worshipful gentleman, entertained the dancer at Melford till the Saturday, whence he proceeded by Clare to Bury. It was a long day’s work, but between Clare and Bury he was received at the house of a bountiful widow of a rich yeoman named Everet. As he entered Bury at one gate, Chief Justice Popham entered at another, and the wondering and regardless multitude made clear way for his honour to gape at the dancer. On Saturday, February 23, fell a great snow, and Kemp did not resume his journey till Friday, the 29th, when he danced over the heaths in grand style, reaching Thetford in about three hours.”I fared”, says he, “like one that had escaped the stocks, and tried the use of his legs to outrun the constable; so light were my heels, that I counted the ten miles no better than a leap”. At Thetford we leave this merry fellow to enjoy the hospitality of Sir Edwin Rich, to pursue his course by Rockland, Hingham, and Barford Bridge to Norwich.

Those who want detail as to the hardship of royal purveyances will know where to find it. Times were hard enough in all respects. On Christmas Day, 1594, the Rector of Halesworth could not thaw his ink to write down the names of his communicants, and the constant apprehension of a repetition of the Spanish Armada cost the parishes large sums for armour, for watching Sizewell Beacon, for the saltpetre monopolist, and for trainings at Bulcamp Heath and elsewhere.

1. Cooper, “Athenae Cantabrigienses”, i. 186.
2. These pamphlets are in “England’s Garner”, vol. ii., by E. Arber.