The History Of Suffolk

For methinks it serveth to no thyng,
All such pevish, prykeryd song.

The list of incumbents of Norfolk and Suffolk parishes would doubtless include many a village lad who had received his education under the secular priests of these colleges. Sometimes they chose to perform their functions, in part, by proxy, as in the first year of John Wilby’s mastership at Mettingham, from 1403 to 1404, when xvjd. was paid to the schoolmaster of Beccles for the schooling of two clerks. Carving in wood and stone, screen-painting, and dry-plaster painting by the distemper method were doubtless also taught ; and when the Mettingham choir was re-edified in 14o7 and the following years, freestone was brought from. Yarmouth to Beccles by water, and a local artist, sometimes called Thomas of Yarmouth, and sometimes Thomas Barsham. of Yarmouth, was paid the large sum of £xxxvii iiijs. viid. for making images with tabernacles and a tabula, or picture, for the high altar. Barsham is the next parish but one to Mettingham, and it needs no stretch of fancy to see in this instance the schoolboy returning to the scene of his boyhood, to redecorate the chapel in which he had prayed and sung, almost in sight of his father’s roof-tree.

The importance of these rural colleges may be seen more clearly when we consider that at the time of Sir John de Norwich’s original foundation at Raveningham there were only ten colleges in the University towns : University, Balliol, Merton, Exeter, Oriel and Queen’s at Oxford – the latter but two years old – and Peterhouse, Michaelhouse and King’s Hall (both now incorporated with Trinity), and Clare Hall at Cambridge. Undoubtedly the religious houses had done much educational work, but as undoubtedly that work received a great impetus from the colleges, these secular priests retaining their property, and so their interest, up and down the country – much more in touch with the general mass of the people than the regulars could possibly be.

The resuscitation of the Collegiate Church is not the most remarkable of the changes in things ecclesiastical at this time. The parochial clergy had not an easy time of it. Manorial jealousies between different lords in the same parish led to applications, made to the Bishop, for the establishment of a chapel in connection with some manor-house ; and to this day payments are made year by year from different estates for “pensions” due to the diocesan on account of the free chapel. The chaplain was often a very useful member of the manorial household – bee-master, farrier, head-gardener, family scribe, tutor, what not. So, too, the village guilds had their chaplain, who might happen to be the parish priest, if they pleased, or more frequently was somebody else. In this and other ways that religious restlessness which is ineradicable from the human heart sought some vent for its action and passion.

For this the struggle with Rome, one would have thought, might have served as an outlet, but the Statutes of Provisory and Praemunire belonged rather to Parliaments than to the bulk of the people. An alien rector or vicar holding place through Papal influence was, after all, not so common a phenomenon in English life, and there are not wanting instances of appeals to Rome by parishioners against monastic ill-treatment, as when the parishioners of Metfield appealed to Pope John XXIII., in 1411, against the Prior of Mendham, alleging that, although the Prior got his tithe, he would not cause their chapel to be properly served.

Many and various were the elements in the great stir which reached its height in the reign of Richard II. Amongst them labour stands prominent. Its market value, of course, went up after the Black Death. To regulate this value was the intent of the Statute of Labourers. Labourers must work, and work at a prescribed rate ; they must be punished if refractory, or if they take more than the legal rate. But while labour was thus fixed, prices fluctuated. First they went down, as Knighton tells us, through fear of death. Then, through a dearth of necessaries, they went up, till the penny was worth fourpence or fivepence. Thereupon came an ordinance commanding victuals to be sold at reasonable prices, which not even the ordinance-makers had the courage to define.

Such legislation was, of course, inoperative, and the Parliament, consisting of employers and owners, enforced obedience by branding the refractory. Still labour combined, as it ever will do, and with a certain success, while, in spite of the misery arising from high prices and low wages, a poll-tax was laid on time after time, till in 1380 came the great revolt under Wat Tyler, in which our Suffolk Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, met his tragic end.

But our concern is rather with John Litester, the Norwich dyer, and his Norfolk and Suffolk followers in 1381. The priest or preacher, John Wraw, seems to have been sent by Wat Tyler to start the movement in Suffolk. The flood was so sudden that two lords and divers knights were carried away with it, and the Earl of Suffolk, William de Ufford, narrowly escaped by a sudden departure from the supper-table. The captured notables were to be turned to account, Lord Morley and Sir John Brewis being compelled to accompany three of Litester’s henchmen to obtain a charter of manumission from the King.

The conditions were certainly unfavourable to emancipation, for the insurgents had been plundering and murdering at a great rate. The house of Sir John Cavendish, Lord Chief Justice, at that village, had been burned to the ground. The abbey of St. Edmund had been spoiled of many of its jewels and structurally injured, and the heads of Cavendish, of Abbot Cambridge, and of Sir John Lakenhythe, keeper of the barony, had been set up in the abbey tower.

Meanwhile, Henry Spencer, grandson of the younger Spencer of the reign of Edward II., the young and hot-blooded Bishop of Norwich, heard of Litester and his doings, came from the neighbourhood of Stamford, where he happened to be tarrying, and rode over the breck country for his rebellious city. At Icklingham he fell in with the five envoys and their little train, released the two unwilling members of the company, and presently beheaded Litester’s representatives. After this act of laudable energy he pressed across the heaths, left our county, probably at Thetford, and ceased not till, with the men who had gathered round so dauntless a leader, he dispersed the insurgents at North Walsham with great slaughter. The Jeffreys of that day, Chief Justice Tresilian, in solemn assize, finished in the name of law what Bishop Spencer had effected in the name of the Gospel, and many a gibbet in the quieted villages of our county remained for years to tell the tale of Socialism, the outcome of selfishness and oppression, and generally bearing in its demeanour a strong hint of its parentage. To discuss Wycliffe’s position in this movement would be beyond our local purpose. We may turn to an instance of his theological teaching. An assembly of notables was gathered at South Elmham Manor in the pleasant spring weather on the eve of the Feast of SS. Philip and James, 1399. Here was the lord of that episcopal estate, Henry Spencer, his temper perhaps a little cooled by age and disappointment, yet impatient of contradiction, and contemptuous of his social inferiors, as ever, and John Derlyngton, in whom we may see the Northumbrian vigour, Archdeacon of Norwich. With them is a predecessor of my own at Fressingfield, John de Rykingale, a pluralist of the period, Master of Gonvile Hall at Cambridge, sometime Chancellor of the University, who was one of the delegates to the Council of Constance, and ended his days as Bishop of Chichester in 1430. I write these words probably on the very spot where his pen was in its day active. Before them comes the well-known William Sautre, the first of the Reformation martyrs, to recant his opinions as to adoration of the Cross, transubstantiation, and other doctrines. Though all seemed to go well, the day’s work was undone afterwards, and within two years Sautre, reverting to his old opinions, stood manfully the test of the flames in London. Bishop Spencer died in 1406, and the diocese was ruled successively by Alexander de Totyngton, Prior of Norwich, and Richard Courtenay, of the noble house of Devon. Then came an Essex man, John de Wakeryng, the last years of whose episcopate were embittered by not entirely futile efforts to repress Lollardism on the Norfolk side of the Waveney Valley. Opinions are, however, too volatile to be restrained by limits, natural or artificial, and it is not surprising to find the purgations made before Bishop. Wakeryng the predecessors of a multitude both in Norfolk and Suffolk before William de Alnwyk and his Chancellor, William Bernham. A certain “Master Robert Beete of Berry” appears early as examined upon suspicion of heresy, and there is a list of abjurers in Foxe of 120 names or so, from which I extract these : Nicholas Canon of Eye ; Richard Fletcher, and Matilda his wife, John Reve, Baldwine Cooper, Richard Knobbing, Richard Grace, John Eldon, all of Beccles; John Spire of Bungay; and “The herd⁷⁸ of Shepemedow.” These were not of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and Foxe offers the best excuse he can for their defection, as they were constrained “to protest otherwise with their tongues than their hearts did thinke”. It is hard to imagine how he could have known anything more of these people beyond what he seems to have found in the official record of John Exeter, “Register” of the diocese.

From this register, however, Foxe has given some precious details, as of John Skilley of “Flixon”, miller, who was “injoyned for penance seven yeares imprisonment in the monastery of Langley”, and for the enormity of eating flesh on Fridays he was put on a bread and water diet on Fridays during his imprisonment, and when his time was up he had to put in four appearances at the cathedral, with the other penitentiaries, two on the ensuing Ash Wednesdays, and two on the ensuing Maundy Thursdays. Like St. Paul, these bold thinkers were often “in peril among false brethren”. One William Wright turned informer, naming Fletcher as “a most perfect doctor in that sect”, able “very well and perfitly to expound the Holy Scriptures”, and, further, having “a booke of the new lawe in English, which was Sir Hugh Pies first”. Nicolas Belward of “Southelam” had given in London “foure marks and forty pence” for his copy, out of which he had instructed the informer and the informer’s wife. “John Perker, mercer of a village by Ipswich, is a famous doctor of that sect. Also he said that father Abraham of Colchester is a good man”. The miserable kind of Paul Pry gossip which must have been engendered is painful to reflect upon. Mrs. Cliffeland’s servant, Agnes Bertham, for instance, being sent to the house of Mrs. Backster, one of the accused, at Martham in Norfolk, found on the Saturday after Ash Wednesday “a brasse pot standing over the fire, with a peece of Bacon and Oatmeale seething in it”. The fleshpots of Skilley and Belward would have proved equally accursed. One awful miscreant had the Ave, Pater Noster, and Credo in English. We must not inquire too curiously into their abjurations. In a similar case Thomas Fuller quaintly describes these utterances as “rather oral than cordial”. The name of Wakeryng’s predecessor, Bishop Richard Courtenay, takes us back to the French wars at the beginning of the reign of Henry V., the siege and capture of Harfleur, in spite of the ravages of dysentery in the English camp, and the day of St. Crispin, for ever inscribed on the banner of England’s fame :

See how the Lion of the Sea lifts up his ancient crown,
And underneath his deadly paw treads the gay lilies down.

So glared be when at Agincourt in wrath he turned to bay,
And crush’d and torn beneath his claws the princely hunters lay.

Where the heads of East Anglia were found, followers accompanied them from manor-houses, farms, mills, and country towns. The stately form of Richard Courtenay, when it was laid low on the sick-bed, was but one among those of the stalwart men-at-arms who hailed from Norfolk and Suffolk, and the earth was a pillow for many a “good white head” from our parts beside that of good old Sir Thomas Erpingham. Courtenay is described as “of noble family, of tall stature, of excellent wit, and not less dis¬tinguished for the greatest eloquence and learning, than for other of the more noble endowments of nature. He fell sick on Tuesday, September io, of a bloody flux, and on the following Sunday, in the presence of the King, who covered his feet after extreme unction, and closed his eyes with his own hands, amidst the bitterness and tears of many, released his spirit from his prison ; and our King, out of his tender affection, quickly sent him over into England, to be honourably interred in the royal cemetery at Westminster”. ⁷⁹

A conspicuous warrior at Agincourt was Thomas Beaufort, the King’s half-uncle, Earl of Dorset, whom Shakespeare by anticipation calls Duke of Exeter, a title to which he was not advanced till the King’s return to England, the year after the battle. He poses grandly in the drama, and is highly commended even by the fastidious Fluellen, yet his merits do not seem to have been overrated by poetic license. Commanding as an energetic and prudent soldier, of such mental calibre as to be Lord Chancellor, and Lord Admiral at a time when no mere land-lubbers handled ships, he must have been a man of unusual and varied powers. Ten years after his elevation to the duchy of Exeter, he died at Bury St. Edmunds, and was interred in the abbey church, though apparently unconnected with the county of Suffolk by titles, possession or marriage, his Duchess being a Lincolnshire Nevile. In .1772, some labourers, in removing part of the ruins of this church, came upon a leaden coffin that had been enclosed in an oaken case, much decayed at the time of discovery. The embalmed corpse was quite fresh, the nails and hair, the latter turning gray, being perfect, a parallel to the case of St. Edmund. The labourers, for the sake of the lead, threw the body among the rubbish ; but the story got abroad, the remains were collected, and buried near the north-east pillar which used to support the belfry. Some of the great Duke’s hair, preserved by the surgeon who examined the body, passed from hand to hand till it came into the possession of my deceased sister-in-law, Mrs. Harris of Mildenhall, a native of Bury, and from her to me.

The words put into the mouth of the Duke of Exeter by Shakespeare ⁸⁰ , in describing the death scene at Agin court, are among the most striking in the play:

Suffolk first died : and York⁸⁰ , all haggled over,
Comes to him where in gore he lay insteeped,
And takes him by the beard, kisses the gashes
That bloodily did yawn upon his face,
And cries aloud, ” Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk!
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven.
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast :
As in this glorious and well-foughten field
We kept together in our chivalry!
Upon these words I came and cheered him up :
He smiled me in the face, might me his hand,
And with a feeble gripe says, “Dear my lord,
Commend my service to my sovereign.”
So did he turn, and over Suffolk’s neck
He threw his wounded arm and kissed his lips :
And so, espoused to death, with blood he sealed
A testament of noble-ending love.

Wars might rage abroad, and people imagine a vain thing at home, but the traces of material progress in the fifteenth century, whether in written record or in the more palpable evidence of wood and stone, are too plain to be passed over even by the casual observer.

The great mass of church architecture in Suffolk belongs to the fifteenth century, and it is wonderful with what little reverence the designers of that day treated the works of their predecessors. The Perpendicular style, with all its merits and demerits, came in like a flood, sweeping all before it. Money must have come in like a flood too, the outcome of the wool trade in a large degree. The two noble churches at Bury St. Edmunds, standing in one churchyard, as well as those at Southwold, Stoke-by-Nayland, Clare, Lowestoft, Ipswich St. Mary-le-Tower, and many others, with their lofty arcades and darkness-hating clerestories, testify to the wealth, piety, and public spirit of the period of their erection. The three sister-towers of Bungay St. Mary, Eye, and Laxfield seem to have emanated from the same mind ; and a fourth, Redenhall, is just within the Norfolk border, but in the same district. Leaden spires, too, of the lantern order, after the manner of Belgium, now appear. There was till the earlier part of this century a fine specimen on the tall tower of Mildenhall, a notable waymark in the heaths and fens of the hundred of Lackford. Brandon and Stowmarket are good instances. That at Whepstead was blown down on the night of Oliver Cromwell’s death. The interiors of the churches also were vastly improved. Rood-screens of great stateliness, and often bearing figures of the Apostles or of virgin saints, such as St. Cecilia, St. Apollonia, St. Barbara, and others, were erected ; Southwold, Eye, Bramfield, and many others, remain. I can recollect the forester of St. Vedast in a pew at Mildenhall, well covered with “french-white” paint, and often wondered what it meant. Often the screen was surmounted with a loft, approached by a newel staircase in one of the pillars of the chancel-arch, whence would issue the voice of praise in the service. In front of the crucifix which was on the screen hung the rotula, or rowell, a ring of light. The cost, about eighteenpence, for renewing the wax from time to time often occurs in parish accounts, e.g., Cratfield. In Fressingfield the pulley and block for the rowell rope may still be seen, with a guider in the easternmost of the arches of the south arcade.

The new Perpendicular towers were not allowed to remain silent. Indeed, the cages for the bells were placed as soon .as the building had reached the belfry floor, and the towers were then built around them. This is proved by the length of the wooden pins which fasten the beams together, such that they could not have been driven in after the walls had been constructed round them.

A very large number of these fine old bells may still be heard, and seen by such as fear not steeple-climbing. They are beautiful objects, and the ornamentation on them surprises all but the campanalogist. In my “Church Bells of Suffolk” there is an account of all that survive indeed, of every bell now existing in Suffolk, and of some which have passed away. The greater part came from Norwich or London, but by the middle of the fifteenth century there was a flourishing foundry at Bury St. Edmunds. The founder’s initials were H. S., as may be seen from his foundry-stamp, from which also we learn that he cast cannon as well as bells at Bury. After him came two men named Chirche, Reignold and Thomas. There are still existing nearly a hundred of their bells, of which rather more than half are in our county. The men of Mildenhall, in 1469, had a suit in the Court of Common Pleas against Richard Brasyer, the Norwich founder, for alleged breach of contract, they complaining that in recasting “le graunde bell de Mildenhall” he had failed “de ce faire un tenor accorder in tono et sono a les auters belles de Mildenhall.” The best lawyers of the day were retained on both sides, and the Year-book contains a full rehearsal of the arguments, which are of an ingenious character. ⁸²

Domestic architecture advanced greatly, some of the old stud-and-plaster houses being of a highly picturesque character. One in the street of Barton Mills is especially worthy of note. Another in St. Mary’s Street, Bungay, with the history of Samson, is sure to attract attention. The “Ancient House”, Ipswich, only needs to be named, while there is hardly a town in the county which cannot show at least portions of an example.

The guild-houses at Lavenham, Hadleigh, Kelsale, Laxfield, and Fressingfield are amongst the best remaining, the latter adorned with a figure of St. Margaret trampling on the dragon.

Built without substructure, and merely resting on the soil, when mediaeval houses decayed the traces of them soon vanished. One in the parish of Weybread was burnt down in the autumn of 1892, and few would now, little more than two years after the fire, notice that there had been a house on the spot. If we are sometimes surprised at the existence of solitary churches, we may remember that the clusters of houses which were once round them have left no sign at their departure.

We must not leave this period without a few words about its Suffolk poet, John Lydgate, a native of that village, in the Woodland country, and a Benedictine of the great house of St. Edmund. He was an imitator of Chaucer, but, to use Thomas Fuller’s words about somebody else, he had the fiddle and the bow, but not the rosin of his original. Ritson has a list of 251 pieces of his in the “Bibliographic Poetics”, and even this is probably not exhaustive. Exhausting, doubtless, most of his compositions are. Even the “Storie of Thebes”, which the author puts in as an extra Canterbury tale, borrowed from Statics and Boccaccio, is pronounced exceedingly dull and prolix, and is no better than it is called. Like many others of that time, he was a travelled man, and had overlaid his English wit with French and Italian lore, which he had rather acquired than absorbed. Pilgrimages, indeed, proved a most important link between nations, and fostered exchanges in produce, literature and politics, as well as in hagiology. If foreigners came to Walsingham and Bury, East Anglians went to Rome and Santiago. Of the latter I possess a notable memorial. In the year 1878 I was at Dunwich with one of my old Yarmouth boys ⁸², trying to discover some traces of Route IX in Antonine’s “Itinerary”. We were just on the point of departing when I asked a man who was at work at the Gray Friars’ whether anything had been found lately. He prodooed an undistinguished scrap of copper, thickly encrusted with mud, which I bought of him there and then. It took some days’ soaking to remove the earthen crust, and then came to light a little copper Santiago cockle,’ a ‘shell of Galice,’ 9.s we find it sometimes called. No doubt it had been dropped there by some Suffolk pilgrim who bitterly mourned its loss ; but it has fallen into loving hands, and, indeed, so charmed my deceased friend, Mr. Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, that he had it photographed, engraved and recorded⁸³.

These excursions were not all pleasure. A humorist, who writes as though from painful experience, has de picted the miseries of the voyage to ‘ Seynt Jamys,’ or, rather, to Corunna, the nearest port to Compostella.
A qualmish passenger ejaculates :

Steward, felow ! A pot of bere!

and is cheerfully answered :

Ye shalle have, sir, with good chere, Anon alle of the best.

By the time the dinner-cloth is laid all appetite is gone :

Thys mene whyle the pylgryms ly,
And have theyr bowlys fast theym by,
And cry aftyr hote malmsy ;
“Thow helpe for to restore.*
And som wold have a saltyd tost,
ffor they rnyght ete neyther sode (boiled) ne rost
A man myght sone pay for theyr cost,
As for oo (one) day or twayne.
Som layde theyr bookys on theyr kne,
And rad so long they myght nat se ;—
“Allas I myne hede wolle clove on thre!”
Thus seyth another certayne.⁸⁴

In this forlorn condition we will in imagination leave the owner of the Compostella scallop, and turn to the Home Department, and in particular to the election of members of the House of Commons.

Hitherto the County Court seems to have been open to all comers, as before the Norman Conquest, and in case of difference of opinion the rough and ready show of hands settled the matter. In the eighth year of Henry VI., 1429, on the prayer of the Commons, this was changed. The franchise was unmanageable, and the forty-shilling freeholder was invented. Sheriffs could examine on oath, and be punished for not maintaining the restriction. Knights returned contrary to the ordinance were to lose their wages. The result was undoubtedly the aggrandizement of the nobles, and our county affords an excellent instance of its working. When, at the Parliament held at Bury in 1447, the Beauforts and William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, had the ascendancy, the “good Duke Humphrey” of Gloucester was arrested the day after the Houses met, and was found dead in the course of a few days, not without strong suspicion of foul play. Then came the reaction. Suffolk fell, and his relation, Archbishop Stafford, retired from the Chancellorship, which was reoccupied by Cardinal Kempe, a man raised from the ranks.

In these struggles there can be no doubt that influence from high quarters was freely used. It comes to the surface in letters of the Duke of Norfolk and of the Earl of Oxford to John Paston in 1450, the former written from Bury, and the latter from East Winch in Norfolk. The latter encloses a “sedell” (schedule) of the names of the persons to be chosen for Norfolk – Sir William Chambirlayn and Henry Grey. Grey was returned with Sir Miles Stapleton for Norfolk, but another Chambirlayn (Sir Roger) and Sir Edmund Mulso sat for Suffolk. Of these two, the Duchess of Norfolk had at the same time recommended Chambirlayn ⁸⁵. The residence of the Mowbrays at Framlingham, and their ancient possessions at Bungay and elsewhere, gave them great weight in Suffolk. At the same time, the first duties of governors, the keeping of the peace and the protection of life and property, were miserably neglected. Jack Cade and his merry men had their humble but sincere imitators in East Anglia in 1452, under Captain “John AmendAlle”, who seems to have been a certain Roger Chirche, alias Bylaugh. Their doings were mainly confined to Norfolk, but on “the Saterday next before Palme Soneday” (April 1) we find that they or some of the same kind were at work in Suffolk, when “Alredis sone of Erll Some, fast be Framyngham, was pullid ought of a hous and kyllid”. Fourteen of the gang are named as “gadderyng to hem (them) gret multitude of mysrewled people”, and keeping “a frunture and a forslet” at the house of Robert Ledeham, whence they issued, sometimes thirty strong and more, “jakked and salattyd” (in coats of mail and helmets), and did many “orible and abhomynable dedis”. From the petition that went up to the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Kempe, Postwick Wood, near Norwich, was regarded as their headquarters. In the case of the Earl Soham outrage, however, the information falls short of connecting the murder of young Aldred with Ledeham’s gang. “Whedyr any of the seid felechap were there or not men kan not sey, there be of hem so many of wheche many be unknowe people”.” This, be it remembered, took place almost in sight of John Mowbray’s ducal castle at Framlingham.

It is probable that a wholesome extinction of these savages came about through the Wars of the Roses; otherwise those sad struggles affected our county only indirectly. The Earl of Oxford was very powerful in Essex, and not without influence in Norfolk, but in Suffolk his name did not go far. He and the Duke of Norfolk, the latter with 6,000 men, are related to have turned up at St. Albans the day after the first battle there. The Duke’s father and the Yorkist claimant had married sisters; somehow, nevertheless, Norfolk was in alliance with Lancaster. A neighbour, Philip Wentworth, who carried the King’s standard, “kest hit down and fled”, and the narrator of the battle adds, “Myn Lord Norffolk seyth he shal be hanged therfore, and so is he worthy. He is in Suffolk now. He der not come about the King”. This is not the last time that a Wentworth of Nettlestead will be named in the annals of the county. The writer of this letter is one William Barker.

Thomas Playter, or Playters, of Sotterley, tells us some of the detail of the battles in this devastating civil war, but it is all at second hand, and the slowness with which intelligence travelled in those days is surprising. Playter, whose brass remains in Sotterley Church, where he was interred in 1470, was much in London on business connected with the Pastons. From the tone of his letters the courts seem to have sat, and their decisions to have commanded respect; while in the North the midwinter snows were crimsoned with blood at Wakefield, and the choristers, after chanting the Palm Sunday anthem at York, might have heard outside the cathedral the deadly din at Towton.

The battle of Towton was fought on March 29, 1461, and on the following day Edward IV. entered York, but no tidings arrived till Easter Eve at London, which “unto this day”, say Playter and William Paston, writing as soon as the news came to hand, “was as sorry cite as might”. The letter which conveyed the result of the battle was from Edward IV. to his mother. Playter and his friend excuse themselves for sending no “er” (sooner) because they were without intelligence, and as the messenger could hardly have reached Suffolk till Monday, and Norfolk till Tuesday, a good ten days must have intervened between the battle and the knowledge of it in North Suffolk. The lordship of Framlingham about this time passed from one John Mowbray to another, and the Duke of Suffolk was more occupied with advancing his personal interests than in affairs of State. What the Mowbrays and De la Poles thought of that breaking of the cloud in the North we know not.

The municipal history of the fifteenth century is doubly important as regards Suffolk, as showing the connection of the county with the Metropolis, and as marking a great advance in the position of the county town.

It is no mean testimony to the moral and intellectual education in the provinces that so many country lads should go up to London, serve faithfully in the lower stages of office work, and rise by degrees to the aldermen’s bench and to the loth mayoralty. Such was Sir Henry Barton, citizen and skinner of Mildenhall, or rather, I suspect, from Barton Mills, in which village there is an ancient house which may have belonged to his father. He was Lord Mayor in 1416 and in 1430, and became the father of the public lighting of London, ordaining lamps to be hung outside each citizen’s house at night, from All Hallows to Purification. The noble parish church of Mildenhall contains his tomb, and a font bearing the City arms and those of Barton, a municipal relic whereof the City should not be unmindful, for it is getting dilapidated, and may, perchance, find its way into a stonemason’s yard, should some benevolent person pre sent the church with a new one. Barton turns up in the “Paston Letters” in his proper character as skinner, being requested to send to Thomalin Grys, spicer, of Norwich, some “loder” (leather) as soon as he can goodly buy it. Such also were another Mildenhall man, Sir William Gregory, Lord Mayor in 1451, and Sir Thomas Cooke, a native of Lavenham, Lord Mayor in 1462; and there will be two more from Suffolk in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, the town of Ipswich was rising in commercial importance. The earliest of its charters was granted in the first year of King John, before which time the borough was in the position of Norwich, Lewes, Oxford, and other places, paying two-thirds of its revenue to the King, and the ‘third penny’ to the Earl. The Domesday Book extract makes this clear. Earl Guert in the time of Edward the Confessor, and Roger Bigod after the Conquest, received this “third penny”. But the place had gone terribly down in the world, the burgesses having fallen in that interval from 538 to 210, half of these too poor to pay more than a penny a head to the King’s Geld. There were then 328 empty houses, and the borough was in perpetual debt. John’s charter was apparently to be paid for by clearing off these arrears, a process occupying more than a year, if we may judge from the slow action on the part of the burgesses in acting on their new privileges. They had no fixed place of meeting, but held their first assembly in the churchyard of St. Mary-le-Tower, where they chose their two bailiffs, and subsequently, by committee, their twelve portmen. Passing over intermediate charters, we come to that of 24 Henry VI., whereby the two bailiffs and four of the portmen received the commission of the peace, with all fines, etc., accruing thence, with the assize of bread, wine, and ale, the admiralty, and clerkship of the market. With the exception of magisterial privileges, this was only putting in black and white what had been matter of custom. Edward IV., in 1464, after his manner, totally ignored what the Lancastrian usurpers had done, but took care that his charter should in no way abridge their newly granted rights. The town is now incorporated by the title of the “Bailiffs, Burgesses, and Commonalty”. The two bailiffs are to be elected at the Guildhall every eighth of September, and the burgesses are to be exempt from jury service. The incorporation soon made by-laws, and pigs, in Ipswich as elsewhere, were among the first reformanda⁸⁶. Stray hogs might be sold by those in whose gardens they were found, half the money to be kept by the injured person, the other half to go to the town; and those who suffered their swine to go at large were to pay for every foot one penny at the first offence, and twopence at the second. A third transgression could be expiated only by the forfeit of the whole hog, the origin of one of our proverbial expressions.

Notes:

1. I suspect this to be a misprint for “Tho. Herd”. The surname existed at Shipmeadow about that time. —East Anglian, N.S., iv. 29.
2. Nicolas, “Battle of Agincourt”
3. I “Henry V.”, Act IV., scene vi.
4. Eldest son of Edmund Langley (the fifth son of Edward III.), elder brother of the traitor Richard, Earl of Cambridge, and uncle of Richard the “White Rose”.
5. Mr. Arthur B. Cooper, of Westwood Lodge, Blythburgh.
6. See his paper “On the Tomb of a Pilgrim at Haverfordwest.”
7. “The Pilgrim’s Sea-voyage” (Early English Text Society, 1867).
8. Gairdner’s “Paston Letters”, i. 16o, 161; Cox, “Ancient Parliamentary Elections”, p. 115.
9. Taylor, “In and about Ancient Ipswich”, p. 45.

The existing traces of the fourteenth century, ecclesiastical, political, domestic, commercial, indicate a period of great activity and general prosperity, retarded indeed by the two great pestilences which occurred, the first just before the half-century, the second about thirteen years later. After a partial recovery from these visitations there was a general social upset, in which socialism came to the front and subsequently, after its wont, fell to the rear. In these ups and downs, as well as in the religious difficulties of the time, Suffolk bore its share.

Edward III. was married to Philippa of Hainault when he was a mere boy, a year before his accession revealed .those high qualities which budded early and decayed before the usual time. Her people for some time had been carrying on frequent peaceful invasions of England, introducing their improvements in weaving, but in 1336 they entered the country in great force. Whether the quality of the wool tempted them, or trouble at home from over-population drove them forth, they came in battalions, and it was necessary to keep them in work. Hitherto England had produced more wool than it wanted. Forests had been felled, and much timber cut down in particular over the heavy lands of Suffolk, letting in air and sunlight, which boons, with the clearance of under growth and scrub, in time gave many acres of fair pasture; and sheep do well on the better qualities of heathland, so that the production of Suffolk in this respect must have been large. No doubt the population was large too, many believing that the eastern counties have not yet recovered the ground lost at the Black Death. Certainly the power of getting the wool transferred from the backs of sheep to those of human beings was far below the production of the raw material. The manufacture had drifted across the sea. The time had now come to change all this. The Fleming had been encouraged to settle, the Englishman was beginning to learn his craft, and the wool must not go out of the country. Legislation came in 1337. The ‘vent of wool’, as Baker calls it, was by statute confined to the realm, to the no small annoyance of landowners who found themselves uncomfortably in the power of English wool staplers, though there must have been consolation in rents for weavers’ cottages and the rise in the price of much of the produce of the soil.

Two royal deaths, those of Charles IV. of France and Robert Bruce of Scotland, in 1328, threw all Western Europe soon afterwards into confusion. At first the anti-English party prevailed, Edward III. doing homage to Philip of Valois for his French possessions, and David II. succeeding his father. But the calm was delusive. Edward Baliol’s sufferings, claims, successes, cessions, defeats, kept the North of England and Scotland in constant turmoil, and the help accorded by the French to David Bruce irritated the English monarch into the assumption of the title from which he had retired. Having obtained supplies from the Parliament in the spring of 1340, he made the Orwell estuary a rendezvous for his fleet, and the midsummer weather saw those fair waters all alive with sail. His ships were under way on June 22, and two days afterwards they came across their French foes at Slays, on the Belgian coast. It seems to have been a hot day, but probably nowhere hotter than at the scene of a naval engagement, the greatest and most desperate which the narrow seas had ever witnessed. The French were 400 sail, the English 300. From eight in the morning till seven at night the conflict raged, when the French, to avoid the cold steel, leaped into the sea, abandoning their ships, of which only thirty escaped. By commanding in person, Edward reserved for himself the chief laurels ; but among his vice-admirals was Sir John de Norwich, supposed, from a similarity in armorial bearings, to be connected with the house of Bigod. His services must have been great if they are to be measured by their recompense. Not the most important item was the permission to crenellate his mansion at Mettingham, and the great gateway still remains to testify to the prowess of a vice-admiral on the coast of Flanders.

With Cressy we have little to do so far as records go, but the awful visitation of the Black Death, which followed in three years, has left a mark on the county not to be obliterated. Originating in China, after those volcanic throes which are known to precede such manifestations of the death-dealing powers which lurk in the elements, it spread through Asia into Egypt, and thence leaped from point to point among the great cities of Europe. Coincident with its progress came the furious storms of 1347, the general failure of the crops, misery, and starvation. Then in January, 1348, close on each other, came a seismic crash in Italy and the outbreak of the Black Death at Avignon, with its horrible accompaniments of carbuncles, delirium, inflammation of the lungs, and blood-vomiting. Seven hundred years had elapsed since the Destroying Angel had given forth a like blast from his. trumpet. It was to recur in not so fierce a form fourteen years afterwards, and a faint echo has been felt time after time down to our own days; but 1348 and 1349 are years by themselves in the later ages. The ‘deadly pestilence,’ as the letter of Edward III. to his Lord Treasurer, Bishop Ellington of Winchester, calls it, had broken out in Westminster before 1348 was out, and a royal proclamation on March 18, 1349, speaks of its serious increase there as well as in London and elsewhere. About this time it appeared in Suffolk. Dr. Jessopp, in the Nineteenth Century⁷⁵, has told the story of one parish in these graphic words :

In the Valley of the Stour, a mile or two from Sudbury, where the stream serves as the boundary between Suffolk and Essex, the ancestors of Lord Walsingham had two manors in the township of Little Cornard-the one was called Caxtons, the other was the manor of Cornard Parva. At this latter manor a court was held on March 31 ; the number of tenants of the manor can at no time have exceeded fifty, yet at this court six women and three men are registered as having died since the last court was held, two months before. This is the earliest instance I have yet met with of the appearance of the plague among us, and as it is the earliest, so does it appear to have been one of the most frightful visitations from which any town or village in Suffolk or Norfolk suffered during the time the pestilence lasted. On May 1 another court was held: fifteen more deaths are recorded- thirteen men and two women. Seven of them without heirs. On November 3, apparently when the panic abated, again the court met. In the six months that had passed thirty-six more deaths had occurred, and thirteen more households had been left without a living soul to represent them. In this little community, in six months’ time, twenty-one families had been absolutely obliterated – men, women, and children and of the rest it is difficult to see how there can have been a single house in which there was not one dead. Meanwhile, some time in September, the parson of the parish had fallen a victim to the scourge, and on October 2 another was instituted in his room. Who reaped the harvest? The tithe sheaf too – how was it garnered in the barn? And the poor kine at milking time? Hush! Let us pass on.

The Bishop of Norwich at this time was the well-known William Bateman, founder of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The eight crescents which flash out on the Cam when the ‘Hall’ boat is gliding over those waters, calm but not clear, are from the arms of this prelate. He was rather a politician and a jurist than a theologian, and, having served much at Avignon, was probably looking forward to a cardinal’s hat. State business took him thither after the Black Death had run its course in France, and just before its outbreak in East Anglia. It must have been with the most acute distress that he heard of the devastation of his diocese. He was a native of Norwich, where his father was a citizen of high repute, and his eldest brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman, among many other possessions, owned the manors of Gillingham and Flixton, hard by the South Elmham palace, the Bishop’s favourite residence. He seems to have lost no time in returning to his flock, probably posting across from Avignon to some north-east port, by an ancient and excellent road, and then sailing direct to Yarmouth, where he landed about June ro, to learn, among other sad events, of the death of his brother at Gillingham. The plague had found its readiest course along the shore and up the rivers, invited possibly by insanitary conditions in both cases. Bungay, which in my sojourn there⁷⁶ was by no means a model for the hygienic student, had suffered. The Prioress died, and the remaining nuns sent her successor to Gillingham to be instituted on June 13. In the course of a day or two the Bishop went on to Norwich, and thence to London, to give an account of his French mission to the King. How the Bishop’s commissary, Thomas Methwold, discharged his duties till relieved by his chief may be read in Dr. Jessopp’s admirable paper. The Bishop held on at the palace for about three weeks, and then retired to Hoxne, where in seven weeks he had instituted more clergymen than in an average year. The parishes must be served, and priests had been mown down by the Dread Reaper’s scythe by the score. Hence, not only deacons, but, as it would seem, even boys in the first tonsure, were put in charge of the churches. Better that supplication should go forth from these lads than that the voice of public prayer should be hushed at such a time. In the future, when we will may hope for some provision made for research, more will come to light as to the state of England in general, and Suffolk in particular, in 1348 and 1349. What strikes me as among the greatest marvels of that time is the recovery of the nation, so that in 1350 the Spaniards were defeated off Winchelsey, and in 1352 the French in Brittany.

Political prelates, such as Bishop Bateman, are a common jibe for the shallow observer; nor was he the first of his kind at Norwich. Ever since the Conquest there had been no long interval without a Bishop of Thetford or Norwich serving high office in Chancery or the Exchequer. Of Bishop Bateman’s three predecessors, Salmon had been Lord Chancellor and Ayermyn Lord Treasurer, the latter being succeeded by Antony de Bek, who is said to have been a great tyrant, and to have been poisoned by his servants. To those who reflect on the character of the nobility of these days, it will seem that, after all, the interests of the humbler classes would have been worse served by them than by men, of whom some were of lowly extraction, and all bound at least outwardly to some decency and kindliness of life.

Death overtook this energetic Churchman at the scene of his diplomatic labours, Avignon, in 1354, where he lies in the cathedral of St. Mary. He was attended to his grave by a throng of cardinals, prelates, and other great men, and committed to the earth by the Patriarch of Jerusalem ⁷⁷. To him succeeded Thomas Percy, ‘out of Northumberland,’ and to him in sixteen years the famous fighting Bishop, Henry Spencer.

There can be no doubt that the neighbourhood of Woodbridge was properly represented at Poictiers, as Robert de Ufford, the first Earl of Suffolk, of whom I have spoken, took a prominent part in that battle, his cool head keeping the rash youths from eager advance, and directing the archers advantageously. He also rode round to the various bodies of the English, keeping them in good courage.

In 1369 he died, and was succeeded by his son William. The second Earl’s four sons predeceased him. In the troubles of the reign of Richard II. he pleaded the cause of the distressed poor in the House of Lords, and died almost while speaking, from some fit, a martyr after his manner.

After the Uffords come the De la Poles, whose sad record I propose to trace to its close.

We begin with William de la Pole, taking our words from the register of the abbey of Meaux.

He “was first a Merchant at Ravenrod, skilful in the arts of trade, and inferiour to no English merchant whatsoever. He afterwards living at Kingston upon Hull, was the first Mayor of that Town, and founded the Monastery of St. Michael, which now belongs to the Carthusian Monks, near the said Kingston. His eldest son Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, caused the said Monastery to be inhabited by that Order. William de la Pole aforesaid lent King Edward many thousand pounds of gold during his abode at Antwerp in Brabant. For this reason the King made him chief Baron of his Exchequer, gave him by Deed the Seigniory of Holderness, with many other lands then belonging to the Crown, and made him a Baneret”

Camden gives a reference to the records of the Tower, in which he is styled “dilectus, valectus et mercator noster”. On the term valectus he observes that it was an honourable title both in France and England, till it came to have a menial significance, when it was turned into Gentleman of the Bedchamber. It was bestowed on the poet Chaucer in 1367, when he received an annuity of twenty marks.

The son Michael here mentioned, sometime Lord Chancellor of England, married Catherine, daughter and heiress of Sir John Wingfield of Wingfield, and thus the De la Poles became inwrought into the history of this district.

The earldom of Suffolk was conferred on Michael de la Pole in 1385. “Better versed”, as Thomas Walsingham tells us, “in merchandise than in martial matters, as a merchant himself and the son of a merchant”, he appears to have been unequal to the burden laid upon him by these accessions of dignity. He had enjoyed his earldom barely a year, when the voice of the Commons thundered against him, charging him with the misappropriation of supplies, the acceptance of excessive grants from the Crown, and the abuse of the Great Seal, in applying it to illegal pardons and charters. They weakened their case by imputing to the Chancellor the capture of English ships and the loss of Ghent. The trial is justly regarded, from the order which characterized its proceedings, as one of great constitutional importance, but it ended in a conviction only on the lighter charges, a forfeiture of money, and imprisonment during the King’s pleasure, which terminated just after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1386. But the Parliament of 1387 was found to be more rancorous against him than its predecessor bad been. He fled from the realm, and died at Paris in the year 1389, an exile from his native land, but, as we find from his son’s will, was buried in the church of the Carthusians at Kingston-upon-Hull.

That the measures taken against this favourite Minister of Richard II. were generally regarded as severe, we may infer from the restoration of the earldom and estates by Henry IV. to the eldest son, the second Michael de la Pole with whom we have to do. The young man had in 1397 obtained the reversal of his father’s outlawry ; but, as it would appear, had courted and won Catherine, daughter of Hugh, Earl of Stafford, while the cloud of his father’s disgrace still hung over his name.

During the reign of Henry IV. the De la Poles had a “close time”, but family troubles revived in a new form after the accession of his warlike son. The siege of Harfleur, in the autumn of 1415, was attended by terrible loss of troops by fever and dysentery, contracted in the pestilential marsh air, with the usual accompaniment of camp filth. It must have been a truly miserable campaign. Before embarkation Richard, Earl of Cambridge, second son to Edmund Langley, Duke of York, Edward III.’s fifth son, and ancestor of a long line of Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian sovereigns, was executed with others for treason to their King. Richard Courtney, Bishop of Norwich, died of fever on the march from Harfleur, far from the flock committed to him, with the Lords Molina, Burnel, and others, while Michael de la Pole had already succumbed to the baleful influence of malaria, thus leaving their Sovereign, for whom they had yielded their lives in a struggle more deadly than that of battle, to cut his way through his enemies on the memorable day of St. Crispin Crispian.

The Countess Catherine was still in the first agony of grief for the loss of the husband to whom she had clung in the dark days of their betrothal as well as in the brightness of wedded life, when tidings reached her of the death of her first-born, the third Michael. For a short month he had enjoyed the title, if the term enjoyment can be applied to the desperate march of the English army towards Calais. Twice had they been disappointed of battle, at the bridge of St. Maxentius, over the Somme, and at Amiens. Then came the brush at Corby with a body of French men-at-arms reinforced by the peasantry, the gallantry of Bromley of Bromley, the hanging of the church robber who stole the silver pix, the tedious harassed march across the upper valley of the Eaulne, the clearing of the bridge over the Canche, and the final victory of combined method and impulse against the most tremendous odds at the village of Agincourt.

Two, and two only, of the English nobility perished on that famed day : Edward, Duke of York, who had made suit for the command of the vanguard; and young Michael de la Pole, who was in the main battle with the King and the King’s brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.

It could not have been long after the young Earl’s marriage with Elizabeth Mowbray, daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, that a second widowed Countess of Suffolk mourned with her mother-in-law, and the title of Earl of Suffolk passed to the next brother, William. It was not long before he found himself occupying his brother’s place in the French war. In 1417 he was at the capture of the castle of Tonque; in 1421 he shared the fate of others in the ambuscade near Angers, and was taken prisoner ; but in 1423 he was at work again in Burgundy, under the dreaded Thomas Montacute, Earl of Salisbury.

When at the siege of Orleans, five years afterwards, a great shot struck the bars of one of the windows of the captured Great Fort, from which Salisbury was taking observation, and caused the death of that valiant captain, Suffolk succeeded not only to the command, but in process of time to the widowed Countess, Alicia, daughter of Thomas Chaucer of Ewelme, in Oxfordshire.

The siege of Orleans in Suffolk’s hands was a failure, and he was again captured at Jargeux, where his brother, Alexander de la Pole, was killed in cold blood by the Duke of Alençon. We find him, however, assisting in the defence of Paris in 1430, and negotiating a peace some ten years afterwards. In this matter he went beyond his commission in propounding and carrying through the marriage between Henry VI. and Margaret of Anjou.

His marquisate appears to date from 1443. In 1447 he became Duke, but as he went up in rank he went down in popular estimation. His services in France for more than thirty years were set at less than nought. The disastrous ending to the -Hundred Years’ War was put to his account. But so far as we may judge the man from the last words to which he put pen, he was good and true-hearted.

Of the two localities assigned for his embarkation, Camden’s (Suffolk) is probably the more correct. His enemies having procured his banishment in 1450, we may suppose that he took sea at Dunwich, the nearest Suffolk port, and trace him in the fair spring weather through Fressingfield, along the “broad” road, called in all deeds the highroad from Dunwich to Bury St Edmunds, by Laxfield and Yoxford, and over Westleton Heath to the Roman Sitomagus. How he was caught and beheaded on the side of a boat off Dover is well known. Bloomfield speaks of a defaced monument to him in Wingfield Church remaining to his day, but we can point to no such thing now.

Duke John, a fresh creation after his father’s forfeiture, whose noble monument we see on the north side of the altar, seems to have been a dutiful son. The mother lived a good deal at Wingfield. The Paston letters give glimpses of her there in 1452, but more notably in October, 1460. Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, the legitimate Sovereign, is now all-powerful in London. Though the Suffolk interest was distinctly Lancastrian., Duke John had married York’s daughter, Elizabeth, and the young couple were made wire-pullers by the dowager. So we find from a letter written by the wily Franciscan, Friar Brackley, to John Paston, “The Lady of Suffolk hath sent up hyr sore and hise wyf to my Lord of York to aske grace for a schireve the next yer, Stapelton, Boleyn, or Tyrel, qui absit. God send zow Ponyng, W. P., W. Rokewode, or Arblaster”. A keen practitioner apparently was Duke John, very unpopular according to Margaret Pastor; but we must make allowances for Pastor’s dislike on account of the Duke’s attempt to seize Hellesdon Manor. We find him raising men for Henry VII. in the autumn of 1485. In 1491 he died, leaving his widow presumably living in Wingfield. His eldest son John, created Earl of Lincoln by Edward IV., died before him. He espoused the cause of Lambert Simnel, and fell on the field of Stoke, near Nottingham, in 1487. The dukedom appears to have been restricted to the eldest son, for when in 1491 Edmund de la Pole succeeded his father, it was only as Earl. He married Margaret, daughter of Richard, Lord Scrope, head of a well-known Yorkshire house. In the year of his succession he accompanied his sovereign to the siege of Boulogne ; in 1495 he lent his aid to the overthrow of the Cornish rebels under Lord Audley and Thomas Flammock on Blackheath. He was no model of self-restraint or discretion, but whatever he might have been, it was not in his power to purge himself of the taint of royal blood. He escaped from England on July 1, 1499, whereupon letters were issued by Henry VII., not only to arrest his abettors, but also “any suspect person nyghe unto the see cosies which shall seine . . – to be of the same affynyte”. The unfortunate man remained in exile fourteen years, and venturing to return to England some little time after ,the death of his merciless Sovereign in 1509, was finally executed by Henry VIII. in 1513, “I being a man of turbulent spirit, and too nearly allied to the crown”. Truly, the tender mercies of the Tudors were cruel! Last in our mournful record comes Richard de la Pole, another son of Duke John and Elizabeth Plantagenet. He was evidently awake to the fact that, “turbulent” or not turbulent, he was “too nearly allied to the crown”. Accordingly he remained on the Continent, a soldier of fortune, and wielded his sword for Francis I. of France, in whose service he was slain at the disastrous. battle before Pavia in 1525.

With him ends the grim family chronicle. Cardinal Pole’s father was a Welsh Ap Hoel, and had no claim to an origin from the vicinity of the big pond from which the Earls of Suffolk took their name.

Matthew Poole, M.A., of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the learned author of the “Synopsis Criticorum”, evidently was thought to be of this family, from the arms engraved with his portrait in the first volume of his “Annotations”. He was a Yorkshireman, but I am unable to throw any light on his pedigree.

Notes:

1. February, 1884
2. 1859-1866. Much improvement took place in this time and subsequently.
3. 77 See Cooper, ‘Memorials’, i. 112.

Let us descend for a minute in the scale of creation, and recall the wonderful Fish of Orford.

In the year 1180 … near unto Orford in Suffolk, certain fishers took in their nets a fish, having the shape of a man in all points, which fish was kept by Bartholomew (sic) de Glandevile in the castle of Orford six months and more ; he spake not a word ; all manner of meats he did gladly eat, but most greedily raw fish when he had pressed out the juice ; oftentimes he was brought to the church, but never showed any sign of adoration : at length, being not well looked to, he stole to the Sea, and never was seen after.

So writes Baker ⁶⁶ , after Ralph of Coggeshall, and it would be negligent not to record the phenomenon, though it comes into the picture awkwardly. It is useless to try to harmonize it with its surroundings. The next topic is the Coming of the Friars, than which anything more real and less grotesque is not to be found in the nature of things, and even St. Antony’s Sermon to the Fishes is a feeble link between the two subjects.

The times were evil, and no better in England than elsewhere. In the Court, conjugal infidelity had been followed by parricidal rebellion. In the towns, filth and vice reigned supreme. In the country, the cry of the op pressed went up to heaven, for few on earth seem to have heard or heeded. Justice slumbered, and iniquity throve apace.

When the miserable Henry II. lay down in sorrow at the castle of Chinon, and his lion-hearted son succeeded him, things went no better. Richard was hardly ever in England. The Christian world was humbled to the dust by the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, and r efforts of the Crusaders availed for its recovery for more than forty years. The long interdict in John’s reign had only paralysed religion instead of terrifying the nation to proceed to the King’s deposition. No better description of the epoch can be given than in the words of Dr. Jessopp: ⁶⁷

‘For eight years England had lain under a terrible interdict ; for most of the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John had small need to tax the people ; he lived upon the plunder of bishops and abbots. The churches were desolate ; the worship of God in large districts almost came to an end. Only in the Cistercian monasteries, and in them only for a time, and to a very limited extent, were the rites of religion continued. It is hardly conceivable that the places of those clergy who died during the eight years of interdict were supplied by fresh ordinations, and some excuse may have been found for the outrageous demands of the Pope to present to English benefices in the fact that many cures must have been vacant, and the supply of qualified English – men to succeed them had fallen short.’

The Dominicans, Black Friars, or Friar Preachers, who were instituted four years before the Franciscans, also preceded them in their appearance in England, 1221. As elsewhere, so in Suffolk, they threw themselves into the misery of the towns, standing between the poor man and the devil after the manner of the earlier days of John Wesley and his followers, of the Primitive Methodists, and of the Salvation Army. Their foundations were at Dunwich, Ipswich⁶⁸ , and Sudbury. The first whereof being threatened and finally swallowed up by the sea, a design is mentioned for the removal of the convent to Blythburgh, but there is no hint of anything being really effected, and the Dunwich Black Friars probably died out without issue. We do not hear of any opposition to the Dominicans, but the Franciscans, Gray Friars, or Friars Minor, were as unwelcome to the Benedictines in Bury as ever an Evangelical of the earlier decades of this century could have been to an old-fashioned rector of the Nimrod, Ramrod and Fishing-rod type. For six years they hung on like bull-dogs, but the abbey won in the end, and procured an order from Pope Urban IV. for their removal, which was carried out on November ig, 1263, being the eve of St. Edmund’s Day. They retired to Babwell, just beyond the liberty of St. Edmund, where from time to time they received help from sympathizing friends – Clopton, Drury, Peyton, Howard, Bedingfeld, and others. So does persecution ever fail of its end. The Gray Friars’ Gate and part of the wall yet stands ou the north of the town. At Dunwich, too, much of the wall remains, and here one day when I was Roman-road-hunting, I became possessor of a Compostella cockle or shell of Galice, sign of a pilgrimage to Santiago ; but of their buildings at Ipswich, west of St. Nicholas’s Church, there is no vestige. The White Nuns of the Order of St. Clare, or Nuns Minoresses, had a small abbey at Rokehall in Bruisyard parish. The foundress was Matilda of Lancaster, a descendant of the well-known Edmund Crouchback, brother of our Edward I. On the death of her husband, the Earl of Ulster, she entered the Austin nunnery at Campsey, but obtained permission from Pope Urban V. to exchange for the Order of St. Clare, which at that time had no habitation in England. A small college of secular priests had been removed from Campsey to Bruisyard, but dissolved in 1366, and the buildings became the sole Suffolk house of the Minoresses.

The White Friars, or Carmelites, who took their name from an aggregation of hermits on Mount Carmel in the second Crusade, were never a power in England. They had but one convent in Suffolk, on a site in the parishes of St. Nicholas and St. Lawrence in Ipswich, of which a part was taken in after-days for a county gaol, the name being yet preserved in Gaol Lane.

Allusion has been made to the Austin Friars as distinguished from the Austin Canons. Clare is their earliest foundation, and Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, is claimed as their founder, in the middle of the thirteenth century. Weever quotes a monument to the memory of his widow Maud :

Her lord and she with an holy entente,
Made up our chirche fro the fondament,
As shewith our wyndowes in housis thre,
Dortour, Chapiterhous and Fraitour, which she
Made out the grounde both plaunche and wal.

As compared with others, much of the building remains, and there used to be communication between the castle and the friary by a bridge over the moat. Of the Orford friary no detail can be given but the date, circa 1294, and the names of a few benefactors. Though the abode of these Hermit Friars at Gorleston has disappeared, it must have been a place of great importance in its day. The site was to the west of the high road near the junction of Gorleston and Southtown, where terra firma emerges from the marsh. Here was a church 100 feet long and 24 feet wide, with a fine tower which formed a sea-mark, and existed in a ruined condition till 1813, when the sole remaining wall fell in an easterly gale. The engraving in Palmer’s ‘Perlustration of Great Yarmouth’⁶⁹ , shows that it was of the Perpendicular period. A small doorway of the same style, very late, may also be seen in a house hard by, the sole material relic of what was once a convent of the highest esteem; for here were interred three Earls of Suffolk (one Ufford and two De la Poles), Sir Robert Bacon, Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, Roger Fitz-Osbert of Somerleyton, and many others of distinction. Three cartloads of encaustic tiles with armorial bearings, taken from these ruins, are said to have been broken up to mend the roads in 1800, and now and then one has been dredged from the bottom of the river⁷⁰ . A cell to this priory existed in Yarmouth, the remains whereof may be seen at the back of the Star Hotel.

Last in this long list of mendicants come the Crutched Friars, who derived their name from the cross at the head of their walking-staff. They were rare in England, and we have no trace of them in Norfolk. In London their house, the mother-house of the Order, was near the Tower, where the name is not extinct. Great Welnetham, founded before 1273, their sole habitation in Suffolk, was at once subordinate to this, and had a cell at Bergham in Linton, in the county of Cambridge. It is remarkable that their principles admitted of landed possessions. Altogether they had, besides houses, not less than 350 acres in Welnetham, Cockfield, Linton, Waldingfield, and Acton, the last the gift of Sir Robert Bures, whose fine brass remains in that church.

From the friars to the Jews is nearly as abrupt a transition as from the fish to the friars at the beginning of this chapter ; but the time has come for some notice of the Chosen Race in Suffolk.

Considering their constant migrations and undoubted presence in all the great cities of the Roman world, there seems no reason to doubt the early appearance of the Jews on English soil, though direct evidence is not forthcoming. Mention is made of them in the Canonical Excerptions by Egbert, Archbishop of York, A.D. 740- We cannot rely on the Semitic extraction of Ithamar, Bishop of Rochester, A.D. 644-656, or afterwards on such names as Manasses de Gratis, Earl of Guisnes, the founder of the nunnery at Redlingfield. The Scripture narrative was sufficiently known for the names of Old Testament seers and monarchs to become ‘household words,’ and to be commonly used as Christian names.

The Norman Conquest would not be likely to work the Jews any harm. Indeed, to William Rufus all religions were much on a level, and that a very low one.

Moyses’ Hall at Bury St. Edmunds is regarded as a Jewish synagogue of the time of Henry I. The words of Mr. Hudson Turner, in his I Domestic Architecture of the Middle Ages,’ describe it thus :

In plan the building is nearly square, measuring in round numbers about 5o feet either way. The ground floor is vaulted and divided into three alleys, by ranges of three arches of stone, springing from either round or square pillars, having Norman capital bases. The arch ribs of the western alley are semicircular; in the others they are Early Pointed. The western division differs from the others, too, in being of greater width, the space be tween pillar and pillar being about 6 feet, while in the others it is less than i[ii feet. These differences in form and size, coupled with the fact that the western range has been in comparatively modern times dissevered from the others, and made to form part of the adjoining inn, have led some to suppose that they must have originally belonged to distinct, though conjoined, tenements ; but this notion was satisfactorily set aside a few years since by the discovery of the original staircase to the upper floor, in the first arch between the western and middle alleys, with its perfect well, lighted by two small aper tures, one pointed and the other square, and having a doorway in each alley. On the west side the vaulting was within the memory of persons still living 8 feet deeper than at present, and the descent was by a small staircase from the present staircase. It appears origin ally to have had no windows on the ground-floor.

On the upper stage, over the eastern vaultings, are two good Transition Norman windows, each of two lights, square-headed and plain, under a round arch, with moulding and shafts in the jambs, having capitals of almost Early English character. It is a good example of the external and internal details of windows of this date.

It will be observed that internally the masonry is not carried up all the way to the sill of the window ; by this arrangement a bench of stone is formed on each side of it. The other part of the house has a Perpendicular window, which may have replaced a Norman one.

The sculpture under this window, representing the wolf guarding the crowned head of St. Edmund, is worthy of notice. The upper part has been too much altered to enable us to make out exactly what it originally was ; it may have been a tower, of which the upper stage is destroyed, or it may have contained a doorway.

The fireplace is in the wall of partition on the first floor, and not towards the street, as in the Jews’ house at Lincoln ; but this fireplace is not part of the original work, though it probably replaced an older one. The principal entrance to the house would appear to have been on the east side.

We have seen in the previous chapter to what extent the Bury Benedictines borrowed from the Jews. The interest was outrageous, of course ; but the security was bad. The lenders might well have used the words which Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth of Isaac the Jew: ⁷¹

I pray of your reverence to remember that I force my moneys upon no one. But when churchman and layman, prince and prior, knight and priest, come knocking to Isaac’s door, they borrow not his shekels with these uncivil terms. It is then, “Friend Isaac, will you pleasure us in this matter, and day shall be truly kept, so God sa’ me?” and “Kind Isaac, if ever you served man, show yourself a friend in his need.” And when the day comes, and I ask my own, then what hear I, but “damned Jew,” and “The curse of Egypt on your tribe I” and all that may stir up the rude and uncivil populace against poor strangers ?

Bury St. Edmunds took a share in a general assault made on the children of Israel in ii9o, John Taxster mentioning the place in connection with the massacres at Norwich and at Stamford Fair, and their slaughter of one another at York, when England

Learn’d by proof, in one wild hour, how much the wretched dare.

Many Jews were here killed on March 18, which was Palm Sunday, says Taxster, writing in the reign of Edward I., and the rest were banished for ever, by the procuration of Abbot Sampson. They had thriven under no loving rule, as my old friend the author of the ‘Perlustration of Great Yarmouth’ used to say, whereas in an open town like Yarmouth they could not earn a living. Perhaps they found those burgesses as hard as Yorkshiremen, one of whom is said to be a match for six Jews.

It is impossible to prevent the Burgh of St. Edmund from usurping a very large space in this part of the county history. The character of King John needs no comment, and the part played by Archbishop Langton will never be forgotten. The judicial restlessness which was the outcome of a wicked conscience at one time drove John up and down England, after the manner of gadfly-stricken Io. From Windsor to Tollard Royal in Cranborne Chase, back to Windsor, to York, north, south, east, west, anywhere, and all in vain, to be quit of the ghastly presence of Arthur – this was the manner of his torment.

In A.D. 1214 his ill-devised military operations on the Continent, resulting in defeat and disgrace, undid what credit he had obtained from the revocation of the Interdict and the Excommunication.

In the previous year, at a great assembly at St. Paul’s, Langton had produced a charter of Henry I., the observance of which would have had the effect of depriving the nation of the far greater blessings of the Great Charter. Now (November 20, 1214) Bury witnessed, under colour of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund, that great gathering of prelates and nobles at which a general oath was taken to continue in arms till the King should grant a charter confirming these ancient rights, embodied in the laws of Edward the Confessor.

The year was waning, the “brief November day” sinking on heath and woodland, when the Bury assembly broke up. The new year had just commenced, when the barons’ demands were presented to the King, and, in spite of temporizing and intriguing, the Great Charter was signed on June 15, and broken, so to speak, before the ink was dry on the parchment. Civil war broke out, the barons holding London, and exacting large sums of money from Yarmouth, Ipswich, Colchester, and other towns, while John ravaged the North. Louis, the Dauphin of France, landed at Sandwich on May 21, 1216, to help the barons. John marched southwards to Lynn, retraced his steps, and died at Newark, October 19, leaving his nine-years-old son to inherit his crown and its troubles. It is at this point that the alleged removal of St. Edmund’s body to Toulouse took place.

For the abstraction of the body there is only the general language of Matthew Paris, that Louis the Dauphin despoiled the cities and villages of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, and the mention of the body of “Aymund”, King of England, in an inventory at St. Sernin, Toulouse, bearing date 1489. Further evidence may exist at Seville, as suggested.

On the other side, there is a total silence in the chronicles of that time as to the alleged robbery, and, indeed, with the exception of Matthew Paris, a total silence as to the operations of Louis and his merry men in East Anglia. We turn in vain to Thomas Walsingham, Roger Hoveden, Peter of Langtoft, Thomas Wykes ; to the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, a chronicle which is continued beyond his death ; to the royal letters of Henry III., which begin December 27, 1216 ; as well as to the annals of Evesham, Dunstable, Winchester, Waverley, Tewkesbury, and Burton.

Then there is the expressed belief at Bury that the body of St. Edmund was still there.

Florentius was under the impression that in 1296 he was visiting the place where the body lay. Lydgate, to whom the epithet ‘most authentic’ is applied, says nothing about the removal of the body. The fifteenth-century letters of affiliation call St. Edmundsbury `monasterium in quo gloriosissimus Rex et Martir Edmundus corporaliter et in corrupte quiescit;’ and it is not satisfactory to refer these words merely to common form.

To many readers these considerations will outweigh the 1489 inventory at Toulouse, especially when the items of some of these inventories are borne in mind. If we are to accept inventory evidence, we are confronted with unum jocale, cum petio digiti Adae,’ and much else. The stirring events of the latter part of the reign of Henry III., and the wars of Edward I. in Wales and Scotland, only touch our county by the draughts made on the able-bodied male population to fill up gaps in the rank and file. We have no Cressinghams and Ormesbys to speak of, like our Norfolk neighbours. Nor do the miserable errors and horrible fate of Edward II. affect us locally.

The architecture of the time has suffered much at the hands of all following generations. Fashion changed, and for the worse, as often in other matters. The lofty purity of Early English gave way to the flowing curves of the Middle-pointed style, and both had to strike their colours to the imperious demands of the Perpendicular. Hence, comparatively little of Early English is left. A fine tower was evidently planned for Rumburgh, but never carried beyond the first floor. At Mildenhall, a beautiful chancel, with vaulted roof and pilasters of Purbeck marble, is used as a vestry ; a new chancel, built by Richard de Wycheford, Vicar, .’qui fecit istud novum opus,’ with a perfectly unique seven-light east window, the lights being of graduated width, threw the older chancel into the shade in the first years of the fourteenth century ; and in repairing the Perpendicular tower large masses of fine dog-tooth work were discovered, mouldings inside, serving to form the buttresses. In the smaller towns and villages there is more remaining of the Decorated or Middle-pointed work, sometimes with pretty fragments of glass with black and yellow ribbon, which has escaped the hands of the restoring nineteenth-century destroyer. We have at Acton a fine brass of the complete chain-mail style, before plates came in, and at Gorleston, fixed in the wall, a later specimen to the memory of the Sir John Bacon whose name occurs in the Inquisition Rolls of 1292. Very likely this is one of those mentioned by that miserable fanatic, William Dowsing of Laxfield, as being torn up in the course of his Puritan vagaries. It was purchased by Mr. John Gage Rokewode at Mr. Craven Ord’s sale in 1830, and by the kind care of Mr. Dawson Turner replaced in its original matrix.

Two names, both connected with the Franciscan Order, must not be passed over in this chapter : Bishop Robert Grosseteste and Friar Thomas Bungay.

In the middle of the “Bissopes Hundred” is the parish called Stetebroc in Domesday Book, now Stradbroke, where the great opponent of Papal usurpation in his day first breathed the air of this world in some obscure cottage, such as little farm-houses then were. He had a brother, of whom he said, “A farmer you are, and a farmer you will be.” ⁷² We know little of his boyhood, but from the proximity of Stradbroke to Hoxne, he very probably fell under the notice of John Oxford, Bishop of Norwich, as a bright and promising boy. At Oxford he studied Greek, Hebrew and physics, and at Paris he pushed these studies further, and added French. In 1235 he became Bishop of Lincoln, and, as we learn from his letters⁷³,’ he had occasion twelve years afterwards to resist the very same Franciscans by whom he had been taught. With their vows of poverty on them, they were exacting money all over England, and required 6,000 marks from-his diocese. The resistance offered by him to this claim, and subsequently to Pope Innocent IV. himself, when he demanded a Lincoln canonry for his boy-nephew, can only be glanced at here. He died in 1253 at his palace at Buckden, in the county of Huntingdon.

Like Grosseteste, Friar Bungay was regarded as a magician, and like his friend and contemporary, Roger Bacon, he got into trouble through his reputation. ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’ were a well-known pair, and afterwards formed the title to the best known of Greene’s plays. Whence that inventive genius got his ideas it is hard to say ; but the story is a pretty one, with a strong local flavour.

The scene is laid mainly in East Suffolk. Prince Edward is hunting the hart in the Forest of Framlingham, and comes to ‘merry Fressingfield’, where at the Hall he becomes enamoured of a simple rustic beauty, the ‘fair Margaret of Fressingfield’. Henry III., however, summons his son to himself, having other views for a matrimonial alliance, and the Prince deputes the Earl of Lincoln to look after his interests. Margaret, apparently without intent, captivates not only the Earl, but two stout yeomen, Sersby of Cratfield and Lambert of Laxfield, who slay each other in single combat. This tragic event Friar Bungay exhibits in his magic glass to the sons of the combatants, students at Oxford, who are not backward to follow their fathers’ examples, and the simple Margaret, after unwillingly causing this quadruple devastation, becomes Countess of Lincoln. The fair at Harleston, and the conversation about a horse which had been sold by the father of one of Margaret’s many admirers to a man at Beccles, are described in very lively dialogue, and if the time is not accurately represented, the same may be said of the greater part of Shakespeare’s historical plays. Friar Bungay, like other magicians, had a dog, and ‘dog Bungay’ was a name not unknown, though not so common as ‘dog Toby,’ of apocryphal fame. Sir John Harington had a dog of the name. ⁷⁴

Notes:

1. Chronicle, P. 58.
2. ‘The Coming of the Friar’ P. 31.
3. The Grammar School occupies the site.
4. III. 324.
5. Palmer, ‘Perlustration of Great Yarmouth’, iii. 326-328.
6. ‘Ivanhoe,’ chap. xxxiv.
7. Howell’s ‘Letters’, p. 406.
8. Epp. cxiii., cxiv.
9. Grosart’s ‘Sir John Davies’, p. 348.