The History Of Suffolk

Both the military Orders which ramified over Europe were represented in Suffolk – the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Battisford, and the Templars at Dunwich and Gislingham. The former were Hospitallers. Originating in a hospital at Jerusalem dedicated to St. John the Baptist, and founded for the tending of sick and weary pilgrims in the middle of the eleventh century, they gradually slipped out of ambulance work and became in the main military. Their sole commandry has no date earlier than the reign of Henry II., who gave it his lands in East Bergholt. When the Templars were dissolved, early in the fourteenth century, their revenues at Dunwich and Gislingbam were transferred to the Battisford commandry. At the dissolution, the Gisling ham preceptory was granted to John Grene and William Hall ; the Battisford possessions passed to Richard Gresham and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, but the Dunwich manor remained ungranted till 1561, when Queen Elizabeth gave it to Thomas Andrews.

The dates of the foundation of the Templars’ preceptories are also uncertain. Their dissolution in the time of Edward II., though free from the extreme horrors which accompanied the fate of the Order in France, leaves, nevertheless, ground of grave suspicion of injustice and cruelty behind it. They had existed for about two centuries since King Baldwin II. gave them part of his palace, occupying the site of Solomon’s Temple, whence arose their name.

The convent of Bungay, founded in 1160 by Roger de Glanville and his wife Gundrada, is about the only foundation in the Plantagenet period till the arrival of the Mendicant Orders. The revenues were early drawn from the tithes of parishes which have never recovered their impoverishment. Six Suffolk rectories at once became vicarages – Bungay, St. Mary and St. Thomas ; Mettingham ; and all the Ilketshalls except St. John’s ; besides Roughton in Norfolk. It will be well, perhaps, to break a little into our severe chronological order, and note a few points in the history of this nunnery.

A century elapses, and we find the Lady Sarah, Prioress, a very capable woman, driving a hard bargain with a needy neighbour, Sir James de Ilketshall.

This is just in the thick of the Robin Hood adventures, according to most who have treated of that

Gode outlaw
Who did pore men mocha gods,’

and some light on the transaction may be thrown by a scene in the ‘Lytyll Geste of Robin Hode,’ where, as Little John was in Barnsdale :

Then came there a knyght redyage
Full sone they gas hym mete,
All dreari then was his semblaunte,
And lytell was his pride,
Hys one fore in the sterope stole,
That other waved besyde.
Hys bode hangynge over his eyes two :
He rode in simple way;
A soryer man than he was one
Rode never in somers, day.

He is bid by Robin Hood to dinner, but has only half a pound to offer his host. Robin asks him the cause of his poverty, and he says that he has lost all by ransoming his son, who had committed murder :

My londes beth set to wedde [mortgage} Robyn,
Untyll a certain days,
To a ryche abbot here besyde,
Of Saynt Mary abbay.’

The North-Country knight found friends in these usually generous, but occasionally iniquitous, outlaws, and all eventually went well with him. Had such excep tional luck befallen the distressed landed proprietor of those days, there would have been rejoicing in the hall of Ulchete or Ulfketyl; but there was no Robin Hood in East Anglia to set the affairs of Sir James de Ilketshall in order, and the advowson of Ilketshall St. John followed the other three.

The Bungay nunnery was shortly afterwards presented with a woman and her little boy by Roger de Huntingfield, who succeeded his father in 1286, and died in 1301- The woman was Alveva, the wife of Roger Brunllan, of Metfield, the boy their eldest son Thomas. By that time the distinction between serfdom and villenage had pretty well faded away, and the words were used as convertible terms for all who were not free. The document conveying Alveva and little Tom, with the whole tenement which they held of Roger de Huntingfield, is in the possession of Mr. Rider Haggard, sealed with a fine impression of Roger’s seal, and witnessed by Adam, William, and Martin, “sanctimoniales”, probably Mendham Cluniacs, and by Godfrey of Linburne, a tenant of the Bungay convent, as well as by others.

With our nineteenth-century ideas, it seems hard that mother and child should be thus handed over as though they were mere fixtures to the tenement, especially as the father was presumably alive, the woman being called `wife,’ not ‘widow! Still, we must consider our inability to read between the lines of these ancient documents, and if we were in possession of all the circumstances of the case, it might be manifest that what was done was really for the benefit of all concerned.

In spite of foreclosures and presents, the nunnery got into debt, and had to be set straight by further grants. All was not peace within those sacred walls, and on one occasion the authority of the well-known Henry Spencer, the ‘fighting’ Bishop of Norwich, had to be called in. One of the noble house of Salisbury, Katherine de Montacute, was in the Bungay convent. A sister, Joan, was the wife of William de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk. For some reason or other Katherine ran away. The Prioress in formed Bishop Spencer, who by letters patent signified the same to the Crown, and a warrant was issued for her apprehension.

The list of persons to whom the warrant was addressed does not include the Earl, those designated being John Trailly, knight ; Andrew Cavendish, knight ; Walter Amyas, clerk ; Hugh Fastolf, Edmund Gourney, John Caltoft, and Edmund Spicer, all, save the last, local names, and he very likely being a local tradesman, with a good rouncie, or packhorse, useful for business purposes, and now to be utilized in scouring the country in search of the missing nun, who is described as ` fleeing about from parish to parish, in divers parts of our kingdom of England, in secular dress, to the contempt of the dress of her Order, in peril of her soul, and to the manifest scandal of her said Order.’ When caught she was to be delivered to the Prioress of the Bungay convent, or to her attorneys in this matter, ‘to be punished according to the rule of the said Order.’

It has always seemed to me that this was a case of a mountain from a mole-hill. These set terms in warrants, like those in an old-fashioned writ of latitat, were not supposed to be literally true ; and it may be that all the while Katherine de Montacute was with her sister Joan, and that something more than persuasion was wanted to bring her back. This warrant was issued in 1376, and four years afterwards a lady of the same name became Prioress. It is possible that there were two of the same name in the convent ; but the more natural solution is, that the quarrel was made up, and the heroine of the warrant became in the end the successor of the lady whose authority she had resisted.

We have in the pages of Jocelin of Brakelond a con tinuous and charmingly-written account of the affairs of the Bury abbey from 1173 to 1202. This invaluable narrative is contained in a MS. which passed through the Bacons of Redgrave into the hands of Bishop Stillingfleet, and so into the Harleian Collection. The gratitude of all historical students is due, first, to Mr. John Gage Rokewode, who published it for the Camden Society in 1840; then to Mr. John Greene, of Bury St. Edmunds, who translated and popularized it ; and finally to Thomas Carlyle, on whom- its honest vivacity made a deep impression.

“Past and Present” is a book not to be criticised here. Suffice it to say that the narrative of Jocelin served as a text for many a sermon, which, like similar homilies, mainly addressed those who wanted them least. The start is made in 1173, after the battle of Fornham, about which something must be said, battles in Suffolk being about as rare as political peace in a South American republic.

The family relations of Henry II. were notoriously unhappy, and his weakness in allowing his eldest son, Henry, to be crowned during his own life-time only had the effect of precipitating that ambitious young man into a whirlpool of plots, which plots in the end broke forth into a general attack upon the old King. Among the English conspirators were Robert Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, and Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. Leicester landed on the Suffolk coast with a large force of Fleming mercenaries, marched to Framlingham, to effect a junction with Bigod, and thence to Haughley Castle, where Randal de Broc offered only a slight resistance. Their intention was to proceed westward to the relief of Leicester ; but in the meanwhile Humphrey Bohun, the King’s Constable, one of the few who had remained faithful to his master, not accepting the “large promises of the Lion’s Skin before he was dead,” ⁶¹ made a truce with William the Lion, King of Scotland, against whom he had been sent, and marched to Bury St. Edmunds, where he was joined by other adherents of the King. This movement turned the course of Beaumont and Bigod, who attempted to cross the Lark lower down. There must have been large numbers of Brabant mercenaries on both sides, when the armies met at Fornham St. Genevieve, a little north of the town. The King’s victory was, however, regarded as a Flemish defeat. Ten thousand of the rebel army, supposed to be Flemings, are said to have fallen. Carlyle apparently considered the detail of so distant an event hardly worth notice, and has related the cause of the rebellion in a very queer and hazy manner. ⁶² An account of the traces of the battle is given by Mr. Gage Rokewode: ⁶³

‘ Human bones, fragments of weapons, and other relics of war, beside pennies of King Henry II., have been occa sionally found upon the spot. In particular, in felling, in 1826, an ancient pollard ash that stood upon a low mound of earth, about fifteen feet in diameter, near the church of Fornham St Genevieve (the ground being within the Duke of Norfolk’s park, but apparently part of the church yard at some former time), a heap of skeletons, not less than forty, was discovered, in good preservation, piled in order, tier above tier, with their faces upward and their feet pointing to the centre. Several of the skulls exhibited evident marks of violence, as if they had been pierced with arrows, or cleft with the sword. In the bed of the river, in the adjoining parish of Fornham St. Martin, was also found some years since a gold ring with a ruby, late in the possession of Charles Blomfield, Esq., which is con jectured by some to be the ring that the Countess of Leicester is related (Matthew Paris, 128) to have thrown away in her flight.’

It is a pity that Jocelin’s chronicle does not begin eight years earlier, for then we might have heard some particulars of the great earthquake on January 26, 1165, in ‘Ely, Northfoc and Sufoc,’ which threw men to the ground and rang the bells.’ The narrative would have been beyond all price, told in the clear, unaffected simplicity of the good old Suffolk Benedictine. In all thankfulness for what we have, let us peep into monastic life as disclosed by him. Zealots of each extreme will care little for it. ‘ Many have told of the Monks of Old⁶⁴, as one of the songs of the last generation used to run, but they made the story too much out of their own brains. There was too much Ego in their Kosmos. The Englishman, or grown-up English baby, whose highest ideal is tobacco and brandy and water, still hears with pleased surprise how the monks `laughed, ha-ha ! and they quaffed, ha-ha!’ The red-hot Protestant, who regards the Tudor period as the be-all and end-all of history, wants as much crime as a reader of a ‘ penny dreadful,’ to furnish an enormous indictment to be launched at the memory of the shaveling wretches. The ‘Catholic,’ as the Roman calls himself, rose-tints every feature in the picture, and presents you with a miserable daub of undiluted piety, of about the same value as those portraits of saints with mechanical smile and outspread palms which sprawl on a gilt-gingerbread background. Whereas, if the story tells itself, it is neither the one thing nor the other. Human infirmity and human perversity are recorded for our warning, with much more of divinely-sent rectitude, perseverance and humble trust, for our encouragement. Early in the pages of our chronicler comes before us poor old Abbot Hugo, broken in health, and even at his best estate unfixed and irresolute, a kind of Benedictine Ethel¬red the Unready, never doing to-day what could be put off to to-morrow, raising money from hand to mouth, like a Turkish official before dividend day. Qualls rex, tabs grex. The Benedictines of Bury, bound to poverty, somehow could not get on without money, and each for himself pawned vessels of gold and vestments of silk indiscriminately to Jew and Christian. The unhappy Jocelin specifies, too, sundry notes of hand, frequently in the hands of gentlemen of the ‘ Hebrew persuasion,’ one for £1,040 to William, the son of Isabel, one for £400 to Isaac, son of Rabbi Joce, and a third to Benedict, the Jew of Norwich, for £880. These would be serious sums now, and were stupendous sums then ; and after the manner of such liabilities they got heavier and heavier. Jocelin only knew the history of the third of these notes of hand. The `chamber’ was out of repair, and William the Sacristan, charged with the business but not with the means, borrowed 27 marks of Benedict, sealing his ‘carta’ with a certain seal, not then broken up as it ought to have been, hanging at the tomb of King Edmund, with which gilds and fraternities used to be sealed. With constantly accruing compound interest, at a liberal rate, this became £100, and further cozenage and production of old debts ran the amount up to £1200, besides interest. The Jew, Shylock-like, carries the matter before the King’s Court, and the King’s Almoner comes to inquire into the matter. The Chapter is assembled, but none dare make complaint. Jocelin himself, a sharp novice, wonders at this, and asks Master Sampson, Teacher of the Novices, why he does not speak up. Sampson replies that ‘ a burnt child dreads the fire,’ that he has been already incarcerated at Acre⁶⁵ for saying what he thought, and that the two Hinghams, Hugh and Robert, are only just back again from a similar exile. “This is the hour of darkness . . . God see and judge!”

Deliverance came suddenly and unexpectedly. Old Abbot Hugh bethought him of a Canterbury pilgrimage, the shrine of St. Thomas being just established. On the journey he fell from his mule and dislocated his knee-pan. Physicians attended him, tortured him in many ways, but healed him not. He returned to Bury, his leg mortified, he died, and his death was announced to Ralph Glanville, Justiciary of England ; but some time elapsed before the King granted a free choice of a successor to the convent. Then the election came off, into the detail of which we must not enter ; and Sampson of Tottington, the despised Norfolk paltener and barator, or wrangler, the late Teacher of the Novices and Sub-sacrist, rules in the place of helpless old Hugh. How he ruled his devoted Jocelin tells us, and Carlyle, ever the panegyrist of the strong, echoes his praises. Order arose out of chaos. Finance got right-sided, but not without many an effort. When the money-bonds were examined it was found that there were as many as three-and-thirty convent seals in existence, all of which he broke up, and guarded carefully the new seal, which stands engraved at the beginning of Gage Rokewode’s book. A man he was of middle stature, nearly bald, with face neither round nor long, a high nose, thick lips, eyes clear (‘cristalline’) and piercing, eyebrows lofty and often shaven, of keen hearing, apt to become hoarse with a slight cold, with a streak of white in hissed beard and dark hair at the time of his election, but white as snow fourteen years afterwards. Skilled was he in Latin and French, yet he knew and loved the Scriptures in English, and preached to the people in his mother-dialect of Norfolk, for his native Tottington lies a few miles north of Thetford. Oh that his lips had language! What treasures, social, religious, philological, would come to us from ten minutes’ oral instruction! Read the incidents as they follow in the chronicle : how he baffled Bishop Geoffrey Ridell of Ely about the Elmsett timber ; how he compelled the Rural Dean to pull down his illegal mill at `Haberdon;’ how he withstood the haughty Coeur-de-Lion about the wardship of the baby orphan girl of Adam de Cokefeld ; and the, rest of his acts, for are they not written in that book of Jashar, or the upright, whereof we speak? We cannot delay over dear Jocelin, and can only hope that some kindly soul will re-edit John Greene’s translation.

Of the various fraternities, some thirty in number, living according to rule deduced from the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, we had four in Suffolk : Austin or Black Canons, Premonstratensian or White Canons, nuns of the Order of Fontevrault, and Austin Friars or Friars Eremite. The last we will leave till we come to the mendicant friars generally.

It is impossible to find the origin of the first, of whom there seems to have been a remodelling about the later days of Edward the Confessor. Their discipline was less severe than that of the Benedictines. A house according to the new model is found at Avignon circa xo6i, whence, in less than half a century, sprung the Colchester Black Canons. Ixworth, built by Gilbert le Blount, nearly at the time of the accession of Henry I., soon destroyed, but immediately rebuilt by William, son of Gilbert, is their earliest Suffolk house, the picturesque ruins of which remain in Captain Norton Cartwright’s grounds. Very soon after Ixworth appeared Bricett, circa 1110, founded by Ralph Fitz-Brian and Emma his wife, under the pro tection of Bishop Herbert de Losinga. It became a cell to Nobiliac in the diocese of Limoges, after having existed independently for about a century and a half, and went the way of other alien cells under the Statute of Leicester.

Next comes Blythburgh, near the scene of Anna’s defeat at Bulcamp. The grounds appear to have been larger than the number of inmates, there being only three canons in 1473, whereas the buildings extended, probably with interruptions, to some distance from the church. According to Leland, Smodemus, Abbot of St. Osyth, whose successors nominated to this priory, was the first founder. Something will be said about it in connection with Cardinal Wolsey.

Butley dates from 1171, by the munificence of the Chief Justiciary, Ralph de Glanville. It was specially favoured by episcopal benefactions, Archbishop Richard the Monk, Hubert Walter, and Peckham, three Bishops of Norwich, and two of London, being contributors to its possessions. The gate-house exists comparatively uninjured, and there are other remains.

Kersey, as far as evidence goes, was a hospital or free chapel of St. Mary and St. Antony, converted into a priory of Austin Canons by Nesta de Cokefield, widow of Thomas de Burgos, in 1219. Her retention of her maiden name after her marriage is suggestive of her being an heiress, and possibly she is identical with the babe of three months old, the orphan of Adam de Cokefield, about whose wardship we saw Abbot Sampson withstanding Richard Coeur-de-Lion.

Two houses in Ipswich have had different destinies : that called by the name of the Holy Trinity, or Christ Church, after various changes, just lately purchased by the municipality for a public park ; the other, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, passing into Wolsey’s great projected college in that town. It had a cell at Letheringham. Woodbridge belongs to the latter part of the twelfth century. Three generations of Ernaldus Rufus or Rous joined in the foundation, the patronage of which soon passed from their family to the convent. The priors were often natives of the county : Joh. de Athelington, Joh. Brandish, Tho. de Troston, etc.

Little enough can be seen of or recorded about Alborne, in the ancient parish of Hallowtree, between Ipswich St. Clement and Nacton, Chipley in Poslingford, or Dodnash in Bentley ; but the traveller to Yarmouth may catch a sight of the remains of St. Olave’s Priory in Herringfleet, on the left hand, just after passing St. Olave’s Station. Here is still commemorated the name of that fierce old Christian King whose endeavour to propagate the Gospel of peace by sword and flames ended in his defeat and death at Sticklestad, in A.D. 1030. The miracles wrought by his body, at the cathedral at Trondhjem, were known far beyond Norwegian limits. From the connection of this priory with the ferry across the Waveney, hard by, it is easy to see what works of hospitality were done here in days when roads were foul, water rough, and weather relentless. When St. Norbert of Cleves, A.D. 1119, was seeking a place where he might establish a house of Austin Canons on a more rigorous rule, which was to include a vegetable diet, a meadow in the Forest of Coucy was pointed out to him in a dream (pratum monstratum), from which arose the White Canons’ name Premonstratensian.

Their solitary Suffolk house, founded near the sea in 1182, was afterwards moved inwards to Leiston, though the old site was never deserted. In 1531, John Grene, a canon of Butley, gave up his position there, choosing to be a hermit in the original Premonstratensian building. The remains of Leiston, interesting in themselves, are rendered more beautiful by the wall-flowers which luxuriate on those gray walls.

Whatever may have been the intentions of Robert d’Arbrissel, founder of the house of Fontevrault, with regard to a mixed society, they did not take effect in Suffolk. The two houses, Campsey and Flixton, of that Order, are for nuns only. The former was founded by Theobald de Valoines for his two sisters, of whom one was the first Prioress, and others who might join them. The date is within the reign of Richard I. Important as it was, hardly anything of it remains, and nothing can be shown at Flixton, founded about sixty years after Campsey, but the site. The inventory of Elizabeth Wright, the last Prioress, in the Record Office, contains the usual domestic articles, and probably not more than seven nuns were living there at the Dissolution. This completes the Augustinian foundations, with the exception of the friars.

Notes:

1. Daniel, ‘Life and Reign of Henry the Second.’
2. `Past and Present,’ chap, iii.
3. Notes to Jocelin of Brakelond, p. 106.
4. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majors, A.D. 1165.
5. Probably Castle Acre.

THE thrilling events of the Norman Conquest told on Suffolk chiefly by change of proprietorship. The men whose names ended in wulf, ketyl, bert, and win went out, and the men whose names began in Fitz, De and Le came in. One remarkable survival is that of the ante-conquestal Toelmag in the Tollemaches of Helmingham. What Edric of Laxfield had done we know not ; but, as a rule, we know that Robert Malet, or the Hammer, held the broad lands that were Edric’s in the days of Edward the Confessor. Roger of Poitou, Ralph Baynard, William de Varennes, and other friends of the victor, eminently Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, appear as the new owners. No earl held Suffolk as his sole jurisdiction, Norwich in the course of a little time becoming the civil and ecclesiastical centre ; and from the well-known hill of that city was wielded the rod of county authority till the reign of Richard II.

The fortunes of the Malet family may serve as a comment on those days.

The family was founded by William Malet, of Graville, in Caux, Normandy. He married Hesilia Crispin, descended from Crisping, daughter of Rollo, first Duke of Normandy. He took part in the battle of Hastings, where his rashness nearly lost him his life. According to most of the chroniclers of the time whose accounts are accepted by Freeman, he was entrusted with the burial of Harold’s body on the sea-shore, before its removal to Waltham. He was made Sheriff of York, and placed in charge of the city when it was taken by William in 1068; but only a year later he was made prisoner by the Danes when they recaptured the city. Probably, soon exchanged, he died during the campaign against Hereward the Wake in 1071. He was one of the few nobles allowed to build a castle, which he did at Eye. He also established a market there by the King’s leave. It is recorded in Domesday that this market rendered quite valueless that of the Bishop established at Hoxne. There is no account of the amount of his very large possessions in England, but besides those into which he entered without question, his son Robert laid claim to many lordships in York and Lincolnshire ; but the chief bulk of his property was undoubtedly in Suffolk.

In the King’s grant to Lanfranc of the manor of Fracenham ⁵⁷, Robert Malet is styled Vicecomes. There is no mention of him in the reign of William Rufus, but in Henry I’s reign he was Grand Chamberlain of England. Unfortunately, he joined Robert de Bellesme, Earl of Shrewsbury, and others, in inviting Robert Duke of Normandy to invade England. In the treaty between Robert and Henry it was stipulated that Robert’s adherents should not suffer for joining his cause ; but notwithstanding this agreement Robert Malet was banished from the country, and all his English possessions were confiscated. He retired to his Norman estates, where he passed the rest of his life. He was supposed to have been killed at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106. His forfeited estates were granted to Stephen of Blois, while his office of Grand Chamberlain was given to Aubrey de Vere, in whose family it became hereditary. He married Elisée de Brionne, daughter of the Count of Brionne. His son William went as a banneret to the first Crusade in the train of Duke Robert. In 1109 he was banished, like his father, for participation in the rebellion of Helias, Earl of Maine, and, like his father, retired to Normandy. Of his two sons, one founded the still existing French family ; another, Hugh, remained in England, where he married an heiress and settled in the West. Robert Malet had a brother, Gilbert, the last of whose descendants, William Malet, was one of the guarantors of Magna Carta.

To revert to the earldom: East Anglia was destitute of such a dignitary till nine years after the Conquest, when the North-folk and the South-folk were united under the title of the former. There was a certain Ralph de Guader, to adopt the best known form of many spellings, a Breton on his mother’s side, though his father was a Norfolk man named Ralph. Like most of the military adventurers of the day, he was not averse to a good match, and found one in Emma, daughter of the powerful William Fitz-Osberne, Earl of Hereford, and joint-Regent with Bishop Odo during the Conqueror’s absence in Normandy. So far as conflicting authorities may be reconciled, it seems that the King’s consent to the marriage had been obtained and withdrawn. The great Earl William died about this time, and his second son, Roger, a young man, took his place. The marriage took place at Exning, but according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle there was a bridal feast at Norwich :

Then was that bride-ale
The source of man’s bale.’

Ralph de Guader, newly-created Earl of Norfolk, had amongst his guests his young brother-in-law, Earl Waltheof, son of the great Siward of Northumbria, and bishops and abbots. There seems to have been good cheer and strong talk, and in the end a dangerous con spiracy, which broke up through the defection of Waltheof. Ralph de Guader escaped from Norwich by water, got out to sea, sailed to Brittany; and thence to Denmark, where his later plottings resulted in failure. With his departure the East Anglian earldom collapsed for some sixty years, when it was renewed in the Bigod family. However the realm in general may have suffered at the hands of the lordly owners of castles in those days when ‘men openly said that Christ and His saints slept,’ the scourge was comparatively lightly laid on in Suffolk. There are but six castles to be ascribed to this period Framlingham, Haughley, Bungay, Eye, Clare, and Orford. The first has already been mentioned in the account of St. Edmund, the Martyr-King. It has but little advantage of natural position. Uncertain, but not improbable, tradition represents it as a stronghold of King Redwald, what time he held Court at Rendlesham. The first and second Norman kings are said to have held it in their own hands. Shortly after his accession, Henry I. granted it to Roger Bigod (A.D. 1103). The present building arose on its ruins.

In the other instances existing earthworks appear to have been utilized. Haughley and Eye stand upon high artificial mounds, which may have been memorials to mighty men, unrecorded in the history of their remote times. The keep at Bungay is well protected on the west by a great earthen vallum, apparently forming one side of a large rectangular enclosed space, of which a small part of the north boundary also remains on Outney Common, as yet not quite obliterated by the operations of the Great Eastern Railway.

After awhile this keep received an outer fence of curtains and round towers, so that each tower could be defended separately, and in case of all surrendering, the keep itself might prolong resistance. And here a remarkable discovery was made in 1891. In the bailey, or enclosure between the keep and the outer walls, was found the square well, its sides properly plastered, and a grim underground apartment about 14 feet square, with two square shafts through which a scanty supply of air and a hardly perceptible modicum of light would be admitted. A more effectual comment on the condition of captives within these walls could hardly be afforded than by the inspection of this dreadful hole. Many have been the vicissitudes of Bungay Castle. At Whitsuntide, 1140, Stephen came with his army on Hugh Bigod, and took ‘Castellurn de Bunie,’ which he soon restored. This policy of deprivation and restoration was repeated by Henry II., but Bigod a third time defied the reigning sovereign, taking the side of the King’s rebellious sons in 1174, It was on this occasion that he is said by tradition to have uttered the well-known words : “Were I in my castle of Bungay, upon the river Wavenay, I would not care for the King of Cocknay.” He that seeks the origin of this story is not so likely to find it, as to find the origin of the modern-antique ballad, which appears for the first time in the pages of Suckling. The ruined site and the earldom were restored to Roger, son of Hugh, in 1188, by Richard I., but the place remained desolate for nearly a century. In 1281 Edward I. issued to another Roger Bigod, now not only Earl of Norfolk but also Earl Marshal, the usual license to crenellate his mansion of Bungay.

It is remarkable that the latter part of the eleventh century witnessed no independent monastic foundations in Suffolk. It is not till A.D. 1120 that the Benedictine nuns, non-affiliated, were settled at Redlingfield. There were, however, three cells to abbeys, in Normandy by the end of William the Conqueror’s reign, two of them to Bernay (Creting. St. Mary and Eye), and one to Greistein (Creting St.Olave), besides Rumburgh, which Blakere and other Benedictine brethren from St. Bene’t’s-at-Hulm formed about the same time.

The learned and wealthy abbey of Bec, in Normandy, over which Archbishops Lanfranc and Anselm presided in their earlier days, had cells at Blakenham and Clare. William Martel founded Snape, A.D. 1099, dependent on St. John of Colchester; and Felixstowe, which is supposed to have been removed to the neighbourhood of Walton Church, was made a cell to Rochester by Roger Bigod early in the reign of Henry I. The foundation at Hoxne originated from the gift of the church there, and the chapel near the spot where St. Edmund was slain, to the Norwich priory by Bishop Herbert de Losinga, A.D. 1101. Thus arose a small cell in that village, charged with the care of the lamps before St. Edmund’s image, to which pilgrimages were constantly made.

Colne Priory in Essex, a daughter of Abingdon, was in charge of the small house at Edwardstone, which does not appear to have lasted quite half a century (1114- 1160), at the expiration of which time two secular priests were appointed to pray in Edwardstone Church for the founder’s soul, Hubert de Montchensy, and the possessions passed to Colne.

Another little house, Wickham Skeith, founded by Sir Robert de Salcovilla, or Sackville, belonged, like Snape, to Colchester.

If Norman influence is felt in the foregoing instances, it may well be expected in the Cluniac and Cistercian foundations. We have two of each in Suffolk, all cells: the Cluniacs, Mendham and Wangford ; the Cistercians, Sibton and Coddenham. The glories of the great abbey of Cluny have departed. The little ‘one-horse’ town on the higher ground which forms the watershed between the Saone and the Loire is to most people nothing more than a name, if so much ; and of the multitudes who visit the Mus6e de Cluny in Paris, a small percentage indeed will think of it as the former palace of the wealthy Abbots of Cluny.

Wealth, learning, and state, characterized this Order, and each showed its reproductive power. The great house at Lewes, with its Cluniac double transepts, was founded by William, Earl of Warenne, and his wife, Gundrada, considered by the late Professor Freeman as a daughter of the Conqueror’s Queen, Matilda, by her former husband, Gerbod ⁵⁸,’ in the year 1077. The gratitude for their kindly reception at Cluny did not exhaust itself in Sussex. The next year saw the Castle Acre Priory begun, with the help of four monks from Lewes, and more of the same Order appeared at Thetford, A.D. 1104. Mendham was a cell to Castle Acre, and Wangford to Thetford, both being, as it were, grand-daughters of Lewes, and great-grand-daughters of Cluny. The traveller along the Waveney Valley will see on the Suffolk side of that river, between Shotford and Mendham bridges, a ragged but venerable mass of masonry “in the place called Hurst or Bruninhurst, being then a woody isle.” It is so little above the river as to raise a feeling of surprise how these Cluniacs could have escaped the floods to which the Waveney has been at all times subject, and certainly to dispel the idea that the water-level used to be higher than it now is. Much of the beautiful Norman arcading has been removed to Mendham Place, a mile or two distant, where it stands as a curious comment on the taste and fancy of those who transplanted it. The foundation dates from 1140, when William, son of Roger de Huntingfield, gave the isle of “Medenham”, or the place of meadows, to the Castle Acre Cluniacs, on condition that they should build a house and place at least eight of their monks there.

About 30 feet of wall on the south side of Wangford Church will be all that a visitor can see of that Cluniac cell, founded by a steward of the royal household, whom Bishop Tanner takes to be identical with Eudo, Dapifer, founder of St. John’s, Colchester, though Leland’s ver sion of the name is Doudo Asini. The date is circa 1160. Contrasting itself with the Cluniacs stands before us the severe Order of Cistercians, ascetics to the core. They had existed at Citeaux only thirty years, when they came to England in 1128, backed by the great name of St. Bernard. Wealth indeed was theirs. They could not have avoided it. Learning was theirs in abundance, but not state. The “cell” system was replaced by visitations from the abbey from which the house originated. Thus Sibton, being an offshoot from Wardon in Bedford shire, was liable to a visitation by that Abbot, and, in like manner, Wardon could be visited by the Abbot of Foun tains, Fountains by Clairvaux, and Clairvaux by Citeaux, the mother of them all . ⁵⁹

The Sibton house was founded in 1149 or 1150 by William de Cheney, greatly helped at the time by his daughter, the Lady Margery de Cressy.

Eustace de Mere appears to have failed of the purpose intended in the Coddenham foundation, and eventually to have turned it over to the Austin canons of his establish ment in Royston. That it was intended to be Cistercian is clear by his confirming the grant of Coddenham Church to the convent, which he describes as of the same Order as that of Appleton in Yorkshire, a Cistercian nunnery. Castles and abbeys are manifestly but small factors in this portion of the history of Suffolk. In the north-west the great abbey of St. Edmund grew and prospered, and its liberty, granted by Edward the Confessor, contained the hundreds of Cosford, Babergh, Risbridge, Lackford, Blackburn, Thedwastre, and Thingoe ; and the half-hundred of Exning, consisting of that parish and New market St. Mary’s. As the abbey grew, so its dependencies throve.

Over the rest of the county also a slow and sure development went on. Subsequent changes in architecture have swept much of the Norman work away, but a few grand specimens remain, and many a church-wall of undressed pebbles and flints, now elevated and pierced with third-pointed windows, is the original wall of a little single Norman church. We find in Domesday Book, on the whole, a church to each parish, served by the clerk, nominated in most cases by the Lord of the Manor, whose’ predecessors had erected the building, and from whose acres came the tithe. Such churches we may find at Wiston on the Stour, and at Wordwell, on the heath country between Bury St. Edmunds and Brandon. The nave at Santon Downham and the chancel at Lakenheath are of the same character. Eyke, between Woodbridge and the sea, had a central Norman tower, of which the massive arches are still standing. Little Saxham tower is crested by an elegant circular arcade. At Somerton, Ousden, Mettingham, Wissett, Hargrave, Hawstead, Horham, Kelsale, and other places, are Norman doorways, with that variety of moulding for which the style is remarkable. The beautiful west front of Westhall has been disfigured by a tower of fifteenth-century work built up to it, against which it seems mutely to appeal. Huntingfield and Polstead have excellent arches of this period. But the crown of all the Suffolk work is the great Norman tower at Bury St. Edmunds, originally built as a gateway, restored within my own recollection, and serving now as the campanile for St. James’s Church, whence sound the fine ten bells placed there in 1785.

At once comely and massive, it must be seen to be appreciated. The late Mr. J. H. Parker, to whose action we owe so much preservation of architectural relics, as well as accounts of them, says of it : “This tower affords a valuable specimen of rich early Norman work, of the shallow character, executed with the axe, and not with the chisel. It was built in 1095. A shallow porch has been added in later Norman work.” ⁶⁰

Notes:

1. Now Freckenham.
2. Freeman, ‘Norm. Conq.,’ iii., App. 0, p. 660
3. W. H. St. John Hope, in ‘Proceedings of Suffolk Institute of Archeology,’ viii., part i, P.55.
4. ‘Churches of Suffolk,’ No. 538

For some half a century East Anglia remained in the hands of the Danes, and of such as they suffered to continue in their possessions. The proverbial happiness of those without annals cannot be claimed for these parts. The little glimpses afforded to us by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are not bright. If we may judge by the analogy of Northumbria, lands were portioned out and tilled ⁴⁷. As settlement went on, fresh bands from the teeming population of the home country were invited over ⁴⁸ and in all parts of England the struggle with the Danes was carried on with little intermission. In A.D. 885 King Alfred, who had relieved Rochester from its besiegers, sent his fleet on to East Anglia. At the mouth of the Stour it encountered and defeated sixteen ships of pirates, but suffered defeat immediately afterwards, at the hands of a larger fleet. Next year he repaired to London, and received the submission of all the English, ‘ except those who were under the bondage of the Danish men,’ and before long he had six hostages from the East Angles, by whom we must understand Danes settled in East Anglia. Nevertheless, they as well as those from Northumbria were constantly taking hostile action in concert with their brethren, using the ports of Norfolk and Suffolk as places of retreat in case of being hard pressed. Thus we read that after a desperate fight on the South coast in A.D. 897, the single ship which escaped of the Danish six came to East Anglia, the men being sorely wounded. In 901 the Great Alfred died, and his cousin-german Ethelwald seized the castle at Wimborne Minster in Dorset, but on the approach of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, as near as Badbury Rings, he retired to the Northumbrian Danes, who received him as King. This renegade Saxon encouraged the men of Norfolk and Suffolk to a general raid in Mercia. Edward followed them as far as the dikes of Cambridgeshire on their return, dealing retribution on their own lands.

The Kentish men in his army disobeyed the order for a general retreat, and somewhere in this district they attacked the Danes, but were unable to drive them from the field. The slaughter was great on both sides, but greater among the Danes, who lost both their kings, Eohric of East Anglia and the traitor Ethelwald. This was in the year 905. Edward’s necessities compelled him to make peace with their army in the next year, a peace which seems to have been the endurance of unavenged injuries. At last, after serious reverses at Tempsford and at Maldon, the army of East Anglia, in the year 921, swore union with Edward, who died King of England, shortly after the fruition of his struggles, four years afterwards. “The land had rest (comparatively) forty years and something more.

Then set in slowly and irregularly a kind of granulation, if we may use a comparison from the healing of a wound. Dane and Angle were after all of a common stock, and there were no radical incongruities of character to be got over. By degrees ancient wrongs came to be forgotten, and even wrongs of later date to assume a less odious aspect. The sons of the Dane saw the daughters of the Angle that they were fair, and merry blue eyes and flaxen locks played no inconsiderable part in consolidation. Grandfathers made friends in the common delight of the gambols of grandchildren. Peace gradually brought prosperity, and prosperity dignity. The state of a Thane became attainable, and to my mind many of the round towers of Norfolk and Suffolk mark the progress of Christianity, as well as the material advance of civilization.

Among the laws passed by Athelstan in the year 937, after the battle of Brunanburg, Brumby or Brunton, with the advice of Wulfhelm, Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bishops, was one which necessitated the building of a bell-tower on the estate of a Thane. This wise regulation I regard as having given rise to many of those round towers which are hardly to be found out of East Anglia. One of them, Eccles Tower, a well-known object on the Norfolk beach, fell in the terrific gale of Wednesday, January 23, 1895, and in its fall revealed its wheat-stalk-like construction. From its appearance it was evidently built in sections of about 10 or 12 feet. Each portion is perfectly smooth where broken off in its fall, as if the builder allowed one portion to firmly settle before another was added. This is observable throughout the circular portion. The walls of this part are exactly 5 feet in thickness. The massive tower-arches, always on the east side, testify to the ecclesiastical nature of the structures, evidently intended to open into a church, and the frequent contiguity of church and landlord’s homestead rendered tower and bell useful for many mixed purposes. Many of the old moated farm-houses now standing bear the name of ‘hall,’ a term strictly more applicable to the moat than to the house enclosed by it.

Some of the round towers stand near the halls ; others, marking possibly the joint action of the village community, rather than the mandate of an incepting thane, are more in the little street of the parish. Of the whole number in Suffolk, forty-five, some may date after the Conquest ; many have received subsequent additions, occasionally octagonal. I append a list of them, those marked with the letter o being of the last description :

It will be seen that these structures thicken as we approach the coast, where in all probability the Scandinavian population most abounded. I would especially name Bungay, Holy Trinity ; Southelmham, All Saints ;Syleham and Wissett, as possessing marks of high antiquity. Bramfield Church is now detached from the tower, and Little Saxham in all likelihood dates entirely from Norman times.

This more settled condition of the country draws me to speak of the names of parishes as now existing, the majority of them mainly of Teutonic, if not of Angle, character. It is only with hesitation that one dare speak of Combs, with its falsely-added s, as equivalent to the Wessex Combe, and the Welsh cwm, as first a hollow, and then a village in a hollow. There is some encouragement in thinking of a similar history in other languages. Lin in Linstead and Linburne (in Homersfield) suggests a gully, of which there are traces. Burgh or Bury is indeed cosmopolitan, but comes to us through a German channel⁴⁹. There are about a dozen of these in the county, and the position of the earthwork in each should be, if possible, recorded, as spade and pickaxe are fast obliterating these precious parcels of the past. Ton and ham muster about a hundred each, the former perhaps rather denoting equality, and the latter ascendancy, in a community. Ford claims about five-and-twenty. Field falls mainly into two groups, one in the hundred of Hoxne, with ramifications into Loes and Blything; the other in the Suffolk Woodlands. By, connected with biggan, to build, is very Danish, and mainly affects the coast hundreds, but Risby lies further inland. These, with stead, worth, hall (always spelt hale in old documents), thorpe, which is the German dorf, and denotes a satellite to some superior village planet, and a few more, will be found to complete our Suffolk terminations of local names.

Remains of Saxon architecture are scanty enough. Here and there, as at Syleham and Holy Trinity Church, Bungay, the well-known “long and short work may be seen, and St. Nicholas’s Church, Ipswich, is thought by some to claim a like antiquity.

Many of the moats surrounding our farm-houses; are due to the energy of the Saxon landowners, for the houses are named in Domesday Book in such a way as to indicate habitations of no recent settlement. What has been said about ‘hall’ and I hale ‘ may surprise some readers, but Suffolk people are still familiar with the Hord in the form ‘holl’ for a ditch.

The history of St. Fursey has already introduced us to the monastic life. His, indeed, was strictly a monastery or hermitage—the abode of a solitary man. And Bede’s words about King Sigebert point to a similar life, that he entered ‘ a monastery which he had made for himself.’ But man is a social animal, and the law that I it is not good for man to be alone ‘ wrought at this time for the aggregation of men apart from women, as it did afterwards for the destruction of that system.

St. Benedict himself began his ascetic life in solitude, but early in the sixth century formulated the rule which goes by his name. Pope Gregory the Great being a Benedictine, his emissary Augustine naturally brought the Rule to England ; and though Suffolk can show but little of early Benedictine history, it is not quite destitute, even in the Saxon period, of traces of that great system which in its day so remarkably nursed literature as well as theology.

We can only note the early destruction of small Benedictine houses at Hadleigh, Hoxne and Stoke-by-Nayland, as recorded by Tanner, and turn to the establishment of that rule at Bury St. Edmund’s.

The body of St. Edmund, which had remained there till A.D. 1010, when it was temporarily removed to London, had been guarded by a college of secular canons. These seculars did not renounce private property, though living according to rule in other respects. They were accused of negligence in keeping the records of miracles – an offence which will be variously estimated in later ages and of carelessness about the shrine itself.

In A.D. 990 Athelstan, Bishop of Elmham, transferred the guardianship to one who had left them for the Benedictine rule, Ailwin, from St. Bene’t’s-at-Hulme. Twenty years afterwards the later Danish troubles forced Ailwin to seek a more sure resting-place for the martyr’s body than East Anglia could afford, and he carried it to London by Stratford, his difficulties at crossing the Lea being graphically told by Lydgate. But in the course of three years, in a brief political calm, he returned with it to Bury St. Edmund’s, whither Canute brought, in A.D. 1020, Uvius, Prior of Hulm, who was consecrated the first Abbot of St. Edmundsbury. From him and his eleven companions grew that grand abbey, of which the remains are still one of the great sights of the county.

The sudden growth of St. Edmundsbury is marvellous, and testifies to the great popularity of the memory of the martyr-King, and to the profound regard for his uncorrupt body. This epithet of itself is not inconsistent with embalming, but the popular belief invested it with a miraculous character, which does not seem borne out by the evidence adduced, as that of the woman Oswene, who used ‘with holy temerity’ on every Maundy Thursday to comb the saint’s hair and to pare his nails, or of the youth Leofstan, who was struck with madness for his bold attempt to gaze on the remains of the saint, and appears to have seen nothing, and through his insanity to have been incapable of recording anything which was to be seen. It is to be noted that the incorruption of the body is not mentioned in the account of the town in Domesday Book.

Now, from the appointment of Abbot Uvius to the accession of Edward the Confessor the period is only twenty-one years. Put ten or twelve years to this, and we shall not be far out for that undefined ‘ time of King Edward’ which all Domesday readers know by the letters T.R.E. (Tempore Regis Edwardi), and it is instructive to see the progress of the abbey up to that time. Two specimens shall be taken : the hundred of Risbridge in the Suffolk Woodlands for the south-west, and the hundred of Wangford for the north-east. In the former under St. Edmund there were 12 freemen in Poslingford, 7 in Stansfield, 9 in Thurlow, 18 in Bradley, 5 in Kedington,1 in Wratting, and 2 in Haverhill. In the latter the abbey practically held the town of Beccles, save that the King had a fourth part of the market ; also thirty acres of land, two of meadow and the fifth part of a mill in Linburne, which is now in Homersfield ; and half a church, valued at 12d., in Worlingham. If we travel into other districts, the result is the same. Chepenhall, now a farm in the parish of Fressingfield, was given to St. Edmund by its Saxon owner Swartingstone, and formed a convenient halting-place for pilgrims on the I broad road leading from Dunwich to Bury St. Edmund’s ⁵⁰.

For a long time we have a blank record in the chronicles. The turn of Ipswich to be plundered came in the year 991, when Brihtnoth, the Ealdorman, probably of East Anglia, was slain at Maldon. Tribute was recommended by Archbishop Siric of Canterbury, and yielded with the usual result.

Ethelred ‘the Unready,’ ‘unstable in all his ways,’ in the same year (1002) paid £24,000 to the fleet, and treacherously massacred the Danes in England on St. Britius’s Day, November 13. For this Sweyn took an ample revenge, burning Norwich within two years, and striking such terror into the country that Ulfketyl the Ealdorman counselled another purchase of peace.

During the truce the army stole up from their ships and marched on Thetford. The Ealdorman, who by this time appears to have recovered some courage, attempted to cut off their retreat by breaking up their ships, but those to whom he trusted this work failed in it. However, the Norfolk and Suffolk men came round him and gave a good account of themselves when Sweyn’s men were falling back, after having burnt Thetford. Many chiefs fell in the fray, in which their foes said that ‘they had never met a worse hand-play.’ The cycle of ravage had returned. Ipswich saw further trouble in A.D. 1010, preliminary to a general harrying of East Anglia, which was repeated three years afterwards. Next year Sweyn died ; but the struggles with Canute swept off many of the Angle nobility, especially at Assandun (Ashdon in Essex), where he built a minster of stone and lime, appointing to it Stigand, one of his priests, who became Bishop of Elmham in A.D. 1038, and in A.D. 1052 was promoted to Canterbury. Our divisions into hundreds are said to date from Alfred the Great, but perhaps some more settled districts got into shape earlier than others less favoured. Including the liberty of Ipswich, there are twenty-three hundreds. Seven of them are named from fords, Carlford, Cosford, Sampford, and Wilford in the south ; Mutford and Wangford in the north-east ; Lackford in the north-west. These fords, no doubt, were convenient for a hundred-mote hard by, but we can assign localities only. to the last two : Wangford, the ford over the Waveney, already treated of in Chapter III.; and Lackford, the ford over the Lark, just where that parish now joins Icklingham All Saints. Two are meres, Bosmere and Hartismere, the latter perhaps the small lake from which Redgrave Water was developed. Blything takes its name from the river which flows through it. The origin of the rest I leave to conjecture.

The county is not rich in discovered interments of the Anglo-Saxon time. The sexton of Hundon some years ago is recorded to have come upon a hoard of Saxon coins in that churchyard ⁵¹, which looks like an instance of ‘grave goods ⁵², and some of the stone coffins found at Icklingham and elsewhere may be those of ante-conquestal ecclesiastics.

Clarke of Easton, in his uncouth doggerel, often gives valuable information, in spite of his mixing up all periods in a fashion peculiar to himself :

Ipswich, an ancient borough town ;
Here Woolsey’s college was pulled down :
Nothing remains but entrance gate
And royal arms in mouldering state.
This town once had a royal mint,
Sipold on Gipespic coin’d in’t
For King Etheldred the Second:
Sparrowe’s house quite antique reckon’d. ⁵²,

He is sceptical about a mint at Dunwich, but the same rhyme comes in conveniently :

’Tis said that Dunwich had a mint,
But not much faith is placed in’t ;
The coin that has made so much talk,
There’s little doubt was struck at York. ⁵³

Among the larger possessions of Saxon thanes, may be mentioned those of Edric of Laxfield, about the time of Edward the Confessor, an example of that tendency of property of which Tennyson’s Northern Farmer speaks with such intense feeling :

But proputty, proputty sticks ; and proputty, proputty graws.

Reckoning the carucate at 120 acres, this man owned some 6,000 acres, chiefly in the hundreds of Hartismere and Hoxne ; besides possessions of great value across the Norfolk border, dotted about from Kilverstone to Dilham, freemen and freewomen ‘commended’ to him all over the two aforesaid hundreds, and ‘ soc and sac ‘in Bading¬ham, Stradbroke, and Chepenhall⁵⁴. These ‘commended’ persons were such as lived under a great man’s protection. and owed him service, as it were deposited with him for his keeping, as the great Roman lawyer Ulpian explains the word⁵⁵. ‘Sac,’ which exists in our’ sake,’ equivalent to cause, and ‘soc,’ from soca, a plough, are terms belonging to the patriarchal justice then administered by the lords of the soil, the value of which consisted in ‘forfeits, fines and fees.’

Stigand, Bishop of Elmham, when he was translated to Winchester, was succeeded by Grinketyl, who held the see for four years, giving place to Bishop Ailmar, whose name so often occurs in Domesday Book. He was too much of a Saxon for William the Conqueror, who took an early opportunity of getting rid of him.

With regard to the earldom, the old Saxon family dis¬appears from the scene. Perhaps all perished at Assandune, or in subsequent troubles, or a remnant may have preferred a safe skulking to a hazardous eminence. Canute, in 1017, divided the realm into four parts, appointing Thurkill to East Anglia. His short rule of four years is followed by a period of more than twenty years of which we have no account⁵⁶. In 1045 Harold, the son of Godwin, seems to become Earl, but only an occa¬sional flicker of his earldom shows itself We catch a glimpse of him and his East Angles marching down from the Cotswold into the Vale of Gloucester, under Godwin’s command, to plead with that cogency that pertains to an armed array, in the presence of Edward the Confessor, for justice on Eustace of Boulogne and his followers for their ravages committed at Dover. The intervention of Leofric of Mercia warded off the struggle, and the Suffolk homesteads received back their men unscathed. Five years afterwards Harold took flight, and after some delay Alfgar, the son of Leofric, succeeded him, holding the earldom till the memorable Mickle Gemote of London, in September, 1052, restored the Godwin family to their old position.

Next year Godwin died, and Edward the Confessor and his Witan transferred Harold from the more ancient earldom of East Anglia to the more extensive one of Wessex. The general joy at this promotion seems to argue favourably for the state of East Anglia under Harold. Alfgar now sought and obtained restitution to that post which he had occupied for so short a period. Indeed, the earldoms changed hands about that time with a velocity which could not have proved beneficial either to ruler or ruled. Alfgar’s father, the great Leofric, died on the last day of August, 1057, and his French successor, Ralph, followed him before the year was out. In spite of serious faults in his character, Alfgar was allowed to succeed his father in Mercia, and Harold’s younger brother Gurth became Earl of the East Angles. But the territory was cut short by the subtraction of Essex, which helped to create an earldom for another brother, Leofwin, Oxfordshire being added afterwards for important political reasons, as well as by compensation. Gurth remained Earl till the day when he and his brothers fell at Senlac, and the Saxon gave way to the Norman.

Notes:

1. In Northumbria in A.D. 876.
2. See Anglo-Saxon Cbronicle for A.D. 921.
3. Vegetius Renatus, writing about the end of the fourth century, defines it as a small fort ; Isidore of Seville as dwellings within an enclosure.
4. So frequently termed in deeds.
5. J. Clarke of Easton, Suffolk Antiquary, P. 22.
6. Suffolk Antiquary, p. 1.
7. Ibid., p. 13.
8. Now in Fressingfield.
9. Commendare nihil aliud est quam deponere!
10. Freeman’s ‘Norman Conquest,’ ii. 572.

From the recall of the legions to the foundation of the kingdom of East Anglia, we are left much to the guidance of that alluring but untrustworthy companion -Imagination.

The country could hardly have been deserted of man for more than a century and a half. Yet the discovered hoards of coin tell of those who neither returned nor told others of these treasures in earthen vessels. It may be that the remnants of British blood and the numerous half-breeds began to occupy places abandoned by the rulers of the world ; wheat, so long known to Suffolk, even from prehistoric times, when looked after, grew as kindly for them as for their predecessors ; to cattle it recked nought for whom they grazed and were slaughtered; and the sports of the chase do not diminish as civilization retires. A hardy, sparse population would manage to pick up a living. Enough justice to prevent mutual destruction would be meted out in an irregularly patriarchal form. Pottery deteriorated, roads fell into a bad way ; but the Numerarius had disappeared, and the struggle for existence against the wild powers of nature was not so much embittered by the visits of the man with the ink-horn, or the summons to send vectigalia to Villa Faustini or Combretonium. Whatever may have been the condition of our predecessors at that time, we find no trace of any resistance offered by them to the formation of the kingdom of East Anglia by the second Uffa circa A.D. 575.

Uffa and his son Tytil are mere names to us. Redwald, next in succession, certainly permitted the preaching of Christ within his realm, but his personal convictions were not to be depended upon. He was baptized at Canterbury under the eye of Ethelbert of Kent ; but, according to Bede³⁰, he resembled the Samaritans of old³¹ in attempting to unite the worship of Christ with that of his old gods. His sons, Erpenwald and Sigebert, come before us as earnest propagators of the Faith. The former was assassinated by a pagan named Richbert, after three years’ reign ; but the latter, undaunted by his half-brother’s fate, as soon as he became King, invited to his kingdom the great apostle of the East Angles, St. Felix the Burgundian. During the three years’ interregnum ensuing on Erpenwald’s murder, Sigebert had sojourned in Burgundy, where he had been instructed and baptized, and whence he summoned one of the most eminent of his teachers to grapple with the work of Christianizing his people.

The arrival of the Burgundian apostle was followed, after a lapse of at least four years, by his consecration at the hands of Honorius, Archbishop of Canterbury³². His labours, arduous as they must have been, included the organization of a school, probably at Dunwich, which he furnished with masters and teachers after the manner of Kent, whence he had lately come>33. The church at Babingley, close to Sandringham, is dedicated to him. Here the ‘Christian hills’ are by tradition associated with his preaching. The two Flixtons and Felixstowe still preserve his name. The German Ocean has, indeed, swallowed up all material evidence of his life at Dunwich, his see; but one venerable structure remains-the “Old Minster,’ as it is called, close to South Elmham Hall, not to be passed over in connection with the first East Anglian Bishop.

Deeply imbedded in foliage, and only to be reached through byways, in one of the remotest corners of Suffolk, stands that remarkable mass of rubble which represents the toil and hardship of these early preachers of the Word. As elsewhere, whether in the county or out of it ; whether at Combretonium, Burgh, near Woodbridge, and Ilketshall St. Laurence ; at Delgovicia , Goodmanham in the East Riding, Porchester, Dover, or many other places, the enclosure, which apparently dates from the Roman period, to judge from its rectangular form, consisting of a low mound and shallow foss, becomes the Llan, the τέμενος, the God’s Acre, as we regard it from a Keltic, Greek, or Teutonic point of view. In this spot, to which allusion has already been made, may be seen the ‘Old Minster,’ 104 feet long and 33 feet wide, with its semicircular apse, and that most rare feature in church remains, the narthex. Entering the building by the west doorway, the visitor finds himself confronted by a wall only occupying the middle of the building, and leaving access by wide openings into the nave on the north and south. In larger and more stately buildings there was an ante-temple or outward narthex, where lustrations were performed, emblematical of that purity of soul without which no worship is acceptable, where also the dead were often interred. The word narthex, which, like canon, signifies a reed, became used for any oblong space³⁴, and in particular for that space at the entrance of a church which was reserved for hearers who were allowed to stand and listen to the psalms, lessons, and sermon, and then dismissed without joining in the prayers or receiving the benediction. The openings into the nave are called by later Greek writers the beautiful and the royal gates.

With regard to the apse or bow at the east end, it seems to have become a feature in churches after so many basilicas, partly temple, partly law-court, partly exchange, passed into Christian hands in Constantine’s time. We know from Justin Martyr that in earlier days the Eucharist was celebrated in the body of the church, and that there was much of that unseemly crowding about which St. Paul complained³⁵. The raised space within the apse of the basilica carried its own recommendation for the avoidance of this scandal, and from the cancelli, or rails which stood in front of it, comes our word ‘chancel.’

The comparison of this building with known specimens attests its ante-conquestal character ; boulder stones and flints alone are used, even the arches and angles being formed of them, and there is no trace of ashlar throughout the whole structure. The orientation is true. There are thought to be some rudiments of a tower ; in the walls are sundry holes which do not sufficiently correspond to enable us to regard them as used for scaffolding ; Roman urns are recorded to have been dug up at no great distance. These fragmentary notices of one of the earliest Christian buildings in Great Britain are meager enough, but comprise nearly everything that can be said about it.

To Sigebert also we owe the residence of St. Fursey, as well as the coming of St. Felix. That Irish missionary, in his travels, was kindly received at the East Anglian monarch’s Court, where he made many converts, and confirmed in the faith those who already believed. After a time, feeling his strength to be failing, he desired to establish a monastery before his death. Sigebert had granted him a site at a place called Cnobheresburg, in a camp surrounded by woods, and pleasant from its nearness to the sea, not hard to identify with Burgh Castle, the Gariannonum of the Counts of the Saxon Shore. Here he had many visions of the other world, which he did not relate publicly, but only to those who sought him out from desire of reformation of life. Afterwards he quitted all the business of this world, and even his monastery, becoming an anchorite. When the irruption of the pagans appeared to threaten destruction to what was dear to him, he retired to France, built a monastery at Lagny, near Paris (Latiniacum), where his body was said not to have seen corruption.

Attracted by the calm of monastic life, and perhaps by the visions vouchsafed to St. Fursey, Sigebert retired to a monastery of his own founding at Beodricesworth, afterwards Bury St. Edmund’s. Egric, his successor, however, became embroiled with that old pagan, Penda, King of Mercia, who, according to William of Malmesbury, hated peace worse than death, and as the East Anglian soldiers would hear of no leader but Sigebert, the peaceful cell had to be abandoned for the camp. Bearing only a wand,the ex-King appeared at the head of his troops, and perished with Egric at the hands of the Mercian idolater in A.D. 642, probably in the bounds of East Anglia, but where is unknown.

By this time the good Felix and his successor, Thomas the Deacon, who seems to have been a Fenman³⁶, had gone to their rest, and Bregilsus Bonifacius³⁷ was Bishop of Dunwich.

The new King, Ina, or Anna, son of Eni, no less odious to Penda than his predecessors had been, fell in battle at the field of Bulcamp (bellus campus), now in the parish of Blythburgh, in A.D. 654 or 655. It is thought, not unreasonably, that his capital was Norwich ; that Conisford (Kingsford) Ward, which stretches down to Trowse, already mentioned, is named from him ; that his progress to his last battlefield was mainly along the Roman road, Ant. IX., already mentioned ; and it is quite possible that King’s Lane in Henham is on the line of march. His tomb, doubted by Kirby, is shown in Blythburgh Church ; but the later dates of the monument and of the church which enshrines it are no valid grounds for rejecting the tradition, the stone being renewable in the Middle Ages in the same spirit in which James I. placed the memorial to Ethelred I. in Wimborne Minster. On the field of battle now stands the partially-filled Union Workhouse of the Blything Hundred. I am not aware that much has been discovered at this spot. Some of the bodies of the slain may have been removed to Blythburgh, for in 1758 and in 1851 great numbers of bones were discovered near the site of that priory. One circumstance in the later discovery, the interment of bodies with their feet eastward and westward alternately, may have been in mockery of the usual custom in Christian burial. The body of Firminus, whom some speak of as Anna’s son, and others as his brother, is said to have been removed to Bury St. Edmund’s.

‘Cast down, but not destroyed,’ are words which may well be applied to Christianity at this time. Penda and Ethelhere, Anna’s successor, fell the next year at ‘ Winwidfield,’ near Leeds, fighting against Oswy of Northumbria. Penda’s son Peada brought his people over to the Faith. Of Ethelwald, Ethelhere’s and Anna’s brother, Bede ³⁸ relates that he received from the font Swithelm, King of Essex, after his baptism by St. Chad, at Rendlesham. When Aldulf became King of the East Angles in A.D. 664, the Metropolitan See of Canterbury had just fallen vacant, nor did it receive its head for four years, when the great Theodore of Tarsus was promoted to the Primacy by Pope Vitalianus. Even then the arrival of the new Archbishop was delayed for eighteen months, but it was worth the delay. A vigorous administrator, a great patron of learning, his tenure of office for twenty years and more was marked by consolidation and progress. Parishes were now organized, landowners stimulated to church-building, provision for the clergy recognised, and their characters simultaneously improved. In all these and other good works he found in Aldulf of East Anglia a cordial coadjutor. The Synod of Hertford, in A.D. 673, with much other matter on hand, undertook the division of the East Anglian see into two. Bisi, the old Bishop, remained at Dunwich, a second see being formed at Elmham. And now the question arises, Which Elmham, North in Norfolk, or South in Suffolk ? Something is to be said on each side. The North folk were obviously important enough to have a bishop to themselves. There had been flourishing settlements all over the county, from Walpole to Caister-next-Yarmouth, from Baconsthorpe to Brettenham, in the Roman period ; nor is it likely that so fair a territory should have fallen entirely out of shape. Roman remains have been found at North Elmham, and the entrenched mound there has been episcopal property from time immemorial. Hither retired John de Grey in the troubles of King John’s reign, and the remains of the palace of the fighting Bishop Spencer, formerly well known, have of late been brought more extensively to light. On the other side it must be borne in mind that the progress of Christianity was far too variable for us to expect any symmetrical ordering of sees. Lichfield, only seventeen years old, was then the sole cathedral of the midlands from the German Ocean to Wales, for Dorchester in Oxfordshire had been abandoned, and Sidnacester not yet formed; while, on the contrary, Wales was well manned, and London, Canterbury, and Rochester were within easy distance of each other. If Bishop Spencer lived at North Elmham, so we shall also find him at South Elmham. It may be that the establishment of a see at the latter place was all that was at the time possible, while the tide of paganism, so late at the flood, was slowly ebbing from the borderland of the Waveney Valley. Adhuc sub judice lis est. It is hardly for us to determine so vexed a question.

The change from darkness to light, as the great law of love took the place of the merciless worship of the gods of war and conquest, must have been of a most startling nature. What was destroyed needs not to be recapitulated, and what took its place, thank God! we still have. Yet one point in the old worship, the reverence in which the ash was held, may receive a brief notice, emphasized as it is by some of our existing names of villages. Though the detail of the Yggdrasil, or mystic ash, comes to us from a Scandinavian source, yet it is so intermingled with the myth of Odin, the great god common to the Teutonic race, and the ash is of such frequent occurrence in Angle and Saxon names and words, that it claims an earlier notice than would be accorded to it by Danish invasions. Yggdrasil is at once the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, with roots reaching to the abode of the Old Dragon, to the Fountain of Wisdom and to the Seat of judgment. With regard to Odin, as he, Haener and Loder were walking by the sea, they found an ash and an elm, whereof they made the first man and woman, Ask and Embla³⁹. With this double importance attached to Fraxinus excelsior, which successive bands of Teuton rovers must have been delighted to find indigenous to British soil, it is not surprising to find the name attached to localities in a way peculiar to itself. Ashfield, indeed, is of itself no more noteworthy than Oakley or Elmsett ; but Campsey Ash, known simply as Ash, is very near Route IX in Antonine’s Itinerary, and Badwell Ash seems to accord with that part of Route V. which has been spoken of as lying between Stoke Ash and Ixworth. With these may be compared Ash-next-Sandwich, close by Route II., which ends at Richborough. The suggestion is that near these great roads the sacred tree was planted, and there would courts, first tribal and then local, be held. Ash Bocking, which also was called simply Ash, is possibly another instance. Other detail of Teutonic worship may be sought for in the many treatises on the subject.

After King Aldulf’s death in A.D. 683, there followed in succession Elfwulf, Beornred, Ethelred, and Ethelbert. There is -little to be said about any but the last, who was assassinated near Hereford while at the Court of the Mercian Prince Offa. This murder seems to have been committed in A.D. 793, and the seizure of the vacant throne without delay by Offa brought great suspicion on him. But Offa and his house soon came to nought, and another Offa, chosen by those who- had been driven out of the land by the usurper’s tyranny, appears to have spent a long reign in struggles, first with Mercia, and afterwards with the Danes. The history of this time, however, must be received with caution, for there are serious discrepancies to be reckoned with, and Gaufridus de Fontibus, whose detail is very full, is separated from the time by more than three centuries. In this perplexity we record with some diffidence that Offa of East Anglia, seeking an heir, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, visited on the way a relative named Alcmund in Saxony, adopted his son Edmund, and died on board ship in the Hellespont as he was returning home. We have a plethora of wonderful stories about Edmund, the Martyr-King, which may be read by those that will in a florid biography of the saint ⁴⁰, who was endued with every possible virtue, and, according to a most reliable frontispiece, wore a fringe, was remarkably neat in apparel and hosiery, and generally resembled a pretty school-girl of sixteen summers.

His struggles against the Danes, however, were a grim reality, whoever he may have been, and whatever he may have been like. And this brings us to say a few words about that race.

There seems to have been a superabundance of searovers. While some were thus settling down into decent Christian folk, digging their ‘hales’ or moats, breaking up the stubborn glebe, slowly clearing forest and scrub, and rearing cattle, sheep, swine, and poultry, others were constantly growing up, over-populating their districts, and being shipped off to take their chance over the water rather than to remain a burden to the already hardpressed home. Who the Danes were let those say that know. Dudo of St. Quintin, whose book Camden found in John Stowe’s library, describes their horrible custom on driving out those of their youth who were chosen by lot to cut out their fortunes with the sword :

When they were ready to be dispatched away, their custom was to sacrifice to Thur, the god whom they anciently worship’d ; not with sheep, or oxen, but with the blood of men. This they looked upon as the most precious of all sacrifices,: and after the priest had deter- mined by lot who should dye, they were barbarously knocked on the head with yokes of oxen, and kill’d at one stroak. Each of them who were to die by lot, having. their brains, dash’d out at a single blow, were afterwards stretch’d on the ground, and search was made for the fibre on the left side, that is, the vein of the heart. Of this they us’d to take the blood, and throw it upon the heads of such as were designed fora march : and imagining that this had won the favour of the gods, they immediately set to sea, and fell to their oars.

Ditmarus, of somewhat greater antiquity than Dudo, adds some ghastly particulars:

But because I have heard strange things of the ancient sacrifices of the Normans and Danes, I would not willingly pass them over. There is a place in those parts, the capital city of that kingdom call’d Lederun, in the province of Selon. There they meet once every nine years, in January, a little after our twelfth day, and offer to their gods 99 men, and as many horses ; with dogs and cocks for hawks ; being fully persuaded (as I observed before) that these things were most acceptable to them.

The first reliable notice we have of the Danes is in A.D. 787, when, according to the Saxon Chronicle, in the days of Brithric of Wessex, three ships of Northmen came, out of Haeretha-land. Seven years afterwards they destroyed the church at Lindisfarne, and in the next year the monastery founded by St. Columba on Raghlin Island, on the north-east coast of Ireland. The distracting feuds of the Saxons and Angles prevented any unitedresistance to these Scandinavian invaders.

In A.D. 823 a King of the East Angles joined a general alliance under Egbert against the men of Mercia, and to them is assigned the death of Beornwulf, King of Mercia. The Danes, of course, profited largely by this condition of things. As this internecine struggle went on they became more bold, and, in spite of sharp rebuffs, repeated their desolating visits, not only along the old Saxon shore, but as far north as Lincolnshire, and as far west as Dorset.

In A.D. 851 they wintered in Thanet for the first time, and four years afterwards in Sheppey. Just about this date began St. Edmund’s reign, for, according to Asser, he ascended the throne, a mere boy, on Christmas Day, A.D. 855, and was crowned by Bishop Humbert of Elmham a year afterwards.

Perplexity again awaits us as we enter on the quarrel between Edmund and the Danes. Who Lothbroc was, whether identical with Ragnar of that name, whether the name means “hateful brook”⁴¹, or “leather breeches”⁴², or what not, which of half a dozen versions of spelling should be adopted, whether he taunted his sons with the prowess of Edmund, whether he was put into a dungeon with snakes, or murdered by Beorn the Hunter out of jealousy in the forest of Heglesdune or Hoxne, must remain among things not generally known.

For some cause or other, Hingvar and Ubba, sons of Lothbroc, backed by the King of Denmark, burst upon the east coast of England with a host of 20,000 men in the year 865. They were driven on the coast of Northumbria first, but, unsated by slaughter and devastation, Hingvar made for Norfolk and Suffolk. Bearing his terrible standard of the Raven, he harried the East Anglian sea-board with constant depredations, in spite of the defeats which Edmund and his people managed to inflict upon their foes. Twice the Angle King narrowly escaped capture, once at Barnby, where his local knowledge enabled him to use a ford⁴³ unknown to his enemies, and once at Framlingham, where a weak part of the castle walls is said to have been disclosed by one of his old pensioners, who had fallen into the hands of the Danes. For a time the invaders were occupied in Mercia and Northumbria. After the winters of 869 and 870 they turned their steps again south-eastward. Bardney, Crowland, Thorney, Medeshamsted⁴⁴, Ramsey, and Ely in turn yielded to their wild fury. Sword and fire only seemed to whet their fell appetite by indulgence. Crossing from Ely to Stuntney, they had an unobstructed march on Thetford, which soon shared the fate of the other towns. At length, on the heaths south of Thetford, they encountered the young Christian King, whose character and faith were equally objects of their hatred and scorn. Surely the words of the Saga about Ringmere, a few miles over the Norfolk border, may be applied to this struggle on the ground where now the parishes of Thetford St. Mary and Barnham join :

On the wild heath
The chime of war.
Sword striking shield
Rings from afar. The living fly ;
The dead piled high The moor enrich ; Red runs the ditch.

No permanent mark of the struggle remains, save, perhaps, that not far off is the base of one of those wayside crosses which showed the pilgrims’ track to St. Edmundsbury or Walsingham. The scream of the stone curlew and the broken whistle of the lapwing still ring in a weird fashion in the ears of those that pass that way. The rabbit’s active feet construct his tunnels among the furze, which often takes toll in the shape of tufts ofhis gray or white fur. The wheatear lays her greenish-blue eggs and brings off her young brood. No longer, indeed, does the stately bustard stalk over these broad stretches of free warren, and show that glory of fawn colour which England is never like to see again save in museums. Otherwise all is unchanged, and no great effort of the imagination peoples the scene with Dane and Angle met in mortal fray.

According to Abbo of Fleury, Hingvar first sent a message to Edmund, then at Hoxne, inviting submission, which the King refused, in spite of the counsel of Bishop Humbert ; then an indecisive battle took place, and Edmund retired on Hoxne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions but one battle in which the Danes, under Ingwair and Hubba, ‘got the victory and slew the King.’ The story of the discovery of the King under the ‘Golden Bridge’ at Hoxne, through the flash of his golden spurs, rests on local tradition only, and may be dismissed, together with an equally popular legend, witnessed to by many a medieval carving ⁴⁵, of the wolf which guarded the saintly head. Abbo tells us of this, and of the voice which proceeded from the head, ‘ Here, here, here,’ guiding the searchers to the right spot. Butler adds a pillar of light, emanating, apparently, from .his inner consciousness ; and some picturllesque imaginings are to be found in a later write ⁴⁶, all pointing to the cumulative instinct when the wondrous is related.

What seems to rest on a substantial basis, the martyrdom at Hoxne, confirmed by the flint arrow-head discovered in an old oak which was felled near the traditional place of the King’s death, and the subsequent interment at Bury St. Edmund’s, is intermingled, as usual, with contradictory and extravagant tales. The narrative, however, which represents the martyr-King as shot to death by arrows, the English representation of St. Sebastian, has a just demand on the historian, and has never failed of recognition.

1. Bede, ‘Eccl. Hist.’, ii. 15.
2. Kings xvil. 41.
3. Honorius succeeded Justus in A.D. 634.
4. See Bede, ‘Eccl. Hist.’, iii. 18.
5. See note in Bingham, ‘Antiq.’, book viii., chap. iv.
6. Cor. xi. 17, etc.
7. ‘Ex Girviorum proximia oriundus.’ — William of Malmesbury.
8. A fragment of his name remained in my memory in some fifteenth-century glass in Blythburgh Church.
9. Eccl. Hist-il iii. 22.
10. I See the article `Scandinavian Mythology,’ by Professor Rasmus Andersen, in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia 1892.
11. ‘Saint Edmund’, by the Rev. J. B. Macicinlay, O.S.B., 1893.
12. ‘Odiosus rivus’. — Gaufridus de Fontibus.
13. Lelard.
14. Said to be called Bernford, because by it he escaped from Bern.
15. Now Peterborough.
16. Eg., at Fressingfield.
17. Black and While, February 6, 1891.

Our business now lies with the Route IX. in Antonine’s Itinerary, the text of which, after a most exhaustive recension of MSS. by the latest editors, stands thus;

A full discussion of the sites of Venta Icinorum and Camolodunum is better suited to treatises on Norfolk and Essex than to these pages. The former I take to be Norwich, and the latter Leiden, two miles on the London side of Colchester, which accords with the Itinerary. Caistor, a Roman camp near the river Tase, appears to be Ad Taum, communicating with Suffolk by a post Antonine road, to which we shall have to refer. With regard to our starting-point, the arguments of Hudson Gurney and others in favour of Norwich seem unanswerable, save for the general absence of Roman remains at that city ; but the recent discoveries of fictile fragments, some- thumb-marked, and apparently of Romano-British make, on the north side of the cathedral, may probably prove the precursors of others. He that stands on the grounds of Carrow Abbey, and surveys the water-protected character of that position, with the Tase in front, and the Wensum curling behind, so as to leave only the east without a river-front, will see that no more suitable position could have been chosen fora settlement by the Britons. They had, indeed, to learn at the hands of the Romans the futility of such defences against organized warfare ; but for intertribal struggles Norwich must have been a place of unusual strength.

The roads are older than the record of them, and I should regard this Route IX, in the Itinerary as gradually improved from old British tracks by straighter cuts in places and bolder treatment of water-crossings. And I think that the time for earlier improvements would be that of P. Ostorius Scapula, who in A.D. 51 settled a colony at Camulodunum after the defeat of the Iceni, subdued the Brigantes of Yorkshire, and the Silures and Ordovices of Wales.²⁰

Between Norwich and Lexden the distance is under fifty miles as the crow flies ; but between Venta Icinorum and Camolodunum we have to account for seventy-five Roman miles, and consequently there must have been a great deflexion either eastward or westward. If we adopt the former theory, Sitomagus is Dunwich, and Combretonium is Burgh, near Woodbridge. The westward course will give us Thetford and Brettenham, near Lavenham, respectively for those stations ; and this was the solution of Camden and his followers.²¹ ‘ Sit’ in Sitomagus he identified with ‘Thet’ in Thetford, assuming without any evidence the former syllable as a variety of the latter, while ‘ Bret’ in Brettenham was undoubtedly a strong temptation for Combretonium.

The latter spot is not to be passed over without mention. There are traces of a camp, yearly growing more faint, and about three-quarters of a mile from it is a rather commanding situation, called Castle Hill. But there seems to be no knowledge -or tradition of coins, pottery, etc., found here.²²

In the Peutinger Tabula Convetni.²³, which no doubt represents Combretonium, is close to the coast. Written against it is xv., the Antonine mileage between it and Ad Ansam.

Suckling’s remark that the adoption of the eastward course would charge the Romans with having left the heart of the county of Suffolk unprotected may be disposed of by the fact that Route V. traversed that very district. Camden’s preference for the western course has no other basis than the supposed identity of `Sit’ in Sitomagus with I Thet’ in Thetford. He speaks of the river Sit or Thet, but there is no other proof of the existence of the first name.

The balance of evidence seems to me to incline eastward, and such remarks as I have to make from local knowledge are based on that theory. Assuming this, let us look to the first stage. And first of all its length (thirty-two miles) is remarkable, being rarely surpassed. We have thirty-five-mile stages twice in the very obscure Iter V., and one thirty-six-mile stage on Iter XV. be tween Durnonovaria and Muridunum, on the road from Silchester to Exeter, and these are the only British instances in excess of the stage between Venta Icinorum and Sitomagus. And as it was undoubtedly long, so it was presumably difficult. Three rivers, the Tase, the Waveney, and the Blyth, had to be forded. On the inland side lay, for the greater part of the way, an ancient and deep forest, which also extended occasionally beyond the road on the sea side. The lighter lands on the sea side were covered with thickets and scrub, and excellent shelter was afforded to marauders, whether sea-rovers or salvagers. The character of the soil was hostile to traffic for a great part of the year, and so far as the record of Antonine’s Itinerary goes, the road was no thoroughfare. I am not denying the existence of other roads out of Norwich at the time ; none of them, however, were thought worthy of a place in the Itinerary. If the centurion M. Favonius, whose monument remains at Colchester, ever made the journey, he would have had occasion to contrast the stage with others, to its disadvantage.

The passage of the Waveney was the most critical point in the road, and at no place are the conditions more favourable than at Wainford, or Wanney-ford, already mentioned, there being an especially strong glacial deposit on the Suffolk side. Afterwards the name passed on to the hundred of Wangford, the ford, as a place of common concourse, being suitable for the hundred mote.

The extent of marsh is here reduced by the presence of a twofold patch of higher ground, called Pirnough Street. Below Wainford the Waveney is not fordable. On August 2, 1889, 1 examined the way between Ditchingham Station and the church of Ilketshall St. John’s. The turns in the road at first are quite accounted for by the advantage of keeping on these patches of gravel in the marsh. The second of the two patches ends a little more than 100 yards before the first of the two present bridges; but everything here has been cut about for milling and malting. The old road ran to the east of the malthouses, and herein 1856 were found Roman coins and a flint arrow-head.

Moreover, in 1893, two coins were discovered, one of Philip the Arabian – sen.,obv., IMP M IVL PHILIPPVS AVG. ; rev., PAX AETERNA, with a standing figure of Peace bearing olive branch and caduceus between the letters s c. This reverse, which seems to have indicated the Emperor Philip’s discreditable peace with Sapor, resembles one of Alexander Severus, struck after a genuine victory over the Persians. The other coin was a large brass of T. Antoninus Pius. Rev. SALVS … , a sitting figure.

Very likely, if the mill were ever to be pulled down, we might have a second edition of the Bassingbourne discovery. The gravel on the south side of the river is about 5 feet from the surface, so that the little bit of marsh could not have been very formidable. I have little doubt that the present nearly-deserted road which continues the route straight away indicates Iter IX. It is a watercourse road, and probably the Roman road lay just to the east of it, detail being thus arranged for carrying off the water. On the top of the ridge there is a well-defined double elbow, the middle about 5o yards long, quite level, and at right angles to the general course of the road. This way is described as the Packway, between Wangford Cross and Wangford Green. It seems to be an excellent instance of the method called I double spanning’ so well known to colonists. Waggons bound for Sitomagus, en route perhaps for Colchester or London, would be halted after crossing the river, and a double service of beasts would be put on to tug the first wagon to this level, at the further end of which it would be left while the animals returned for the next, and so on, till the troublesome hill was worked. ‘Wangford’ Green, between Mettingham Castle and the slope of the hill, was all open common till the enclosure of 1817. No trace therefore can be found here, save that land between Mettingham Castle and Wainford Bridge is described as ‘ abutting on a certain street called Wangford Street.’ I think, however, that at the north-west comer of the Mettingham Castle property the Roman road appears again, and goes away for Ilketshall St. John’s Church, with another double elbow before the dip for the little stream which has there to be crossed. There are some suspicious-looking pieces of brick in the outer wall of this church. Here the road assumes its most important aspect, and begins to bear the high title of Stone Street.

The church and churchyard of Ilketshall St. Laurence, on the left of the road, stand on an artificially-raised platform. At St. Laurence’s Green the road is crossed by another, leading to Rumburgh, westwardly, which westward road is called St. Margaret’s Street ; and eastwardly, avoiding all brooks in a truly British fashion, coming out on the piece of ‘corduroy road,’ described by Mr. Edwards in his pamphlet dealing with the question whether the Waveney ever reached the sea at Lowestoft. The dame of Stone Street belongs to the road, even after passing the Triple Plea, when it turns towards the right for Halesworth. The farm called Harley Archer’s lies on the left after this turn. Part of it is described in the title deeds as abutting 1 upon the Queen’s Highway and turnpike road leading from Halesworth aforesaid to Bungay, formerly called Stone Street, or the broadway, towards the south.’ Broadway Farm is on the right of the road. On the other side the road turns eastward for Holton, but the name of Stone Street no longer belongs to it, a piece of copyhold land hard by being described in the court books of the manor of Dame Margaries, in Halesworth, as situate in Holton, and I abutting upon the common way, leading from Holton towards Stone Street.’

This, however, may have been part of Iter IX. Leading down to Holton, and so by the present road, nearly parallel to the river, to Blythford. Or it may be that the road worked more easterly from the Triple Plea, by the village of Wangford – not to be confounded with Wainford. Here the names of ‘Streetwalk Comer,’ ‘One Mile Field,’ and I King’s Lane’ are noticeable.

At Blythford the circumstances of crossing are most favourable. I am convinced that I thought too well of Blythburgh. For the rest of the way there would be an easy course over the heaths to Dunwich.

It appears to me that great efforts were made to deal effectively with the worst parts of the road.

Sticking in the mud time after time, between Holton and Ilketshall St. John’s, and attacked by parties of plunderers when in these straits, the great necessity was to get clear of this middle section of the stage. Hence not only was this grand Stone Street laid down, but little redoubts were thrown up at some distance from the route, not as summer camps, but rather to be occupied occasionally, when some baggage train was to pass to or from Norwich. Such was Rumburgh, a highly suggestive name. There seem to have been earthworks here, but I am not bold enough to discriminate between them and the foundations of the house of the Augustinian canons. Such was Mells, a little scarped position guarding a ford just above Blythford. Such was the little square rampart in which stands that venerable building known as the Old Minster, while Alburgh²⁴, the great mounds at Bungay, and others of British origin, may have been turned to useful account. I have a first-brass Clodius Albinus dug up in Mr. Lait’s garden at the `back of the hills’, At Bungay, and a good Vespasian with incuse reverse, found near that town, is in the possession of Mr. R. Walesby.

Passing out of the first stage, we must not linger on the ruins of Dunwich, where, though the sea has destroyed the old town, Roman coins, pins, etc., are found in abundance, but pursue our journey over the little Minsmere stream at Fordley, probably by Kelsale and Saxmundham, to Stratford St. Andrew, where the name reassures us. Once more probability has to be our guide, as to the road originally passing close to Glemham Hall, and being turned northward for the improvement of that park. We leave Wickham Market on the left, and are on what looks like a British track straightened out, with Charsfield on the right and Debach on the left, till we strike into the valley of one of the Deben feeders just above Clopton, which seems to be the Com, or hollow, pointed out by Combretonium. On the east side of this little ravine stand within a very short distance of each other the churches of Clopton and Burgh ; the former just to the north of a square camp, and the latter within it. Burgh churchyard is well scarped to the south and west, and at about 200 yards to the south the remains of a trench, now filled in, may be clearly seen. This, at a point east-south-east of the church, turns northward, and then between the two churches westward till it meets the scarp. The name Castle Field is still preserved, and the late Major Rouse of Woodbridge could remember the ruined walls. Here, a few years ago, a gold Roman bracelet was found, and at the further end of Clopton, in 1883, a boy named John Gardiner found a gold Roman coin, which he sold to a watchmaker in Woodbridge. Fictile remains are found strewn on the ground, and Burgh tower contains much suspicious brick. Certainly no outward sign of a Roman station is wanting in this place, and the measurements suit Combretonium.

Returning to the point where we first struck into this valley, we follow a road which leaves Otley Church on the right and Swilland on the left. This will bring us to Henley and Barham, near to the Orwell Valley, and by some ford we cross the stream, and find ourselves on Route V., by which we reach the next station, Ad Ansam, or Stratford St. Mary. There are three interpretations of this peculiar name. Ansa in classical Latin means a handle or clamp, and the roads and paths which meet here, then the lowest fordable point of the Stour, may have been regarded as gathered up in a handle. But ansaria is a low-Latin word for market produce, and the existence of Chipping Hill, or Market Hill, in Stratford parish, suggests to Mr. Coote that a British market gives the name to the station.²⁵ The French derivation from ansa, anse, means, among other things, a creek, which suits well with the situation.

This is the second Stratford, or paved ford, on Route IX., the first being Stratford St. Andrew, already mentioned. The well-known ‘Stratford atte Bowe’ is a third; and though it lies far beyond our limits, I will not leave the conjoined Routes V. and IX. without quoting what Defoe said in 1722 :

There seems to be lately found out in the bottom of the Marshes (generally called Hackney Marsh, and beginning near about the place now called the Wick, between Old Ford and the said Wick), the remains of a great stone causeway, which, as it is supposed, was the highway, or great road from London into Essex, and the same which goes now over the great bridge between Bow and Stratford.

That the great road lay this way, and that the great causeway landed again just over the river, where now the Temple Mills stand, and passed by Sir Thomas Hickes’s house at Ruckolls, all this is not doubted ; and that it was one of those famous’ highways made by the Romans there is undoubted proof, by the several marks of Roman work, and by Roman coins and other antiquities found there, some of which are said to be deposited in the bands of the Rev. Mr. Strype, vicar of the parish of Low Leyton. ²⁵

The Ravenna cosmographer of the seventh century, -himself, apparently, an indifferent copier, or possessed of imperfect information – has not been happy in his transcribers. We have in him this sequence, puzzling enough:

LONDINIVM AVGVSTA
CAESAROMAGUM
CAMVLODVLO COLONIA
DVRCINATE
DVROVIGVTO
DVROBRISIN
VENTA CENONIVM

The suggestion is that the fourth, fifth, and sixth names have been inserted from another route, perhaps Route Ill. of Antonine, representing DUBRIS, DVROVERNO, DVROCOBRIVIS (Dover, Canterbury, Rochester) respectively. Whatever may be the reading of the riddle, it will add nothing to our knowledge of Roman East Anglia.

The last document which tells us of the Roman occupation is the survey entitled Notitia ImPerii, made shortly before the division of the Empire into the Eastern and Western Empires under Arcadius and Honorius in A.D. 395.

Suffolk at that time, with the exception of the coastline, was a portion of the third province, Flavia Cawriensis²⁶, which included the country between the Humber and the Thames. The province was governed, as to fiscal matters, by a Prases, subject to the Vicar of the Britains – himself one of the six vicarii or deputies of the Pro-consul of Africa. The Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls had also a jurisdiction here, which gave him the responsible position of judge in a Court of Final Appeal ; and the Count of the Saxon Shore through Britain – a man spectabilis, though not illustris – guarded the Suffolk coast as a portion of the littus Saxonicum, which extended from Brancaster in Norfolk, to the mouth of the Adur, in Suffolk.

The Saxons were well known in these parts long before the days of Hengist and Horsa; and if anybody has found a good character for them, except as regards the purity of their women, it will be just as well to let the world have the references, for the passages at present known depict them as pirates of a terribly ferocious nature, and no less skilful seamen than desperate fighters and ruthless victors²⁷ The earliest notice of them is about A.D. 285, when in conjunction with the Franks they were ravaging the northern coast of France. The noted Carausius was set to look after them, but allowed them to enrich themselves with plunder that they might be the better worth handling afterwards – a piece of management which led to a decree for his execution, and a temporarily successful assumption of the purple by him, as a preferable course²⁸. In him we see in fact, though not perhaps in title, the .first recorded Count of the Saxon Shore. We learn from Ammianus Marcellinus of one Nectaridius, Count of the Maritime District, who is killed in a general uprising of the barbarians in A.D. 368, of the defeat of these insurgents in the following year near ‘London, an ancient town which men of the latter days have called Augusta’, of a fresh assault of sea-rovers in the year after that on the Count Nannenus, and of their destruction during a truce – perfidious, but excusable in its perfidy, in the historian’s opinion-arranged by Severus, Count of the Body-guard to the Emperor Valentinian²⁹,.
The nature of their keels is so preserved to us as to prove the penetrating power of these flat bottoms, and to suggest to us how often the crushed remnants of the Iceni or the settling military colonists had been wont to plunge themselves into inaccessible woods, and caves in the scrub, when the accursed snake-like head of the pirate craft had been reported as making for the shore.

We must say a little about the staff of the Count of the Saxon Shore. That so wide a jurisdiction should have required a lieutenant is only natural. This officer, called Princeps, came from the Count’s Chief, who is called the Master, of the Foot-guards in the West. The revenue. officers are styled numerarii, or reckoners. From what we can learn from other sources, they were an objectionable set of men, as several of the emperors put forth rescripts to restrain their pride, greediness, fraud, and sloth. If they were suspected of falsifying their accounts, they might be tortured by a kind of rack called the horse, and when their time of office was up they were to wait awhile in their provinces to answer any charges which might be brought against them. Nor does the Superintendent of Prisons (Commentariensis) show up better. He is especially ordered to bring up for trial no abject and base person in place of the real prisoner. Another officer is called the Regerendarius. I can find nothing about him, but suppose from the form of the word that his business was to block out fresh work, arrange expeditions, etc.

Another surprise for the general reader will be to find shorthand writers (singulares) on the Count’s staff. They were so called from writing each word with one mark, instead of using letters. These marks were called notae, and thus the shorthand writers were called notarii as well as singulars. Hence our ‘notary.’

The nine stations of the Count of the Saxon Shore were Brannodunum, Gariannonum, Othona, Regulbium, Ritupiae, Dubri, Lemanni, Anderida, and Portus Adurni, of which only the second, Gariannonum, known as Burgh Castle, is in Suffolk, where a Provost (Prapositus) of Stablesian horse was posted. We find these Africans also at Pelusium, in the Delta of the Nile, and in Scythia and Moesia. They would have a busy time of it, scampering over the country when a small party of pirates appeared, and rearing their turrets and preparing for a siege in case of a more serious irruption.

The dimensions of this camp are, internally, 620 feet by 383 feet, and the average height is from 14 to 15 feet, according to measurements made by me September 13, 1886.

The question at once arises as to whether Burgb Castle originally had four walls, or was protected on the west-north-west side by what was then an arm of the sea. To this question Mr. Harrod’s labours were largely directed by desire of the late Sir John Boileau, to whose spirit the preservation of this splendid monument is due.

The opinion of those who denied the existence of a fourth wall was defended on the ground that the sea would form an adequate protection at the back. No doubt the whole of the marsh might be flooded at an exceptionally high spring tide, or under the influence of a north-westerly gale, or by heavy freshets, or by a combination of these causes ; but a dry, still season and the absence of unusual tides would bring about a different state of things ; and, indeed, the most unfavourable condition of the marshes would offer no fatal obstacle to the pirates who swarmed up the estuaries and creeks of this part of the country. On this ground there is really no presumption against the hypothesis of a fourth wall. Rather, the existence of a British tumulus on the spot where Norwich (Thorpe) Station now stands, and the salting mound just above the present average water-level in Herringfleet, would favour the idea that there has been but little change in that level since the days of Roman occupation. But Mr. Harrod’s excavations went to the extent of affording strong positive evidences as to the fate of the fourth wall. The ragged ends of both north and south walls and the broken bonding courses convinced him that both walls must have been extended beyond their present terminations, and thus he was led, at his first visit in 1850, to make a series of trenches on the low ground to the west, separated by a hedge from the present path leading to the cement works. He began nearly opposite to the Praetorian Gate, but a little further to the north, and worked steadily southward. Very little reward he met with at first broken mortar, loose flints, and fragments of tiles ; but in one place he found a layer of flints placed on the clay, with a thin covering of gravel sifted over them. One of Sir John Boileau’s gardeners, James Kettle, drew Mr. Harrod’s attention to this, as the same thing had been observed in the foundations of a small building within the walls, to be noticed presently. But this faint indication of the foundation of a wall was soon excelled by that which was found in the trench numbered 3. Here, 4 feet below the surface, a fragment of the wall was reached, which in its fall had retained its continuity. Penetrating a little below this, a number of oak piles about a foot apart were discovered. On these the walls had originally rested, and further investigations in the trench No. i showed the piling precisely in the line of foundation indicated in the other trenches. The piles, Mr. Harrod tells us, ‘were about a foot apart, and had clay, chalk stones, mortar, etc., very firmly rammed in between them to the depth of about iS inches, after penetrating which space black mud was thrown out, speedily followed by the water, which then rose a little above the top of the piling, and, as I judge, to the level of the water in the adjacent drains.’ The obvious difficulty of carrying out extensive diggings in such a position as that of the footpath below the camp prevented Mr. Harrod’s inquiries from being pushed much further. In one trench, marked 15 on his plan, a solid mass of mortar was found 7 feet below the footpath, but the hole had to be filled up, and from that day to this no further excavation has been made on that special spot.

Where, then, is the west wall? Its fragments have doubtless been dispersed over the vicinity of the camp. Some, perhaps, underlie the oozy bed of the Waveney, or even of Breydon. Some may be looked for in the farm buildings, cottages, or in the walls of the parish church of Burgh Castle. Much, very likely, has been ground to powder on the roads of the Lothingland Hundred. But Mr. Harrod’s investigations will carry conviction to most minds that at Burgh Castle, as at Richborough, the camp originally had four walls.

The characteristic

Indurate flint, and brick in ruddy tiers With immemorial lichen frosted o’er,

require no notice here ; but it may be a question whether the overhanging of the walls is not to a certain extent intentional, and the higher level of the ground inside the camp is to be remarked.

Six cylindrical bastions remain, of which one on the west side has fallen,

Undergnaw’d by years.

The diameter is about 14 feet, and only the upper part is at all bonded with the walls, which circumstance suggests that the bastions were built at a time between the commencement and the completion of the walls. Down the middle of each is a round hollow space, apparently for the insertion of the centre timber of a temporary wooden turret, to be raised in case of an attack upon the camp. Adjoining the west wall was a room, 16 feet 6 inches square, the foundation resting on a layer of flints with fine gravel sifted over them, as described above. The flue formed by the usual flanged tiles was found, with some indications of a furnace.

On each side of the Praetorian Gate the remains of a wall were discovered, turning inwards at right angles to the main wall. Mr. Harrod conjectures this to be merely intended to keep the roadway clear of earth. No other discoveries were made hereabouts, save a narrow trench just within the gate, apparently for the reception of a wooden threshold ; but Mr. Harrod expressed his conviction that he was wrong in not digging to a greater depth, and in adhering too closely to a straight line.

Roman roads not recorded are of course more hypothetical than those of which we have treated, but as two centuries elapsed between Antonine’s Itinerary and the recall of the legions, much development of traffic must have taken place during that period. From Stoke Ash a gravel road goes northward by Scole, Dickleburgh and Long Stratton to the great camp Ad Taum at Caistor, near Norwich. Those who work at the pick and shovel on this road say that there is a great difference in its character north and south of Stoke White Horse. The road from this point to Eye, connecting two villas, can hardly escape being Roman. The roads from Norwich to Felixstowe; from Woodbridge to Debenham by Burgh; from Stratford St. Mary by Hadleigh, another, to Ixworth and Thetford ; ‘ Stone Street’; from Thetford by Barton Mills to Newmarket, the old coachroad ; from Brandon to Mildenhall, and thence into Cambridgeshire ; from Bury St. Edmunds – which, though forbidden to be Villa Faustini by the measurements, must still have been an important centre before it was Beodricesworth–to Stowmarket and to Sudbury ; and pieces of coast road-these and others suggest their origin, but this is all that we can expect of them. We have notes of villas at Eye, Great Thurlow, Coddenham, West Row in Mildenhall; hoards of coins at Undley in the parish of Lakenheath, at Cardale Head in the parish of Eriswell, at Stowlangtoft, Ickworth, Felixstowe and a great many other places ; strigils at Covehithe and Great Thurlow ; bronze ornaments at Icklingham, where the discoveries are more than we can here record ; and surveyors’ shafts at Felixstowe and Covehithe. Roman Suffolk, however, would require a treatise by itself, in spite of the poverty of the county in inscriptions.

1. 1 Tac., `Ann.,’ Aim 3r, etc.
2. Camden only identified Sitomagus with Thetford. William Burton in his `Commentary on Antoninus his Itinerary’ (1658), P. 229 adopts Brettenham, but in rather dubious language.
3. The Rev. C. J. Betham, Rector of Brettenham, to the author May Z2, 1894.
4. Various readings are Comvretonum and Ad Coverin
5. just over the Norfolk border.
6. ‘Tour through the Eastern Counties’ (Cassells) p. 17.
7. ‘Not. Imp.,’ in loc.
8. Paull. Diac., xi. 3 ; Amm. Marc., set infra; Claudian, ‘ Sidon. Apollin.,’ viii. 6; SaIv. Gab., iv. 14.
9. Eutrop., ix. 13.
10. Amm. Marc., xxvii. 8; xxviii. 5.

In order that the small contribution to the history of the Roman occupation of Great Britain which is allowed in this work may have any value, it is necessary that its sources should be indicated and their reliability estimated.

The ‘Commentaries’ of Julius Caesar bear the impress of truth, as plain, straightforward relations of fact, destitute of those literary attractions which give liveliness and take trustworthiness from a narrative.

The historian Tacitus was the son-in-law of the great commander Julius Agricola, and had access to sources of information which were closed to others.

Dion Cassius, who was twice Consul, was the friend of the learned and virtuous Emperor Alexander Severus. He unselfishly retired comparatively early from public life, to compile those annals which bear his name; and though much of his work has perished, fortunately we have the summaries of Xiphilinus, Patriarch of Constantinople, one of the great band of scholars in that city about the time of the Norman Conquest.

The geographical notes of Ptolemy, misinformed as he was in many points, will give some valuable hints. Of the work called ‘Antonine’s Itinerary’ it is difficult to speak shortly. It is not all of a piece, nor all of a time, nor does it pretend to absolute accuracy in its road measurements. The portion with which we have to deal seems to belong to that great survey which was made circa 200 by the Emperor Septimius Severus, who united with his own name that of his son Antoninus, better known to the ordinary reader by the name Caracalla. The last of our great documentary authorities is the Survey of the Roman Empire made shortly before its final division into the East and the West, under Arcadius and Honorius, A.D. 395. It is generally called ‘Notitia Imperil’, was published by Frobenius in 1552, and contains details which we should seek in vain elsewhere. But beyond history there is the great unwieldy mass of unwritten testimony – coins and medals, pottery, traces of domestic life and colonization, roads and fords, and arguments fairly deducible from the nature of the soil and the set of the country. Inscriptions are not as yet discovered within our limits.

In endeavouring to deal with some of this matter, reducing it from a heap to a pile, it is inevitable that conflicts of opinion should arise. Finality is often denied to us in archaeology, as in other matters; but, on the other hand, established views have a certain presumption in their favour, if only they date far enough back. Our medieval ancestors troubled themselves little about these things, and left a scanty legacy to their followers, the great Elizabethan labourers. These, again, were beset by difficulties of travel, preventing access to original documents and examination of localities, and often by false derivations, arising partly from the mangled form in which names of road-stations and camps were presented to them, and partly from the condition of philology in their time.

Such conclusions as we of the later days may adopt will be the more trustworthy the less they are dogmatic. Julius Caesar, although his operations did not extend into the East of England, has devoted three chapters¹³ to a general description of the island. He distinguishes the aboriginal population of the interior from the settlers of Belgic extraction on the sea-board, turned from sea rovers into agriculturists. He says of them that they generally retained the names of the states from which they had migrated. This is traceable in the Belgae and Atrebates of South England. The island he describes as triangular, with sides facing south, west, and north respectively, the last, of course, being the coast with which we are concerned, estimated by him at 800 miles in length.

But we are confronted with this difficulty:

Kent, ‘the civil’st part of all this isle’, must have been a Belgic settlement. In another place in the ‘Commentaries’ he speaks of the Gauls or Celts as differing from the Belgae in language, customs, and laws. Here he says that the inhabitants of Kent differ little from Gallic custom, and he notes their numerous houses as very like those of the Gauls, without distinguishing the men of the coast from those of the interior, about whom he had information which he regarded as trustworthy. Taking into account the second-hand character of his knowledge of our coast, and the varying nature of the soil, I am inclined to infer that there were more races than one in East Anglia, these Belgic immigrants, of whatever race they might be – Teutonic, Celtic, or mixed – holding the lighter and more easily-cleared soil bordering on the sea, and those of earlier standing, analogous to Caesar’s interior aboriginals, being driven to the dense forests on the clay, or to the almost inaccessible fishing and fowling mounds in the fens and marshes.

It is to be observed that no writer of antiquity calls the inhabitants of these islands Gauls or Celts, but Britons.¹⁴

Our subject excludes Caesar’s campaign, for Cassivellaunus, whose fortress was at Verulamium, or St. Albans, is in residence beyond our limits; but Imanuentius of the Trinobantes had been killed by him, and Mandubratius, successor to his murdered father, was taken under the direct protection of Julius Caesar.

This tutelage obtained by the men of Essex induced other tribes to surrender to the Roman invader, among whom were, according to the common reading, the Cenimagni, possibly identical with the Iceni. The reading, however, is very doubtful, though somewhat confirmed by the after-history of the latter.

We gather some scraps of information from the coins attributed by Stukeley to Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, and his wife Boadicea, which may be styled half-barbarous imitations of Roman coinage. The portraits have no discernible identity; the reverses are rude but vigorous representations of horses or bare-backed riding, and the lettering is Roman. Of Cunobellinus, whose rule bordered on Suffolk, and possibly extended over part of it, we know nothing, save from his coins, which often bear on the reverse CAM or CAMV, being presumably minted at his capital, Camulodunum. The portraits, again, are in charming variety, and the reverses ludicrous copies of some of Augustus Caesar. Apollo still plays his lyre, seated on a tub instead of one of the peaks of Parnassus; the Sphinx has lost her mystic air of silence, and has no more expression than a barber’s block; an ear of wheat is without its beard, but is, nevertheless, notable as probably indicating some advance in agriculture as distinguished from pasture.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery, and the money of Cunobellinus and Tasciovanus is a perpetual witness to their admiration of those Greek designs which often adorn the medals of Augustus. From Tacitus we obtain one glimpse of our side of Britain during the dark period, nearly amounting to a century, which intervenes between the invasions under Julius Caesar (s.c. 54) and the Emperor Claudius (A.D. 43), recorded in his ‘Annals’¹⁵. Germanicus, nephew of the Emperor Tiberius, in his operations in Germany, suffered a terrible wreck of his fleet at the mouth of the Rhine, A.D. 16. Of the shipwrecked, ‘some were thrown on the coast of Britain, and sent back by the petty chiefs; and, as is usual with men returning from a distance, they related many marvels – the force of whirlwinds, and un heard-of birds, monsters of the sea, blended forms of men and beasts, things either seen or credited through fear.’ Our own coast must have shared in this reception, and this fragmentary notice reveals a chief, or chiefs, acting a friendly part towards Romans, perhaps from pity, perhaps from fear.

Thus, more by evidence than by hypothesis, we come across the wealthy Prasutagus or Brasutargus, King of the Iceni, husband of Boadicea, or, as Dion Cassius calls her, Bonduica, for he was an old man¹⁶ when he made his will, appointing his daughters co-heiresses with Caesar, a few years, as it seems, before Boadicea’s revolt in A.D. 62. This would make him either newly come to his chieftainship, or acting under the existing chief at the time of the shipwreck.

The failure of the testamentary scheme for the preservation of his family, through the greed of the Roman soldiers, of itself shows that there was both real and personal wealth among the Iceni. In the revolt Prasutagus, if alive, took no part. From Dion Cassius we have a spirited sketch of the well-known queen:

She who mainly excited them and urged them to war against the Romans, their commander-in-chief, was Bonduica, a British woman of the royal race, endowed with a more than female mind. For she collected an army of about 120,000, and ascended a rostrum made of clay after the Roman fashion. She was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below her waist, wearing a great golden collar, with a highly-embroidered tunic, and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over it. This was her usual dress, and on this occasion grasping a lance, so as to strike awe into all, she spoke’ the conventional his torical oration, to which no sort of historical value can be attached.

Thus saying, she produced a hare from the folds of her dress, by way of divination, and when it ran auspi ciously, and the whole multitude shouted with delight, then Bonduica raised her hand to heaven, and¹⁷ uttered a second speech.

When Bonduica had harangued them something to this effect, she led her host against the Romans, who were without a commander, because Paulinus was cam paigning in the isle Mona, close to Britain. Thus she sacked two Roman cities, and wrought an incredible slaughter, as I said, and no horror was wanting to their treatment of the captives . . . which things they did in other of their sacred places, and especially in the grove of Andate, which is their name for Victory, a goddess whom they eminently honour.

The account of the defeat of the great Queen belongs not to Suffolk, and I will leave it to its proper county the more readily because so many great pens have treated of it in poetry and prose.

In Ptolemy¹⁷, whose Geography dates from about the time of the Emperor Hadrian, the mouth of the Yare takes its place thus on the East Anglican coast:

However much he may have been misinformed as to the Scotch coast, imagining it to run out nearly eastward from the Forth, his account of our own shore shows practical acquaintance with its outline. The tendency of the measurements is to thrust the mouth of the Garienus northward and Extensio eastward, which tallies with the natural changes of situation, the Caister mouth being then probably regarded as the principal haven, and Lowestoft Ness having suffered curtailment in common with other points of projection. Ptolemy’s degrees of longitude, it must be remembered, start from Fortunatae Insulae, which are generally regarded as the Canary Isles.

We have now to consider the Roads of Antonine’s Itinerary, No. V. and No. IX., which pass through Suffolk.

The attention given by the Romans to their roads needs no comment, but the detail recorded in one instance may be well referred to. Among the public works carried out by the censors Q. Fulvius Flaccus and A. Postumius Albinos, B.C. 174, it is mentioned that they caused the roads in the city to be strewn with flint, and those outside the city to be sub-strewn with gravel, and bridges to be made in many places.

The author of the work, ‘Antiquitas Schematibus Illustrata’, who had examined the Appian Way in Crevier’s time, found the gravel foundation entire. These same censors were the first who caused the roads to be margined (marginandas), a word which has been variously interpreted, but probably means the erection of a low stone wall each side of the road.

Considering that the work of these censors was carried out nearly six centuries after the received date of the foundation of Rome by Romulus, we cannot expect to find in so distant a country as Britain any general adherence to the excellent system referred to. Nor, again, must anything like a rigid adherence to straight lines between stations be looked for. It is needful to emphasize this, because there is no more wide-spread error than the idea that Roman roads ran straight from town to town. The Czar Nicholas could take a ruler in his hand, and direct an engineer to make a railway on the line ruled from St. Petersburg to Moscow; but unlimited monarchy, a central position, and the absence of engineering obstacles, are three concurrent circumstances which do fall not to the lot of all road-makers.

The constant tendency of every people has been to shorten and straighten roads, but this is a work of time. Nature is not always propitious, and sometimes the rights of proprietors have to be considered. An existing road, if tolerable, will hold its own for a long while, in spite of indirectness. Houses have sprung up in its vicinity, grain stores, smithies, and, above all, taverns. There are three stations in the Antonine Itinerary called Tribust abernis, one in Cisalpine Gaul and two in Italy, that on the Appian Way noted for its mention in the Acts of the Apostles.

Thus a good trackway on a light soil, where water would not accumulate, might be used for years, or even centuries, while immediate action would be necessary in a stiff clay country overgrown with forest and brushwood. The zig zags which are imperative in a hilly country are also imperative in a comparatively flat district where there is an occasional sharp drop, especially should there be a river at or near the foot of it. There is also the advantage of existing fords to be consulted, and we shall find their location a great guide to us. The detail of Iter V. runs thus:

It is unnecessary for me to recapitulate the evidence as to the identity of Casaromagus with Billericay, or of Colonia with Colchester, or of Camboricum with Cambridge ; but the solution of the locality of Villa Faustini is so acknowledged a desideratum that any attempt at this time deserves careful consideration, inasmuch as eventual benefit may arise from the most timid and tentative efforts, if only made honestly and on the lines of existing evidence.

The name, in the first place, is of an unusual type, there being only eight other similar instances in the whole of Antonine’s Itinerary. Of these, seven are in North Africa, and the eighth, Rostrata Villa, twenty-four Roman miles from Rome, on the road to Ariminum, is identified by Lapie with S. Maria della Guardia, and by Westphal with Ostoria Nova. Besides these, there is a Villa Pampati, in the Jerusalem Itinerary, at the mansio Andavilis, or Andabalis, in Cappadocia, apparently some twenty-eight miles from Faustinopolis, noted for its fine breed of horses (‘unde veniunt equi curules’ – Itin. Hieros.), many of which would come clattering through the well-known pass in the Taurus to be shipped at Tarsus. Putting these instances side by side with the classical use of the word, and its probable derivation from vicus, as a diminutive, we should expect to find at a station bearing the name Villa a substantial residence of a wealthy colonus, with the usual adjuncts of dwellings for bailiff (villicus) and labourers, granaries, stables and stalls, fowl-houses, dovecots, and all other necessary farming appliances.

But, strange to say, we have in Martial’s ‘Epigrams’ one (iii. 49) of fifty-one lines on a certain Villa Faustini, at Baise. Writing to Bassus, he contrasts the suburban primness of his friend’s house with the rude plenty which reigns at that of Faustinus. Martial’s ‘Epigrams’ were such ‘household words ‘ all over the Roman Empire that the suggestion is that some visitor to the eastern parts of Britain, beholding the jolly cheer at the house of his host, named the place Villa Faustini, and that the name had sticking power. Whereabouts in the Seismic Baian district Faustinus’s villa lay, I suppose none can tell; I am bold enough, however, to present my readers with a metrical version of the epigram :

The homely grange in friend Faustinus’ hand,
Dear Bassus, nigh to Baiae’s gentle strand,
Knows nought of languor in its myrtle groves.
No plane-tree, widowed of the grape-vine’s loves,
Or clipped box edge adorns the garden ground.
Wide and productive lie the leas around,
The genuine rustic life may here be found.

Each corner’s piled with grain-heaps, wondrous great;
The wine-jar sends forth odours delicate.
When grim November doles each shortening day,
And shivering soup expect stern winter’s sway,
Late though the season be, the dresser rough
Still brings ripe clusters to the vineyard trough.
In the deep valley bulls loud bellowing stray;
The hornless calf is eager for the fray.
Lovely in plumage stalks th’ untidy host,
With claws relentless, to the gardener’s cost:
Here scream the jewelled peacocks, hiss the geese,
And shrieks from throats of scarlet never cease
Here speckled guinea-fowl and partridge neat,
Here Colchian pheasants, find a safe retreat;
Struts Rhodian chanticleer, his power to prove,
Echo the airy cots with constant love
Of amorous pigeon and of waxen turtledove.
Round goody’s lap throng swine, a greedy band
The lambs, their mothers waiting, patient stand.
The frost-nipped milkmen crowd the hearth-fire clear,
Crackle the forest billets dry and sere,
The black rafters lambent flame-tongues seem to fear.

No sallow vintner squirms relieved from toil,
No greasy wrestler spends for nought his oil,
But nets the thrush ensnare in meshes fine,
And fish hang quivering on the angler’s line.
Pleased with the rustic scene, the citizen
In gardening to take his share will deign;
Fops from their airs and graces now unbend,
Meek to the bailiff’s voice their ears they lend;
The pampered flunkey hoes at his command,
And contemplates with joy his hardening hand.

Each gift of visitors their goodwill tells:
One bears the pale gold honey in its cells,
One from Sassinian glade the bowl of cream;
The drowsy dormice some a present deem.
In hamper prison’d sounds the baby voice
Of hairy kids Anon, the gourmand’s choice,
Fat capons come, a joy surpassing all.
Then too, their mothers’ pride, the daughters tall
Of farmers rich with baskets trim appear,
Replenished well with wholesome country cheer.
The day’s work ended, sounds the welcome call
To food and rest. Blithe throng the neighbours all.
The chins wag merrily. The viands go
Fast as the sun dissolves an April snow,
None for the morrow left. The serving-man,
Himself well filled, fills every empty can.

To this your sparing elegance oppose.
These laurel bushes, pressed by houses close,
From window viewed, are all your wilderness
Your wooden Priapus may rest in peace.
Your meal’s from city bakery supplied.
In rattling carts your vegetables ride.
Eggs, chickens, apples, cheese, and musty foam
The several chapmen send to your spruce home.
Is this a country seat ? I ween ’tis none.
A house I call it near the busy town.

We must consider the measurements in Antonine, Route V., Britain, which have always proved such a stumbling-block. However perplexing they may be, there can be no reasonable doubt of their accuracy. All are agreed about the mileage of the three stages with which we are concerned, and the only variation is between the names Icinos and Icianos for the remaining station.

We have, then, between Colchester and Cambridge,

– according to Parthey and Pinder’s text, eighty-eight miles to account for, between two places distant from each other hardly forty miles, as the crow flies. But the zigzag character of this portion of Route V. is not unique, as the road, beginning at London and ending at Luguvallum on the Wall, takes in Colchester, Cambridge, and Lincoln. Indeed, the more direct course, in Route II., by Chester and Wroxeter, is not much straighter. Sometimes there were potent physical reasons, both these roads avoiding the dense Midland forest (Needwood, Charnwood, Sherwood, etc., of after times); but sometimes, perhaps, the stations were purposely dispersed over the country for the better carrying out of the fiscal business which devolved on the Vicar of the Britains, himself one of the six vicarii of the Pro consul of Africa.

Our function now is to endeavour to find stations thirty-five Roman miles from Colchester and Cambridge respectively, with a distance of eighteen miles between them. I think that Villa Faustini may be identified with Stoke Ash, and Icinos with Ixworth. Precision is denied to us, firstly because the points of starting can only be defined by the names of the stations, and thus, in large places like Colonia, we might easily gain or lose a mile before we -move an inch¹⁸, and secondly because all the measures are marked ‘p.m.’ or ‘plus minus’.

However, we may regard Stratford St. Mary, the station Ad Ansam on Route IX., as seven English miles from Colchester. Thence to Copdock is six and a half miles ; but at this point we break from the Ipswich road, keeping on the west of the river. There appear to be several fords hereabouts, and I do not feel sure of my ground till we are on the Ipswich and Scole road, some ten English miles from Stoke Ash. Here we find ourselves on a peculiarly fine road, traversing a district full of Roman remains.

The twenty-three and a half miles accounted for will leave nine and a half miles between Copdock and the point which I have spoken of as ten miles from Stoke Ash, to make up thirty-three English miles between that place and Colchester. Thirty-three English miles = 174,240 English feet. This number, when divided by 4,854, the estimated number of English feet in a Roman mile, gives 35.8+, which is quite as near the xxxv. in Antonine, Route V., as we have any right to expect.

My friend and correspondent, Mr. H. Watling, of Ipswich, thus writes to me about Stoke Ash, after treating of Baylham, Coddenham, Crowfield, and Stonham, all abounding in fictile and other remains :

Stoke Ash is decidedly the most important place, and the finest description of pottery is found here … just below the White Horse Inn on the same side. … It is a curious fact that the opposite side was devoted to burial purposes. Some vessels containing calcined bones were inverted on a square tile (April 4, 1892) . About this time the Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, wrote an account of the find here. The position had attracted attention early in the century, when Lapie, probably from measurements only, placed Villa Faustini at Little Thornham, close by Stoke Ash.

I visited the place on May 30, 1892, in company with one of my sons. The spots where the fictile fragments were discovered, as related by Dr. Searle and Mr. Watling, were indicated to us, and the landlord of the White Horse brought out several coins found thereabouts, of which one bears the head of Crispus, the eldest son of Constantine the Great, with a reverse referring to Vota Vicennalia of that unhappy prince.

There are two or three possible routes from Stoke Ash to Ixworth, within a little of the recorded xviii miles between Villa Faustini and Icinos; but in my imperfect information about this intervening country, it would be premature to discuss them; and I address myself to the last problem, the distance of xxxv. miles between this place and Cambridge. Ixworth is situated on a nice little stream, which, flowing northward by Honington and Pakenham,, and through Euston Park, reaches the Little Ouse a few miles above Thetford. Many Roman remains have been found there, and at the adjoining village of Fakenham, and the name Ixworth is certainly suggestive of the Iceni.

As Lapis places Icinos at Rymer-house, near Thetford, I did not wish to pass that theory unnoticed, but on visiting the place on July 28, 1892, I failed to find any confirmation of his view, and the distances would present a difficulty. Ixworth, then, with Pakenham contiguous to it, I regard as this station, and record, on the information of the Rev. C. W. Jones, Vicar of the latter parish, the find of a denarius of Tiberius in the triangle formed at the fork of the roads through Pakenham. to Bury, and to Thurston Station.

The road thence to Camboricum I believe to be at first the old coach-road to Bury, whence I suppose it passed out by West Gate, Risby Gate suggesting a later origin, and the road by Saxham White Horse and Kentford to Newmarket, apparently having been, in part at least, made in times within Gough’s memory¹⁹. Thence the way may have been by Chedburgh and Wickham Brook, both names containing propitious roots, to the Thurlows, so full of Roman remains; thence by West Wickham and at the south of Balsham, so as to strike into Wool Street and run for Cambridge. If anyone will take this course from Ixworth to Cambridge, he will find it not far out from the xxxv. Roman miles from Icinos to Camboricum. But we are now beyond the confines of the county, and must turn to Route No. IX.

Notes:

1. 1 De Bello Gallico v. 12-14. If we aim to follow Caesar, we must regard the Belgae on the other side of the Channel as more purely Teutonic than those on British soil.
2. Pomponius Leta (‘Compend. Hist Rom.,’ ii.) says that they were first called Britanni, and afterwards Britones.
3. 1 11.24.
4. ‘Longa opulentia Glarus.’—xiv- 31. The epithet loxgus is used in L 8 to denote a period of forty-five years.
5. I Lib. ii., cap. 3. My quotations are from Sebastian Munster’s edition (Basle, Y54o).
6. Mr. Laver’s recent discoveries at Colchester point to a spot very near Eudo Dapifer’s castle as the site of the Roman Forum.
7. See ‘Suffolk Traveller,’ p. 400.