Chapter 10

OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.

Colchester was long in recovering itself after the rough treatment received during the siege; and in fact, it is only in recent years that the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion, has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St Botolph remains the roofless ruin that cannonading and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in 1656 found Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming with sectaries," and if he had visited it nine years later would have witnessed a worse state, for the plague almost depopulated the place.

"Sectaries"—that is to say, those who preferred to think for themselves on religious matters, and to worship in their own way—were treated with an unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker, was imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle, and died there, his story affording a sad example of barbarity in the authorities of that period.

But the early nineteenth century was as savage in some ways as the late seventeenth, which so delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists. The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance, include a particularly ferocious instrument devised for the protection of the squires' property and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap; one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated by powerful springs and furnished with sharp steel teeth, would, when accidentally trodden on by the poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient to injure the bone and probably mutilate him for life. It was thus the landed interests protected their rabbits, hares and pheasants. The existence of this man-trap, together with the spring guns also used at the same time, is a reproach to the England of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, just as its preservation here as a curiosity is a certificate of the progress achieved in humanity since then.

The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected in many ways, but in none more strikingly than the condition of the castle, now a municipal property, and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at variance with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness of these surroundings and of the ornamental railings that fence off the enclosure is admirable from the everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect and rural squalor of other years pointed the moral of the place and annotated its story, while present prettinesses blur the historic page. It is so everywhere throughout the land. When, a hundred years ago, Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our earlywater-colourists, roamed the country, making their picturesque sketches, they did not find themselves baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences, or requested not to walk on the grass. They had to pick their hazardous way through miry lanes, or adventure through the bottomless sloughs of farmyards. All these things were offensive to the wayfarer, but they generally meant picturesque compositions and exquisitely sketchable foregrounds. Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron railings new from Birmingham last week, is in a quandary.

COLCHESTER CASTLE.

The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle doubtless originated in 1726, when its then owner, Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a detested grandson, on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance,a more exasperating bequest than even the proverbial cutting off with a shilling.

A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect is found in the book of an auctioneer, who wrote an account of his "Professional Travels in England in the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on his title-page, "An Auctioneer." Part One of his work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is yet to come, and as his first instalment shows little merit, the world can well afford to forego the second.

Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins, and weeps that cabbages and coriander employ the attention of the Colchester people, rather than the care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating "the sad remains of so many interesting scenes," enters from an adjoining farm one whom he is pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an affectation, but he might have done worse. Hemighthave called him, seeing that Colchester is a place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas, evidences of jocular intent, which would have been dreadful.

"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel work when them great Barons, as they call 'em, lived here."

"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but it's a pity to see hogs and donkeys depasturing in their courts and gardens, and grubbing and kicking down their halls and chapels."

"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of thesoil, "what's the use on 'em in these days? I'd sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day, than them there towers and dungeons. Them swedes afore you 'ool carry a score o' fine wethers any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at 'em, but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for ever and a day 'fore you find enough o' green for a garnish"; which was indeed a practical rural way of looking at things.

The summit of those old walls has nowadays a very charming green garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured by wind- and bird-sown wallflowers and vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are the young sycamores, that have struck deep roots into the walls and bid fair to grow into large trees.

It is still possible to follow the greater part of Colchester's old walls along the queer alleys that run above or below them. Eld Lane, out of whose elevated course the steep descent of the old postern, now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated along the summit of the south wall looking over towards St John's Green, where, facing a wilderness of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse stands, all that is left of the proud mitred Abbey of St John. By that green is the frowzy little church of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner from the wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that to call its "architecture" merely "debased" is to deal kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded tower is a feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a flat plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, andfilled with flimsy pine-wood pews, painted and grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within; dust and broken crockery without. And yet, although so unlovely, it is not altogether with satisfaction that an elaborate design is seen for rebuilding the church from its foundations, together with the notice, "It is earnestly hoped that contributions will be given toward the restoration fund." "Restoration" is not the word, for the design is alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood on the ground. Rather let the place be repaired and cleansed and its unbeautiful details preserved as a characteristic and shocking example of how they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the dark days of churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic. It is here, under the north aisle, that those two valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.

For the church-towers built of Roman bricks, and for other evidences of that ancient Empire, let the explorer seek, and, presently finding, think himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a harmless attitude, if at the same time unwarranted by fact. Let us to other matters, and then, leaving the town, hie away for Ipswich.

Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters, and has been ever since the Roman occupation. In the estuary of the Colne, and the Crouch, and in the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester "natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity and feed upon the semi-maritime slime, as they did close upon two thousand years ago, and doubtless long before that. If we may judge from thestupendous heaps of oyster-shells discovered on the sites of Roman towns and villas, near and far, to say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters would be far too mild a term. They must have almost lived on oysters, dreamt oysters, and thought oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a Roman colony.

Although the fishery brings wealth to the town, it is more than a mile away and makes no sign. Those who might think that, because of it, Colchester should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells should strew every street, would be vastly disillusioned. But beside its oyster fishery, other Colchester trades are of secondary importance. Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing and corn-milling carried on, but the once famed textile manufactures are gone. Among those old trades was the industry of baize-making, which left Colchester considerably over a century ago for other centres, after having given additional prosperity to the town for a period of a hundred and fifty years. It was shortly after 1570 that numbers of Dutch Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions in Holland, introduced the making of "bays and says," and, despite local jealousies, flourished amazingly for generations here.

But Colchester will never be dull while it continues to be what it is now—a great military depôt. Those worthy representatives of the Roman legionaries at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or so, the Tommies and troopers of the British Army,are a prominent feature in every street, and bugles blow all round the clock, fromréveilléto the last post, when every good soldier goes home to his barracks down the Butt Road; while the King's bad bargains stay behind and fortify themselves against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with another glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the street, find themselves presently in charge of the military patrol that walks the town with measured step and slow.

XXIX

"FromColchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says that seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes, in her diary. The milestones, however, tell quite a different tale and contradict the lady by making the distance between the two towns eighteen miles and a quarter.

Seven miles of these bring the traveller from Colchester across the Stour and so into Suffolk. It is not an exciting seven miles. Passing the eastern outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and puddles beside the slattern streets offend the sense of propriety, as, having reversed their natural positions, the Fair Field is left on the right. "Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who would linger there? But the Fair Field cannot be passed unawares. If not seen, it will be heard, for on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts andtravelling circuses that still draw rustic crowds with their fat women, giants and dwarfs; or delight them with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs follow the traveller in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy when the wind unkindly wills it so. The sounds nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between himself and those siren strains, and happily the road is a fast one, so that he need not be long about the business. It goes, as an old turnpike should, broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of six miles, with little to vary the monotony of trim hedgerow and equi-distant telegraph poles.

Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying some three hundred yards along the Harwich Road, come across a railway level-crossing to the suburb of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage called Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up, but an inscription in the wall of a cottage still proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It seems strange that the Hermitage should have been placed, not on the main road where pilgrims were surely more plentiful, but on the seaward route. The explanation may probably be sought in the existence already of another establishment of the kind, long since forgotten. Here, then, the Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy well and an oratory made appeal to the piety or the superstition, as the case might be, of all who passed by. To these the hermit presented his leathern wallet, beseeching travellers, who would have gone without giving alms, to spare a trifle forthe upkeep of the road, even though they valued not the Blessed Saints.

For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted, and a long line of hermits lived here. Some were pious and industrious, keeping the road in repair; others had neither piety nor industry, spent their time in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and fought, so that the road became scandalously neglected, and many Colchester worthies received apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such an one must have been the hermit who lived here in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and was indicted in 1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in 1535, when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, the Hermitage was closed, and the then occupant turned out, with a warning that if he solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded as a "sturdy beggar," and dealt with accordingly.

The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the second half of the seventeenth century, shortly after the first coaches had started running, of many highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679 three men were rewarded with £6, 8s. between them "for apprehending those ytrobbed the Ipswich coach." Again, in September 1698, three men were rewarded "for pursuen hiewaymen," and for "going to Ardlegh" on that business; but as they received only two shillings each and an extra shilling for "drinck," it looks as though the pursuit was unsuccessful.

COLCHESTER.

The high road, to which we have now returned,has already been described as an excellent highway, but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a roadside inn on what was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude. It has, however, the advantage of commanding the best general view of Colchester, with the inevitable Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town Hall tower in rivalry with it.

Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the road changes its character and drops sharply down by an almost precipitous descent, to where a lazy river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and bends between the grey-green foliage of willows lining either bank. It flows through a land of rich green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land, too, of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the waters of a salt estuary sparkle in the sun, while in between, from this Pisgah height, rises the tall tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale of Dedham. The estuary is that of the Stour at Manningtree, and the church tower that of Dedham. This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that fact explains the homelike and familiar look it wears, even to the stranger. Constable, born close by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes lovingly for over forty years, and remained constant to his native vale all his life. By the magic power that comes of sympathy, he transferred the spirit of these lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully as he did their form and colour; with the result that the veriest stranger viewing them becomes reminiscent.

Nor did Constable onlypainthis native vale; he has described it in almost as masterly a way. To him it was "the most cultivated part of Suffolk, a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which river separates that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity and excellence hardly anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing story of travelling home by coach down this very hill. He shared the vehicle with two strangers. "In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of them remarked, on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes, sir, this is Constable's Country.' I then told him who I was lest he should spoil it."

From this hill-top to the left of the road, and in what are now the woodlands of Langham Hall, Constable painted his best-known Vale of Dedham. In one respect the scene has changed. The willows still fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or pollarded, are now allowed to grow as they will, and the river is not so visible as it was once. Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered. Even on this hill, close by Langham church, Church Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm," remains as it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church tower. Only the foliage has changed, and the little guttering stream been drained away.

THE VALE OF DEDHAM.After Constable.

GUN HILL.

This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the Stour, is Dedham Hill, more often locally known as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently a most picturesque old inn, with the painted sign of a cannon hanging over the road. The sign has gone, and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead. At the foot of the hill the road, turning abruptly to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the Stour and its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long series of flood-water arches across the oozy valley.The old toll-house, taking tolls no longer, still stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,—

THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.

Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,Let not one curse escape your lips,God sees and hears.T. T. H., Posuit.

OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.

This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves. When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice they could scarce helpseeing, but it only by rare chance attracts attention now.

Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable "white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue; a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is more or less bedevilled with it.

This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry, just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and changes and romances of their own.

From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech the wayfarer to pray for their souls.Vain request! The work had not been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for.

The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:—

Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margareteuxoris ejus qui istam alam ffieri feceruntanno dni mccccmlxxxxviiii

Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:—

Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alyshys wyfe and all crysten sowlys, AnnoDomini 1530.

Many other inscriptions and devices are seen, among them the letters,P B A E S, said to be the initials of an invocatory sentence, "Propitiemini beati ad eternam salutem," addressed to Saints Thomas and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and Margaret Mors. But, stranger than any, is the appearance of the entire alphabet on these walls. Many attempts have been made to explain the reason of this, among them the view that the object was to educate the villagers in the rudiments of spelling!

XXX

Thelong rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich lies through a beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland, with ancient trees gripping sandy banks in a tenacious clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road, and one in which, when the coaches were toiling up, the guards' hands went instinctively towards their blunderbusses and swordcases. One never knew what or who might be lurking in that shade.

But if it was a chancy spot then, how very suspicious a place it must have been hundreds of years before. That it was so regarded may be learnt from thePaston Letters, the instructive correspondence of the Paston family in the fifteenth century. Therein we read how a rival of John Paston in the wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out of Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers, all armed with bows and arrows in their hands, with saletts on their heads, well-padded jacks and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the Pastons in the hollow way where the trees meet overhead and a mid-day darkness broods under the dense foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being afraid of the Pastons or any of their friends; but if not, why did he go escorted with this motley crew, tricked out with all the ancient weapons and rusted armour they could find? Happily they were not attacked, but that it was possible for petty warfare of this kind to be plotted is proof that the MerryEngland of that period was no safe place for peaceful travellers.

Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack county of England," as Cobbett called it, the "sweet and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a county to which the alliterative term "silly" has long been applied. It is probably by this time quite hopeless to scotch that nickname, for it is of a considerable age and has a specious and easy glibness that comes trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves—whom it most concerns—are at pains to explain that the real, and entirely flattering, solution of the phrase is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon for "holy" or "blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy religious houses within the county, and to the East Anglian saints and the many places of pilgrimage. Another party advancing the theory that the epithet was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the seasons, would thus have us believe that Suffolk must have been more observant than other counties, which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk of the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele," but this is not the only county that uses the phrase. It becomes evident that the nickname must go unexplained.

Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than historic grounds. "I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there," said William, the coachman, to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry here, as indeed throughout England, to serve pudding, or "dumpling," before meat in order to take the edgeoff appetites with a kind of food cheaper than butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of the peasantry scarce demand such a practice nowadays, and in any case, Norfolk is the county of dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that speech in the coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings," he should have known, are as proverbial as "Silly Suffolkers."

Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world for the "Suffolk Punch." This sounds convivial, but has no connection with punch-bowls; the reference being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.

"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said William, the Canterbury coachman, to David Copperfield. "A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good 'un, is worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not a very great exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the fields or an observant glance along the road, and the Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his native country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or dragging with indomitable spirit the heaviest loads that the stupidity of the most stupid of waggoners could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he is "a Noble Animal, the Friend of Man," it is to this breed that it most particularly applies. The Suffolk Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will pull against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been said that the Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse in early British times, and it has been supposed that his remote ancestors were the horses that drew Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he isinvariably a chestnut, it might be supposed that his fame in the county had originated the sign of the "Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from chestnut the breed never varies. It may be of various shades, from the darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown, but never any other hue. It is, of course, not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in London, drawing heavy loads, and are to be seen expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms, thousand of miles away from their native claylands.

The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and Norfolk, but the "Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the county; it is a rising inflection of the voice towards the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech "fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and archaic words, heard occasionally in Essex, grow more common as the traveller advances. So also does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood of Colchester—the custom of affixing the place-name to the sign of an inn in ordinary talk. The "Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is always spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley, the custom is emphasised by the sign of a roadside inn being inscribed "Bentley Tankard," and not merely "The Tankard."

SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS.After Constable.

But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give themselves up to play and gossip.Then, as the long summer day draws to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins," at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"—the young men, in short.

But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be immediately distinguished anywhere.

When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter," or quarts and pots of beer—the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance, aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen":the men mostly in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are saying:—

"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"

"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'. The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi' me sure."

"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."

"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."

"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."

"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish and fresher'n a paigle."

A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.

THE CORNFIELD.After Constable.

The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow, is careful to explain hiscornfields away. When asked why, if it does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo, largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook, and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest, elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen. The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is, what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere," to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless. Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever" and "levenses" remain yetin the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.

Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green, and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their social status, the story does not tell.

Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow, together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley, together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.

It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the "Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.

XXXI

Therecan be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.

"From the town itself," he says, "you can see nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it aquarter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had already for years been painting these very scenes.

The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's next remarks: "And then, the country round about is so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful state, the farmhouses all white and all so much alike; the barns and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stock of turnips so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with a level; in short, here is everything to delight the eye and to make the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great boasters of their superiority over others, and I must say that it is not without reason."

Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round Ipswich so numerous that, while standing in one place, he counted no fewer than seventeen, all painted or washed white, with black sails. They are fewer to-day, and could Gainsborough, old Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of their artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the picturesqueness they gave these woody scenes andfertile hills and vales. It is from the crest of one of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell; "doubtlesse one of the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built townes in England," as John Evelyn thought in 1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect of dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess aright who these fanatics were. They were neither sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but merely Quakers.

One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of the Orwell when descending into the town by the London road, and the crowded mass of the place rises confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply descends, and forms no picture. You must take Ipswich in detail to admire it, and the actual crossing of the river at the foot of the hill where the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch before it widens out into the noble harbour that makes the fortune of the port. A sign of that accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the great railway sidings and goods yards spread out before the stranger's eye as he comes downhill. One may say that the town begins at the door of the "Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying the fine "old coat" of this famous seaport; a shield with a rampant golden lion on a red field on the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on the dexter side.

"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says Cobbett, still harping on an unwonted string of praise. "The town is substantially built, well paved, everything good and solid, and no wretcheddwellings to be seen on its outskirts." He knew no town to be compared with it, except it were Nottingham, which, after all, is not properly comparable, Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a vale, and moreover, is situated on an arm of the sea. It is amusing to read Cobbett's remarks on the population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at twelve thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think Ipswich was far larger and far more populous seven hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"—that hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked upon "the twelve large, lofty and magnificent churches," each of them seven hundred years old, one capable of holding from four to seven thousand persons, and came to the conclusion that, in fact, although he found Ipswich populous, it must, even thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self. That shrewd observer was right. Ipswich had grievously decayed even in Charles the Second's reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described it as "a town without inhabitants, a river without water, streets without names, and where the asses wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river without water," was probably referring to the estuary of the Orwell at low tide, when mud-banks stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison feeble and thread-like through them. In its then nameless streets, Ipswich was not singular, for many small provincial towns were in like case. The asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling the lawn of a neighbouring park, the object probably being to prevent their hoofs injuring the surface.

"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to her husband over four hundred years ago, spells the name, derives its title from the aboriginal Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down beside the Orwell, and not only established their primitive village of Gippingswick here, but contrived to foist their tribal name upon the non-tidal part of the river above the town, which therefore still generally bears thisalias. The town probably saw its greatest prosperity in the time of Cardinal Wolsey, a native, and, according to legend, son of a butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his birthplace should be great in learning as well as in commerce, and to that end founded a College which he intended to be in some sort preparatory for his greater college of Christ Church at Oxford. That his foundation was reared on the spoliation of a religious house and its revenues, procured by him for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to completion, and the omen was speedily fulfilled, for the new-made abode of learning never sent forth a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth almost before the mortar of its brick walls was dry; the buildings themselves torn down and the endowments confiscated. All that remains of Wolsey's College is one noble red-brick gateway in College Street.

Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a curious contrast with Wolsey, his brother townsman of two hundred years before. In his day the oldprosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress of Dutch competition and the virulence of the plague; but modern times have made amends for that temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four times larger than when, shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth century had gone, Cobbett noted its many and empty churches and its scanty population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls, and its trades are numerous and prosperous. Whether it be in the making of agricultural and milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial manure making, or the manufacture of corsets, Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune of those who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not put all their eggs in one basket.

WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.

Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from thetraveller who merely passes through the chief streets. Not in the open square of Cornhill, where the cabs and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross and the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office and the Town Hall rise, side by side, does it appear, nor in the long street beyond; but rather in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct to the waterside. There be streets in that quarter with odd names, among them Silent Street; and almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns. Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls, unhappily rebuilt in modern times, the charitable Smart and his no less charitable coadjutor, Tooley, are commemorated:—

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