It was pleasing to observe that, although here and there a black beast or a mongrel might be seen, and a considerable number of Shorthorns, the Norfolk farmers as a body cling to the old East Anglian breed of Red Polls. They could not do better. The Red Polls mature early, make a lot of beef, and are hardy; the cows of the breed are admirable milkers, and celebrated for remaining long in profit; and the absence of horns is a distinct gain when it comes to a matter of transport by train. Far be it from me to compare the merits of breeds of cattle apart from environment, for that is often rather a foolish thing to do. Environment matters a great deal and, nobly as Shorthorns thrive in many parts of the country, and at Sandringham in Norfolk particularly, there remains in me a strong conviction that the local breeds, Red Polls in East Anglia, Herefords in the Marches and Borderland of Wales, Devons in the county from which they take their name, Castle Martins in South Wales, and Welsh black cattle in North Wales, thrive best in their appointed districts under the conditions to which the normal farmer is more or less bound to expose them. They fill in the picture better, too, than do cattle of a "foreign" stamp. Your white-faced Hereford seems out of place in Berkshire, a Kerry looks like a toy in Hertfordshire; only for the gentle Jersey cattle—Mr. Cobbold has a herd of them at Felixstowe, but that is a story to come later—would I make an exception. They, however, are not farmers' cattle, for they are worth little to kill, and their rich milk, sold at ordinary prices, as it must be, is too small in quantity to be profitable. They are for private owners and butter-makers only, and, as such, they cannot be surpassed.
Let this headstrong hobby be curbed; but let it be added that these burly, fair-complexioned farmers of Norfolk, whose very faces, seen in considerable numbers, convinced one more than much reading of the presence of abundant Danish blood in the county, looked and acted as if they understood their business thoroughly. If they go on breeding gentle Red Polls—the Red Polls are really quiet of disposition, perhaps because inherited instinct tells them it is poor sport to fight without horns—it is because the process pays. Let me add, in opposition to a statement seen elsewhere, that I saw nothing of that brutal treatment of the animals which is far too usual an accompaniment of the cattle trade. So to the general market near the Guildhall, a grateful sight because more flowers were for sale on the stalls than is usual in provincial markets, and the wares, particularly the butter and the fowls, the latter neatly trussed and wrapped in coarse muslin of spotless cleanliness, were so nicely exposed for sale. Leland observed that "Northfolk" were said to be "ful of wyles"; a barber, from Hants, told me that morning, when I said I found the people very intelligent, that he thought they knew far too much. My own view is that of the "wyles" which consist in cleanly neatness in exposing food for sale it is not possible to find too much, and not often easy to find enough, in this England of ours.
Of the Guildhall, really a very interesting example, dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, of ingenious work in flint, and its contents, some mention has been made before, and of the interior of the cathedral also. But we entered the cathedral once more, walking on tiptoes in the grand and empty nave, and certainly not disturbing the worshippers in the chancel, for service was going on. The organ, as on a former visit, was remarkably impressive, and, as quite a minor detail, I noted part of an almost illegible inscription to one Ingloit on the south pillar of the chancel arch. "In descant most, in voluntary all, he past." What was, or is, "descant"? None of us knew. The necessary if rather humiliating process of reference to a dictionary, which it is more honest to confess than it would be to profess to have understood the legend at first sight, showed that descant was the first stage in the development of counterpoint. So, mounting once more to the Norman tower on the Castle Mound, to look at the entrance to the Museum, but not entering, for time pressed and our enterprise lay in the open air, we repaired to the "Maid's Head," discharged the reckoning, and were off again to the westward, on a windless and rainless day; but that wisp of cloud no bigger than a man's hand, which we had seen behind the cathedral spire against the pure blue overnight, had been the precursor of a grey veil of cloud which overspread the whole face of the sky.
Always to make sure of your exits is one of the golden rules of successful motoring. Entrances do not matter so much. If, having followed unknown roads over strange country for many miles, you eventually strike the town of your desires, that is enough for all practical purposes. You are sure to be as near your actual destination as makes no difference to a motor-car worthy of mention in almost any town or city in England except London. But a wrong exit is fatal. Our instructions from John Ostler of the "Maid's Head," who took to a motor kindly as if he had never seen curry-comb or dandy-brush, were elaborate; but the leading feature of them was that, when we reached the market-place near the Guildhall, we should ask for what, on its spelling, we called "Earlham Road." "Ask for the 'Arlam' Road," said John Ostler; and forthwith sprang into memory the fact that at Norwich we were in the heart of that part of East Anglia in which the Gurneys and their kin were never weary of well-doing and, as is the custom of Quakers, throve amazingly in their business. Of them, of their good deeds, of their family life, a full account may be found in one of the very best books of what, for lack of a better description, may be called earnest family gossip. Need it be added that the book is The Gurneys of Earlham, by Augustus J. C. Hare (London: George Allen)? Well, perhaps it is necessary to give the information, for the two volumes contain little or nothing which is sensational, they saw the light of day in 1895, and all but the very best of books, to say nothing of a good many of them also, pass out of the mind of a hurrying generation in less than that time, and in much less. Of the Gurneys, of their manifold relatives and connections, of their abundant and honourable commerce, of their share in the making of Norwich, of their sober and intimate family life, it would be a sheer delight to write at length; but this is hardly the place in which to attempt again that which has been done remarkably well already. Suffice it therefore to commend the book, and to quote an unrivalled description of it by a masterly hand. That it happens to be found in the first three pages of the first volume is mere coincidence. Those who are so disposed may, if it pleases them, imagine that they are quoted simply because they come first, and refuse to believe that the volumes are among the familiar acquaintance of one who finds a wholesome and hearty appreciation of the joys of the open air to be entirely consistent with a rational pleasure in books.
"After leaving the hollow where the beautiful crochetted spire of Norwich Cathedral and the square masses of its castle rise above the dingy red roofs and blue smoke of the town, the road to Lynn ascends what, generally called an incline, is in Norfolk a long hill. After passing its brow, at about three miles from the city, the horizon is fringed by woods—grey in winter, radiant with many tints in summer—which belong to Earlham. This delightful old place has for centuries been the property of the Bacon family, and they have never consented to sell it; but since 1786 it has been rented by the Gurneys, a period of a hundred and nine years—perhaps one of the oldest tenancies known for a mansion of the size, though very frequent in the case of farmhouses. Thus, to the Gurney family, it has become the beloved home of five generations; to them its old chambers are filled with the very odour of holiness; its ancient gardens and green glades and sparkling river bring thoughts of domestic peace and happiness, which cannot be given in words; its very name is a refrain of family unity and love.
"The little park of Earlham is scarcely more than a paddock, with its fine groups of trees and remains of avenues, in one of which a Bacon of old time is still supposed to wander, with the hatchet in his hand which he was using on the day of his death. Where the trees thicken beyond the green slopes, above an oval drive familiarly called 'The World,' stands the house, white-washed towards the road by the colour-hating Quaker, second wife of Joseph John Gurney, but infinitely beautiful towards the garden in the pink hues of its brick with grey stone ornaments, and the masses of vine and rose which festoon its two large projecting windows and white central porch. Hence the wide lawn, to which the place owes its chief dignity, spreads away on either side to belts of pine trees, fringed by terraces, where masses of snowdrops and aconites gleam amongst the mossy grass in early spring. The west side of the house is perhaps the oldest part, and bears a date of James First's time on its two narrow gables. Hence the river is seen gleaming and glancing in the hollows, where it is crossed by the single arch of a bridge. From the low hall, with its old-fashioned furniture and pictures, a very short staircase leads to an ante-room opening on the drawing-room, where Richmond's striking full-length portrait of Mrs. Fry, now occupies a prominent place among the likenesses of her brothers and sisters. Another sitting-room leads to what was the sitting-room of the seven Gurney sisters of the beginning of the nineteenth century, with an old Bacon portrait let into the panelling over the fireplace. The dining-room is downstairs, and was the latest addition to the house, a handsome, long and lofty room, built by Mr. Edward Bacon, long M.P. for Norwich, that he might entertain his constituents. Close by is the humble little study occupied by the father of the numerous Gurney family of three generations ago. But the pleasantest room at Earlham is 'Mrs. Catherine's Chamber,' always occupied by the eldest daughter, mother and sister in one, and in which in her old age, with her beautiful intonation and delicate sense of fitting emphasis, she would assemble the young Norwich clergy to teach them how the Scriptures should be read in church."
Surely Mr. Hare, who wrote many a vivid description, was often entertaining, and sometimes a little spiteful, never penned a passage better calculated than this to bring home the characters of a home and of the dwellers in it. The single trace of the old Adam, or the old Augustus, is the gently sarcastic antithesis of Richmond's "portrait" and the "likenesses." Earlham's peace and goodwill bewitched Augustus Hare, and those who had been entertained by his bitterness, no less than those who have writhed under it, will recognize the strength of Earlham's tranquil witchery. Somewhere I have read of late that the Gurneys are of Earlham no more. That is sad indeed.
"Ask for the Arlham Road when you are near the Guildhall," was what John Ostler said, and we, full of map and guide-book pride, translated it into Earlham; but we were reduced to Arlham at last. Even in England it is wise to adopt local pronunciations of place-names when you know them, unless you have plenty of leisure; and it is easy to do so. (In Wales it is equally wise, indeed wiser, for collocations of apparently English characters have totally distinct values in Welsh words, but English lips have, I am given to understand, some difficulty in expressing those values.) Apart from place-names it seemed to me, talking often and freely with the natives, that the spread of education has banished not a little of the Norfolk dialect, and that the country folk of Norfolk pronounce in a more clean-cut fashion, use more ordinary English words, and are easier to understand, than their contemporaries in Berks, Sussex, Devon, Cornwall, or, infinitely most difficult of all, Durham. Among sundry quaint books lent to me by way of preparation for this are several containing terrific examples of Norfolk dialect, which it would be a real pleasure to transcribe, but it must be confessed frankly that, at the moment of writing, I have no more excuse in experience for copying them out than for introducing a sentence or two of Welsh, Gaelic, or Erse. Yet I am, in the matter of tours to be described, many hundreds of miles ahead of the point which my lagging pen has reached. Suffice it to say that the Norfolk dialect may survive, that I have heard it from the lips of cultivated folk of Norfolk, whose normal talk is the same as that of any educated English folk, but that it has not come my way as an every day phenomenon. Is that matter for regret? Sentimentally, perhaps, it is; but practically it is a decided convenience and, combined with the exceptional intelligence of the East Anglian people, it seems to argue that the schoolmaster has been abroad among them to good purpose. Dialects may be picturesque; the words in them may have philological interest, especially when they are good and old words like "largesse" (much used in East Anglia, but by no means peculiar to it), but persistence in sheer mispronunciation, which is the main ingredient of most dialects, is really a sign of ignorance or of affectation, and neither is to be encouraged. For example, I can talk, and can approach fairly near to writing, English "as she is spoke" by the more ignorant Welsh, without any difficulty; and that is as much a dialect, really, as that of Devon or of Yorkshire; but it would be a very foolish and inconvenient thing to do.
Nothing could have been more delightful, for the time of year, than the travelling, for the air was not too cold, hedges had the unmistakable air of verdure on the point of coming, tree-twigs seemed to have thickened as the buds upon them swelled, spring was in the air, and the steaming horses we passed now and again in adjacent fields, straining at plough or harrow, added to the pleasing effect of a landscape undulating a little, but rich in tall trees. Looking on them from time to time I remembered the lines in the Freer's Tale—
The Carter smote and cried as he were wode
Heit Scot! Heit Brock.
This may sound like affectation, but it is nothing of the kind. Although most travellers in spring are apt to quote, more or less correctly, the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, because they are familiar and because, for simplicity, sweetness, and truth, they are not to be surpassed in the English language, one does not, at least the ordinary man does not, go about the country with all Chaucer on the tip of his tongue; and that, on the whole, is a blessing. On this occasion, however, there was an express reason for having these lines in mind—there were even two reasons—and for looking for a farm horse as an excuse for letting them fly. The first reason was that East Anglian antiquaries have long cherished the tradition that Chaucer was born in Norfolk. There is even a jingling rhyme—
Lynn had the honour to present the world
With Geoffrey Chaucer and the curled
Pate Alanus de Lenna.
The rhyme may be true of Alanus de Lenna; it does not matter much whether it be true or false; but it is undoubtedly false about Chaucer, who was the son of a London vintner and was born at Charing Cross, and at Charing Cross, London, not Charing Cross in Norwich, as the learned have now discovered for certain. Still it is a peculiar fact that it is, or is reported to be, the custom of Norfolk farms to apply the name Scot to a very large proportion of their farm horses, and it is true that Chaucer's poetry shows a very intimate knowledge of rural life in Norfolk. The explanation may be found on family tradition, for Dr. Skeat says "It is probable that the Chaucer family came originally from Norfolk."
The second reason was soon to come on the left-hand side of the road in the form of a park, boasting superb trees and ensconcing Kimberley Hall, the seat of the Wodehouse family, who are of far more ancient standing in Norfolk than is the present hall. It was built on Italian lines in the reign of good Queen Anne, but the Wodehouses, of whom Lord Kimberley is the head, had been in the land long before Philip Wodehouse, Member of Parliament for Castle Rising, was created a baronet by James I. Not that the honour attached the family to the Stuart cause, for Sir Thomas, the second baronet, sat in the Long Parliament and, I think, fought for it against Charles. Clearly they were a fighting family. "Agincourt" is inscribed under their coat of arms; their crest is "a dexter arm couped below the elbow, vested argent, and grasping a club or, and over it the motto Frappe fort." The quotation comes appositely, or at any rate one striking word in it does, because the "supporters" are "Two wild (wode) men, wreathed about the loins, and holding in the exterior hand a club, raised in the attitude of striking, sable." Yet with this explanation always before them, staring them hard in the face whensoever a head of the house of Kimberley has been summoned to sleep with his fathers, some good folk of Norfolk have, as the Notes and Queries show, been content to puzzle their brains and to seek far for an explanation of the Wild Man as a tavern sign. They have even gone so far as to drag in the historic Peter the Wild Man, quite unnecessarily, for he is modern by comparison with the "wode" men who support the Wodehouse crest now, as they supported it no doubt in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, when she visited in 1571 a Kimberley Hall which modern taste would probably prefer to the present Italian edifice.
Almost immediately after passing Kimberley Hall we came into full view of Hingham Church, which is exactly what a church should be, and stands exactly as a church ought to stand, for the purposes of the motorist. That is to say, it is a very commanding edifice, which has the appearance, at any rate, of standing with its length at right angles to the road, and both tower and clerestory—surely there are more clerestories as well as more churches to be found in Norfolk than in any county—are visible, and very imposing, from a great distance. It was built for the most part by Remigius of Hethersett, who was rector for forty years from 1319, and is of most remarkable height. Inside, most motorists will be content to believe, are some interesting tombs and much stained glass of admirable quality, presented by Lord Wodehouse in 1813. In fact, Hingham is emphatically one of the places at which a halt ought to be made, for old stained glass of high merit is, unhappily, very rare in this England of ours. This secluded village of Hingham ought to be—perhaps is—one of the places in England to which Americans make pilgrimages, for far away in Massachusetts is another Hingham owing its origin to an emigration, early in the seventeenth century, of one Robert Peck, vicar of Hingham, and many of his parishioners. Apparently, parson and parishioners were Puritans of the violent order, who pulled down the altar rails and lowered the altar, insomuch that they incurred the wrath of the reigning bishop. Parson Peck deemed it wise to flee from the wrath to come, and many of his parishioners went with him. Settling down in Massachusetts, they gave the name of the old village in Norfolk to the new home, and although the parson returned to his cure when Puritanism got the upper hand, parishioners stayed in the new world. At any rate, Hingham, Massachusetts, exists to this day, not, indeed, as one of America's mammoth cities, but with a population (in 1900) of 5059, of whom oddly enough more than 900 were foreigners. In fact, in its minor way, it is as much more important than Hingham in Norfolk, as Boston, Massachusetts, is greater than Boston, Lincolnshire. But it is not likely to be more pleasing to the eye, and it is very safe to conjecture that, in fact, it is not a tenth so pleasing as the Norfolk village.
Before long we reach Scoulton Mere, a silent sheet of gleaming grey, with not a bird to be seen on or over it, a fine expanse of sedge-girt water. "Here," says "Murray," "the black-headed gull breeds in enormous numbers, and their eggs are collected, to be sold as plovers' eggs, by thousands for the London market." This may readily be believed, for the eggs of Larus Ridibundus, although they vary a good deal in marking, are often practically indistinguishable from those of the green plover, or grey plover, except that they are not so sharply pointed at the small end. The imposture does not matter a straw so long as the two kinds of eggs remain, as they are at present, identical in point of flavour. Indeed, the subject prompts a digression, flagrantly irrelevant, but certainly pardonable for its practical value. Ten or twelve years ago the owner of Hanmer Mere, which is situate at about the point where Shropshire and Flintshire are so inextricably mixed that an ordinary atlas will not tell you which is which, desiring to reduce the number of the coots, spent an afternoon with a friend in taking some two hundred eggs. It seemed a pity to destroy them without trying them cold, and hardboiled, like plovers' eggs. They were every whit as good to eat, and they were distinctly the clou of luncheon at Chester races next day. This is certainly worth knowing, for, if plovers be more numerous than coots, there are enough coots and to spare, and their nests are as easy to find as those of plovers are difficult.
But "Murray" proceeds: "There are only three breeding places of this gull in Britain." This must be quite wrong. The late Mr. Henry Seebohm, whose Eggs of British Birds (Paunson & Brailsford, Sheffield) is both admirably produced and of the highest authority, wrote, and Dr. Bowdler Sharpe left the passage in editing the book after Mr. Seebohm's death: "The Black-headed Gull is one of our commonest species. Its colonies are not so large as those of the Kittiwake, but they are much more numerous. It is a resident in the British Isles, frequenting the coasts during winter, but retiring inland in summer to breed in colonies in swamps." Now Mr. Henry Seebohm was a mighty ornithologist, and the most indefatigable birds-nester at home and abroad who ever lived, and, having read often before, and now again, all he has to say of the nesting places of all kinds of gulls claimable by Great Britain, I am convinced that this claim set up by "Murray," perhaps on the word of some local fowler, cannot be maintained either in relation to the Black-headed Gull or any other kind of gull or tern that breeds in England.
Leaving Scoulton Mere behind we were again in a land of flat heaths of wide extent, and of sheltering hedges of dense Scotch fir. It was a country of the most pleasing face but, apart from that, no use for any purposes save those of the motorist and the rabbit-breeder. That it had been well used by the latter evidence was soon apparent on the roadside in the form of a gang of men, with nets, dogs, and ferrets, pursuing their operations on such a scale, and so completely in the open, that they must surely have been authorized rabbit-catchers and not poachers. Still the thought occurred to me that, in bygone days and in far-distant North Wales, we always found from the advertisements that ferrets, who are the poachers' best friends, were to be obtained more easily from Norfolk than from any other part of the country, and that they knew their work very well when they arrived. In fact, there is a huge head of game in Norfolk, and where that state of things exists, there poachers will be. Theirs is a lawless pursuit of course, but Lord! as Mr. Pepys would have said, what good sport it must be "on a shiny night in the season of the year," and what a vast and intimate knowledge of animal and bird life these poachers must possess.
If it was a rabbit-catcher's paradise it was a motorist's paradise also. There was no possible danger to human beings, for, after the rabbit-catchers, there were none; after the fir hedges had been passed the road became an unfenced ribbon of tawny grey running through the bare heath, with no other roads debouching into it, and no cover of any sort for a police trap. There was no reason in life against a good spin at top speed except that superstitious regard for the letter of the law which not one man in a thousand really has. The car simply flew forward; the speed indicator marked 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and even 50 miles an hour; the road seemed to open wide to our advent, to stretch out its arms, so to speak, to embrace us; the motion, smooth, swifter and swifter still, even as the flight of the albatross that stirreth not his wings, and absolutely free from vibration, was, in a single word, divine. Suddenly, a few miles in front of us, a dusty cloud hove in sight over the road. "There," said my friend, half in jest, but only half—for a motorist's paradise is at its best when solitary—"is one of those beastly motor-cars. What a foul dust it is raising!" So it turned out, on rising and looking back over the cape hood, were we; not that it mattered, for no wayfarers had been passed or, therefore, powdered, for many a short mile—I had written "a long mile" from force of habit, but it would have been inappropriate. Was the other car meeting us or going in the same direction? In the same direction surely, for though the cloud of dust was coming nearer to us, it was not approaching very fast. So we determined to pass as soon as might be, and "giving her a little more gas," we were very soon "on terms," as a racing man would say, with a two-seated car going along the middle of the road at a fair pace. Once, twice, thrice our horn sounded, but the occupants of that car never heard us. At last, keeping well to the off-side of the road, and when our bonnet was level with their rear off-wheel, Mr. Johnson and I gave a simultaneous and stentorian yell; and the two pairs of goggles that were turned upon us, who were then, as nearly always, un-goggled, clearly covered four eyes starting with surprise. It was a lesson to them and to us of the very poor penetrative power of a motor-horn in relation to motor-cars in front, and of the necessity of looking behind you now and again, especially if you be in a noisy car. So that two-seated car was passed as if it had been standing still, and the lot of the dust-recipient, which one or other must needs endure for a while, was transferred from us to them; but they were not called upon to endure it, nor could they have kept it if they had so desired, for any length of time.
So hey for Watton, near which lies Weyland Wood, fondly famous in local story as being the identical wood in which the ill-fated babes in the wood were lost. That is a tradition as to the origin and true locality of which, so far as I know, even the most ardent folk-lorists have not concerned themselves very seriously, and certainly the likeness of sound between "Weyland" and "Wailing" may have caused it to be localized here. As it happens, however, there is a very much simpler explanation of the name of the wood and of the Hundred in which it is situated. Weyland is simply the modern representation of the "Wanelunt" of Domesday, and that again is simply descriptive, like Blacklands in Berks, and the names of scores of Hundreds besides. For "Wanelunt" is just "wan land," and a more wan land than this, from the agricultural point of view, it would be hard to find. Islington in Norfolk may be, in all probability was, the place in which the Bailiff's daughter lived and was beloved by the squire's son, but Weyland Wood cannot detain us. It has no more claim to this particular honour than a hundred other woods in other parts of the kingdom have, except upon an etymological basis, and that has the trifling disadvantage of being quite wrong.
Nor did Watton detain us, any more than it need detain anybody else. Brandon, the next place passed, was renowed in ancient times for its rabbits and its quarries of gunflints, and the "Grime's graves" in the vicinity are said to be interesting earthworks. The glory of the rabbits remains, but the gunflint trade was, of course, vanished. "Murray," it is true, says that flints "are still (1875) exported to Arab tribes round the Mediterranean," but that was more than thirty years ago, and Mr. Rye is, no doubt, correct in saying that the old industry has, naturally enough, died out of late years. But those desert tribes on the African coast of the Mediterranean still use some charmingly antique pieces, and it may be that Brandon flints are still fitted to some of them. They were the same kind of flints which the ancient Briton, or perhaps Neolithic man, used to dig out at Brandon, for excavations some time since revealed a stag's antler, says "Murray," in what was clearly a "working" of a prehistoric flint quarry. Thus much the writer tells us and no more. It would really have been much more interesting to know something of the nature of the antler; but on that point he is silent.
If one were in a hurry, and a train happened to be convenient, it would, for once, be simpler to reach Ely from Brandon by train than by car: for the railway follows the course of the Brandon River across Mow Fen and then cuts straight across Burnt Fen and Middle Fen to Ely. On the other hand the road, dating very likely to a period long before the reclamation of the fens, and keeping to the high ground, turns south-west by south to Mildenhall and then, skirting Mildenhall Fen, nearly due west to Fordham and Soham, and from Soham north-west to Ely: and this is a long way round. Here there would be a first rate opportunity for saying something of the romantic history of the Fens, for it is truly romantic, and of the real glamour which they exercise upon a traveller through their midst. The opportunity is deliberately reserved to a later point for three reasons. First, there is much to be said on other matters; secondly, you really do not see very much of the Fens by this line of route; thirdly, it was found later that the drive from Lynn to Ely is par excellence the occasion upon which the peculiar character of the Fens, their limitless extent, their rich and black soil, and the reflection that all this wealth has been reclaimed from the wasting waters by the industry and the enterprise of man, the very spirit of the Fens in fact, enter into the traveller's soul.