Part 1

Transcribed from the 1893 Edmund Durrant & Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected]

Some of Our East Coast Towns.

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BY J. EWING RITCHIE (CHRISTOPHER CRAYON.) _Author of_ “_East Anglia_” _&c._

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

Chelmsford. EDMUND DURRANT & CO.

London: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD.

1893.

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_NOTE_. _With one exception and some few additions these articles have appeared in the_ “_Christian World_.”

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER. PAGE. I. ONE OF OUR YOUNG BOROUGHS (CHELMSFORD) 1 II. IN AN ANCIENT CITY (COLCHESTER) 6 III. A QUIET SUFFOLK TOWN (HADLEIGH) 15 IV. A GRAND MEDIÆVAL TOWN (BURY ST. EDMUNDS) 21 V. IPSWICH: THE PRIDE OF THE ORWELL 28 VI. LIVING NORWICH 36 VII. A DAY AT LYNN 42 VIII. FRAMLINGHAM AND ITS CASTLE 48 IX. SUDBURY 52 X. INTERNATIONAL HAVERHILL 58 XI. THE OLDEST ESSEX BOROUGH (MALDON) 63

I. ONE OF OUR YOUNG BOROUGHS.

CHELMSFORD, one of the youngest of the Essex Boroughs, and almost a suburb of Greater London by means of the Great Eastern Railway, was, when I first knew it, a dignified county town, the leading people of which considered a second post from London as a daily nuisance, and had no taste for what is practically too near the rush and roar of modern life. The old stage-coaches stopped and changed horses at quaint old hotels, which have long disappeared. Now, as you drop down from the railway station, past the Quakers’ chapel on one side, and the big brewery on the other, all is modern, and except the church which stands on your left, there is little left to recall the past. In the square, opposite the Shire Hall, there is a modern statue which recalls to memory Chief Justice Tindal, who, born in 1776, at a house called Coval Hall, was educated at the Chelmsford Grammar School, and died at Folkestone, in 1846. The statue is erected on the site of an ancient conduit, which stood long upon the spot, with a Latin inscription which few Essex people cared to read. Not far off is the Corn Exchange, which, what time corn was a commodity worth dealing in, was on Fridays as busy as Mark Lane itself.

But on the whole the town is modern, and all of the modern time. It is respectable, thoroughly so, quite as much as any London square or street. Its great industry is a modern one—the manufacture of Electric apparatus, by the firm of Crompton and Co., Ltd., a firm which has for some time occupied a leading place in connection with the installation of Electric light, and has been the means of lighting not only Chelmsford, but many of the principal buildings in London. If you want to see antiquity in Chelmsford, you must pay a visit to the Museum, now incorporated with the Essex Field Club, which is a very good one of its kind. One of the best antiquarian magazines of the day is the _Essex Review_, published in High street, which is really a credit to the town. But Chelmsford is of the present rather than the past. Its men and women move with the times, perhaps in consequence of their nearness to the great metropolis. It has literary and scientific tastes, of which the sette of Odde Volumes is an illustration; and it is further known to fame as the head-quarters of the Essex Bee-keeping Association, established in 1880, which has done much to develop the taste for, and the growth of, honey—an article not unknown to the ancients, and an industry by means of which many a careful cottager may pay his rent. Of that association Mr. Edmund Durrant is the life and soul, and in all parts of the land he has lifted up his voice, on behalf of this new and desirable source of wealth in our country towns and village homes. As to its Beef Steak Club, which was founded in Chelmsford in the time of the Georges—it was second to none.

“The position of the town at the junction of the rivers Chelmer and Cann probably” writes Mr. Christy, “led to its being inhabited in very early days.” As Roman remains have been discovered there, there is reason to suppose that it was known to those enterprising people.

In the good old times, as some people call them, there was a Priory here (of which no trace now remains), where in the reign of Edward II. resided Thomas Langford, an author, of whose works I know little, save that a local historian describes them as curious. A greater man, I apprehend, was Philemon Holland, a physician and translator of Livy, Pliny, and other classic authors. He has better claims on us as having first translated Camden’s Britannia into English. He was born in Chelmsford, in 1551, and educated at the Grammar School, a school which still exists, but in a recent building, the older one having passed into the hands of the County Council Technical Instruction Committee. One of the old houses still remaining, “Springfield Mill,” is that in which Strutt wrote his Sports and Pastimes.

Chelmsford fell into Church hands at an early date: It owes indeed much of its prosperity to Maurice, Bishop of London, who, about the year 1100, built a bridge over the Cann, which brought the main stream of traffic through Chelmsford instead of Writtle.

The Church has been once at any rate in danger, that is in 1800, when a great part of the building fell down. Hence arose a well-known local rhyme.

Chelmsford Church, and Writtle steeple, Both fell down, but killed no people.

Chelmsford seems early to have struggled after a Reformed Church. Strype tells us of one, William Maldon, who learned to read in order that he might study the Bible for himself, and there discovered how idolatrous it was to kneel to the crucifix, much to the anger of his father, who beat him till he was almost dead. A little later we hear of George Eagles, who, for preaching, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Chelmsford, in Queen Mary’s reign, and whose head was set up in the market-place on a long pole. Archbishop Laud found many victims in Essex. One was Thomas Hooker, Fellow of Emanuel College, Cambridge, and lecturer at Chelmsford, where by his preaching he wrought a great reformation, not only in the town but in all the country round. Happily for himself, Hooker escaped to America, where he died. When the Quakers appeared, they were sorely handled by those who ought to have known better; for instance, in July 1655, there was a day of general fasting, prayer, and public collection of money for the poor persecuted Protestants of Piedmont. John Parnell, the Quaker, embraced that opportunity for disturbing the people, and for this he was tried at Chelmsford, and sent to Colchester Castle where he died. One of the ejected ministers at Chelmsford, Mark Mott, is described as an able preacher. The congregational cause in Chelmsford, dates from the time of John Reeve, who took out a license for a Presbyterian Meeting-house, in 1692. Edward Rogers, an ejected minister, succeeded him. Before the year 1716, a meeting-house had been erected, and at that time a separation took place, which led to the erection of another meeting-house. In 1716, the pastor at the old meeting was Nathaniel Hickford. The congregation then consisted of seven hundred hearers, of whom twenty are described as having votes for the county, and eighteen as gentlemen. The first pastor at the new meeting was Richard, the father of the well-known Nathaniel Lardner. In 1763, the two churches united, but not long after they separated again. The new meeting, which is still in the London road, was for some time under the pastoral care of the Rev. George Wilkinson, but lately resigned, and his place is filled by the Rev. MacDougal Mundle, whose popularity argues well for the cause with which he is connected, and the church over which he presides.

For another thing the Chelmsford of the past was distinguished, and that was by a mock election, a very proper thing, when election was a farce, and not as now, the opportunity of the free and independent democracy to utter their political opinions, and to send the wisest of the wise and the purest of patriots to Westminster as Members of Parliament. An election is no farce now when the eyes of all England are on the electors, and orators from every corner of the land come to call on the electors to do their duty. In old times men were merry, and made fun even of an election; at any rate they did this in Chelmsford, where at every county election, a mock contest was held on a small island between the two rivers known as Mesopotamia, (that blessed word, as the old woman said when she heard it in the course of her favourite parson’s sermon). At this mock election, we are told, after the successful candidate was chaired with every mark of honour, he was ducked in the stream. Sometimes one wishes that old customs were revived, I know at any rate more than one candidate, who if he were ducked in the stream, and left there, would be little missed by an enlightened public such as we have in this present age.

II. IN AN ANCIENT CITY.

ABOUT fifty miles away from London—you can run down in an hour by the Great Eastern—stands an ancient, if not the most ancient, city in England, where the mother of Constantine is said to have lived, where, at any rate, she founded a chapel, which still remains, and where Constantine the Great is said to have been born, and where old King Cole, that merry old soul, is reported to have reigned in all his glory. It was built by the Roman Claudius, A.D., 44. It boasts an old castle, which was terribly damaged by Cromwell’s soldiers when they took it after a severe siege, in which the inhabitants suffered terrible privations. It has an ancient priory in ruins, but which is deeply interesting to antiquarians; and it contains old houses and winding streets, which are ever a delight and wonder to the intelligent of the rising generation. Colchester, of which I write, is a busy place, and moves with the times. As you look at it from the Great Eastern Railway, which sweeps around its base, it seems a city set upon a hill; and in the old coaching days, when we drove along its High street, now handsomer than ever, it was a great relief in the summer time, when we stopped there to change horses, after a long and dusty ride, to buy some of the fruits and flowers offered for sale, and for the production of which the country round is famous. The Colchester people have a fine appreciation of their ancient and prosperous town, the streets of which are alive with military. There is a large camp here, the gallant men of which seem to have a due appreciation of the fine complexion and healthy figures of the Essex servant girls. It has its park and its promenades, a river which is rich in commerce and famed for its oysters, and if not quite up to the standard of Dr. W. B. Richardson, I must give its municipal authorities credit for doing the best they can, to bring it up to our modern ideas of sanitary excellence. It has lately taken to making shoes in the swiftest manner possible, and threatens to be a formidable rival to Northampton, and assuredly, when I hear of the money made by many of its citizens, who, starting with the proverbial half-crown, have now accumulated handsome fortunes, I feel justified in asserting that grass does not grow in its streets.

The religious history of Colchester is deeply interesting. That unfortunate Puritan, Bastwicke lived at the Red House, Red Lane. Matthew Newcomen, one of the Puritan divines who took part in the Smectymnian Controversy, was the son of a rector of Trinity. His brother Thomas, a Royalist, lived to be a Prebendary at Lincoln at the Restoration. Colchester has done much for Nonconformity. It was one of the earliest cities to do battle for religious freedom and the rights of conscience. As far back as 1428 we find the keeper of Colchester Castle empowered to search out and imprison persons suspected of “heresie or Lollardie.” In Queen Mary’s days fourteen men and eight women were brought from Colchester to London like a flock of sheep, but bound or chained together, to appear before Bonner, on account of religion; but several were burnt there at different times. The first certain account of the Baptists of Colchester is that of Thomas Lamb, about the year 1630, who was one of the victims of Archbishop Laud. For some time Baptists and Pædo-Baptists seem to have worshipped together here; they in time separated, and the present flourishing cause, under Rev. E. Spurrier, celebrated its bi-centenary last year. From a MS. account in Dr. Williams’s library, we learn that in 1715 there were three Non-conformist congregations in Colchester—one Independant, one Presbyterian (with a total of 1,500 hearers), and one Baptist (with 200). In the schoolroom of the Baptist church at Eld-street is a fine portrait of the Captain Murrell whose noble rescue of a shipwrecked crew in a stormy sea was the admiration of the whole civilised world a year or two since. And it rightly hangs there, for as a boy he was brought up in its Sunday-school. Close to the Baptist church in Eld-lane is the well-known Congregational church, a new and handsome structure, of which Rev. T. Robinson is the pastor.

Let me now take the reader to another Congregational church—that of Stockwell, of which the Rev. Thomas Batty is the present pastor. It looks uncommonly well, considering how often it has been altered and enlarged. Like all the other Nonconformist places of worship in Colchester, it is situated in an out-of-the-way part of the town. The old Noncons were too much given to set their light under a bushel, but there were reasons for that which happily do not exist now. But it is worth while looking at the place if only for the sake of seeing the monument to Mr. Herrick, the famous Independent parson, who preached there for fifty years. It is said of him that whilst his preaching _regaled the highest_ intellect, the common people heard him gladly. The present occupier of the pulpit, who has been there twenty-five years, seems destined to achieve fame in many ways. One of his latest inventions is a fire-globe, for warming rooms.

There were, to me, two specially interesting ecclesiastical edifices in Colchester. One now utilised for industrial purposes, almost side by side with Mr. Batty’s chapel, was erected in 1691 for Nonconformist worship. It was there Isaac Taylor preached, and there his celebrated daughters attended. Their dwelling-house is close by, and there they wrote those charming poems and tales for infants’ minds which are popular in the nursery still. It was there Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, learned to think, so as to become one of the foremost essayists of his age. As you stand outside and look at the roof of the old tabernacle you will see that some part of it is more modern than the rest. It appears there was an orthodox minister whose preaching was not acceptable to the Unitarian part of the congregation. He would not go, and they resolved to make him, and to compel him to move they took off part of the roof. The preacher, however, remained, and the small endowment with him, which has been transferred to Mr. Batty’s church over the way. The other ecclesiastical edifice to which I allude is a small Episcopalian church of ancient date, which contains the tomb of the celebrated Dr. Gilberd. But the great lion of Colchester is, of course, its castle, now utilised as a museum, full of interesting Roman remains found in the neighbourhood, and to which they are constantly being brought, as almost every excavation in the city disinters something or other left by those rulers of the ancient world. In the castle is an interesting library, left to the city by Bishop Harsnett, a Colchester lad who became a great man—Archbishop of York, if I remember aright—but who in his old age was sadly worried by the Puritans. Some of the books are in excellent preservation, and are marvels of typography. I was especially struck with one, “Meditationes Vite Jesu Christi,” printed at Strasbourg in 1483. No printer in our day could surpass such work. We have gained much, but our old masters are our old masters still. It is interesting to note that the library is used by Mr. Round, one of the Essex M.P.’s, for a Bible-class on Sunday afternoons.

Of the many distinguished natives of Colchester, I have already mentioned the Newcomens. Another famous name connected with the town is that of Daniel Whittle Harvey, a great man in London on the Liberal side, and, perhaps, still remembered by the joke in _Punch_, where, when a cabman asks another what the V.R. on his badge implied, replied, “It’s Vittle Harvey to be sure.” He commenced his career as articled clerk to a Colchester solicitor, and very early developed a considerable talent for public speaking. He became a somewhat ardent Radical, and was so zealous at public meetings in favour of Reform that he was induced in 1812 to contest the borough, but was defeated by the Conservatives. “His determination and perseverance,” writes Mr. Charles Benham in his _Colchester Worthies_, “urged him not to abandon his attempts, which were afterwards more successful, and he was several times returned at the head of the poll.” He was subsequently appointed by the Corporation of London, Chief Commissioner of the City Police. He held that office simultaneously with his seat in Parliament until the passing of the new Police Act, when he was no longer eligible for his seat in Parliament, which he relinquished in 1834, maintaining his official appointment till his death, which was about 1864. Colchester has supplied London with two Lord Mayors—one of them, Sir Thomas White, was Lord Mayor of London in 1553. He received the honour of Knighthood for preserving the peace of the city in Wyatt’s Rebellion. He made various benefactions in different towns, including Colchester, in 1566. The second was David Williams Wire, who was in D. W. Harvey’s office in his youth, and was one of the first Dissenters to become Lord Mayor. He died in 1860, and was buried at Lewisham.

Science owes not a little to natives of Colchester. One of the most distinguished of them was Dr. William Gilbert, born in 1540. The house in Colchester where he received Queen Elizabeth as a guest remains to this day, and a very attractive old house it is. He was chief physician to the Queen, who valued him highly, and wonderful to say, allowed him an annual sum to encourage him in his studies. He was also chief physician to James I. In 1600 he published his famous book, “De Magnete,” the first work ever written on electricity. It indicates great sagacity on the part of the writer. The word electric was first given to the world in it. He also wrote a learned work about the world, which was published at Amsterdam after his death. In all English-American and Continental Pharmacopœias we have Dr. Griffiths’ mixture reproduced under the title of _Mixtura ferri composita_. It was in a work published at Colchester by Dr. Moses Griffiths that that prescription originally appeared. It is still frequently used. Only the other day, as it were, a celebrated, fashionable and wealthy surgeon died at the West end of London. I refer to Sir William Gull, the son of a Colchester mariner, who ultimately moved to Thorpe, near Clacton, where the son was brought up at a village school. He chose to be a schoolmaster, and assisted for a time at a Colchester seminary. He then went to be usher in a school at Lewes, where he developed great scientific tastes, which gained for him a post at Guy’s Hospital in connection with cataloguing the Museum. This led him to devote his attention to medicine, and having commenced practice, he soon rose to distinction. He attended the Prince of Wales, in conjunction with Sir William Jenner, throughout a dangerous attack of typhus fever, and was rewarded with a baronetcy. He died in 1890, and was buried at Thorpe, where there is a handsome monument to his memory. Nor in this catalogue of Colchester natives would we fail to omit the ladies. Let us give the first place to the far-famed Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, daughter of Charles Lucas, and born at Colchester. There were highly educated and gifted women then as now, and the fair Margaret early exhibited a taste for literature. She became the second wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, to whom she was married in 1645. Two years previously she visited the Court of Charles I., then at Oxford. She was appointed one of the Maids of Honour to the Queen Henrietta Maria, and accompanied her Majesty to France. She published ten volumes of letters—plays, poems, philosophical discourse, and the life of her husband the Duke. Her town residence was in Clerkenwell, a more fashionable locality at that time than it is to-day. The lady was certainly eccentric, but she is said to have been distinguished by pious and charitable works, and for them, perhaps as much as for her literary talent, deserves her tomb in Westminster Abbey, where she was buried in 1673.