Part 20

[9] There are "Mockbeggars" in Kent, as in most other counties. There is one near Rochester. Some old buildings pulled down in 1771 at Brighthelmstone were called Mockbeggars. Local opinion held the belief that there had been a Mendicant Priory, but this was not generally credited. The name seems to have been generally applied to objects wearing at some distance the appearance of an hospitable mansion, to which travellers would be drawn out of their road only to meet with a disappointment in finding an empty house, or no house at all. Two such places, so called, are to be instanced: one is an isolated rock at Bakewell in Derbyshire, presenting from the road the semblance of a house, to which it is said beggars and tramps wend their way, only to be mocked by a freak of nature: seeking for bread they find, literally, a stone. The other is an old Tudor mansion, called Mockbeggar Hall, at Claydon in Suffolk, standing in a conspicuous situation, near the road leading from Ipswich to Scole; a place to which mendicants would naturally be attracted, in expectation of finding inhabitants there, but which has, according to tradition, remained so long unoccupied as to have earned its name a hundred years, or more, ago.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

The notation [symbol] is used to represent various geometric shapes.

The following misprints have been corrected: "conjuction" corrected to "conjunction" (page 24) "ong" corrected to "long" (page 77) "ot" corrected to "to" (page 78) "botton" corrected to "bottom" (page 238) "Admiraly" corrected to "Admiralty" (page 249) "Rebell on" corrected to "Rebellion" (index)

Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.