Part 17

Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far. The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the "South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where the navigation ceased.

It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old channel.

The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins with this, and together they descend into the city.

XXXIX

THIS way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress" of 1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even condemned the belated citizen to lodge the night without the precincts of the city, in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned safe.

Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the better he becomes acquainted with it.

Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists, brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern; and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly Conisford Street.

The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name, standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."

Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the "Phenomenon" favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times" house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the "Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled together under the lee of the castle mound, were then to be found in the Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the rear that still goes by name of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age, are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the "Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century, the last named still standing between King Street and the river, with a picturesque but battered entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew and pig together down ancient courts and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored; and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do with tombs, is the "Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an "hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric light; but its restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary, with both the opportunity of purchasing the property and the means of doing so, has been carried through with taste and discrimination. The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history of six hundred years, and is thought to have been built upon the site of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of evident antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or even a greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is its beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the "Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely name was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to Queen Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches have proved the change to have been made at least a century earlier, and so goes another belief!

The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was the meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern town bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the crypt that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of the home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew. "Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given to one of his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle dungeons. A long succession of owners, including the Pastons, followed; last among them Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided here in 1633.

It has already been hinted that the streets of Norwich are mazy. They are indeed the most perplexing of any town in England. Many roads run into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a plan of it, these roads resemble the main strands of a spider's web, and the streets the cross webs. In midst of this maze is the great castle, like the spider himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old wrong-doing, religious and private spite, have immured many a wretched captive, like that unfortunate unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name scratched on the walls, and the statement that he was here confined "saunz resun," a reason of the best in those times. Did he ever see the light of day again? Or did some midnight assassin murder him as many another had been done to death?

"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who built the castle called his keep when it arose on its great mound, its stone new and white. He built upon the site of a castle thought to have been Saxon, and built so well that it became a fortress impregnable save to famine and treachery. It has, therefore, unlike weaker places that have been stormed again and again, little history, and even seven hundred years ago was little more than a prison. And a prison of sorts--for State captives first, and for common malefactors afterwards--it remained until so recently as 1883, when it was restored and then opened as the Museum and Art Gallery it now is.

This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral that withdraws itself with such ecclesiastical reserve from the busy quarters of the city, and is approached decorously through ancient gateways in the walls of its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that other, the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the Fifth's time by Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose little kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in the gable over the archway, and whose motto--variously held to be "Yenk," or "Think,"--"Denk," or "Thank"--is repeated many times on the stone work. Norman monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light and graceful spire in the same style, is almost wholly of that period, and the grammar school that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and has its playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of demeanour that, considering its history, is eminently proper.

Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge and the steep road up to Mousehold Heath: the "Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of times gone by when it was common land of the manor belonging to the Benedictine priory.

XL

HERE, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the gorse and heather and the less common broom yet flourish, despite the electric tramways that bring up the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged and unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed as a whole. Even though the chimneys of great factories may intrude and smirch the sky when winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the view, it is a view quite unspoilable. The cathedral, as is only proper, is the grand dominating feature, with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its left hand, the huge bulk of the castle keep rears up; a time-ball on its battlements to give the time o' day to the busy citizens; those battlements where from a gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his rebellion was crushed and his army of 20,000 peasants who had encamped on Mousehold defeated. In similar fashion his brother William was hanged from Wymondham steeple. Between castle and cathedral the great tower of St Peter Mancroft looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of worship crown the sky-line. To the extreme right of the accompanying illustration is St Giles's, and on the extreme left, in company with the pinnacled tower of a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre, Bracondale, which for shortness and simplicity the citizens call "Ber Street Church." For the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of houses and gardens and churches in great number, that one sees down there; old Norwich, in short, exclusive of the modern suburbs that are flung everywhere around and cause the Norwich of to-day to outnumber the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000 inhabitants. It must be evident from those figures that the picturesque old Norwich numbering a population of only 30,000 has been in great degree improved away and borne under by that human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Crome and De Wint and others sketched and painted its quaint bits, the picture-galleries of the Castle Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth century it was still very different, as a collection of early photographs in the castle proves. Then, before St Peter Mancroft was restored, before the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had many more quaint nooks than now to show the stranger; even as, centuries before, it was yet more quaint and even more remarkable for its many churches than at the present time.

"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw. How irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of worship fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller suggested, "make good use of their churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These churches bear a close resemblance to one another, having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, some five hundred years ago, and all built of the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian architecture quite distinct from that of other districts. The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only a great period of church-building throughout England, but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile and trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful and merchants wealthy in the flourishing industry of cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool that before had gone across the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the land of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield, "that before could not get their bread could now by this means live handsomely." In that age, to become rich and prosperous was to become also a founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of an old writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches in the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon." The old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"--the distinctive signs with which they labelled their wares--engraved on them in lieu of coats of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the registered trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas Sotherton, in the church of St John Maddermarket. He--

"Under this cold marbell sleeps,"

and was no common fellow, mark you, but

"Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit, Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."

Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich churches with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that several churches to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in the city of London. As in old London, it was in those cases necessary to confer surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.

They are surnames of the geographical sort and not a little curious. The four St Peters are, for example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest and most important in the city, so called from the Magna Croft, or large field of the castle; St Peter per Mountergate, in King Street, named from the road by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the "hundred gate," or road, reminiscent of the time when Norwich was a hundred of itself, even as it is now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate. St Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in its churchyard; St Michael Coslany, with St Mary's of identical surname, was built in Coast Lane; and St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood to an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket is thus distinguished from other St Johns--St John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre. In the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the dyers' use was marketed; while at Timberhill was the market in wood. St Martin-at-Palace, by the old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take up the tale, which might be continued at great length.

The business life of modern Norwich centres in the Market Place and the streets that immediately lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old commerce peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and old red-brick and plastered walls in the lanes and along the wharves of the Wensum.

There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in many-storeyed piles of brick, stone and stucco, with great show of goods in plate-glass windows and bold advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in London, but not even in London are the electric tram cars so great a menace to life and limb as in these narrow and winding streets, where they dash along at reckless speed.

The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The huge bulk of St Peter Mancroft and a row of queer old houses beside it still avert that disaster, and form a picture from one point of view; while the flint-faced Guildhall stands at another corner of the great open place and in its Council Chamber, in use five hundred years ago as a Court of Justice, and still so used, proves the continuity of "our rough island story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall once lay the heroic martyr, Thomas Bilney, who "testified" at the stake in the Lollards' Pit, where many another had already yielded up his life. He wondered, as others before and after him had done and were to do, whether the tortured body could pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by holding his finger in the flame of a candle. That test sufficed, and he suffered with unshaken constancy when the morrow dawned.

The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this, and was indeed the scene of many old-time municipal revelries in times before Corporations became reformed. But old revels and frolics have been discontinued, and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome beast of gilded wickerwork, who was wont to be paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles and whifflers in 1835, now reposes in the Castle Museum.

The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide open square is close-packed with stalls, is Norwich at its most characteristic time and in its most characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich Road may fitly end. The city itself, glanced at in the immediately foregoing pages, could not yield its story in less space than that occupied by that of the road itself.

INDEX

Aldgate, 1, 8, 11, 13, 51

---- Pump, 11

"Bacon End," 180

Boreham, 127-129

Bow, 6, 8, 75-80

---- Bridge, 77-79

Brentwood, 23, 94-99, 132, 200

Brockford, 257

Brome, 261

Brook Street, 94

---- Hill, 94, 132

Caistor St Edmunds, 4, 298, 301-303

Capel St Mary, 236

Chadwell Heath, 51, 83, 85, 86

---- Street, 86

Chelmsford, 5, 40, 51, 52, 54, 57, 80, 114-121, 127, 167, 200

Chipping Hill, 133-139, 302

Claydon, 252

---- Hall, 252

Coaches:-- "Confatharrat," 34 "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," 46, 140 "Expedition," 39, 306 "Gurney's Original Day Coach," 39, 267, 306 "Ipswich Blues," 23, 39, 132 "---- and Yarmouth Mail," 41, 45 "---- Post Coaches," 36 "---- Shannon," 39 "---- Umpire," 81 "Magnet," 39, 306 "New Colchester," 81 "Norwich Machine," 34-36, 306 "---- Mail," 39, 40, 43 "---- Post Coach," 39 "---- Times," 28, 39, 267 "Parcel Mail," 54-57, 111 "Phænomenon," 39, 306 "Telegraph," 306

Coaching, 30-51, 54-57, 81, 82, 97, 132, 142-151, 267

Coaching Notabilities:-- Alexander, Israel, 46, 140 Nelson, Mrs Ann, 19-25, 27, 81, 132 ----, George, 19 ----, John, 19, 25-27 ----, Robert, 19 Suggate (Norwich carrier), 34 Thorogood, John, 28, 267

Colchester, 5, 6, 43, 54, 56, 94, 156, 163, 165, 167, 177, 179-212, 217

Constable, John, R.A., 149, 154, 217-219, 232, 238

Copdock, 236

Copford, 175, 176

_Copperfield, David_, 28, 44, 45, 150, 226, 274

Creeting, All Saints, 253

Creetings, The, 255

Dedham, 217-221

Deodand, Law of, 50

Dickleburgh, 6, 277-279

Dilbridge, 217

Dunston, 298

Feering, 152, 153, 158

Forest Gate, 81

Goodmayes, 83

Gore Pit, 152, 176

Great Eastern Railway, 25, 46, 51-54, 83, 152, 158, 175

Hare Street, 94

Hartford Bridge, 304

Hatfield Peverel, 129, 131

Highwaymen, 29, 30, 41, 58-62, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99, 142, 143, 214

Highwaymen:-- Cratfield, Rev. Wm., 30 King, Matthew, 58 ----, Robert, 58 ----, Tom, 58, 61 Tapyrtone, Thomas, 30 Turpin, Richard, 57-62

Ilford, 6, 29, 80, 82, 83, 167

Ingatestone, 6, 56, 99, 105-110