Читать книгу Through East Anglia in a Motor Car - James Edmund Vincent - Страница 2

Elections delay start—Rail to Oxford—A treasure gained—Rail to Cambridge—Bull Hotel—English hotels criticized—Motorists squeezed—Morning at Cambridge—King's Chapel—Trinity Library—The Panhard arrives—Battered at elections—A start—Load and equipment—Undergraduates as pilots—A street blocked—Dull road to Newmarket—Bottisham Church excepted—Delusions about Swaffham Prior and Bulbeck—The Devil's Dyke—Prosperous Newmarket—The Icenhilde Way—A delusion in East Anglia—Kentford to Bury St. Edmunds—A switchback run—Fine trees—Arthur Young quoted—Bury St. Edmunds—Leland, Dickens, Arthur Young—Legends of St. Edmund—Past greatness of Bury—Parliaments held at—The Abbey ruins—Study with Shakespeare—Pickwick at the "Angel"—At the boarding school—Bury viâ Bayton, Woolpit, and Stowmarket to Ipswich—Night travelling—A legend of Woolpit—Dull Stowmarket—Ipswich at last—Narrow streets and fast tramcars—The "Great White Horse"—Why did Dickens speak so ill of it?—Quære why the White Horse is an East Anglian sign—The "Crown and Anchor"—Ipswich oysters and gloves.

The year 1905 had almost run out when this volume was finally decided upon, and then a good many things happened, according to expectation and otherwise. Christmas came, surprising the railway companies as usual, but not the public, and the resignation of Mr. Balfour's Government. The resignation of Mr. Balfour, with its corollary of a General Election, involved some unavoidable delay in opening this campaign of pilgrimages in East Anglia. For during that General Election almost everybody who owned a motor-car and could drive it, or thought he could drive it, was stirred to lend his car and his energies to the service of his party by motives of double cogency. He desired, more or less keenly at the outset, but always vehemently, and even passionately after he had tasted the joy of battle, to lend his aid to the political party of his choice; and he knew further that the General Election of 1906 had provided motorists with a priceless opportunity of doing missionary work among the electorate at a critical moment in the history of Automobilism. He felt that the Motor Act of 1903, of limited duration in any event, needed to be supplanted by a measure treating him as a reasoning and responsible being, rather than as a dangerous beast, and, having some hope that the Royal Commission then sitting would report in his favour (as, on the whole, it has reported), he recognized that enlightened self-interest made it desirable to educate public opinion into the frame of mind suitable for the reception of an enabling measure.

For these reasons, and some that are immaterial, it was not convenient to make the first raid into East Anglia until nearly the end of January, 1906, and that was a period calculated to try the reality of man's or woman's sincerity as a devotee of motoring by a somewhat severe test. How that test was applied it shall be my endeavour to tell in a narrative form, and to that form a preference will be given throughout the book, digressions being made, as occasion serves or fancy calls, to mention matters of practical utility or of intelligent interest.

Let me, therefore, "cut the cackle and come"—not to "the 'osses" by any means—but to the country and to the motor-cars. On Monday, January the 23rd, 1906, my daughter and I proceeded first to Oxford, and then to Cambridge by rail. Both journeys were an object lesson in the inferiority of the railway train, as it is arranged in England, to the motor-car, for purposes of cross-country travel. Our starting point being Abingdon, distant six miles only from Oxford, we were compelled to change trains at Radley en route. A long wait at Oxford would have been irritating if it had not been providential; as it was it furnished me with a private copy of Mr. F. J. Haverfield's Romano-British Norfolk, extracted from the "Victoria County History," and the dreadfully tedious journey to Cambridge allowed me to master that most accomplished and useful work. Cambridge we reached—not for the first time by any means—well after dusk, and there we lay, as they used to say in old times, at the Bull Hotel on King's Parade in reasonable comfort, an undergraduate kinsman of Trinity College having cheered us by his company at dinner.

Here let me pause for a moment to speak of an all-important matter. It has been written that we were comfortably entertained at the "Bull"; it might be added that the hotel seemed much cleaner and brighter than when I had last entered it, and that the charges were, for an English hotel, not unreasonable. Unfortunately, it must be said also that the charges at the "Bull" and throughout the United Kingdom are far in excess of those for which at least equal accommodation and at least equally palatable fare can be obtained on most parts of the Continent frequented by tourists, and that this fact is at once the most serious obstacle to tours by motor-cars at home, and the principal cause why Englishmen go touring abroad to the neglect of their own country, the prejudice of British hotel-keepers, and the profit of the foreigner. They do not, I think, desire to ignore the beauties of their own country; they are even anxious to study it in detail; but the hotel-keepers of the provinces, without quite killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, have a suicidal habit of making nesting accommodation so expensive that the bird, being a wise bird really, becomes perforce migratory as the swallow. More unwise in relation to the motorist even than in relation to the ordinary traveller—it will be observed that there is no special reference to the "Bull," and that we did not go there as motorists openly—hotel-keepers frequently behave as if they thought the owner of a motor-car must needs possess an endless supply of ready money, whereas the legitimate inference from his ownership of an expensive vehicle is that he has none to spare. Motor-cars of real value—and no sensible man will have them of any other kind—cannot be obtained on credit, and hotel-keepers might have learned from experience that a banking account is reduced, unless it be an overdraft, not increased, by drawing a heavy cheque upon it.

Some day, perhaps, there will be an improvement in this respect. In the meanwhile the path is not altogether clear before him who would fain play the part of guide to his fellow-men. So long ago as 1799 a correspondent of the Norfolk Chronicle wrote: "There is room for a most useful work in the form of an itinerary, which shall give an impartial account of the several inns of the kingdom under the heads of quality, cleanliness, beds," etc. There is still just as much room, but until the law of libel shall be changed the "most useful work" is not likely to be written. Certainly I am not going to write it—not that I lack the inclination nor the desire to be of service; not that I have not a nice taste for comfort, nor an experience of British and Irish hotels possessed by few men other than commercial travellers—simply because I cannot afford the time or the money to fight a series of actions, in which a verdict for the defendant would leave me still liable for the difference between my solicitor's bill of costs "as between solicitor and client," and the same bill taxed "as between party and party." The utmost that is possible, and at the same time prudent, is to point to examples of merit. Demerit, dearness, and dirt must go unchastised.

My arrangement with a friend, who had done as much electioneering as he and his car could endure, was that he should run down from London and pick us up at the "Bull" on Tuesday after luncheon.

Tuesday morning, therefore—a frosty, windless, somewhat misty morning—was spent in what in our domestic circle is called "abroading" in Cambridge, that is to say, in visiting places of paramount interest. But let the reader take heart. Some little knowledge of Cambridge, the fruit of many sojourns and of considerable reading, is not going to be made an excuse for a topographical, archæological, and architectural chapter upon a subject worthy of a long book, already treated in many volumes, grave and gay. Even if such a chapter could be legitimate here it would be wrong for a mere Oxford man to write it, and I shall never forget how, when I was staying at Cambridge a year or two ago, a Cambridge friend who took me out sight-seeing closed my mouth before it was opened, so to speak, by saying, "You are absolutely forbidden to ask where our 'High' is." As matters stand, remembering always that this Cambridge friend is not at my elbow, and firmly believing, with Mr. Ruskin, that "the High" at Oxford is not to be matched in the world as a whole, I am inclined to think King's College, as seen from King's Parade, leaves nothing to be desired, and that King's College Chapel has a claim almost equal to that of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, to be recognized as the most exquisite example of Perpendicular architecture to be found in England. Of course, the best way to see all there is at Cambridge, and to understand it, is to live at Cambridge; and the next best is to go there often and to study it piecemeal. To try to absorb impressions of Cambridge in one visit, even one of many days, is to submit the human brain to too severe an ordeal. On former occasions I had seen the Backs in summer, had spent an hour or two in the Senate House on a State occasion, had looked into the University Library and had admired the delightfully free-and-easy way in which graduates are permitted to borrow its books, had seen cricket played and had played football on Parker's Piece, had stayed in college rooms at Caius: and yet impressions remained a little confused in memory. This time we went to King's College, and to the chapel especially, again. If it falls behind St. George's at all, it is in point of lightness, in which St. George's is perfect. So to Trinity College, where we admired unfeignedly the Great Court, Nevile's Court and the Library, and spoke politely of the chapel, where the Grinling Gibbons' carvings are really good. But it was in the library that one would gladly have spent hours.

A lecture was in progress in the hall, so that was closed to us; but the library is perfect. Somewhere in the world there may be the equal of it, but, in a life of fairly extended wandering, I have not entered its match. One hundred and sixty feet long, forty feet wide, with its carved bookcases, its abundant busts of famous men, its portraits, its magnificent collection of coins, its rare books and manuscripts, its unbroken stillness, and, above all, its ample and all-pervading light, Trinity College Library is not merely a book-lover's paradise, but even a place to compel an air-loving man to be bookish. Hence to St. John's, many-courted, with walls of ancient brick and stone dressings, the most architecturally individual of Cambridge's colleges, and so, by the Bridge of Sighs, across the chilly, green, and exiguous Cam to the Backs. These, since there had been no white frost of the dainty kind that drapes a landscape in a fairy veil of silvered lace, were not at their best, but in summer they are of rare beauty. Still this was winter. So the small remaining part of the morning was devoted to a pilgrimage to Magdalene, the only college entirely situated on the left bank of the Cam, famous mainly for the Pepysian Library (everybody knows how the six volumes of shrewd gossip in shorthand were discovered and interpreted) and itself a quiet and sequestered retreat in appearance, although the undergraduates are not always in the mood appropriate to their environment.

By two o'clock the charioteer had come, his face bearing traces of the black fog through which he had forced his way out of London; the 15 h.p. Panhard, with a short wheelbase, was in the yard. We must be tolerant, he said, of his Panhard's shortcomings, after a fortnight of hard electioneering on the part of master, mechanic, and car; and he had come down from London on three cylinders. In due course the Panhard came round to the door, dinted a little by the missiles of partisans, having lost some of the white paint of her rear number under the impact of voters' iron-shod toes, a little war-worn and dingy, in fact, to the eye. Her carrying capacity was, however, soon tested severely, and she bore the trial unflinchingly. First luggage: a suit-case for the daughter, the same for my friend the charioteer, a small kit-bag for me, nothing visible for the mechanic—a stalwart ex-soldier of six feet and 14 stone, if he was an ounce. Charioteer, in motor-coat, was about 13 stone. He and an undergraduate of some 9 stone sat in the front seats, the mechanic on the step. In the back seats were my daughter, say 10 stone, wraps included; myself, say 13 stone in the like condition; and on the back step a second undergraduate, say 11 stone 7 lb.—for the two young men were going to pilot us out of Cambridge. But the little Panhard made no account of these things, and started off as a greyhound from the slips.

Practical considerations make it desirable to say what my daughter and I wore. My friend and his mechanic wore a lot, precisely in what detail I cannot say. My daughter wore a thick tweed dress, a short fur coat, a mackintosh with sleeves gathered in at the wrists over that, a red Connemara cloak sometimes—its colour proved to be of incidental advantage later in quite an unexpected way—a motor-cap and veil, fur-lined gloves, and a muff. I wore a vest, flannel shirt, lined corduroy waistcoat, ordinary tweed trousers, a rowing "sweater" over the waistcoat, thick Norfolk jacket, thick Ulster coat—without inner sleeves gathered, worse luck—and loose woollen gloves. I was never too warm, often much too cold, and the woollen gloves turned out a fraud. They were of no use as a protection against wind and cold combined, and a motor-car makes its own wind. In fact, there is nothing like leather, with or without fur or wool within.

The undergraduates were useful as pilots to Jesus Lane, where we turned to the right, which brought us in fact, although not in name, into the direct road for Newmarket; not that it is so difficult in Cambridge, as in many other towns of East Anglia, to solve correctly the all-important problem how to find the absolutely right exit having regard to the point sought in the distance. But the streets of the heart of Cambridge are of an exceptional narrowness, and we were not through them without becoming witnesses of an incident, almost worthy of the title accident, which delayed us a little and might have delayed us more but for the camaraderie of motorists. We were proceeding slowly up a narrow street behind a motor omnibus, the roadway being wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass, but no more. On the off-side of the omnibus, facing it, were a motor-car, attended as the law directs, at rest by the kerb, and a tradesman's cart and horse behind the car, cart and horse being unattended, as is not unusual, law or no law. The horse, perceiving the motor omnibus, and being probably unaccustomed to the sight, proceeded at once to give one of those convincing exhibitions in equine intelligence which must be the constant joy of the thick-and-thin champions of that traditionally "noble animal." Planting its forefeet on to the pavement, it backed the cart violently into the bonnet of the passing omnibus, of course blocking the route completely. Somebody, possibly the man who ought to have been in charge, came up and pulled the stupid brute into line, but not before it had also contrived to injure a wing of the resting and innocent motor-car. The omnibus was disabled for a time at any rate; traffic accumulated rapidly behind us; it seemed likely that we might have to spend the rest of the afternoon in this street that might justly be called Strait. But the injured motor-car was most courteously backed out of the way to make a passage for us, and we proceeded on our journey rejoicing and grateful.

It would be a stretch of imagination—in fact, it would be what the late Sir William Harcourt once called "a good thumping lie"—to say that the exit from Cambridge to the eastward has any features of interest, or that the dead level of the Newmarket road for the first few miles is attractive on a cold and dull day, when Ely, dominating the low-lying plain in decent weather, is not visible to the naked eye. This Fen Country has its charm of appearance no less than of history. Its history, indeed, is an engineering epic, to which it will be possible to allude, hardly to do justice, at a later point. January 24, 1906, was not a day calculated to make the motorist feel in a romantic mood concerning the Fens. The road, straight, level, muddy where it was not metalled, metalled where it was not muddy, was lost in grey vapour to the front of us. The prospect on either side was of flat ploughed land, and of land on which the steaming plough-horses were even then at work; there was no distant view at all.

Some five or six miles out of Cambridge the undergraduates alighted to walk home through the mud, and we left them behind with many shoutings of farewell, reflecting to ourselves the while that one of them, who, with the true carelessness of a twentieth-century undergraduate of Cambridge (or for that matter of Oxford), was wearing tennis shoes, would find walking in the mud to be one of those carnal pleasures whereof satiety cometh soon rather than late. Soon we passed a church close to the road on the left, a striking structure of brick and stone, and said to be the finest example of Decorated architecture in East Anglia. How that can be, having regard to the existence of Ely and the rhapsodies that are penned concerning its Decorated portion, it is not for me to say. At any rate Bottisham church, commanding the landscape as it can only be commanded in a plain, is a stately and beautiful structure, leaving an abiding impression on the memory. It is, in fact, essentially a motorist's church—that is to say, one of which a passing view gives sincere pleasure.

The afternoon had advanced more than was desirable. I did not like to ask my kindly charioteer to make a detour for Swaffham, which I then believed to lie on our left. Instead of that I regaled him with memories of Swaffham, which have their proper place in another chapter. The conversation helped to pass the time; at any rate it did no harm, and it was only a month or two later, in the "Maid's Head" at Norwich, that I learned where the real Swaffham was, and that this detour, if it had been made, would have shown us nothing but the relics of two churches at Swaffham Prior and another church at Swaffham Bulbeck.

Now there is an end of the dead level whereof the most eager of motorists is apt to grow weary, if only because it gives his good car nothing to do. At Bottisham, among the Fens, in fact, but not in their heart, the road is but forty-six feet above the sea-level at King's Lynn, but in the course of two miles to Street Way (surely Roman by its name) the road rises rapidly and the Panhard climbs cheerfully to a height of 170 feet, an upland having regard to its surroundings on the western side. The very air, eagerly as it bites the cheeks of those who are forced through it, seems more bracing, more exhilarating, more instinct with life than the stagnant atmosphere of the plain. Here are wide spaces, pines and Scotch firs; but the spaces are not wild, for innumerable white boards on posts, the marks of galloping grounds, tell us that we are on the confines of Newmarket Heath and near the metropolis of the turf. Such it has been since the days of Charles I, and such, having regard to the fact that it has been for upwards of a century and a half the head-quarters of the Jockey Club, it is likely to remain, even though the "going" be better at Newbury in Berks, which is a little nearer to London.

But we are not at Newmarket yet. There is the Devil's Dyke—irreverently called the Ditch where it bisects the familiar course—to be crossed. Why his Satanic Majesty should be credited with so many dykes it is not easy to see. Devil's Punchbowls, of which there are scores, if not hundreds, in the kingdom, are more natural and rational, for a being of Satan's traditional environment might reasonably be credited with thirst upon a large scale and with a liking for cold punch equal to that which was all but the temporary ruin of Mr. Pickwick, and quite fatal for the time to his young friend upon another memorable drive to Ipswich, for that was our destination too. The devil did not make this dyke, running from Reach, north of the Great Eastern Railway, to Ditton Green, near Wood Ditton, that is certain; yet nobody knows exactly who the builders were. What is known is that it has a rampart on the west side, and that the Iceni, of whom all that is necessary will be told soon, held the land to the eastward, so far as land was held in those days. Probably, like their successors in the same territory in mediæval times, during the Stuart period, and now, they had a good conceit of themselves and a robust contempt for their western neighbours, and therefore, perhaps, they built them this rampart and digged this ditch, or made their captives dig it for them, as a bulwark against the outer world. It must be confessed, however, that thoughts and conversation ran not on the Iceni, not on the violent deaths which came to most of them eighteen centuries and a half ago, but on the death of one man of our time whom Newmarket Heath had known as a familiar visitor. Only a few days before Sir James Miller had died full of racing honours, but by no means of years. A tribute to the memory of this prince of racing men was surely due most appropriately at Newmarket.

Of Newmarket the story needs no telling. It is not, perhaps, so long as that of Cambridge, but probably it is better known to a greater number of persons. Equally well known are the seats of the mighty in the immediate vicinity. But perhaps the traveller through Newmarket, and to it, by road, will not only notice the thoroughbreds, if there be any on view—we naturally saw none late on a winter's afternoon—but will not resent the fact that his attention is directed to an interesting feature of Newmarket, as of other racing and training centres. Newmarket may be, as Lord Chesterfield said in his will that it was, "an infamous seminary of iniquity and ill manners." Men may back horses at Newmarket, may gamble, may try every cunning device known to those who have to do with horses—not that some of those who are concerned with motors are much better—but Newmarket, in appearance at least, is free from that worst of all evils, poverty, which is rarely absent from agricultural Arcadia, and, as Dr. Jessopp has shown, very prevalent in East Anglia. Its houses are trim and weatherproof, the paint of doors and gates is clearly renewed often. The whole place has an air of prosperity which disarms curious investigation into the sources of its wealth. The children are rosy and plump, and that, at any rate, is a blessing; and, save perhaps for backing a horse with judgment now and again, which is a great deal less vicious than backing one without knowledge or judgment, I dare be sworn that their morality and their standard of life are much higher than those of the Arcadian peasant.

The weak light was growing quite dim as we passed through Newmarket and out of Cambridgeshire into Suffolk—out of "the Sheers" into East Anglia, in the narrowest sense of the term. Our course for Bury St. Edmunds lay along a road of astonishing straightness, having many fine oaks and other trees on either side; for the matter of levels it was, and of course is, a series of long ups and downs, of no very severe gradients, and the going on the newly-frozen road left nothing to be desired. At Kentford, according to the Ordnance map and the tradition of the antiquaries of yesterday, we crossed the Icknield or Icenhilde Way. Unfortunately, from the point of view of one who would like to conjure up visions of ancient Britons, neatly painted with woad in summer, fur-clad in winter, sweeping down this road with scythe-chariots to meet an invader from the west, or to make a raid into the Midlands themselves, the Icenhilde Way has to be numbered among the pretty traditions which cannot be cherished any longer. It has been called the warpath of the Iceni, or a principal Roman road. Ickleton, in Cambridgeshire, Icklingham, in Suffolk, Ickleford, in Herts, have been imagined to represent points upon its route from Norwich to Berkshire and the west. But probabilities, philology, and charters are separately fatal to the theory, and they are irresistible in combination. Over philology I shall not delay longer than to say, on the best authority, that, according to well-known laws, if the places now known as Icklingham and so on had been called after the Iceni, they would have been written otherwise than they are. Again, if the way had been the warpath of the Iceni, it would certainly be more clearly traceable in the east, which was theirs, than in the west, which was not; whereas the contrary is the case. Charters are even far more deadly to this romance than philology and probability. Referring to the date of the Norman Conquest and to the Icenhilde Way, Mr. Haverfield says: "Not till three centuries later do we find its name applied to roads in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, while east of Newmarket we never find it at all." This is conclusive, for it is the considered judgment of a man exceptionally learned and acute upon the subject to which he has devoted most of the leisure of an academical life, and so this avenue of romance and to romance is definitely and permanently closed.

From Kentford to Bury St. Edmunds was a fine, but cold, switchback run along a very straight road, just before lighting-up time, though it was not dark enough yet to prevent an impression of the landscape from being left on the mind. No very great houses were close to the road on either side, but the trees on the right were of remarkable stature, and on the left were many belts of Scotch firs, evenly planted, almost like shaws in Kent, which seemed, as did many similar belts seen on other tours, to indicate the existence of landowners, past or present, who had prepared the way for the continental method of driving partridges. For the first time, as our car coursed along with the subdued and yet lively melody of the true "Panhard hum," one began to realize how vast an influence has been exercised over the face of nature in Norfolk and Suffolk, how many new features have been grafted on to that face, by men who have made good shooting the principal object of estate management in the part of England better suited to that purpose than to any other. Arthur Young thought, it is true, of the land between Thetford and Bury, and probably of this land also, that it would repay cultivation. It "lies for some miles over a wild heath, overrun with bushes, whins, and fern, the wild luxuriance of whose growth displays evidently enough how greatly it would answer to break it up and convert it into arable farms; for a soil that has strength enough to throw up such vigorously growing weeds would, if cultivated, produce corn in plenty." But Arthur Young, as we shall see in a minute or two, had no eye for the picturesque; he certainly could not have foreseen the present low prices of various grains; and still more certainly he could have had no idea of the length to which game preservation would go, or of the amount of employment to which it would give rise. His advice was followed in a number of cases, but it may be suspected that some of the famous warrens of Norfolk and Suffolk pay better in rabbits for the London market in these days than they would pay under crops.

Soon we glided "through the well-paved streets of a handsome little town," to quote the words of Charles Dickens, who was impressed, as Leland had been three centuries before him, by the cheerful brightness of Bury St. Edmunds. Arthur Young's editor of 1772, "the author of the Farmer's Letters"—I see I have done Young himself an injustice—tells us that "Bury is a tolerably well-built town, in a dry and healthy situation; many of the streets cut each other at right angles; but a parcel of dirty thatched houses are found in some of them not far from the centre of the town, which has a very bad effect." We should probably hold a different view of the thatched houses now, and the motorist who passes through Bury will certainly desire to know more of it than the author of the Farmer's Letters deigned to tell. I had been to Bury before January, 1906, and I have visited it since, though never in such discomfort as the Confessor, who made the last mile of his pilgrimage to St. Edmund's shrine unshod. Yet, interesting as Bury St. Edmunds is, it is not as a pilgrimage to St. Edmund's shrine that a visit to Bury and a fairly long halt there are recommended. St. Edmund is really rather a difficult saint concerning whom to wax rapturous, because our certain knowledge of him amounts to very little and yet gives him a date sufficiently modern to make the monkish legends about him even more completely absurd than such legends are wont to be. There is no doubt that he was a king of East Anglia who was defeated by the Danes in 870 a.d. Hume, one of the most matter-of-fact of our historians, and surely the most unimaginative man who ever took it upon himself to tell an historical tale, says this and no more: "They broke into East Anglia, defeated and took prisoner Edmund, the king of that country, whom they afterwards murdered in cool blood." (This is quoted from the edition of 1823, containing Adam Smith's "appreciation" of his friend, written in 1776, and the "author's last corrections and improvements.") The Student's Hume of my youth, mindful perhaps of the wisdom of appealing to the memory of the young through the imagination, gives the date of Edmund's defeat as 871, for the sake of variety perhaps, and adds that, Edmund having rejected with scorn and horror a proposal that he should abjure Christianity and rule under the Danish supremacy, "the Danes bound him naked to a tree, scourged and shot at him with arrows, and finally beheaded him." That is not unlikely. A live target was, as the Scandinavian mythology shows, quite to the taste of the northern barbarians. King Edmund's body may very likely have been, as Abbo says, "velut asper hericius, aut spinis hirtus carduus, in passione similis Sebastiano egregio martyri"; "like a rough hedgehog or a thistle bristling with thorns, etc." (There need be no apology for giving the translation which caused a classical schoolmaster some trouble, because hericius is not a word used in classical Latin.) That was a martyrdom sufficient to justify canonization, an abbey in honour of the martyred king, and pilgrimages to his shrine, which were undertaken by quite a number of distinguished persons to the great profit of the institution preserving of it. But the monkish chroniclers had an unhappy habit of spoiling their stories by excessive and impossible embroidery. The romantic inventions that, when Edmund's followers stole back to the scene of his torture, they heard a voice crying, "Here, here, here," in a wood, and there found a wolf guarding the saint's head between its paws, and that the head, being replaced upon the trunk by human hands, was miraculously reunited to it, only spoil the story for us of the modern world; for 870 a.d. is fairly late in the history of England really. They suggest the vision of crafty ecclesiastics plotting how most effectively to advertise the shrine, for the glory of God of course, but also for the profit of the abbey; and that, to our minds, is repellent. That the ecclesiastics knew their public is clear, however, from the results here, as at Walsingham. The wolf legend, palpably false as it was, passed into ecclesiastical heraldry throughout East Anglia as generally as the story, probably true, of the manner of the martyrdom, and East Anglian churches have many traces of it in stone and in painted glass. Hence came the illustrious pilgrims and their offerings, and hence, in some measure at any rate, the fact that this little inland city of East Anglia played in its time a very important part in the history of England.

How great that part was it is exceedingly difficult to realize as one stands in the centre of that essentially peaceful town. Yet it really has a genuine claim to its motto: Sacrarium regis, cunabula legis. Of the two great meetings of barons and clergy held before King John was forced to sign Magna Charta, one was held in London, at St. Paul's, the other in the Abbey Church of Bury St. Edmunds, of all places in England, as we should be inclined to add now. In truth, nothing could be more natural, for the venue illustrates not only the paramount influence of ecclesiasticism in those days, but also the characteristic tendencies of the East Anglian people. Other ecclesiastical centres, of course, there were equal in importance and wealth, and other mitred abbeys. Only in London, always jealous for its liberties, and in East Anglia, could such meetings have been held with confident assurance of the support of the mass of the inhabitants. Read the scattered history of Eastern England, reflect upon the many democratic risings that it witnessed; remember the Eastern Counties Association and the almost complete unanimity of East Anglia for the Parliament against Charles—then the selection of Bury St. Edmunds for this memorable assembly becomes easily intelligible. Parliaments were held there sometimes; royal visits were frequent. In fact, this quiet country town was one of the most influential places in the kingdom until the Dissolution. Then it suffered "a knok of a kynge," to quote Piers Plow-man's prophecy concerning the abbey of Abingdon, and its glory departed for evermore. It remains a bright town, possessed of a famous old inn, "The Angel," and of the ruins of the abbey, still of uncommon interest, which were laid out as a botanical garden before Thomas Carlyle wrote Past and Present. They are a garden and a playground still.

A good deal of imagination is called for before the architectural glories of the abbey can be reconstructed in a mental picture, and the best help to be obtained in such an exercise of the imagination comes from reading once again words spoken of the abbey, words purporting to have been uttered within what Carlyle called its "wide internal spaces," words conjuring up realities none the less for that they are themselves the product of an inspired imagination. Need it be said that the reference here is to the second part of Shakespeare's King Henry VI? Here Suffolk and the Queen dropped poison into the King's ears concerning absent Gloucester; here Gloucester pleaded his cause in vain in imperishable lines of despairing resignation and passionate patriotism:—

Here, in some dark recess of a dungeon, Suffolk's hireling villains "dispatched the Duke." Here was enacted the grim scene, very short, but infinitely pathetic, wherein Suffolk goes to summon his victim to trial, knowing him dead already, and the Queen, the very embodiment of cold-blooded hypocrisy, cries aloud to the King, the Cardinal, and Somerset:—

Back came Suffolk, trembling and pale, for fear of consequences, to announce the news that was known to him, for he had made it all too certain before he left the "room of state" upon his futile errand. We can almost hear the dull sound of the swooning King's fall, and his agonized lament:—

And what comes next? Surely it is essentially characteristic of the people of East Anglia:—

Here, again, the substratum of authentic fact is, as in the case of St. Edmund, made the foundation of an imaginative structure; but see how vast is the difference between the effects produced by the paltry monkish embroiderer and the Poet, the maker, the creator. The first tale almost raises a smile of incredulity; the second, written in characters of blood and tears, stirs the heart to its depths.

Bury has its lighter memories and associations too. Many good Englishmen who would not step far out of their way to make a pilgrimage to what was once St. Edmund's shrine, who might even feel that the second part of King Henry VI was a little above their heads, may be relied upon to take a great deal of trouble for the sake of treading in the footsteps of the immortal Mr. Pickwick. It was at the "Angel" in Bury St. Edmunds, still "a large inn standing in a wide open street, and nearly facing the Old Abbey," that Mr. Pickwick enjoyed "a very satisfactory dinner." This was, as we shall have occasion to see at Ipswich, high praise indeed when uttered by the author of Mr. Pickwick's being, who, if displeased by the accommodation and fare offered to him, did not hesitate to express his opinion with remarkable force of language. In the tap-room of the said "Angel," Mr. Weller, having been voted into the chair, cracked such jests and evoked such uproarious laughter that his master's rest was broken. The pump in the "Angel" yard cooled Sam's throbbing head next morning so effectually that, shortly afterwards, he was able to describe the stranger in the mulberry suit, stranger as he deemed him, as looking "as conwivial as a live trout in a lime basket." In the adjoining tap, again, Sam, "the names of Veller and gammon" having "come into contract" for the one and only time in that veracious history, cemented his alliance with the deceitful Job Trotter over gin and cloves. He took the doubtless fragrant and pungent beverage as a pick-me-up in the morning; it might have served us, perhaps well, as a warmth-restorer in the afternoon; but candour compels the confession that, for the moment, we forgot the Pickwick Papers, drew up in front of the "Suffolk," not the "Angel," and did our best to restore heat to our chilled bodies by gargantuan consumption of crumpets, tea, and jam. Even this was mildly Pickwickian (who can forget the story of the gentleman who demonstrated by devoted self-slaughter the proposition that crumpets is wholesome?). But as we did not drink gin and cloves in honour of Sam Weller, so we did not blow out our brains to prove the wholesome character of crumpets.

Yet one more Pickwickian association of Bury St. Edmunds must be set down. In a private room of the "Angel" the artful Mr. Trotter, having "gammoned" Sam, proceeded to "gammon" his innocent master also with the story of "the large, old, red-brick house just outside the town, sir," and the pretended revelation of his own master's nefarious intentions. Hence came kindly Mr. Pickwick's ludicrously pathetic vigil in the garden, alarm of maids, hysterics of Miss Smithers, drenching of Mr. Pickwick, doubts whether he was burglar or lunatic, imprisonment in the Clothes Closet, rescue and explanation by Mr. Wardle, rheumatics of Mr. Pickwick, and, last of all, the Parish Clerk's tale. These things are not history of course, "which there never war no sich a person" as Mr. Pickwick, but they are imperishable and essential truths none the less, and the Pickwick Papers are a possession of Bury St. Edmunds at least equal in commercial value to all the legends of St. Edmund, King and Martyr. So much for Bury on this occasion. We shall see it again, and foregather this time at the "Angel."

We left the hotel, to find cold and windless darkness in full possession. It was my first experience of driving in a motor-car on a dark night for any considerable distance through an unknown country. The first few miles, through Bayton and Woolpit, were very difficult, the road sinuous as a corkscrew, the necessity for dismounting to study the sign-posts constantly occurring. In marked contrast, however, to experience in some of our southern counties, was the alert intelligence of the country-folk. From Stowmarket the road to Ipswich, our destination, was straight, but seemed endless. At first we tried to proceed with oil lamps only; then we were driven to acetylene; but, with air none too clear at any time and wreaths of denser mist now and again, even the acetylene rays did not penetrate very far. On the whole, cold apart, this kind of driving at night is not to be recommended. I remember nothing of that journey to Ipswich, except the cold and the mild excitement of trying to guess the species of the splendid trees passed by their shadowy forms and general character. Oaks I saw, and elms and beeches for certain—for the form of these may not easily be mistaken. In the matter of ashes I would not like to pledge my faith, for one might easily mix up an ash tree in winter, half seen by a light not thrown distinctly upon it, with some other tree. But the best thing I remember of that night, out of doors, was the sight of the lights of Ipswich and of the tall tramcars, which told us that we were there at last.

Neither fate nor inclination has taken me down this same road by daylight since then, but something may be said of the places passed in the darkness, with due acknowledgment of the aid afforded by Mr. W. A. Butt's Suffolk, in the "Little Guides Series" (Methuen). The acknowledgment is made the more gladly, and the aid is borrowed with the more confidence that it will not prove a broken reed, because "in another place" and at another time I have had the privilege of knowing Mr. Dutt in MS. as a careful and fascinating writer, equally learned in antiquities and in ornithology, and very much at home in East Anglia. Had it been light we might have seen at Tostock a fine church, Perpendicular in the main, but with an early Decorated chancel. As motorists, however, we should hardly have been induced to descend and explore the interior even by the hope of seeing carved oak benches, one of them showing "the fabulous cockatrice" and another the unicorn scratching himself with his horn. At Woolpit we might have seen a new tower to an old church, the tower built no later than 1854. But the tower is no outrage, for it had to be built to replace an older one destroyed by lightning. To Woolpit, too, belongs one of William of Newburgh's strange legends, thus summarized by Mr. Dutt: "One day, while some men were at work in a harvest field here, they saw a boy and a girl, whose bodies were green and their dresses of a strange material, appear out of the pits known as the 'Wolfpittes.' They said they had come from a Christian land, which had churches, but where there was no sun, 'only a faint twilight, but beyond a broad river there lay a land of light.' Their country was called the land of St. Martin; and, one day, while they were tending their father's sheep, they heard a noise like the ringing of the bells of Bury Abbey, 'and all at once they found themselves among the reapers in the harvest field at Woolpit.' The boy, we are told, soon died, but the girl lived to marry a man of Lynn." The name of the place in Domesday is "Wlfpeta," which is simply "Wolf-pit," but why this particular wolf-pit, out of the hundreds that there must have been, retained the name, there is nothing to show. At Haughley, moved to alight by some of the guide-books in the hope of finding ruins, we should have discovered a mound only, its origin quite uncertain; and at Stowmarket there would have been no temptation to halt. Chemicals and cordite combine to give the ancient market town some prosperity, some calamities, and no beauty. Here we began to follow the course of the railway and the River Gipping, the eponymous river of Ipswich until it is named anew. At Great Blakenham we passed a manor given by Henry VI to Eton College, and at Claydon an Elizabethan hall.

But, sad truth to tell, we were in the mood of Gallio that evening, so far as these things were concerned, and the vision of the lights of Ipswich was unmixed pleasure. It was generally admitted that the last eight miles into the ancient city, from the point at which a native stated that they begun, must have been measured with a very elastic chain. Nor was entry into Ipswich easy. He who held the steering wheel was one who, for combined nicety, courage, and consideration in slipping through traffic, has few equals in this country; but his task was of more than common difficulty. The streets of Ipswich, or most of them, are of an exceeding narrowness; the electric tramcars glide through them, swift, monumental, irresistible, in their usual Juggernaut mood. Hardly anywhere is there room for a vehicle to be drawn up to the kerb on the inside of the tramway lines. We, indeed, were not suffered by the police to draw up in front of the "Great White Horse" at all, even for the purpose of dismounting, but were motioned to a side street. Moreover, although the immediately local election was over, the streets were grievously crowded for some reason or other—and surely there was never seen a population more serenely indifferent to the blast of a motor-horn! They were, perhaps, inured to peril by the tramcars, swifter in towns than any motor-car would dare to be, heavier by a long way, and exceptionally dangerous by reason of the length and height of the moving veil they draw across the view. At any rate they would not move out of the way.

Arriving, we were in a far more appreciative mood than that of Mr. Charles Dickens when he became a guest at the "Great White Horse," and wrote the account of Mr. Pickwick's arrival on the coach of the elder Weller. We found no labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, no mouldy ill-lighted rooms, no small dens for sleeping in, but rather a kindly welcome and attention, distinctly good rooms, a dining-room having plenty of space, fire and abundant cheer, and a reasonably moderate bill to discharge at the end of our stay. Yet I doubt not that the edifice, built round a cobbled courtyard that is roofed over, the bar parlour on the far side of the yard from the door, where a good many of the citizens congregate of an evening, the office window at which mine hostess receives her guests, are precisely the same as when Boz visited Ipswich. In this view I differ from Mr. Dutt; but the probability is that the alterations to which he refers were made before, not after, Dickens saw the house. Dickens did not like the place at all, that is clear. If there be doubts whether Ipswich was the original of Eatanswill, as Mr. Percy Fitzgerald suggests, there are none about the "Great White Horse," which is, of course, mentioned, and abused from floor to garret, nay, from cellar to garret: for is not "the worst possible port" mentioned—by name? We found things otherwise, but then it was not the misfortune of any of us to look out of bed and see "a middle-aged lady, in yellow curl-papers, busily engaged in brushing what ladies call their back-hair." It would be easy enough to miss the way in the recesses of the "Great White Horse"; in fact, to be frank, I did so myself, although I neither entered the wrong room nor got into the wrong bed. But the censure of Dickens generally has no reference to the present state of affairs at this classic hostelry; nay, more, such is the irony of fate, the bad name given by Dickens to this house is now its chiefest recommendation: prints of Leech's pictures adorn every wall, and the telegraphic address of the hotel is "Pickwick," Ipswich. Thus has railing been converted into blessing; thus is it proved more profitable to be abused by a great writer than to remain uncensured and ignored. Perhaps Mr. Percy Fitzgerald could oblige, as the saying goes, by explaining what the real meaning of his hero's attitude was. It must have had some deeper source than a stuffy bedroom and a bad dinner, or else the essential kindliness of the Dickensian attitude towards everything except cruelty and injustice must be cast aside as an exploded belief. Certainly no public writer would dare to write in 1906 of any hotel as Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse" in the thirties of the last century; and perhaps that is not entirely to be regretted, for hotel-keepers really are our fellow-creatures, unwilling as some advocates of the Temperance Cause may be to admit the truth.

By the way, why is the "Great White Horse" an hotel sign in East Anglia?—not that I can endorse the description of it as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse." It seems to me quite reasonably like to a Suffolk Punch, except in colour, and one finds Phidias never, although Apelles sometimes, over inn doors. But why a white horse? One expects such signs in the parts about Berks, where the classic Vale is named after the gigantic symbol on the northward side of the Downs, of which a simple explanation has become impossible, owing to the tiresome growth of knowledge. But why, despising all commonplace explanations, have we encountered a "White Horse" in Suffolk? Well, one of the many explanations of the White Horse par excellence is that it was taken from the horse delineated on Philip's stater, which was copied a good deal in Britain, and an explanation of the "White Horse"—I beg its pardon, the "Great White Horse"—of Ipswich may be that it had its origin in the horse figured on some of the Icenian coins that have been discovered in East Anglia. Or, again, it may be simply a survival of the ancient Saxon totem. Some such desultory speculation as this may serve to soothe the mind of an evening at Ipswich—not that after motoring all day the mind needs much soothing. But I would counsel all male motorists to burn their last incense of tobacco, as my friend and I did, in the warm bar-parlour on the side of the courtyard over against the main door, for thus shall they see the native of Ipswich in his natural state. The discovery of "this amazing England," as Mr. Kipling has said well, is the main joy of motoring; still in the evening one may do much worse things than pursue the proper study of mankind in easy-going mood, and a provincial bar-parlour is not a bad place in which to do it.

To Ipswich I have been more than once since that night of freezing cold in January, and to Bury St. Edmunds also, and more features of both will find a place in later narratives; but of each there are a few practical things to be said which must not be delayed. On a second visit to Bury, made in the course of the most troubled and delightful tour of my existence so far, I lay at the ancient "Angel" with mighty satisfaction and to the remarkably small minishing of my store of sovereigns. On a second visit to Ipswich I was hospitably entertained by a local gentleman at the "Crown and Anchor," because he thought it was the best hotel in Ipswich, and behold the fare was very good! By the same gentleman I was introduced to oysters, in a little shop near the Butter Market, the best I ever ate, and to hand-made gloves in a little shop hard by which have motored many a merry mile since then. There need be no hesitation in advertising them. They are made by a widow and her daughter out of soft and strong Cape leather, and with them, it is to be feared, the industry will die, since apprentices will not come to them in these degenerate days. Since then I have exhibited these gloves, during the Scottish "Reliability" trials, to a casual acquaintance, and her criticism, although strictly irrelevant, was too witty to be omitted. "Mphm! they look as if you had made them yourself." Ipswich gloves, then, are not for the dandy, but for the motorist they are hard to beat.