Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

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:—

 
I know their complot is to have my life;
And if my death might make this island happy,
And prove the period of their tyranny,
I would expend it with all willingness.
 

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:—

 
God forbid any malice should prevail,
That faultless may condemn a nobleman!
Pray God he may acquit him of suspicion!
 

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:—

 
For in the shade of death I shall find joy;
In life but double death now Gloucester's dead.
 

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

 
The Commons, like an angry hive of bees,
That want their leader, scatter up and down.
 

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.