East Anglia

“ The Danes now proceeded to march into East Anglia, a kingdom whose inland barrier was marked by vast sheets of water that set in from the Wash, and went winding away into the low marshes of Cambridge, far away beyond Ely, over a country above an hundred miles in extent. Along this boggy and perilous course did the pagans advance with their plunder, their cars, and their cavalry; razing the monastery of Ely to the ground as they passed, nor pausing until they came to the residence of the king of East Anglia, which stood beside a river that then divided Suffolk from Norfolk. ”

“ From Hickling it is a long sail down to Thurne mouth, where we regain the main stream of the Bure, and the scenery is thoroughly characteristic of East Anglia. Truly there is nothing like it elsewhere in this country. League upon league we steal along the placid waterway, between rustling sedge, flag, reed, and coarse grasses, protecting all the aquatic flowers in their season. Sleek cattle graze upon the low, fat, boundless pastures; everywhere weather-worn windmills catch the breeze, and work devoted to the perpetual service of pumping out the intersecting dykes. ”

“ Of our last day’s wanderings I have already told in my chapter on East Anglia.
Travel-stained but unwearied, the tried and trusty companion of our pilgrimage stands before our London hotel. It is hard to think of her—is the pronoun right?—as a thing of iron and steel; [Pg 378] she has won a personality to us; but, metaphor aside, what a splendid means to a splendid end the motor has become! In two summers we have seen more of Britain than one might find it practicable to see in years under old conditions, and we have seen the most delightful, though unfamiliar, side. ”

“ The Ipswich of to-day, however, with its water and steam mills, its export business in boots and shoes, its great ironworks, is, in East Anglia, the conspicuous type of go-aheadness, and when the Orwell is at high tide the outlook from the heights is of extreme beauty. The estuary then is a lovely stretch of scenery; gently rising hills laid out with grounds and country seats, diversified by woods and high cultivation, appear on either side, and the estuary from grassy shore to grassy shore is covered with water, dotted with white-sailed yachts and craft of more serious order. ”

“ The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. ”

“ The agrarian history of East Anglia in the middle ages is the natural result of the form of society described in the Domesday survey of that region, but the East Anglian Domesday is at present a record in isolation. Few documents have been published to illustrate the working of the characteristic East Anglian economy in the early decades of the twelfth century. ”

“ It may be thought, perhaps, that my surroundings have something peculiar in them. But, No! they are of the ordinary type. For two centuries or so East Anglia was indeed greatly cut off from union and sympathy with the rest of England, and was a kingdom apart. The result has been that there are certain characteristics which distinguish the Norfolk character, and some of them are not pleasing. These are survivals, and they present some difficulties to him who is not an East Anglian born, when he is first brought face to face with them. ”

“ No time was given for the broken foe to recover. Late as was the season, Eadward kept the field; from every county the land-fyrd and burh-ware marched in hot haste to reinforce or relieve the army in Essex. Northampton, Huntingdon, and Cambridge surrendered, and with them all East Anglia. ”

“ East Anglia was from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties contributed to it far more than all the rest. ”

“ In what calls itself good society you meet men and women whose ancestors were Dissenters, and yet who are ashamed of the fact—a fact of which no one can be ashamed who feels how in East Anglia, at any rate, the religious teaching of Dissent purified the life of the people, enlarged their political views, and helped this great land of ours to sweep into a better and a younger day. ”

“ Thus the Forest and the Fen between them formed a material barrier separating the kingdom of East Anglia from the rest of Britain. At one point only could an entrance be gained. Between the forest and the fen there runs a long belt of land, at its narrowest point not more than five miles wide, consisting partly of open pasture, partly of chalk down. In the neck, so to say, of this natural pass into East Anglia lies the town of Cambridge. ”

“ But every shire and every kingdom fought for itself alone. If the Dorset men could only drive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, they cared little whether it sailed away to harry Sussex and Hants. If the Northumbrians could only drive it away from the Humber, they cared little whether it set sail for the Thames and the Solent. The North Folk of East Anglia were equally happy to send it off toward the South Folk. ”

“ The reason for this, assigned by the gipsies themselves, is not a flattering one to East Englanders. They will tell you, if you are in their confidence, that they come to East Anglia on account of the simplicity and gullibility of its inhabitants. Nowhere else can the swarthy chals find gorgios so ready to purchase a doctored nag, or the dark-eyed chis so easily cozen credulous villagers and simple servant-girls by the mysteries of dukkeripen. Every fair-ground and race-course is dotted with their travelling vans; the end of every harvest sees them congregate on the village greens ”

“ The shores of East Anglia we have already noted to be largely composed of wide-spreading sandy flats, in whose wastes the tracks of wild birds and animals—to say nothing of the deeply indented footmarks of heavily-laden men—are easily distinguished ”

“ These Danes have come as our forefathers came here, to take a new and better country for themselves, but the strife between them and us is not as the strife between alien peoples. They are our kin, but between us and the Welsh was hatred of race. They will settle down, and never will East Anglia pass from Danish hands, even if Ethelred of Wessex makes headway enough to be owned as overlord of England by them. Now therefore is there one place in all England where peace has come, and to that place I would go to end my days. Here in London the tide of war will ebb and flow ever. ”

“ That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the English language, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an East Anglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celtic quality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an East Anglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea.
Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It is astonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I might give you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out of East Anglia. ”

“ Then said Lodbrok:
"Good shall surely ever be to the house that will thus treat a wanderer. Hardly would a castaway meet with so great kindness in my own land. Nor do I think that we Danes have made our name so well loved among English folk that we should look for the like among them."
But I answered that we of East Anglia had no cause to blame his people, who had made peace with us and kept it faithfully. ”

“ The kingdom of East Anglia presents the same rapid panorama of murders which settled the succession to all the Saxon thrones; and Mercia, comprising the midland counties, furnishes all the materials for a melodrama. Offa, one of its most celebrated kings, had a daughter, Elfrida, to whom Ethelbert, the sovereign of the East Angles, had made honourable proposals, and had been invited to celebrate his nuptials at Hereford. ”

“ The midlands, owing to the comparatively slight elevation of the land, are capable of geographical consideration as a plain. But it is not a plain in the sense of that of East Anglia. There is no quite level tract of great extent, excepting perhaps the fertile and beautiful district watered by the lower Severn and its tributary the Upper or Warwickshire Avon, overlooked by the Cotteswolds on the one hand and the Malvern and other hills on the other.
Coast.—The coast-line of England is deeply indented by a succession of large inlets, particularly on the east and west. ”

“ A portion of them, conducted by a leader named Uffa, landed on the north-east coast of Britain and formed a settlement, which gradually became consolidated into a kingdom under the title of East Anglia.
Soon afterwards the right bank of the Thames was invaded by fresh bands, who, assisted by their countrymen in Kent and by the Angles, drove the unfortunate Britons from the soil, and founded the kingdom of Essex, a state exceedingly small, but important, as comprising in its limits the city of London. ”

“ The finest men in East Anglia were the sailors at the various sea-ports along the coast, well-shaped, fair-haired, with grand limbs and blue eyes, evidently of Saxon or Norse descent, and their daughters were as handsome as any girls I ever saw. ”

“ If East Anglia contained a preponderance of one race of settlers, and Kent and Sussex of another, they might well quarrel for supremacy. But when all the settlers on the Saxon shore had lost the control and protection of the Count who once governed them, it may also be imagined that the more exclusively British districts would not readily coöperate for defence with those who were more strange to their kindred even than the Roman. ”

“ Ritchie, in regard to political and theological questions, they cannot fail to gain much enjoyment from his excellent delineation of old days in East Anglia.’—Norwich Mercury.
‘“East Anglia” has the merit of not being a compilation, which is more than can be said of the great majority of books produced in these days to satisfy the revived taste for topographical gossip. Mr. Ritchie is a Suffolk man—the son of a Nonconformist minister of Wrentham in that county—and he looks back to the old neighbourhood and the old times with an affection which is likely to communicate itself to its readers. ”

“ In another way also there came to the children in Wrentham the growing perception of a larger world than that in which we lived, and moved, and had our being. One of the historic sites of East Anglia is Framlingham, a small market town, lying a little off the highroad to London, a few miles from what always seemed to me the very uninteresting village of Needham Market, though at one time Godwin, the author of ‘Caleb Williams,’ preached in the chapel there. There is now a public school for Suffolk boys at Framlingham, and it may yet make a noise in the world. ”

“ After defeating the English at Thetford, they took Edmund, the Saxon King of East Anglia, prisoner, and, upon his refusal to accept the pagan religion, put him to death. For his constancy he was honoured with the title of Saint Edmund. East Anglia was thus completely in possession of the Danes, and Guthrum took to himself the title of king. East Anglia became henceforward for some time the principal point of Danish settlement in England. From thence the invaders passed into Wessex, under the command of Bagsecg and Halfdene. ”

“ I know East Anglia well; few men know it better—few men love it better. I say emphatically that a man more out of sympathy with the East Anglian temperament never lived than he who wished to be taken, and was taken, as the representative East Anglian. Moreover, one very potent reason why he was such a failure in p. xiiiNorfolk—one very potent reason why he was such a failure in his contact with the Anglo-Saxon race generally—was this: he was a Celtic duckling hatched at Dereham, who took himself for a veritable Norfolk chicken. ”

“ So we rode thither, and that ride through the pleasant Thames-side country was good for me. And when we came to the great house where the king lay, we had no trouble in finding the way to him, for Ingild was well known, and one of the great Witan {xviii} also.
I told Ethelred the king of England all that I had learned, and he was troubled. Only we three were in his council chamber, and to us he spoke freely.
"What can I do? Much I fear that East Anglia must fight her own battles at this time. ”

“ These men were the precursors of that Nonconformity which has made England the home of the free, and such men abounded in East Anglia. Under Queen Elizabeth they had as bad a time of it almost as under Queen Mary. For instance, we find under Dr. Freke, Bishop of Norwich, and in the reign of glorious Queen Bess, as her admirers term her, Mathew Hammond, a poor ploughwright, of Hethersett, was condemned as a heretic, had his ears cut off, and after the lapse of a week was committed, in the Castle ditch at Norwich, to the more agonizing torment of the flames. ”

“ The Yare: Norwich—Yarmouth.
After the Medway and the Thames have delivered their great contributions to the sea, the peculiar Essex coast country—flat, marshy, and often very uninteresting—is sufficiently served by a number of small streams of little note in literature, and generally as commonplace in appearance as in the duties they perform. There are exceptions, which will be duly indicated, but with regard to the majority of the streams of East Anglia, poet has not sung nor painter wrought his magic art. If not remote, unfriended, or melancholy, they are, it cannot be denied, slow. ”