The Coming of the Friars Part 3

I dare not stop to explain how the job was managed--that would lead me a great deal too far--but it _was_ managed, and accordingly, a year or two after the marriage of little Alice, they got possession of all the t.i.thes and the glebe, and the good rectory-house at Rougham, and they left the parson of the parish with a smaller house on the other side of the road, and _not_ contiguous to the church, an allowance of two quarters of wheat and two quarters of barley a year, and certain small dues which might suffice to keep body and soul together but little more. [Footnote: This appears from the following charter, which it seems worth while to quote: "Pateat universis... quod nos Robertas de Feletone, Miles, et Hawigia uxor mea concessimus ... Alicie filie Thome de Rucham... Totum ius nostrum... in terris... dicte Alicie... in Rucham, que ... habuimus de dono et dimissione Johannis filii Roberti de Thyrsforde in Rucham _ante diuorstium_ (sic) _inter eundem Johannem et dictam_ Aliciam factum... Omnia munimenta et scripta que de dicto tenemento habuimus eidem Alicie quiete reddidimus... Datum apud Lucham die Dom: prox: post Annunc: B Mar: Virg: Anno R. R. Edw: fit. Reg. Henr: tricessimotertio" (28 March, 1305).--_Rougham Charter_, No. 157.]

John of Thyrsfordhad not been married more than a year or two when he had had enough of it. Whether at the time of his marriage he was already a _cleric_, I cannot tell, but I know that on October 10, 1301, he was a priest, and that on that day he was inst.i.tuted to the vicarage of Rougham, having been already divorced from poor little Alice. As for Alice--if I understand the case, she never could marry, however much she may have wished it; she had no children to comfort her; she became by-and-by the great lady of Rougham, and there she lived on for nearly fifty years. Her husband, the vicar, lived on too--on what terms of intimacy I am unable to say. The vicar died some ten years before the lady. When old age was creeping on her she made over all her houses and lands in Rougham to feoffees, and I have a suspicion that she went into a nunnery and there died.

In dealing with the two cases of Peter Romayn and John of Thyrsford I have used the term _cleric_ more than once. These two men were, at the end of their career at any rate, what we now understand by clergyman; but there were hosts of men six hundred years ago in Norfolk who were _clerics,_ and yet who were by no means what we now understand by clergymen. The _clerics_ of six hundred years ago comprehended all those whom we now call the professional cla.s.ses; all, _i.e._, who lived by their brains, as distinct from those who lived by trade or the labour of their hands.

Six hundred years ago it may be said that there were two kinds of law in England, the one was the law of the land, the other was the law of the Church. The law of the land was hideously cruel and merciless, and the gallows and the pillory, never far from any man's door, were seldom allowed to remain long out of use. The ghastly frequency of the punishment by death tended to make people savage and bloodthirsty. [Footnote: In 1293 a case is recorded of three men, one of them a goldsmith, who had their right hands chopped off in the middle of the street in London.-"Chron. of Edward I. and Edward II.,"

vol. i. p.--102. Ed. Stubbs. Rolls Series.] It tended, too, to make men absolutely reckless of consequences when once their pa.s.sions were roused. "As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" was a saying that had a grim truth in it. When a violent ruffian knew that if he robbed his host in the night he would be sure to be hung for it, and if he killed him he could be no more than hung, he had nothing to gain by letting him live, and nothing to lose if he cut his throat. Where another knew that by tampering with the coin of the realm he was sure to go to the gallows for it, he might as well make a good fight before he was taken, and murder any one who stood in the way of his escape. Hanging went on at a pace which we cannot conceive, for in those days the criminal law of the land was not, as it is now, a strangely devised machinery for protecting the wrongdoer, but it was an awful and tremendous power for slaying all who were dangerous to the persons or the property of the community.

The law of the Church, on the other hand, was much more lenient. To hurry a man to death with his sins and crimes fresh upon him, to slaughter men wholesale for acts that could not be regarded as enormously wicked, shocked those who had learnt that the Gospel taught such virtues as mercy and longsuffering, and gave men hopes of forgiveness on repentance. The Church set itself against the atrocious mangling, and branding, and hanging that was being dealt out blindly, hastily, and indiscriminately, to every kind of transgressor; and inasmuch as the Church law and the law of the land six hundred years ago were often in conflict, the Church law acted to a great extent as a check upon the shocking ferocity of the criminal code. And this is how the check was exercised.

A man who was a _cleric_ was only half amenable to the law of the land. He was a citizen of the realm, and a subject of the king, but he was _more_; he owed allegiance to the Church, and claimed the Church's protection also. Accordingly, whenever a _cleric_ got into trouble, and there was only too good cause to believe that if he were brought to his trial he would have a short shrift and no favour, scant justice and the inevitable gallows within twenty-four hours at the longest, he proclaimed himself a _cleric_, and demanded the protection of the Church, and was forthwith handed over to the custody of the ordinary or bishop. The process was a clumsy one, and led, of course, to great abuses, but it had a good side. As a natural and inevitable consequence of such a privilege accorded to a cla.s.s, there was a very strong inducement to become a member of that cla.s.s; and as the Church made it easy for any fairly educated man to be admitted at any rate to the lower orders of the ministry, any one who preferred a professional career, or desired to give himself up to a life of study, enrolled himself among the _clerics_, and was henceforth reckoned as belonging to the clergy.

The country swarmed with these _clerics_. Only a small proportion of them ever became ministers of religion; they were lawyers, or even lawyers' clerks; they were secretaries; some few were quacks with nostrums; and these all were just as much _clerics_ as the chaplains, who occupied pretty much the same position as our curates do now--clergymen, strictly so called, who were on the look out for employment, and who earned a very precarious livelihood--or the rectors and vicars who were the beneficed clergy, and who were the parsons of parishes occupying almost exactly the same position that they do at this moment, and who were almost exactly in the same social position as they are now. Six hundred years ago there were at least seven of these _clerics_ in Rougham, all living in the place at the same time besides John of Thyrsford, the vicar. Five of them were chaplains, two were merely _clerics_. If there were seven of these clerical gentlemen whom I happen to have met with in my examination of the Rougham Charters, there must have been others who were not people of sufficient note to witness the execution of important legal instruments, nor with the means to buy land or houses in the parish. It can hardly be putting the number too high if we allow that there must have been at least ten or a dozen _clerics_ of one sort or another in Rougham six hundred years ago.

How did they all get a livelihood? is a question not easy to answer; but there were many ways of picking up a livelihood by these gentlemen. To begin with, they could take an engagement as tutor in a gentleman's family; or they could keep a small school; or earn a trifle by drawing up conveyances, or by keeping the accounts of the lord of the manor. In some cases they acted as private chaplains, getting their victuals for their remuneration, and sometimes they were merely loafing about, and living upon their friends, and taking the place of the country parson if he were sick or past work. Then, too, the smaller monasteries had one or more chaplains, and I suspect that the canons at Castle Acre always would keep two or three chaplains in their pay, and it is not unlikely that as long as Archdeacon Middleton kept on his big house at Rougham he would have a chaplain, who would be attached to the place, and bound to perform the service in the great man's chapel.

But besides the clerics and the chaplains and the rector or vicar, there was another cla.s.s, the members of which just at this time were playing a very important part indeed in the religious life of the people, and not in the religious life alone; these were the Friars.

If the monks looked down upon the parsons, and stole their endowments from them whenever they could, and if in return the parsons hated the monks and regarded them with profound suspicion and jealousy, both parsons and monks were united in their common dislike of the Friars.

Six hundred years ago the Friars had been established in England about sixty years, and they were now by far the most influential Religionists in the country. The Friars, though always stationed in the towns, and by this time occupying large establishments which were built for them in Lynn, Yarmouth, Norwich, and elsewhere, were always acting the part of itinerant preachers, and travelled their circuits on foot, supported by alms. Sometimes the parson lent them the church, sometimes they held a camp meeting in spite of him, and just as often as not they left behind them a feeling of great soreness, irritation, and discontent; but six hundred years ago the preaching of the Friars was an immense and incalculable blessing to the country, and if it had not been for the wonderful reformation wrought by their activity and burning enthusiasm, it is difficult to see what we should have come to or what corruption might have prevailed in Church and State.

When the Friars came into a village, and it was known that they were going to preach, you may be sure that the whole population would turn out to listen. Sermons in those days in the country were very rarely delivered. As I have said, there were no pulpits in the churches then. A parson might hold a benefice for fifty years, and never once have written or composed a sermon. A preaching parson, one who regularly exhorted his people or expounded to them the Scriptures, would have been a wonder indeed, and thus the coming of the Friars and the revival of pulpit oratory was all the more welcome because the people had not become wearied by the too frequent iteration of truths which may be repeated so frequently as to lose their vital force. A sermon was an event in those days, and a preacher with any real gifts of oratory was looked upon as a prophet sent by G.o.d. Never was there a time when the people needed more to be taught the very rudiments of morality. Never had there been a time when people cared less whether their acts and words were right or wrong, true or false.

It had almost come to this, that what a man thought would be to his profit, that was good; what would entail upon him a loss, that was evil.

And this brings me to another point, viz., the lawlessness and crime in country villages six hundred years ago. But before I can speak on that subject it is necessary that I should first try to give you some idea of the every-day life of your forefathers. What did they eat and drink? what did they wear? what did they do from day to day? Were they happy? content? prosperous? or was their lot a hard and bitter one? For according to the answer we get to questions such as these, so shall we be the better prepared to expect the people to have been peaceable citizens, or sullen, miserable, and dangerous ruffians, goaded to frequent outbursts of ferocious savagedom by hunger, oppression, hatred, and despair.

Six hundred years ago no parish in Norfolk had more than a part of its land under tillage. As a rule, the town or village, with its houses, great and small, consisted of a long street, the church and parsonage being situated about the middle of the parish. Not far off stood the manor house, with its hall where the manor courts were held, and its farm-buildings, dovecote, and usually its mill for grinding the corn of the tenants. No tenant of the manor might take his corn to be ground anywhere except at the lord's mill; and it is easy to see what a grievance this would be felt to be at times, and how the lord of the manor, if he were needy, unscrupulous, or extortionate, might grind the faces of the poor while he ground their corn. Behind most of the houses in the village might be seen a croft or paddock, an orchard or a small garden. But the contents of the gardens were very different from the vegetables we see now; there were, perhaps, a few cabbages, onions, parsnips, or carrots, and apparently some kind of beet or turnip. The potato had never been heard of.

As for the houses themselves, they were squalid enough for the most part. The manor house was often built of stone, when stone was to be had, or where, as in Norfolk, no stone was to be had, then of flint, as in so many of our church towers. Usually, however, the manor house was built in great part of timber. The poorer houses were dirty hovels, run up "anyhow," sometimes covered with turf, sometimes with thatch. None of them had chimneys. Six hundred years ago houses with chimneys were at least as rare as houses heated by hot-water pipes are now. Moreover, there were no brick houses. It is a curious fact that the art of making bricks seems to have been lost in England for some hundreds of years. The labourer's dwelling had no windows; the hole in the roof which let out the smoke rendered windows unnecessary, and, even in the houses of the well-to-do, gla.s.s windows were rare. In many cases oiled linen cloth served to admit a feeble semblance of light, and to keep out the rain. The labourer's fire was in the middle of his house; he and his wife and children huddled round it, sometimes grovelling in the ashes; and going to bed meant flinging themselves down upon the straw which served them as mattress and feather bed, exactly as it does to the present day in the gipsy's tent in our byways. The labourer's only light by night was the smouldering fire. Why should he burn a rushlight when there was nothing to look at? and reading was an accomplishment which few labouring men were masters of.

As to the food of the majority, it was of the coa.r.s.est. The fathers of many a man and woman in every village in Norfolk can remember the time when the labourer looked upon wheat-bread as a rare delicacy; and those legacies which were left by kindly people a century or two ago, providing for the weekly distribution of so many _white_ loaves to the poor, tell us of a time when the poor man's loaf was as dark as mud, and as tough as his shoe-leather. In the winter-time things went very hard indeed with all cla.s.ses. There was no lack of fuel, for the brakes and waste afforded turf which all might cut, and kindling which all had a right to carry away; but the poor horses and sheep and cattle were half starved for at least four months in the year, and one and all were much smaller than they are now. I doubt whether people ever fatted their hogs as we do. When the corn was reaped, the swine were turned into the stubble and roamed about the underwood; and when they had increased their weight by the feast of roots and mast and acorns, they were slaughtered and salted for the winter fare, only so many being kept alive as might not prove burdensome to the scanty resources of the people. Salting down the animals for the winter consumption was a very serious expense. All the salt used was produced by evaporation in _pans_ near the seaside, and a couple of bushels of salt often cost as much as a sheep. This must have compelled the people to spare the salt as much as possible, and it must have been only too common to find the bacon more than rancid, and the ham alive again with maggots. If the salt was dear and scarce, sugar was unknown except to the very rich. The poor man had little to sweeten his lot. The bees gave him honey; and long after the time I am dealing with people left not only their hives to their children by will, but actually bequeathed a summer flight of bees to their friends; while the hive was claimed by one, the next swarm might become the property of another.

As for the drink, it was almost exclusively water, beer, and cider.

[Footnote: On a court roll of the manor of Whissonsete, of the date July 22, 1355, I find William Wate fined "iiij botell cideri quia fecit dampnum in bladis domini."] Any one who pleased might brew beer without tax or license, and everybody who was at all before the world did brew his own beer according to his own taste. But in those days the beer was very different stuff from that which you are familiar with. To begin with, people did not use hops. Hops were not put into beer till long after the time we are concerned with. I dare say they flavoured their beer with h.o.r.ehound and other herbs, but they did not understand those tricks which brewers are said to practise now-a-days for making the beer "heady" and sticky and poisonous. I am not prepared to say the beer was better, or that you would have liked it; but I am pretty sure that in those days it was easier to get pure beer in a country village than it is now, and if a man chose to drink bad beer he had only himself to thank for it. There was no such monopoly as there is now. I am inclined to think that there were a very great many more people who sold beer in the country parishes than sell it now, and I am sorry to say that the beer-sellers in those days had the reputation of being rather a bad lot. [Footnote: The presentments of the beer-sellers seem to point to the existence of something like a licensing system among the lords of manors. I know not how otherwise to explain the frequency of the fines laid upon the whole cla.s.s. Thus in a court-leet of the manor of Hockham, held the 20th of October, 1377, no less than fourteen women were fined in the aggregate 30s. 8d., who being _bra.s.satores vendidere servisiam_ (sic) _contra a.s.sisam_, one of these brewsters was fined as much as four shillings.

The earliest attempt to introduce uniformity in the measures of ale, &c., is the a.s.size of Richard I., bearing date the 20th of November, 1197. It is to be found in "Walter of Coventry," vol. ii. p. 114 (Rolls Series). On the importance of this doc.u.ment see Stubbs'

"Const. Hist.," vol. i. pp. 509, 573. On the _tasters_ of bread and ale cf. "Dep. Keeper's 43rd Report," p. 207.] It is quite certain that they were very often in trouble, and of all the offences punished by fine at the manor courts none is more common than that of selling beer in false measures.

The method of cheating their customers by the beer-sellers was, we are told, exactly the contrary plan followed by our modern publicans.

Now, when a man gets into a warm corner at the pot-house, they tell me that John Barleycorn is apt to serve out more drink than is good for him; but six hundred years ago the beer-seller made his profit, or tried to make it, by giving his customer less than he asked for.

Tobacco was quite unknown; it was first brought into England about three hundred years after the days we are dealing with. When a man once sat himself down with his pot he had nothing to do but drink. He had no pipe to take off his attention from his liquor. If such a portentous sight could have been seen in those days as that of a man vomiting forth clouds of smoke from his mouth and nostrils, the beholders would have undoubtedly taken to their heels and run for their lives, protesting that the devil himself had appeared to them, breathing forth fire and flames. Tea and coffee, too, were absolutely unknown, unheard of; and wine was the rich man's beverage, as it is now. The fire-waters of our own time--the gin and the rum, which have wrought us all such incalculable mischief--were not discovered then.

Some little ardent spirits, known under the name of _cordials_, were to be found in the better appointed establishments, and were kept by the lady of the house among her simples, and on special occasions dealt out in thimblefuls; but the vile grog, that maddens people now, our forefathers of six hundred years ago had never even tasted.

The absence of vegetable food for the greater part of the year, the personal dirt of the people, the sleeping at night in the clothes worn in the day, and other causes, made skin diseases frightfully common. At the outskirts of every town in England of any size there were crawling about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores, living heaven knows how. They were called by the common name of lepers, and probably the leprosy strictly so called was awfully common. But the children must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch, and the scurvy, and the ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must have played fearful havoc with the weak and sickly.

As for the dress of the working cla.s.ses, it was hardly dress at all.

I doubt whether the great ma.s.s of the labourers in Norfolk had more than a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, with a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a man's knife was stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread, sometimes for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton goods, such as are familiar to you all, they had never been dreamt of, and I suspect that no more people in Norfolk wore linen habitually than now wear silk.

Money was almost inconceivably scarce. The labourer's wages were paid partly in rations of food, partly in other allowances, and only partly in money; he had to take what he could get. Even the quit- rent, or what I have called the ground rent, was frequently compounded for by the tenant being required to find a pair of gloves, or a pound of c.u.mmin, or some other acknowledgment in lieu of a money payment; and one instance occurs among the Rougham charters of a man buying as much as 11-1/2 acres, and paying for them partly in money and partly in barley. [Footnote: In the year 1276 halfpence and farthings were coined for the first time. This must have been a great boon to the poorer cla.s.ses, and it evidently was felt to be a matter of great importance, insomuch that it was said to be the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy by the great seer Merlin, who had once foretold in mysterious language, that "there shall be half of the round." In the next century it appears that the want of small change had again made itself felt: for in the 2nd Richard II. we find the Commons setting forth in a pet.i.tion to the King, that "_...les ditz coes n'on pet.i.t monoye pur paier pur les pet.i.tes_ mesures a grant damage des dites coes," and they beg "Le plese a dit Sr. le Roi et a son sage conseil de faire ordeiner Mayles et farthinges pur paier pur les pet.i.tes mesures... et en eovre de charitee...."--Rolls of Parl., vol. iii. p. 65.] Nothing shows more plainly the scarcity of money than the enormous interest that was paid for a loan. The only bankers were the Jews; [Footnote: I am speaking of Norfolk and Suffolk, where the Jews, as far as I have seen, had it all their own way.] and when a man was once in their hands he was never likely to get out of their clutches again. But six hundred years ago the Jews had almost come to the end of their tether; and in the year 1290 they were driven out of the country, men, women, and children, with unutterable barbarity, only to be replaced by other bloodsuckers who were not a whit less mercenary, perhaps, but only less pushing and successful in their usury.

It is often said that the monasteries were the great supporters of the poor, and fed them in times of scarcity. It may be so, but I should like to see the evidence for the statement. At present I doubt the fact, at any rate as far as Norfolk goes. [Footnote: The returns of the number of poor people supported by the monasteries, which are to be found in the "Valor Ecclesiasticus," are somewhat startling.

Certainly the monasteries did not return _less_ than they expended in alms. Note, too, the complaint of the St. Alban's men to Wat Tyler, who are said to have slandered the abbey "de retentione stipendiorum pauperum." Walsingham, i. 469.] On the contrary, I am strongly impressed with the belief that six hundred years ago the poor had no friends. The parsons were needy themselves. In too many cases one clergyman held two or three livings, took his t.i.thes and spent them in the town, and left a chaplain with a bare subsistence to fill his place in the country. There was no parson's wife to drop in and speak a kind word--no clergyman's daughter to give a friendly nod, or teach the little ones at Sunday school--no softening influences, no sympathy, no kindliness. What could you expect of people with such dreary surroundings?--what but that which we know actually was the condition of affairs? The records of crime and outrage in Norfolk six hundred years ago are still preserved, and may be read by any one who knows how to decipher them. I had intended to examine carefully the entries of crime for this neighbourhood for the year 1286, and to give you the result this evening, but I have not had an opportunity of doing so. The work has been done for the hundred of North Erpingham by my friend Mr. Rye, and what is true for one part of Norfolk during any single year is not likely to be very different from what was going on in another.

The picture we get of the utter lawlessness of the whole county, however, at the beginning of King Edward's reign is quite dreadful enough. n.o.body seems to have resorted to the law to maintain a right or redress a wrong, till every other method had been tried. Starting with the squires, if I may use the term, and those well-to-do people who ought to have been among the most law-abiding members of the community--we find them setting an example of violence and rapacity, bad to read of. One of the most common causes of offence was when the lord of the manor attempted to invade the rights of the tenants of the manor by setting up a fold on the heath, or _Bruary_ as it was called. What the lord was inclined to do, that the tenants would try to do also, as when in 1272 John de Swanton set up a fold in the common fields at Billingford; whereupon the other tenants pulled it down, and there was a serious disturbance, and the matter dragged on in the law courts for four years and more. Or as when the Prior of Wymondham impleads William de Calthorp for interfering with his foldage at Burnham; Calthorp replying that the Prior had no right to foldage, and that he (Calthorp) had the right to pull the fold down.

In these cases, of course, there would be a general gathering and a riot, for every one's interest was at stake; but it was not only when some general grievance was felt that people in those days were ready for a row.

It really looks as if nothing was more easy than to collect a band of people who could be let loose anywhere to work any mischief. One man had a claim upon another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right which was denied--had the claim, or fancied he had--and he seems to have had no difficulty in getting together a score or two of roughs to back him in taking the law into his own hands. As when John de la Wade in 1270 persuaded a band of men to help him in invading the manor of Hamon de Clere, in this very parish of t.i.ttleshall, seizing the corn and threshing it, and, more wonderful still, cutting down timber, and _carrying it off_. There are actually two other cases of a precisely similar kind recorded this same year, one where a gang of fellows in broad day seems to have looted the manors of Dunton and Mileham; the other case was where a mob, under the leadership of three men, who are named, entered by force into the manor of Dunham, laid hands on a quant.i.ty of timber fit for building purposes, and took it away bodily! A much more serious case, however, occurred some years after this when two gentlemen of position in Norfolk, with twenty-five followers, who appear to have been their regular retainers, and a great mult.i.tude on foot and horse, came to Little Barningham, where in the Hall there lived an old lady, Petronilla de Gros; they set fire to the house in five places, dragged out the old lady, treated her with the most brutal violence, and so worked upon her fears that they compelled her to tell them where her money and jewels were, and, having seized them, I conclude that they left her to warm herself at the smouldering ruins of her mansion.

On another occasion there was a fierce riot at Rainham. There the manor had become divided into three portions, as we have seen was the case at Rougham. One Thomas de Hauville had one portion, and Thomas de Ingoldesthorp and Robert de Scales held the other two portions.

Thomas de Hauville, peradventure, felt aggrieved because some rogue had not been whipped or tortured cruelly enough to suit his notions of salutary justice, whereupon he went to the expense of erecting a brand new pillory, and apparently a gallows too, to strike terror into the minds of the disorderly. The other parceners of the manor were indignant at the act, and collecting nearly sixty of the people of Rainham, they pulled down the new pillory and utterly destroyed the same. When the case came before the judges, the defendants pleaded in effect that if Thomas de Hauville had put up his pillory on his own domain they would have had no objection, but that he had invaded their rights in setting up his gallows without their permission.

If the gentry, and they who ought to have known better, set such an example, and gave their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only natural that the lower orders should be quick to take their pattern by their superiors, and should be only too ready to break and defy the law. And so it is clear enough that they were. In a single year, the year 1285, in the hundred of North Erpingham, containing thirty- two parishes, the catalogue of crime is so ghastly as positively to stagger one. Without taking any account of what in those days must have been looked upon as quite minor offences--such as simple theft, sheep-stealing, fraud, extortion, or harbouring felons--there were eleven men and five women put upon their trial for burglary, eight men and four women were murdered; there were five fatal fights, three men and two women being killed in the frays; and, saddest of all, there were five cases of suicide, among them two women, one of whom hanged herself, the other cut her throat with a razor. We have in the roll recording these horrors very minute particulars of the several cases, and we know too that, not many months before the roll was drawn up, at least eleven desperate wretches had been hanged for various offences, and one had been torn to pieces by horses for the crime of debasing the king's coin. It is impossible for us to realize the hideous ferocity of such a state of society as this; the women were as bad as the men, furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without shame, without remorse; and finding life so cheerless, so hopeless, so very very dark and miserable, that when there was nothing to be gained by killing any one else they killed themselves.

Anywhere, anywhere out of the world!

Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will do well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures butchered in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten miles from your own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple of lonely women, apparently living together in their poverty, gashed and battered in the dead of the night, and left in their blood, stripped of their little all. The motive, too, for all this horrible housebreaking and bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of bacon, and the shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a hovel, being too paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never dreaming of making resistance to the wild-eyed a.s.sa.s.sins, who came to slay rather than to steal.

Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on; and, before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former cla.s.s, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all had some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two that he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then there were no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one in Rougham who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we now understand by tenant farmers were a cla.s.s that had not yet come into existence. Where a landlord was non-resident he farmed his estate by a bailiff, and if any one wanted to give up an occupation for a time he let it with all that it contained. Thus, when Alice the divorced made up her mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham--perhaps on a pilgrimage--perhaps to Rome--who knows?--she let her house and land, and all that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her sister Juliana for three years. The inventory included not only the sheep and cattle, but the very hoes and pitchforks, and sacks; and everything, to the minutest particular, was to be returned without damage at the end of the term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this lady, a lady of birth and some position, certainly did not have two hundred acres under her hands, and would have been a very small personage indeed, side by side with a dozen of our West Norfolk farmers today. The difference between the labourer and the farmer was, I think, less six hundred years ago than it is now. Men climbed up the ladder by steps that were more gently graduated; there was no great gulf fixed between the employer and the employed.

I can tell you nothing of the amus.e.m.e.nts of the people in those days.

I doubt whether they had any more amus.e.m.e.nt than the swine or the cows had. Looking after the fowls or the geese, hunting for the hen's nest in the furze brake, and digging out a fox or a badger, gave them an hour's excitement or interest now and again. Now and then a wandering minstrel came by, playing upon his rude instrument, and now and then somebody would come out from Lynn, or Yarmouth, or Norwich, with some new batch of songs for the most part scurrilous and coa.r.s.e, and listened to much less for the sake of the music than for the words. Nor were books so rare as has been a.s.serted. There were even story-books in some houses, as where John Senekworth, bailiff for Merton College, at Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire, possessed, when he died in 1314, three books of romance; but then he was a thriving yeoman with carpets in his house, or hangings for the walls.

[Footnote: Rogers' "Hist, of Prices" vol. i. p. 124.]

There was a great deal more coming and going in the country villages than there is now, a great deal more to talk about, a great deal more doing. The courts of the manor were held periodically, and the free tenants were bound to attend and carry on a large amount of petty business. Then there were the periodical visitations by the Archdeacon and the Rural Dean, and now and then more august personages might be seen with a host of mounted followers riding along the roads. The Bishop of Norwich was always on the move when he was in his diocese; his most favourite places of residence were North Elmham and Gaywood; at both of these places he had a palace and a park; that meant that there were deer there and hunting, and all the good and evil that seems to be inseparable from haunches of vension.

Nay, at intervals, even the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, the second man in the kingdom, came down to hold a visitation in Norfolk, and, exactly 602 years ago the great Archbishop Peckham spent some time in the county, and though I do not think he came near Rougham or t.i.ttleshall, I think it not improbable that his coming may have had some influence in bringing about the separation between Peter Romayn and Matilda de Cringleford, and the divorce of poor Alice from John of Thyrsford.

That year, 1280, or just 602 years ago, when Archbishop Peckham paid his visit to Norfolk, was a very disastrous year for the farmers. It was the beginning of a succession of bad seasons and floods even worse than any that we have known. The rain began on the 1st of August, and we are told that it continued to fall for twenty-four hours, and then came a mighty wind such as men had never known the like of; the waters were out, and there was a great flood, and houses and windmills and bridges were swept away. Nay, we hear of a sad loss of life, and many poor people were drowned, and many lost their all; flocks, and herds, and corn and hay being whelmed in the deluge. In November there was a frightful tempest, the lightning doing extensive damage; and just at Christmas-time the frost set in with such severity as no man had known before. The river Thames was frozen over above London Bridge, so that men crossed it with horses and carts, and when the frost broke up on the 2nd of February there was such an enormous acc.u.mulation of ice and snow that five of the arches of London Bridge blew up, and all over the country the same destruction of bridges was heard of.

Next year and the year after that, things went very badly with your forefathers, and one of the saddest stories that we get from a Norfolk chronicler who was alive at the time is one in which he tells us that, owing to the continuous rain during these three years, there was an utter failure in garden produce, as well as of the people's hope of harvest. The bad seasons seem to have gone on for six or seven years; but by far the worst calamity which Norfolk ever knew was the awful flood of 1287, when by an incursion of the sea a large district was laid under water, and hundreds of unfortunate creatures were drowned in the dead of the night, without warning. Here, on the higher level, people were comparatively out of harm's way, but it is impossible to imagine the distress and agony that there must have been in other parts of the county not twenty miles from where we are this evening.

After that dreadful year I think there was a change for the better, but it must have been a long time before the county recovered from the "agricultural distress;" and I strongly suspect that the cruel and wicked persecution of the Jews, and the cancelling of all debts due to them by the landlords and the farmers, was in some measure owing to the general bankruptcy which the succession of bad seasons had brought about. Men found themselves hopelessly insolvent, and there was no other way of cancelling their obligations than by getting rid of their creditors. So when the king announced that all the Jews should be transported out of the realm, you may be sure that there were very few Christians who were sorry for them. There had been a time when the children of Israel had spoiled the Egyptians-- was it not fitting that another time should have come when the children of Israel should themselves be spoiled?

The year of the great flood was the frequent talk, of course, of all your forefathers who overlived it, and here in this neighbourhood it must have acquired an additional interest from the fact that Bishop Middleton died the year after it, and his brothers then parted with their Rougham property.

Nor was this all, for Bishop Middleton's successor in the see of Norwich came from this immediate neighbourhood also. This was Ralph Walpole, son of the lord of the manor of Houghton, in which parish the bishop himself had inherited a few acres of land. In less than forty years no less than three bishops had been born within five miles of where we are this evening: Roger de Wesenham, [Footnote: The names of several members of the bishop's family occur in the Rougham Charters as attesting witnesses, and a Roger de Wesenham is found among them more than once.] who became Bishop of Lichfield in 1245; William Middleton, who had just died; and Ralph Walpole, who succeeded him. There must have been much stir in these parts when the news was known. The old people would tell how they had seen "young master Ralph" many a time when he was a boy scampering over Ma.s.singham Heath, or coming to pay his respects to the Archdeacon at the Lyng House, or talking of foreign parts with old James de Ferentino or Peter Romayn. Now he had grown to be a very big man indeed, and there were many eyes watching him on both sides of the water. He had a very difficult game to play during the eleven years he was Bishop of Norwich, for the king was dreadfully in need of money, and, being desperate, he resorted to outrageous methods of squeezing it from those whom he could frighten and force, and the time came at last when the bishops and the clergy had to put a bold face on and to resist the tyranny and lawless rapacity of the sovereign.

And this reminds me that though archdeacons, and bishops, and even an archbishop, in those days might be and were very important and very powerful personages, they were all very small and insignificant in comparison with the great King Edward, the king who at this time was looked upon as one of the most mighty and magnificent kings in all the world. He, too, paid many a visit to Norfolk six hundred years ago. He kept his Christmas at Burgh in 1280, and in 1284 he came down with the good Queen Eleanor and spent the whole of Lent in the county; and next year, again, they were in your immediate neighbourhood, making a pilgrimage to Walsingham. A few years after this he seems to have spent a week or two within five miles of where we are; he came to Castle Acre, and there he stayed at the great priory whose ruins you all know well. There a very stirring interview took place between the king and Bishop Walpole, and a number of other bishops, and great persons who had come down as a deputation to expostulate with the king, and respectfully to protest against the way in which he was robbing his subjects, and especially the clergy, whom he had been for years plundering in the most outrageous manner.

The king gave the deputation no smooth words to carry away, but he sent them off with threatening frowns and insults and in hot anger.

Some days after this he was at Ma.s.singham, and one of his letters has been preserved, dated from Ma.s.singham, 30th of January, 1296, so that it is almost certain the great king pa.s.sed one night there at least.

It is a little difficult to understand what the king was doing at Ma.s.singham, for there was no great man living there, and no great mansion. Sometimes I have thought that the king rode out from Castle Acre to see what state the Walpoles of those times were keeping up at Houghton. Had not that audacious Bishop Walpole dared to speak plainly to his Grace the week before? But the more probable explanation is that the king went to Ma.s.singham to visit a small religious house or monastery which had been recently founded there. I suspect it had already got into debt and was in difficulties, and it is possible that the king's visit was made in the interest of the foundation. At any rate, there the king stayed; but though he was in Norfolk more than once after this, he never was so near you again, and that visit was one which your forefathers were sure to talk about to the end of their lives.

And these were the days of old. But now that we have looked back upon them as they appear through the mists of centuries, the distance distorting some things, obscuring others, but leaving upon us, on the whole, an impression that, after all, these men and women of the past, whose circ.u.mstances were so different from our own, were perhaps not so very unlike what we should be if our surroundings were as theirs. Now that we have come to that conclusion, if indeed we have come to it, let me ask you all a question or two. Should we like to change with those forefathers of ours, whose lives were pa.s.sed in this parish in the way I have attempted to describe, six hundred years ago? Were the former times better than these? Has the world grown worse as it has grown older? Has there been no progress, but only decline?

My friends, the people who lived in this village six hundred years ago were living a life hugely below the level of yours. They were more wretched in their poverty, they were incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity, they were worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed; they were sufferers from loathsome diseases which you knew nothing of; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth, and I do not believe there were any giants in the earth in those days. The death-rate among the children must have been tremendous. The disregard of human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive it. There was everything to harden, nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and fierceness. Judged by our modern standards, the people of our county village were beyond all doubt coa.r.s.er, more brutal, and more wicked, than they are. Progress is slow, but there has been progress. The days that are, are not what they should be; we still want reforms, we need much reforming ourselves; but the former days were not better than these, whatever these may be; and if the next six hundred years exhibit as decided an advance as the last six centuries have brought about, and if your children's children of the coming time rise as much above your level in sentiment, material comfort, knowledge, intelligence, and refinement, as you have risen above the level which your ancestors attained to, though even then they will not cease to desire better things, they will nevertheless have cause for thankfulness such as you may well feel to-night as you look back upon what you have escaped from, and reflect upon what you are.