The Ancient House,' Ipswich, only needs to be named, while there is hardly a town in the county which cannot show at least portions of an example.

The guild-houses at Lavenham, Hadleigh, Kelsale, Laxfield, and Fressingfield are amongst the best remaining, the latter adorned with a figure of St. Margaret trampling on the dragon.

Built without substructure, and merely resting on the soil, when medieval houses decayed the traces of them soon vanished. One in the parish of Weybread was burnt down in the autumn of 1892, and few would now, little more than two years after the fire, notice that there had been a house on the spot. If we are sometimes surprised at the existence of solitary churches, we may remember that the clusters of houses which were once round them have left no sign at their departure.

We must not leave this period without a few words about its Suffolk poet, John Lydgate, a native of that village, in the Woodland country, and a Benedictine of the great house of St. Edmund. He was an imitator of Chaucer, but, to use Thomas Fuller's words about somebody else, he had the fiddle and the bow, but not the rosin of his original. Ritson has a list of 251 pieces of his in the Bibliographia Poetica,' and even this is probably not exhaustive. Exhausting, doubtless, most of his compositions are. Even the 'Storie of Thebes,' which the author puts in as an extra Canterbury tale, borrowed from Statius and Boccaccio, is pronounced exceedingly dull and prolix, and is no better than it is called. Like many others of that time, he was a travelled man, and had overlaid his English wit with French and Italian lore, which he had rather acquired than absorbed. Pilgrimages, indeed, proved a most important link between nations, and fostered exchanges in produce, literature and politics, as well as in hagiology. If foreigners came to Walsingham and Bury, East Anglians went to Rome and Santiago. Of the latter I possess a notable memorial. In the year 1878 I was at Dunwich with one of my old Yarmouth

boys,1 trying to discover some traces of Route IX. in Antonine's 'Itinerary.' We were just on the point of departing when I asked a man who was at work at the Gray Friars' whether anything had been found lately. He produced an undistinguished scrap of copper, thickly encrusted with mud, which I bought of him there and then. It took some days' soaking to remove the earthen crust, and then came to light a little copper Santiago 'cockle,' a 'shell of Galice,' as we find it sometimes called. No doubt it had been dropped there by some Suffolk pilgrim who bitterly mourned its loss; but it has fallen into loving hands, and, indeed, so charmed my deceased friend, Mr. Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, that he had it photographed, engraved and recorded.2

These excursions were not all pleasure. A humorist, who writes as though from painful experience, has depicted the miseries of the voyage to 'Seynt Jamys,' or, rather, to Corunna, the nearest port to Compostella. A qualmish passenger ejaculates:

'Steward, felow! A pot of bere!'

and is cheerfully answered:

'Ye shalle have, sir, with good chere,

Anon alle of the best.'

By the time the dinner-cloth is laid all appetite is gone:

'Thys mene whyle the pylgryms ly,

And have theyr bowlys fast theym by,

And cry aftyr hote malmsy;

"Thow helpe for to restore."

And som wold have a saltyd tost,

ffor they myght ete neyther sode (boiled) ne rost ;

A man myght sone pay for theyr cost,

As for oo (one) day or twayne.

Som layde theyr bookys on theyr kne,

And rad so long they myght nat se ;—
"Allas! myne hede wolle cleve on thre!"
Thus seyth another certayne."

1 Mr. Arthur B. Cooper, of Westwood Lodge, Blythburgh.

? See his paper' On the Tomb of a Pilgrim at Haverfordwest.' ''The Pilgrim's Sea-voyage' (Early English Text Society, 1867).

In this forlorn condition we will in imagination leave the owner of the Compostella scallop, and turn to the Home Department, and in particular to the election of members of the House of Commons.

Hitherto the County Court seems to have been open to all comers, as before the Norman Conquest, and in case of difference of opinion the rough and ready show of hands settled the matter. In the eighth year of Henry VI., 1429, on the prayer of the Commons, this was changed. The franchise was unmanageable, and the forty-shilling freeholder was invented. Sheriffs could examine on oath, and be punished for not maintaining the restriction. Knights returned contrary to the ordinance were to lose their wages. The result was undoubtedly the aggrandizement of the nobles, and our county affords an excellent instance of its working. When, at the Parliament held at Bury in 1447, the Beauforts and William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, had the ascendancy, the 'good Duke Humphrey' of Gloucester was arrested the day after the Houses met, and was found dead in the course of a few days, not without strong suspicion of foul play. Then came the reaction. Suffolk fell, and his relation, Archbishop Stafford, retired from the Chancellorship, which was reoccupied by Cardinal Kempe, a man raised from the ranks.

In these struggles there can be no doubt that influence from high quarters was freely used. It comes to the surface in letters of the Duke of Norfolk and of the Earl of Oxford to John Paston in 1450, the former written from Bury, and the latter from East Winch in Norfolk. The latter encloses a 'sedell' (schedule) of the names of the persons to be chosen for Norfolk-Sir William Chambirlayn and Henry Grey. Grey was returned with Sir Miles Stapleton for Norfolk, but another Chambirlayn (Sir Roger) and Sir Edmund Mulso sat for Suffolk. Of these two, the Duchess of Norfolk had at the same time recommended Chambirlayn.1 The residence of the Mowbrays

1 Gairdner's 'Paston Letters,' i. 160, 161; Cox, 'Ancient Parliamentary Elections,' p. 115.

at Framlingham, and their ancient possessions at Bungay and elsewhere, gave them great weight in Suffolk.

6

At the same time, the first duties of governors, the keeping of the peace and the protection of life and property, were miserably neglected. Jack Cade and his merry men had their humble but sincere imitators in East Anglia in 1452, under Captain John AmendAlle,' who seems to have been a certain Roger Chirche, alias Bylaugh. Their doings were mainly confined to Norfolk, but on 'the Saterday next before Palme Soneday' (April 1) we find that they or some of the same kind were at work in Suffolk, when Alredis sone of Erll Some, fast be Framyngham, was pullid ought of a hous and kyllid.' Fourteen of the gang are named as 'gadderyng to hem [them] gret multitude of mysrewled people,' and keeping 'a frunture and a forslet' at the house of Robert Ledeham, whence they issued, sometimes thirty strong and more, ‘jakked and salattyd' (in coats of mail and helmets), and did many 'orible and abhomynable dedis.' From the petition that went up to the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Kempe, Postwick Wood, near Norwich, was regarded as their headquarters. In the case of the Earl Soham outrage, however, the information falls short of connecting the murder of young Aldred with Ledeham's gang. Whedyr any of the seid felechap were there or not men kan not sey, there be of hem so many of wheche many be unknowe people." This, be it remembered, took place almost in sight of John Mowbray's ducal castle at Framlingham.

It is probable that a wholesome extinction of these savages came about through the Wars of the Roses; otherwise those sad struggles affected our county only indirectly. The Earl of Oxford was very powerful in Essex, and not without influence in Norfolk, but in Suffolk his name did not go far. He and the Duke of Norfolk, the latter with 6,000 men, are related to have turned up at St. Albans the day after the first battle 1 Gairdner, Paston Let ers,' i. 236, etc.

there. The Duke's father and the Yorkist claimant had married sisters; somehow, nevertheless, Norfolk was in alliance with Lancaster. A neighbour, Philip Wentworth, who carried the King's standard, 'kest hit down and fled,' and the narrator of the battle adds, 'Myn Lord Norffolk seyth he shal be hanged therfore, and so is he worthy. He is in Suffolk now. He der not come about the King.' This is not the last time that a Wentworth of Nettlestead will be named in the annals of the county. The writer of this letter is one William Barker.

Thomas Playter, or Playters, of Sotterley, tells us some of the detail of the battles in this devastating civil war, but it is all at second hand, and the slowness with which intelligence travelled in those days is surprising. Playter, whose brass remains in Sotterley Church, where he was interred in 1470, was much in London on business connected with the Pastons. From the tone of his letters the courts seem to have sat, and their decisions to have commanded respect; while in the North the midwinter snows were crimsoned with blood at Wakefield, and the choristers, after chanting the Palm Sunday anthem at York, might have heard outside the cathedral the deadly din at Towton.

result of the
Playter and
'er' (sooner)

The battle of Towton was fought on March 29, 1461, and on the following day Edward IV. entered York, but no tidings arrived till Easter Eve at London, which 'unto this day,' say Playter and William Paston, writing as soon as the news came to hand, 'was as sorry cite as myght.' The letter which conveyed the battle was from Edward IV. to his mother. his friend excuse themselves for sending no because they were without intelligence, and as the messenger could hardly have reached Suffolk till Monday, and Norfolk till Tuesday, a good ten days must have intervened between the battle and the knowledge of it in North Suffolk. The lordship of Framlingham about this time passed from one John Mowbray to another, and the Duke of Suffolk was more occupied with advancing his personal interests than in affairs of State. What the