Norwich, and two of London, being contributors to its possessions. The gate-house exists comparatively uninjured, and there are other remains.

Kersey, as far as evidence goes, was a hospital or free chapel of St. Mary and St. Antony, converted into a priory of Austin Canons by Nesta de Cokefield, widow of Thomas de Burgos, in 1219. Her retention of her maiden name after her marriage is suggestive of her being an heiress, and possibly she is identical with the babe of three months old, the orphan of Adam de Cokefield, about whose wardship we saw Abbot Sampson withstanding Richard Coeur-de-Lion.

Two houses in Ipswich have had different destinies : that called by the name of the Holy Trinity, or Christ Church, after various changes, just lately purchased by the municipality for a public park; the other, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, passing into Wolsey's great projected college in that town. It had a cell at Letheringham. Woodbridge belongs to the latter part of the twelfth century. Three generations of Ernaldus Rufus or Rous joined in the foundation, the patronage of which soon passed from their family to the convent. The priors were often natives of the county: Joh. de Athelington, Joh. Brundish, Tho. de Troston, etc.

Little enough can be seen of or recorded about Alborne, in the ancient parish of Hallowtree, between Ipswich St. Clement and Nacton, Chipley in Poslingford, or Dodnash in Bentley; but the traveller to Yarmouth may catch a sight of the remains of St. Olave's Priory in Herringfleet, on the left hand, just after passing St. Olave's Station. Here is still commemorated the name of that fierce old Christian King whose endeavour to propagate the Gospel of peace by sword and flames ended in his defeat and death at Sticklestad, in A.D. 1030. The miracles wrought by his body, at the cathedral at Trondhjem, were known far beyond Norwegian limits. From the connection of this priory with the ferry across the Waveney, hard by, it is easy to see what works of hospitality were done here in

days when roads were foul, water rough, and weather relentless.

When St. Norbert of Cleves, A.D. 1119, was seeking a place where he might establish a house of Austin Canons on a more rigorous rule, which was to include a vegetable diet, a meadow in the Forest of Coucy was pointed out to him in a dream (pratum monstratum), from which arose the White Canons' name Premonstratensian.

Their solitary Suffolk house, founded near the sea in 1182, was afterwards moved inwards to Leiston, though the old site was never deserted. In 1531, John Grene, a canon of Butley, gave up his position there, choosing to be a hermit in the original Premonstratensian building. The remains of Leiston, interesting in themselves, are rendered more beautiful by the wall-flowers which luxuriate on those gray walls.

Whatever may have been the intentions of Robert d'Arbrissel, founder of the house of Fontevrault, with regard to a mixed society, they did not take effect in Suffolk. The two houses, Campsey and Flixton, of that Order, are for nuns only. The former was founded by Theobald de Valoines for his two sisters, of whom one was the first Prioress, and others who might join them. The date is within the reign of Richard I. Important as it was, hardly anything of it remains, and nothing can be shown at Flixton, founded about sixty years after Campsey, but the site. The inventory of Elizabeth Wright, the last Prioress, in the Record Office, contains the usual domestic articles, and probably not more than seven nuns were living there at the Dissolution. This completes the Augustinian foundations, with the exception of the friars.

L'

CHAPTER VIII.

EARLY PLANTAGENET TIMES-continued.

ET us descend for a minute in the scale of creation,

and recall the wonderful Fish of Orford.

In the year 1180 . . . . near unto Orford in Suffolk, certain fishers took in their nets a fish, having the shape of a man in all points, which fish was kept by Bartholemew (sic) de Glandevile in the castle of Orford six months and more; he spake not a word; all manner of meats he did gladly eat, but most greedily raw fish when he had pressed out the juice; oftentimes he was brought to the church, but never shewed any sign of adoration: at length, being not well looked to, he stole to the Sea, and never was seen after.'

So writes Baker, after Ralph of Coggeshall, and it would be negligent not to record the phenomenon, though it comes into the picture awkwardly. It is useless to try to harmonize it with its surroundings. The next topic is the Coming of the Friars, than which anything more real and less grotesque is not to be found in the nature of things, and even St. Antony's Sermon to the Fishes is a feeble link between the two subjects.

The times were evil, and no better in England than elsewhere. In the Court, conjugal infidelity had been followed by parricidal rebellion. In the towns, filth and vice reigned supreme. In the country, the cry of the op

1 Chronicle, p. 58.

pressed went up to heaven, for few on earth seem to have heard or heeded. Justice slumbered, and iniquity throve

apace.

When the miserable Henry II. lay down in sorrow at the castle of Chinon, and his lion-hearted son succeeded him, things went no better. Richard was hardly ever in England. The Christian world was humbled to the dust by the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, and no efforts of the Crusaders availed for its recovery for more than forty years. The long interdict in John's reign had only paralysed religion instead of terrifying the nation to proceed to the King's deposition. No better description of the epoch can be given than in the words of Dr. Jessopp :1

'For eight years England had lain under a terrible interdict; for most of the time only a single bishop had remained in England. John had small need to tax the people; he lived upon the plunder of bishops and abbots. The churches were desolate; the worship of God in large districts almost came to an end. Only in the Cistercian monasteries, and in them only for a time, and to a very limited extent, were the rites of religion continued. It is hardly conceivable that the places of those clergy who died during the eight years of interdict were supplied by fresh ordinations, and some excuse may have been found for the outrageous demands of the Pope to present to English benefices in the fact that many cures must have been vacant, and the supply of qualified Englishmen to succeed them had fallen short.'

The Dominicans, Black Friars, or Friar Preachers, who were instituted four years before the Franciscans, also preceded them in their appearance in England, 1221.

As elsewhere, so in Suffolk, they threw themselves into the misery of the towns, standing between the poor man and the devil after the manner of the earlier days of John Wesley and his followers, of the Primitive Methodists, and of the Salvation Army. Their foundations were at 1 'The Coming of the Friars,' p. 31.

Dunwich, Ipswich,1 and Sudbury. The first whereof being threatened and finally swallowed up by the sea, a design is mentioned for the removal of the convent to Blythburgh, but there is no hint of anything being really effected, and the Dunwich Black Friars probably died out without issue. We do not hear of any opposition to the Dominicans, but the Franciscans, Gray Friars, or Friars Minor, were as unwelcome to the Benedictines in Bury as ever an Evangelical of the earlier decades of this century could have been to an old-fashioned rector of the Nimrod, Ramrod and Fishing-rod type. For six years they hung on like bull-dogs, but the abbey won in the end, and procured an order from Pope Urban IV. for their removal, which was carried out on November 19, 1263, being the eve of St. Edmund's Day. They retired to Babwell, just beyond the liberty of St. Edmund, where from time to time they received help from sympathizing friends-Clopton, Drury, Peyton, Howard, Bedingfeld, and others. So does persecution ever fail of its end. The Gray Friars' Gate and part of the wall yet stands on the north of the town. At Dunwich, too, much of the wall remains, and here one day when I was Roman-roadhunting, I became possessor of a Compostella cockle or shell of Galice, sign of a pilgrimage to Santiago; but of their buildings at Ipswich, west of St. Nicholas's Church, there is no vestige. The White Nuns of the Order of St. Clare, or Nuns Minoresses, had a small abbey at Rokehall in Bruisyard parish. The foundress was Matilda of Lancaster, a descendant of the well-known Edmund Crouchback, brother of our Edward I. On the death of her husband, the Earl of Ulster, she entered the Austin nunnery at Campsey, but obtained permission from Pope Urban V. to exchange for the Order of St. Clare, which at that time had no habitation in England. A small college of secular priests had been removed from Campsey to Bruisyard, but dissolved in 1366, and the buildings became the sole Suffolk house of the Minoresses.

1 The Grammar School occupies the site.