of captives within these walls could hardly be afforded than by the inspection of this dreadful hole. Many have been the vicissitudes of Bungay Castle. At Whitsuntide, 1140, Stephen came with his army on Hugh Bigod, and took Castellum de Bunie,' which he soon restored. This policy of deprivation and restoration was repeated by Henry II., but Bigod a third time defied the reigning sovereign, taking the side of the King's rebellious sons in 1174. It was on this occasion that he is said by tradition to have uttered the well-known words: Were I in my castle of Bungay, upon the river Wavenay, I would not care for the King of Cocknay.' He that seeks the origin of this story is not so likely to find it, as to find the origin of the modern-antique ballad, which appears for the first time in the pages of Suckling.

The ruined site and the earldom were restored to Roger, son of Hugh, in 1189, by Richard I., but the place remained desolate for nearly a century. In 1281 Edward I. issued to another Roger Bigod, now not only Earl of Norfolk but also Earl Marshal, the usual license to crenellate his mansion of Bungay.

It is remarkable that the latter part of the eleventh century witnessed no independent monastic foundations. in Suffolk. It is not till A.D. 1120 that the Benedictine nuns, non-affiliated, were settled at Redlingfield. There were, however, three cells to abbeys in Normandy by the end of William the Conqueror's reign, two of them to Bernay (Creting St. Mary and Eye), and one to Greistein (Creting St. Olave), besides Rumburgh, which Blakere and other Benedictine brethren from St. Bene't's-atHulm formed about the same time.

The learned and wealthy abbey of Bec, in Normandy, over which Archbishops Lanfranc and Anselm presided in their earlier days, had cells at Blakenham and Clare. William Martel founded Snape, A.D. 1099, dependent on St. John of Colchester; and Felixstowe, which is supposed to have been removed to the neighbourhood of Walton Church, was made a cell to Rochester by Roger Bigod

early in the reign of Henry I. The foundation at Hoxne originated from the gift of the church there, and the chapel near the spot where St. Edmund was slain, to the Norwich priory by Bishop Herbert de Losinga, A.D. IIOI. Thus arose a small cell in that village, charged with the care of the lamps before St. Edmund's image, to which pilgrimages were constantly made.

Colne Priory in Essex, a daughter of Abingdon, was in charge of the small house at Edwardstone, which does not appear to have lasted quite half a century (11141160), at the expiration of which time two secular priests were appointed to pray in Edwardstone Church for the founder's soul, Hubert de Montchensy, and the possessions passed to Colne.

Another little house, Wickham Skeith, founded by Sir Robert de Salcovilla, or Sackville, belonged, like Snape, to Colchester.

If Norman influence is felt in the foregoing instances, it may well be expected in the Cluniac and Cistercian foundations. We have two of each in Suffolk, all cells: the Cluniacs, Mendham and Wangford; the Cistercians, Sibton and Coddenham. The glories of the great abbey of Cluny have departed. The little 'one-horse' town on the higher ground which forms the watershed between the Saone and the Loire is to most people nothing more than a name, if so much; and of the multitudes who visit the Musée de Cluny in Paris, a small percentage indeed will think of it as the former palace of the wealthy Abbots of Cluny.

Wealth, learning, and state, characterized this Order, and each showed its reproductive power. The great house at Lewes, with its Cluniac double transepts, was founded by William, Earl of Warenne, and his wife, Gundrada, considered by the late Professor Freeman as a daughter of the Conqueror's Queen, Matilda, by her former husband, Gerbod,1 in the year 1077. The gratitude for their kindly reception at Cluny did not exhaust 1 Freeman, 'Norm. Conq.,' iii., App. O, p. 660.

itself in Sussex.

The next year saw the Castle Acre Priory begun, with the help of four monks from Lewes, and more of the same Order appeared at Thetford, A.D. 1104. Mendham was a cell to Castle Acre, and Wangford to Thetford, both being, as it were, granddaughters of Lewes, and great-grand-daughters of Cluny. The traveller along the Waveney Valley will see on the Suffolk side of that river, between Shotford and Mendham bridges, a ragged but venerable mass of masonry 'in the place called Hurst or Bruninhurst, being then a woody isle.' It is so little above the river as to raise a feeling of surprise how these Cluniacs could have escaped the floods to which the Waveney has been at all times subject, and certainly to dispel the idea that the water-level used to be higher than it now is. Much of the beautiful Norman arcading has been removed to Mendham Place, a mile or two distant, where it stands as a curious comment on the taste and fancy of those who transplanted it. The foundation dates from 1140, when William, son of Roger de Huntingfield, gave the isle of Medenham,' or the place of meadows, to the Castle Acre Cluniacs, on condition that they should build a house and place at least eight of their monks there.

About 30 feet of wall on the south side of Wangford Church will be all that a visitor can see of that Cluniac cell, founded by a steward of the royal household, whom Bishop Tanner takes to be identical with Eudo Dapifer, founder of St. John's, Colchester, though Leland's version of the name is Doudo Asini. The date is circa 1160. Contrasting itself with the Cluniacs stands before us the severe Order of Cistercians, ascetics to the core. They had existed at Citeaux only thirty years, when they came to England in 1128, backed by the great name of St. Bernard. Wealth indeed was theirs. They could not have avoided it. Learning was theirs in abundance, but not state. The 'cell' system was replaced by visitations from the abbey from which the house originated.

Thus Sibton, being an offshoot from Wardon in Bedfordshire, was liable to a visitation by that Abbot, and, in like manner, Wardon could be visited by the Abbot of Fountains, Fountains by Clairvaux, and Clairvaux by Citeaux, the mother of them all.1

The Sibton house was founded in 1149 or 1150 by William de Cheney, greatly helped at the time by his daughter, the Lady Margery de Cressy.

Eustace de Mere appears to have failed of the purpose intended in the Coddenham foundation, and eventually to have turned it over to the Austin canons of his establishment in Royston. That it was intended to be Cistercian is clear by his confirming the grant of Coddenham Church to the convent, which he describes as of the same Order as that of Appleton in Yorkshire, a Cistercian nunnery.

Castles and abbeys are manifestly but small factors in this portion of the history of Suffolk. In the north-west the great abbey of St. Edmund grew and prospered, and its liberty, granted by Edward the Confessor, contained the hundreds of Cosford, Babergh, Risbridge, Lackford, Blackburn, Thedwastre, and Thingoe; and the halfhundred of Exning, consisting of that parish and Newmarket St. Mary's. As the abbey grew, so its dependencies throve.

Over the rest of the county also a slow and sure development went on. Subsequent changes in architecture have swept much of the Norman work away, but a few grand specimens remain, and many a church-wall of undressed pebbles and flints, now elevated and pierced with third-pointed windows, is the original wall of a little single Norman church.

We find in Domesday Book, on the whole, a church to each parish, served by the clerk, nominated in most cases by the Lord of the Manor, whose predecessors had erected the building, and from whose acres came the tithe. Such churches we may find at Wiston on the Stour, and at

1 W. H. St. John Hope, in Proceedings of Suffolk Institute of Archeology,' viii., part i., p. 55.

Wordwell, on the heath country between Bury St. Edmunds and Brandon. The nave at Santon Downham and the chancel at Lakenheath are of the same character. Eyke, between Woodbridge and the sea, had a central Norman tower, of which the massive arches are still standing. Little Saxham tower is crested by an elegant circular arcade. At Somerton, Ousden, Mettingham, Wissett, Hargrave, Hawstead, Horham, Kelsale, and other places, are Norman doorways, with that variety of moulding for which the style is remarkable. The beautiful west front of Westhall has been disfigured by a tower of fifteenth-century work built up to it, against which it seems mutely to appeal. Huntingfield and Polstead have excellent arches of this period. But the crown of all the Suffolk work is the great Norman tower at Bury St. Edmunds, originally built as a gateway, restored within my own recollection, and serving now as the campanile for St. James's Church, whence sound the fine ten bells placed there in 1785.

At once comely and massive, it must be seen to be appreciated. The late Mr. J. H. Parker, to whose action we owe so much preservation of architectural relics, as well as accounts of them, says of it: This tower affords a valuable specimen of rich early Norman work, of the shallow character, executed with the axe, and not with the chisel. It was built in 1095. A shallow porch has been added in later Norman work."

1 'Churches of Suffolk,' No. 538.