The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (48 page)

The northern wind was the clanging trumpeter, who, with
the terrible blast of his throat, in one yellow heap or plump,
⁴⁸
clustered or congested them together, even as the western gales in Holland right over against them have wrought unruly havoc and threshed and swept the sands so before them that they have choked or clammed up the middle walk or door of the Rhene, and made it as stable a clod-mould or turf-ground as any hedger can drive stake in. Caster, two mile distant from this new Yarmouth we entreat of, is inscribed to be that old Yarmouth whereof there are specialties to be seen in the oldest writers, and yet some visible apparent tokens remain of a haven that ran up to it, and there had his entrance into the sea (by aged fishermen commonly termed ‘Grub's Haven'), though now it be gravelled up and the stream or tide-gate turned another way. But this is most warrantable: the alpha of all the Yarmouths it was, and not the omega correspondently, and from her withered root they branch the high ascent of their genealogy.
Omnium rerum vicissitudo est
:
⁴⁹
one's falling is another's rising, and so fell it out with that ruined dorp
⁵⁰
or hamlet which after it had relapsed into the Lord's hands for want of reparations,
⁵¹
and there were not men enough in it to defend the shore from invasion, one Cerdicus, a plashing
⁵²
Saxon, that had revelled here and there with his battleaxe, on the bordering banks of the decrepit over-worn village now surnamed Gorlstone, threw forth his anchor, and, with the assistance of his spear instead of a pikestaff, leapt aground like a sturdy brute, and his yeomen bold cast their heels in their neck,
⁵³
and frisked it after him, and thence sprouteth that obscene appellation of Sarding
⁵⁴
Sands, with the draff of the carterly hoblobs
⁵⁵
thereabouts concoct
⁵⁶
or disgeast
⁵⁷
for a scripture verity, when the right Christendom
of it is Cerdick Sands, or Cerdick Shore, of Cerdicus so denominated, who was the first maylord or captain of the morris dance that on those embenched shelves
⁵⁸
stamped his footing, where cods and dogfish sworn (not a warp of weeks
⁵⁹
forerunning), and till he had given the onset, they balked
⁶⁰
them as quicksands. By and by, after his jumping upon them, the Saxons, for that Garianonum, or Yarmouth, that had given up the ghost, in those slimy plashy fields of Gorlstone trowelled up
⁶¹
a second Yarmouth, abutting on the west side of the shore of this Great Yarmouth that is. But feeling the air to be unwholesome and disagreeing with them, to the overwhart
⁶²
brink or verge of the flood, that writ all one style of Cerdick Sands, they dislodged with bag and baggage, and there laid the foundation of a third Yarmouth
Quam nulla potest abolere vetustas
,
⁶³
that I hope will hold up her head till doomsday.

In this Yarmouth, as Master Camden saith, there were seventy inhabitants, or householders, that paid scot and lot in the time of Edward the Confessor, but a chronographical Latin table, which they have hanging up in their Guildhall, of all their transmutations from their cradlehood, infringeth this a little, and flatters her she is a great deal younger; in a fair text hand texting unto us how, in the Scepterdom of Edward the Confessor, the sands first began to grow into sight at a low water, and more shoulder at the mouth of the river Hirus or Jerus, whereupon it was dubbed Iernmouth or Yarmouth. And then there were two channels, one on the north, another on the south, wherethrough the fishermen did wander and waver up to Norwich and divers parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, all the fenny Lerna betwixt, that with reeds is so embristled, being (as I have forspoke or spoken
tofore)
Madona Amphitrite
, fluctuous demeans or fee simple.
⁶⁴

From the City of Norwich on the east part, it is sixteen mile disjunct or dislocated. And though betwixt the sea and the salt flood it be interposed, yet in no place about it can you dig six-foot deep, but you shall have a gushing spring of fresh or sweet water for all uses, as apt and accommodate as Saint Winifred's Well,
⁶⁵
or Tower Hill water at London, so much praised and sought after. My tables
⁶⁶
are not yet one quarter emptied of my notes out of their table, which because it is, as it were, a sea rutter
⁶⁷
diligently kept amongst them from age to age, of all their ebbs and flows, and winds that blew with or against them, I tie myself to more precisely, and thus it leadeth on.

In the time of King Harold and William the Conqueror, this sand of Yarmouth grew to a settled lump, and was as dry as the sands of Arabia, so that thronging theatres of people, as well aliens as Englishmen, hived thither about the selling of fish and herring, from Saint Michael to Saint Martin, and there built sutlers'
⁶⁸
booths and tabernacles, to canopy their heads in from the rheum of the heavens, or the clouds-dissolving cataracts. King William Rufus having got the golden wreath about his head, one Herbertus, Bishop of the See of Norwich, hearing of the gangs of good fellows that hurtled and hustled thither as thick as it had been to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket or our Lady of Walsingham, builded a certain chapel there for the service of God and salvation of souls.

In the reign of King Henry the First, King Stephen, King Henry the Second and Richard de corde Lion, the apostasy of the sands from the yalping world was so great that they
joined themselves to the mainland of Eastflege, and whole tribes of males and females trotted, barged it thither, to build and inhabit, which the said kings (whiles they wielded their swords temporal) animadvertized of, assigned a ruler or governor over them, that was called the King's Provost; and that manner of provostship or government remained in full force and virtue all their four throneships, alias a hundred year, even till the inauguration of King John, in whose days the forwritten Bishop of Norwich, seeing the numbrous increase of souls of both kinds that there had framed their nests, and meant not to forsake them till the Soul Bell
⁶⁹
tolled them thence, pulled down his chapel, and what by himself and the devout oblations and donatives of the fishermen upon every return with their nets full, re-edified and raised it to a church of that magnitude as, under minsters and cathedrals, very queasy it admits any hail-fellow-well-met.
⁷⁰
And the Church of St Nicholas he hallowed it, whence Yarmouth Road
⁷¹
is nicknamed the Road of Saint Nicholas. King John, to comply and keep consort with his ancestors in furthering of this new water-work, in the ninth year of the engirting his annointed brows with the refulgent ophir circle, and Anno
1209
, set a fresh gloss upon it, of the town or free borough of Yarmouth, and furnished it with many substantial privileges and liberties, to have and to hold the same of him and his race for fifty-five pound yearly. In Anno
1240
it perched up to be governed by bailies, and in a narrower limit than the forty years undermeal
⁷²
of the seven sleepers,
⁷³
it had so much tow to her distaff and was so well lined and bumbasted,
⁷⁴
that in a sea battle her ships and men conflicted
⁷⁵
the cinq ports, and
therein so laid about them that they burnt, took and spoiled the most of them, whereof such of them as were sure flights (saving a reverence of their manhoods) ran crying and complaining to King Henry the Second, who, with the advice of his council, set a fine of a thousand pound on the Yarmouth men's heads for that offence, which fine in the tenth of his reign he dispensed with and pardoned.

Edward the First and Edward the Second likewise let them lack for no privileges, changing it from a borough to a port town, and there setting up a custom house with the appurtenances for the loading and unloading of ships. Henry the Third in the fortieth of his empery cheered up their bloods with two charters more, and in Anno
1262
and forty-five of his court-keeping, he permitted them to wall in their town and moat it about with a broad ditch and to have a prison or jail in it. In the swinge of his trident he constituted two Lords Admirals over the whole navy of England, which he disposed in two parts: the one to bear sway from the Thames' mouth northward, called the northern navy, the other to shape his course from the Thames' mouth to the westward, termed the western navy. And over this northern navy, for Admiral, commissionated one John Peerbrown, burgess of the town of Yarmouth, and over the western navy one Sir Robert Laburnus, knight.

But Peerbrown did not only hold his office all the time of that king, doing plausible service, but was again re-admiral'd by Edward the Third, and so died. In the fourteenth of whose reign he met with the French King's navy, being four-hundred sail, near to the haven of Sluse, and there so sliced and slashed them and tore their planks to mammocks
⁷⁶
and their lean guts to kite's meat that their best mercy was fire and water which hath no mercy, and not a victualler or a drumbler
⁷⁷
of them hanging in the wind aloof, but was rib-roasted or had some of his ribs crushed with their stone-darting engines, no ordinance then being invented. This Edward the Third, of his propensive mind
towards them, united to Yarmouth Kirtley Road, from it seven mile vacant, and, sowing in the furrows that his predecessors had entered, hained
⁷⁸
the price of their privileges and not brought them down one barley kernel.

Richard the Second, upon a discord twixt Leystofe and Yarmouth, after divers lawdays and arbitrary mandates to the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk directed about it, in proper person
1385
came to Yarmouth, and, in his parliament the year ensuing, confirmed unto it the liberties of Kirtley Road, the only motive of all their contention. Henry the Fifth, or the fifth of the Henries that ruled over us, abridged them not a mite of their purchased prerogatives, but permitted them to build a bridge over their haven and aided and furthered them in it. Henry the Sixth, Edward the Fourth, Henry the Seventh and King Henry the Eight, with his daughters Queen Mary and our
Chara deum soboles
,
⁷⁹
Queen Elizabeth, have not withered up their hands in signing and subscribing to their requests, but our virgin rectoress most of all hath showered down her bounty upon them, granting them greater grants than ever they had, besides by-matters of the clerk of the market-ship,
⁸⁰
and many other benevolences towards the reparation of their port. This and every town hath his backwinters or frosts that nip it in the blade (as not the clearest sun-shine but hath his shade, and there is a time of sickness as well as of health). The backwinter, the frost-biting, the eclipse or shade, and sickness of Yarmouth was a great sickness or plague in it
1348
, of which in one year seven thousand and fifty people toppled up their heels there. The new building at the west end of the church was begun there
1330
, which, like the imperfect works of King's College in Cambridge, or Christchurch in Oxford, have too costly large foundations to be ever finished.

It is thought, if the town had not been so scourged and
eaten up by that mortality, out of their own purses they would have proceeded with it, but now they have gone a nearer way to the wood, for with wooden galleries in the church that they have, and stairy degrees of seats in them, they make as much room to sit and hear as a new west-end would have done.

The length and breadth of Yarmouth I promised to show you. Have with you,
⁸¹
have with you! But first look wistly
⁸²
upon the walls, which, if you mark, make a stretched-out quadrangle with the haven. They are in compass, from the south cheans
⁸³
to the north cheans, two thousand, one hundred and fourscore yards. They have towers upon them sixteen; mounts underfonging
⁸⁴
and enflanking them two of old, now three, which have their thundering tools to compel Diego Spaniard to duck and strike the wind cholic in his paunch if he prance too near them and will not vail
⁸⁵
to the Queen of England. The compass about the wall of this new mount is five-hundred foot, and in the measure of yards eight-score and seven. The breadth of the foundation nine foot; the depth within ground eleven. The heighth to the setting thereof fifteen foot, and in the breadth, at the setting of it, five foot three inches, and the procerous
⁸⁶
stature of it (so embaling
⁸⁷
and girdling in this mount) twenty foot and six inches. Gates to let in her friends and shut out her enemies Yarmouth hath ten; lanes sevenscore. As for her streets, they are as long as threescore streets in London, and yet they divide them but into three. Void ground in the town from the walls to the houses, and from the houses to the haven, is not within the verge of my geometry. The liberties of it on the fresh water one way, as namely from Yarmouth to St Toolies
⁸⁸
in Beckles water, are ten mile, and from Yarmouth to Hardlie Cross another way, ten mile. In all which fords or meanders none can attach,
⁸⁹
arrest, distress, but their officers; and if any drown themselves in them, their crowners
⁹⁰
sit upon them.

I had a crotchet in my head, here to have given the reins to my pen, and run astray throughout all the coast towns of England, digging up their dilapidations, and raking out of the dust-heap or charnel house of tenebrous eld the rottenest relic of their monuments, and bright-scoured the canker-eaten brass of their first bricklayers and founders, and commented and paralogized
⁹¹
on their condition in the present and in the pretertense;
⁹²
not for any love or hatred I bear them, but that I would not be snibbed
⁹³
or have it cast in my dish that therefore I praise Yarmouth so rantantingly,
⁹⁴
because I never elsewhere baited my horse, or took my bow and arrows and went to bed. Which leasing,
⁹⁵
had I been let alone, I would have put to bed with a recumbentibus,
⁹⁶
by uttering the best that with a safe conscience mought be uttered of the best or worst of them all; and notwithstanding all at best that tongue could speak or heart could think of them, they should bate me an ace of
⁹⁷
Yarmouth. Much braintossing and breaking of my skull it cost me, but farewell it; and farewell the bailies of the cinq ports, whose primordiat
⁹⁸
Genethliaca
⁹⁹
was also dropping out of my inkhorn with the silver ore of their baronry by William the Conqueror conveyed over to them at that nick
¹⁰⁰
when he firmed and rubricked the Kentishmen's gavelkind
¹⁰¹
of the son to inherit at fifteen, and the felony of the father not to draw a foot of land from the son, and amongst the sons the portion to be equally distributed; and if there were no sons, much good do it the daughters, for they were to share it after the same tenure, and might alienate it how they would, either by legacy or bargain, without the consent of the lord.