Roars of laughter greeted the reply, as all the East Anglians present knew that ‘hull’ meant ‘throw,’ and ‘dickey’ is Suffolk for ‘donkey,’ but some of the Cockney visitors present were for a while quite unable to enjoy the joke. It is to be feared the three R’s were not much patronized in East Anglia, if it be true that some forty or fifty years ago, in such a respectable town as Sudbury, it was the fashion for some fifty of the leading inhabitants to meet in the large bar-parlour of the old White Horse to hear the leading paper of the eastern counties read out by a scholar and elocutionist known as John. For the discharge of this important duty he was paid a pound a year, and provided with as much free liquor as he liked, and there were people who considered that the Saturday newspaper-reading did them more good than what they heard at church the next day. In some cases our East Anglian dialect is merely a survival of old English, as when we say ‘axe’ for ‘ask.’ We find in Chaucer: ‘It is but foly and wrong wenging To axe so outrageous thing.’ In his ‘Envious Man,’ Gowing made ‘axeth’ to rhyme with ‘taxeth.’ No word is more common in Suffolk than ‘fare’; a pony is a ‘hobby’; a thrush is a ‘mavis’; a chest is a ‘kist’; a shovel is a ‘skuppet’; a chaffinch is a ‘spink.’ If a man is upset in his mind, he tells us he is ‘wholly stammed,’ and the Suffolk ‘yow’ is at least as old as Chaucer, who wrote: ‘What do you ye do there, quod she, Come, and if it lyke yow To daucen daunceth with us now.’ An awkward lad is ‘ungain.’ A good deal may be written to show that our Suffolk dialect is the nearest of all provincial dialects to that of Chaucer and the Bible, and if anyone has the audacity to contradict me, why, then, in Suffolk phraseology, I can promise him—‘a good hiding.’