ATTLEBOROUGH, quiet enough on all other days of the week, wakes up and does a considerable business on market-day, although even that weekly fixture does not command the trade of sixty years ago, before the railway brought the better marketing of Norwich within reach. But the trade of the town is still large enough to support several large inns, a Corn Hall, and a long street of shops. It would be unprofitable to argue the origin of the “Attle” in the place-name, for it has already been discussed by Norfolk antiquaries without any light being thrown on it, excepting the fact that the name is shared with Attlebridge on the river Wensum, fifteen miles away. Some topographers, mindful of the fact that the youthful Etheling, or Saxon noble, afterwards Edmund, King of East Anglia, spent a year at this place in A.D. 856 in pious preparation for his kingly and saintly career, have thought the place to be named after him, Etheling-borough; while others are of opinion it enshrines the name of some otherwise unrecorded chieftain whose stronghold was the burh or mound that gives the “borough” termination. However that may be, Attleborough is a place of greater age than might be thought from a casual glance. Nothing in it, except the great church, is of any high antiquity, for the College of the Holy Cross, founded by Sir Robert Mortimer late in the fourteenth century, has disappeared, and the church itself, a part of that religious establishment, although still very large, has been reduced from its original size. All this destruction took place in the time of Henry VIII., when such things were repeated at every monastery and religious college in the land. At that time the Mortimers, the ancient lords of the manor, had given place to the Radcliffes, then newly created Earls of Sussex, and Robert, the first Earl, who ruled at that period, lent a willing hand. One might almost suppose him to have been animated by a personal hatred of his forbears, for it is still recorded in the parish register how he busied himself in the work of demolition and tore up many “fair marble gravestones of his ancestors, with monuments of brass upon them, and carried them, with other fair good pavement, and laid them for floors in his hall, kitchen, and larder-house.” He died in 1542, and was buried in the City church of St. Lawrence Pountney, London. In later years the bodies of himself and his son, with those of their wives, were removed to the church of Boreham, in Essex. With the grandson, the line of Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, ended; and in that church their three marble effigies lie side by side, on one elaborate altar-tomb, fulfilling the threat, or prophecy, that in the third generation of that spoiler of the Church his race should become extinct.