These records of old time explain how it comes that Attleborough church tower is so oddly situated at the east end of the building. It was once at the centre of the cruciform church, but the choir being destroyed in that time of trouble, it is now, of course, immediately over what is now the chancel. [Illustration: ATTLEBOROUGH.] Standing beside the high road, the church is, of course, a very prominent object. It has a singularly beautiful north porch, containing an ancient wooden poor’s-box. Under a slab in the nave rests that Captain John Gibbs of Charles II.’s time, who earned a kind of fame by his foolhardy feat of driving his chaise and four horses over the deepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, on Newmarket Heath, for a wager of £500. The chancel is Norman architecture, the nave and aisles Decorated and Perpendicular. The pulpit is part of the spoil of one of the City of London churches, demolished in modern times, and the magnificent rood-screen is now at the west end, painted white, decorated with the arms of thirty dioceses, and black-lettered with moral maxims from the Proverbs, the work of the Rev. John Forbie, vicar in the first half of the seventeenth century, commentator in the parish registers upon national and local events, and censor, in the safe seclusion of those pages, of his parishioners’ characters. His favourable opinion of James I. is seen in the entry made when that monarch died: “It might be truly said of him, as in the Gospell, ‘Never man spake as this man speaketh.’” John Forbie evidently did not dislike Scots pawkiness. His _post-mortem_, testimonial in 1625 to the landlady of the “Cock” inn—a hostelry still standing by the roadside at the entrance to the town—is hearty. “August 11th,” he says, “there was buried Mary, the wife of Gilbert Greene, hostess of the ‘Cock,’ who knew how to gaine more by her trade than any other, and a woman free and kind for any one in sickness ... and for answering (_i.e._, standing godmother) to any one’s child, and readie to give to any one’s marriage.” Surely, one thinks, it was ill sojourning at the house of one so accomplished in gaining more by her trade than any other. Did she accomplish it by overcharging her guests or diluting their drinks? He records the death of one John Dowe, “an unprofitable tradesman of great estate.” This, he says severely, and moved to verse by indignation, should have been his epitaph:— Here lyeth the Dowe who ne’er in life did good, Nor would have done, tho’ longer he had stood. A wife he had, bothe beautiful and Wise, But he ne’er would such goodness exercise. Death was his friend, to bring him to his grave, For he in Life _Commendam_ none could have.