Cromer, until modern times a small fishing village, but now grown to the proud estate of a fashionable, expensive, and exclusive seaside resort, was once a portion of the town of Shipden, and lay quite half a mile distant from the sea. “Shipedana” and “Seepedene,” the names by which Shipden is referred to in the “Domesday Book,” remind us that Shipden was not necessarily merely a place of ships, but that the name perhaps came originally from Anglo-Saxon words meaning a sheep pasture. Vague accounts still tell how Shipden was suddenly destroyed by a violent storm and eruption of the sea in the reign of Henry IV., and half a mile out to sea is still visible, at exceptionally low tides, the mass of flint walling called the “Church Rock,” said to be the remains of Shipden church. A Yarmouth excursion steamer was wrecked on it in the summer of 1888. Cromer was spoken of in 1374, and again in 1382, as “Crowmere.” Although it thus, by the disappearance of Shipden, was thrust into the foremost place, it never attained the size of that unfortunate town. The sea was advancing too surely for a repetition of Shipden’s fate to be dared. In 1551, if we may judge from the petition then presented to the Privy Council, Cromer was in sore case:— “It is situate and adjoining so near the sees that of late in our memorye, by the rages and surges of the same sees, the number of a grete sort of houses knowen by us have been swallowed uppe and drownded. The inhabitants hathe to their grete and importunate charges defended the same by making of grete peers, and dayle put to insatiable charges scharse and onetheable to be borne of the same inhabitants.” This anxiety seems to have made havoc with their literary composition. A direct result of this petition was the grant, thirty years later, of a licence to levy dues upon wheat, barley, and malt, the revenue from them to be applied in defending the town from the sea; but when Taylor, the “Water Poet,” visited Cromer on his “Very Merry—Wherry—Ferry Voyage” round the coast in 1623, the sea was still encroaching, and he describes the place in doleful strain:— It is an ancient market-town that stands Upon a lofty cliff of mould’ring sands; The sea against the cliffs doth daily beat, And every tide into the land doth eat. The town is poor, unable by expense, Against the raging seas to make defence, And every day it eateth further in, Still waiting, washing down the sand doth run. A goodly church stands on these brittle grounds, Not many fairer in Great Britain’s bounds; And if the sea shall swallow it, as some fear, ’Tis not ten thousand pounds the like could rear.