This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves. When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice they could scarce help seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts attention now. Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable "white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue; a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is more or less bedevilled with it. This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry, just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and changes and romances of their own. From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech the wayfarer to pray for their souls. Vain request! The work had not been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for. The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:-- Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete uxoris ejus qui istam alam ffieri fecerunt anno dni mcccc^m lxxxxviiii Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:-- Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys hys wyfe and all crysten sowlys, Anno Domini 1530.