Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
The second reason was soon to come on the left-hand side of the road in the
form of a park, boasting superb trees and ensconcing Kimberley Hall, the
seat of the Wodehouse family, who are of far more ancient standing in
Norfolk than is the present hall. It was built on Italian lines in the
reign of good Queen Anne, but the Wodehouses, of whom Lord Kimberley is the
head, had been in the land long before Philip Wodehouse, Member of
Parliament for Castle Rising, was created a baronet by James I. Not that
the honour attached the family to the Stuart cause, for Sir Thomas, the
second baronet, sat in the Long Parliament and, I think, fought for it
against Charles. Clearly they were a fighting family. "Agincourt" is
inscribed under their coat of arms; their crest is "a dexter arm couped
below the elbow, vested argent, and grasping a club or, and over it the
motto Frappe fort." The quotation comes appositely, or at any rate one
striking word in it does, because the "supporters" are "Two wild (wode)
men, wreathed about the loins, and holding in the exterior hand a club,
raised in the attitude of striking, sable." Yet with this explanation
always before them, staring them hard in the face whensoever a head of the
house of Kimberley has been summoned to sleep with his fathers, some good
folk of Norfolk have, as the _Notes and Queries_ show, been content to
puzzle their brains and to seek far for an explanation of the Wild Man as a
tavern sign. They have even gone so far as to drag in the historic Peter
the Wild Man, quite unnecessarily, for he is modern by comparison with the
"wode" men who support the Wodehouse crest now, as they supported it no
doubt in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, when she visited in 1571 a
Kimberley Hall which modern taste would probably prefer to the present
Italian edifice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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