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
We will begin, if you please, by going to Castle Rising, lying 3-1/2 miles
N.N.E. of Lynn, and there we must stop for quite a long time. Despite the
local saying "Rising was a seaport town when Lynn was but a marsh," there
is a good deal of doubt about its early history. Concerning its later
history there is none at all. The sand just silted up the harbour, the port
became a mere memory, and of all the "rotten boroughs" disfranchised by the
Reform Act of 1832 none perished more deservedly than Castle Rising, where
the voters were reduced to two. Was it of Castle Rising (it was certainly
of some "rotten borough" in East Anglia) that I read how the nobleman who
kept it in his pocket mockingly caused a waiter to represent it in
Parliament? It was in days at any rate when a waiter, as a member of the
"best club in the world," would have seemed a great deal more out of place
than he would in these days of sectional representation. Let us consider
first what there is to see. Over a bridge and through a Norman gate-house
one enters an almost circular space surrounded by a very high earth bank
and a deep ditch. Inside the commanding object is the keep, its Norman
windows full of character, its walls nine feet thick; the chapel and part
of the constable's lodgings also remain. The hall and gallery remain in
part; everything else is utterly perished. Still, Rising is an impressive
monument of the olden time. How long have the earthworks occupied their
present position? At one period antiquaries of repute placed a Roman "camp"
here, calling some of the earthworks Roman. "But," writes Mr. Haverfield,
"this is most unlikely and no Roman remains have ever been found here." It
is true a coin of Constantine the Great was once dug up in the
neighbourhood; but this would be vague at best, and one coin goes no
further as an argument of a Roman camp than a sixpence dropped by an
explorer does to prove a British settlement in the heart of Thibet. Mound
and ditch may have been British, but there is no suggestion of evidence to
prove it. They are not in the least likely to have been Roman; for the
Romans had little, if any, fighting in these parts, and the defence of this
portion of the "Saxon shore" was, as we shall see shortly, provided for by
the fortification of Brancaster. After all, why should not William
d'Albini, first Earl of Arundel, who at any rate began the building of the
castle, have caused the mound to be heaped up and the ditch scooped out in
the closing years of the twelfth century? It was a period when Norman
nobles were not unduly particular as to the manner in which they extorted
work, and it may well have seemed to him desirable to make a position,
naturally strong, all but impregnable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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