"religious." Moreover, the petition sent up to the king when the rebellion was at its height contained express allusions to religious grievances. It asked "that parsons shall be resident, and all having a benefice worth more than £10 a year shall, by himself or deputy, teach the poor parish children the catechism and the primer." Not a very outrageous demand surely; and if we scan the material grievances complained against--establishment of numerous dovecots, and claims to exclusive rights of fishing, for example--we see that they are essentially the grievances which the religious houses had originated. How Kett and his men marched in due course to Mousehold Heath, on the outskirts of Norwich, the grievous fighting which followed in and about Norwich, how they killed Lord Sheffield by the Palace Gates at a spot marked to this day by a stone with an S on it, how Warwick, after many reverses, finally defeated Kett, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered, shall not be told at length in this volume. These things are an essential part of the history of England; they are far and away the most exciting events in the history of Norwich, and, since they cannot be dealt with fully here, they are best passed over with this slight mention. At Wymondham is, or was, an old house having a very curious inscription, "_Nec mihi glis servus, nec hospes hirudo_," which is not quite free from difficulty even as it stands, for a verb is left to be understood, and it may be "_sit_" or "_est_." In the one case the guest hopes, in the other the house boasts, the servant to be no dormouse and the host no leech. Things were worse when somebody read _hirudo_ as _hirundo_, though one might make attractive translations of that too. But we cannot linger over that when we are close to the scene of a tragedy far more recent, and therefore a good deal more affecting, than that of Kett's Rebellion. Stanfield Hall is close to Wymondham. It is the reputed birthplace of Amy Robsart, who may or may not have been murdered at Cumner--Lady Warwick says she was not--and Stanfield Hall was certainly the scene of a series of remarkably cold-blooded murders in times which may still be counted recent. Prefacing a frank confession that my personal interest in murders is small, which seems to be a misfortune judging by the enraptured attention they attract from many intelligent and cultivated persons, I endeavour to give some account of these murders partly because I desire to please, partly because a very old friend, now dead, devoted a vast amount of attention to them. His meticulous care in studying the _locus in quo_ may serve to compensate for my lukewarmness as a student of homicide; nay more, his interest in the subject seems to have been infectious, for, having read his monograph of some five-and-twenty octavo pages on the subject since the foregoing sentence was penned, I am now distinctly conscious of being keen on the subject and of finding interest in it.