The “Black Boys” owes its existence on this scale to the near neighbourhood of Blickling Hall, perhaps the most famous mansion in Norfolk, and certainly the most beautiful and stately. Blickling is scarce a mile distant, and is so small a village that it must have been to Aylsham in general, and to the “Black Boys” in particular, the custom fell in those old days when the Hobarts of Blickling Hall entertained so royally. We cannot forbear visiting Blickling, for not merely Hobarts, but Anne Boleyn herself, most unhappy of queens, is associated with that noble pile and has made it historic.

The first sight of Blickling Hall is one of the greatest surprises that can possibly befall the traveller in search of the picturesque. Every one, in these days of broadcast photographs, is in some sort familiar with the look of the Hall, and most people can tell you it looks like another, and a better, Hatfield House; but no one is prepared on coming downhill past the church into the village, to find the main front of this finest of Jacobean mansions, this dream of architectural beauty, actually looking upon the road, unobstructedly, from behind its velvet lawns. No theatrical manager, no scene-painter, cunning in all the artful accessories of the stage, could devise anything more dramatic, and you—Columbus of the roads, who steer into unwonted byways in search of the beautiful—cannot repress the involuntary tribute of an admiratory O! at sight of it. There it stands, like some proud conscious beauty, isolated. No meaner building shoulders it, and for all the stir you see or sound you hear, it might be some enchanted palace, not waked to life and love. It has, indeed, its modern tragedy, for its owner, the young Marquis of Lothian, is afflicted, and non-resident.

There is something of a village, a little way removed; but only a few houses, themselves picturesque, are to be found, together with an inn, the “Buckinghamshire Arms,” displaying the heraldic achievement of the Earls of Buckinghamshire and their motto, Auctor pretiosa fecit (“The giver makes them valuable”), one of those delightfully bumptious and self-sufficient phrases abounding in titled families.

Blickling is generally associated with the unhappy Anne Boleyn, but her birthplace is quite uncertain, and although her early years were passed at this place, it was not Blickling Hall, but the long-vanished Dagworth Manor, with which she was familiar. The present stately building was not commenced until 1619, eighty-three years after her death. Dagworth Manor stood nearly a mile distant from the present Hall, and was built towards the close of the fourteenth century by Sir Nicholas Dagworth, who was succeeded by that Sir Thomas de Erpingham who built the Erpingham Gate in the Cathedral Close at Norwich, together with the tower and the greater part of Erpingham church, and was that stout old warrior who in his old age fought at Agincourt, as we read in Shakespeare’s Henry V., where the King says:—

It was that brave old knight who led the onslaught with the war-cry to his men, “Nestroke” (“Now strike!”).

Erpingham was followed by Sir John Fastolfe, who sold the property about 1459 to Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, mercer and Lord Mayor of London, who was son of Geoffrey Boleyn of Salle. The Boleyns are thought to have derived their name from one of their family who traded to Boulogne. Sir Geoffrey was great-grandfather of Anne Boleyn, who became Queen to Henry VIII. and mother of Queen Elizabeth. Sir James Boleyn, uncle to Anne, lived at Dagworth in reduced circumstances, and finally sold the estate to Sir John Clere, of Ormesby, whose spendthrift son alienated it to Sir Henry Hobart, Lord Chief Justice, and grandson of Henry VII.’s Attorney-General. It was this Sir Henry who began to build Blickling Hall, in 1619. His son completed it in 1628. The Hobarts in time became ennobled as Earls of Buckinghamshire, and finally the property came by marriage to the Kerrs, Marquises of Lothian.

The striking general resemblance of Blickling Hall to Hatfield House is accounted for by the belief that the same architectural draughtsman designed both. Its interior is worthy of the lovely outward view, and is still rich in magnificent old furniture, in the famous Blickling library, and in relics of unhappy Anne Boleyn. It is curious to observe how the Hobarts, who had no family connection with the Boleyns, and did not even purchase the estate from them, preserved the memory of their sometime ownership, in the sculptured figures of rampant bulls that flank the main entrance and make punning allusion to Boleyn.

The church of Blickling was restored in 1874, after the death of the eighth Marquis of Lothian, to whose memory a most ornate altar-tomb, with marble recumbent portrait effigy and marble angels at head and foot, has been erected. The guide-books tell with reverence how it cost £5,000, and how it was sculptured by G. F. Watts, R.A.; but we need not necessarily be impressed, save, indeed, by such senseless squandering of money and by the appalling marmoreal solidity of those angels, who do by no means aid and abet the imagination in its conception of angels as ethereal beings. In short, if we resolutely refuse to be snobbishly affected by the cost of this monument and by the Royal Academical initials of its sculptor, we shall have no difficulty in perceiving it to be a gross failure. The last grotesque touch is in the selection of a marble streaked with brown veins. One such streak discolours one side of the effigy’s face, and gives it the dreadful appearance of one suffering from a loathsome skin disease.

Within this church are many pretty and fanciful epitaphs. Here you may read the verses on various members of the Hargraves, citizens of London and members of the Companies of Joiners and “Shoomakers,” and those of their children, untimely dead. “Sleep, sweetly sleep,” says one:

and by the light of that conflagration the youthful Hargrave is doubtless expected to rise, Phoenix-like, and soar into the realms of eternal bliss!

Consalus Hargrave died in his second year, 1626:—

Here, too, are some Boleyn memorials, among them a brass to an Anna Boleyn, who died in childhood in 1476. She was aunt to the historical Anne.

A very striking feature in this church is the altar-tomb of the Cleres, whose armorial bearings, with those of the distinguished families with whom they claimed to be allied, are gorgeously repeated very many times around the four sides of the monument. It is a work of the Jacobean period, and retrospectively includes the old coats of alliances as far back as the eleventh century. Modern research proves most of these claims to be deliberately false.

Among the many Hobarts who lie in the vaults beneath Blickling church is one who met with a very tragical end. This is that Sir Henry Hobart, Bart., who was knighted by Charles II. in 1671, on that monarch’s progress through Norfolk, after having been entertained with princely magnificence at Blickling Hall. Sir Henry was no thick-and-thin supporter of the Stuarts, for he fought for King William against James II. at the Battle of the Boyne, and when Dutch William’s rule was established, settled down here at his Norfolk home, where he might have lived to a green old age, had it not been for his overbearing temper. It was in 1698, in a dispute over an election in which he had borne a losing part, that Sir Henry Hobart’s career was cut short. He resented some expressions of opinion used by a neighbouring gentleman, Mr. Oliver le Neve, and challenged him to a duel. Hobart had the reputation of being one of the most accomplished swordsmen of his day, and doubtless expected to do Le Neve’s business at that spot on Cawston Heath where the meeting was arranged to take place. Le Neve was notoriously a bad swordsman, and probably made his will and went forth to that encounter never hoping to return; but the conflict had an unexpected result. Hobart drew first blood, running his sword through his adversary’s arm, but immediately afterwards fell, mortally wounded, with a thrust in the stomach, of which he died the next day, Sunday, August 21st, 1698. He fell not so much from any unwonted skill on Le Neve’s part as from the circumstance that Le Neve was a left-handed man and his sword-play difficult to follow. Le Neve had to fly the country for a time; not in fear of the law, which then countenanced the duello, but from the threatened vengeance of the powerful Hobart clan. The spot where the duel was fought is some four miles from Blickling. Cawston Heath has long been enclosed and brought under cultivation, but the place is marked by a rude stone pillar surmounted by an urn and simply inscribed with the letters “H.H.” This monument stands within a dense strip of plantation beside the Norwich and Holt road, close to where it is crossed by the road between Aylsham and Cawston. Adjoining the place is an old coaching hostelry—the “Woodrow” inn—with a curious gallows sign spanning the highway