Attleborough, quiet enough on all other days of the week, wakes up and does a considerable business on market-day, although even that weekly fixture does not command the trade of sixty years ago, before the railway brought the better marketing of Norwich within reach. But the trade of the town is still large enough to support several large inns, a Corn Hall, and a long street of shops. It would be unprofitable to argue the origin of the “Attle” in the place-name, for it has already been discussed by Norfolk antiquaries without any light being thrown on it, excepting the fact that the name is shared with Attlebridge on the river Wensum, fifteen miles away. Some topographers, mindful of the fact that the youthful Etheling, or Saxon noble, afterwards Edmund, King of East Anglia, spent a year at this place in A.D. 856 in pious preparation for his kingly and saintly career, have thought the place to be named after him, Etheling-borough; while others are of opinion it enshrines the name of some otherwise unrecorded chieftain whose stronghold was the burh or mound that gives the “borough” termination. However that may be, Attleborough is a place of greater age than might be thought from a casual glance. Nothing in it, except the great church, is of any high antiquity, for the College of the Holy Cross, founded by Sir Robert Mortimer late in the fourteenth century, has disappeared, and the church itself, a part of that religious establishment, although still very large, has been reduced from its original size. All this destruction took place in the time of Henry VIII., when such things were repeated at every monastery and religious college in the land. At that time the Mortimers, the ancient lords of the manor, had given place to the Radcliffes, then newly created Earls of Sussex, and Robert, the first Earl, who ruled at that period, lent a willing hand. One might almost suppose him to have been animated by a personal hatred of his forbears, for it is still recorded in the parish register how he busied himself in the work of demolition and tore up many “fair marble gravestones of his ancestors, with monuments of brass upon them, and carried them, with other fair good pavement, and laid them for floors in his hall, kitchen, and larder-house.” He died in 1542, and was buried in the City church of St. Lawrence Pountney, London. In later years the bodies of himself and his son, with those of their wives, were removed to the church of Boreham, in Essex. With the grandson, the line of Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, ended; and in that church their three marble effigies lie side by side, on one elaborate altar-tomb, fulfilling the threat, or prophecy, that in the third generation of that spoiler of the Church his race should become extinct.

These records of old time explain how it comes that Attleborough church tower is so oddly situated at the east end of the building. It was once at the centre of the cruciform church, but the choir being destroyed in that time of trouble, it is now, of course, immediately over what is now the chancel.

Standing beside the high road, the church is, of course, a very prominent object. It has a singularly beautiful north porch, containing an ancient wooden poor’s-box. Under a slab in the nave rests that Captain John Gibbs of Charles II.’s time, who earned a kind of fame by his foolhardy feat of driving his chaise and four horses over the deepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, on Newmarket Heath, for a wager of £500. The chancel is Norman architecture, the nave and aisles Decorated and Perpendicular. The pulpit is part of the spoil of one of the City of London churches, demolished in modern times, and the magnificent rood-screen is now at the west end, painted white, decorated with the arms of thirty dioceses, and black-lettered with moral maxims from the Proverbs, the work of the Rev. John Forbie, vicar in the first half of the seventeenth century, commentator in the parish registers upon national and local events, and censor, in the safe seclusion of those pages, of his parishioners’ characters. His favourable opinion of James I. is seen in the entry made when that monarch died: “It might be truly said of him, as in the Gospell, ‘Never man spake as this man speaketh.’” John Forbie evidently did not dislike Scots pawkiness.

His post-mortem, testimonial in 1625 to the landlady of the “Cock” inn—a hostelry still standing by the roadside at the entrance to the town—is hearty. “August 11th,” he says, “there was buried Mary, the wife of Gilbert Greene, hostess of the ‘Cock,’ who knew how to gaine more by her trade than any other, and a woman free and kind for any one in sickness ... and for answering (i.e., standing godmother) to any one’s child, and readie to give to any one’s marriage.” Surely, one thinks, it was ill sojourning at the house of one so accomplished in gaining more by her trade than any other. Did she accomplish it by overcharging her guests or diluting their drinks?

He records the death of one John Dowe, “an unprofitable tradesman of great estate.” This, he says severely, and moved to verse by indignation, should have been his epitaph:—

The situation of Attleborough, isolated on the lonely flats, surrounded by commons, must have been singularly aloof from the world in days of old. Up to the very doors of the townsfolk came the dangers of those far-off times, as we may perceive in the road that now leads to the railway station, but is marked on old maps as “Thieves’ Lane.” Where those thieves lurked, there now stand the respectable red-brick villas of modern times, with a “Peace Monument” of 1856 at the cross-roads, celebrating the close of the Crimean War, and at one and the same time recording the victories of that strife and acting as lamp-post, general gazetteer, and compendious milestone