By Prince’s Street we come to Tombland, the open space by the Cathedral, where St. George’s Church and Tombland Alley make so picturesque a group; and thence across the Wensum at Fye Bridge and along Magdalen Street. Bearing to the left, by Botolph Street, and noticing the gable end of the “King’s Arms” inn, with its ornamental tie-rods “I.C. 1646,” on the gable-end, we finally pass along St. Augustine Street, to come to the long suburban rise of the Aylsham Road, through Upper Hellesdon.

Here, just beyond the “One Mile” inn, is an ancient cross, recently restored, looking like a survival of some historic event, but a near glance reveals that it only marks the boundary of the City in this direction.

Horsham St. Faith’s village—generally called in these parts merely “St. Faith’s,” or “St. Fay”—is just over the hill-top, and is the usual small Norfolk village with a large church. It stands aloof from the centre of the place, up a by-lane, and opposite a row of six old seventeenth-century red-brick cottages, known as “Church Row,” all very rural. A last touch in that sort is the sight of a bird’s nest built into the delicately undercut stonework of the upper part of a tabernacle on the south parvise.

A general air of dilapidation and put-off-all-the-repairs-to-next-year kind of aspect belongs to the central spot of this village—the hub of St. Fay’s. A very large, very rush-overgrown, and excessively duckweedy pond occupies the best part of the road, slyly lying in wait to receive into its green and rank bosom the village tippler or the incautious midnight roysterer from Norwich; nay, even the unwary cyclist.

This out-at-elbows air reflects ill upon the condition of the horsehair weaving, still the staple trade of the village. It is “not what it was,” say the natives, and although some thirty to forty weavers are still employed, the trade is a decaying one. Historically, St. Faith’s is interesting, for it is bound up with the story of Katharine Howard, who was daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and fifth wife of that professional widower, Henry VIII., who wrought so greatly in all manner of affairs of Church and State during his thirty-eight years’ reign that we meet him at almost every turn.

It seems that while still a child, not yet thirteen years of age, in the house of her father’s step-mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, at St. Faith’s, she was debauched by one Henry Manox, perhaps a music-master, described as “a scoundrelly player on the virginals,” and that she had relations of a more than questionable nature with one Francis Derham. Loud as are the moralists in denouncing the levity of our own times, we have but to read the intimate accounts of the household in whose vile society this forward girl was brought up, to be convinced that we have advanced since then. The fury of Henry knew no bounds when these disclosures were made, eighteen months after his wedding with her, and she paid the penalty with her life, in the Tower, in the twentieth year of her age.

Of Newton St. Faith, scarce more than a mile down the road, there is little to be said, but its few houses are succeeded by the loveliest two miles of highway in Norfolk. Enclosed fields, trim with their neat hedges and long lines of wheat and barley, or well-ordered in their infinite perspectives of winter furrows, give place suddenly to a land rich in the varied tints of bracken and heather, and wooded, now in dense clumps, or again in isolated trees. These are the fairy-like woods of Stratton Strawless. The peculiar beauty of these ferny glades is chiefly due to the large numbers of silver birch—that airy and graceful “lady of the forest”—intermingled with the dark pines, the grey beeches, and the sturdy oaks that all go to make up the ranks of the Stratton woods, whose picturesque abandon is greatly added to by their being open to the road. For this is common land, and before Robert Marsham planted it in 1797, was a stretch of heath, barren of aught save heather and bracken. It is, in fact, in the existence of this ancient heath that Blomefield, the historian of Norfolk, rightly or wrongly, found the origin of the “Strawless” in the place-name, for he points out that no corn could have been grown here. His finding is probably wrong, for Mr. Walter Rye, eminent in Norfolk archÆology, has found it was “Stratton Streles” in the time of Henry III., and that the name almost certainly is Danish, deriving from the village of Stroeden Strelev in Denmark.

We need not hasten to acclaim the Marsham who created these woods as a public benefactor, because he did not aim at anything of the kind, and merely wished to improve the outlook from his hideous house, now confronted with these glades, instead of by a monotonous flat. There is no denying the ugliness of that square brick mansion. A benefactor would have hidden it from the public gaze, but it is, instead, rather ostentatiously on view from the road, across a wide, uninterrupted stretch of grassy meadow. The lodges are far more endurable than the mansion, and although built in the same dull brick, in a manner fondly thought classic, the brilliant coat of whitewash given them makes their clumsiness almost picturesque.

The village lies nearly a mile away from the road, past the reedy lakes that follow the course of a little stream. In the church may yet be seen the monuments of Marshams, from 1250 onwards; together with a window filled with probably the very worst stained glass on earth.

With regret we leave these lovely woods for the cultivated and more prosaic lands towards Hevingham, whose great church, overlooking the road from its knoll, is a mile distant from the village. It is a church with lofty nave, but no aisles, and, restored with more thoroughness than discretion, has been swept clean of any possible interest. But its noble south porch, and the gigantic sweet-chestnut tree in the churchyard, give the spot an air of distinction.

Hevingham, with the three succeeding places, is celebrated (or rather, made notorious) by a rhyme whose inner meaning no local antiquary has yet followed. Thus it runs:—

Marsham, a mile distant, lies at the foot of a hill. It is a scattered village, its Dutch-gabled “White Hart” and the sign of the “Plough and Shuttle” pointing to some bygone foregathering of local agricultural and weaving interests; but the church is its principal feature. Not imposing without, its interior is particularly beautiful, with clerestoried nave, fine open-timbered roof, and splendid rood-screen. A feature that piques the curiosity of enquiring minds, with no possibility of that curiosity being satisfied, is the very ancient slab on the floor, outside the chancel, with the word “oblivio” repeated eight times, and a Latin inscription to the effect that the person buried here was of opinion that he would be forgotten as soon as his heart ceased to beat. It would appear as though he wished this oblivion, for the stone is without name or date.

Marsham was the incumbency of the Reverend Samuel Oates, father of the famous, or infamous, Titus Oates, who figures so pitifully in the reign of Charles II., and is described, with much justice, in biographical dictionaries as “Perjurer.” But Marsham escapes the odium of being his birthplace, for he was born at Oakham, in Rutlandshire.

From Marsham an avenue of young oaks—young as oaks go, for they are only some sixty years old, and mere infants—leads on to Aylsham, passing, on the right hand, an old toll-house, and crossing the railway on the level at Aylsham station.

Aylsham once manufactured linen and worsted, and the “lineners” and worsted-weavers contributed greatly to the building of its fine church, a church packed away inconspicuously in a corner off the Market Square; but those old trades are dead now, and only the weekly market keeps the little town alive. You enter the place along a street once called “the straits,” and still remarkably narrow, past the old coaching-inn, the “Dog”; but the little town does not fully disclose itself along this narrow way, for its central point and focus is the Market Square, reached on the left by a short and narrow street. Here stands that curious old early seventeenth-century brick inn, the “Black Boys,” remarkable for its coved eaves, still bearing the old decorative design that gave the house its name. This is a device of foliage and fruit, painted and gilt, running the two sides of the house, with three little black, impish-looking figures in the centre of the side facing the square and one at each corner, all blowing gilded horns. They look like the “little demons” of Ingoldsby’s “Truants,” who had “broken loose from the National School below,” but they are really only intended for representations of Bacchus, and thus by a side-wind, as it were, to hint to travellers of old of the good cheer of the house.