Hethersett, whose name means “Heather-heath,” and is pronounced “Hathersett” in the local speech, is heralded along the open road by a solitary roadside inn with the sign of the “Old Oak.” No ancient oak is within sight, but the accustomed pilgrim of the roads has not for years been exploring the highways and byways without having long ago arrived at the conclusion that there is a substantial reason for most things, even the names of inns, and so from that sign deduces an historic oak somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood. And surely enough, a short distance beyond the inn, on the left-hand side of the road, opposite the milestone that marks the twenty-second mile from Thetford and the seventh from Norwich, there stands the gnarled and weatherworn trunk of what the country folk call “Kett’s Oak,” one of the several ancient trees that own the name, and traditionally said to have been one of the meeting-places of Robert Kett and his followers, and one of the scenes of his rough-and-ready sylvan court. But although oaks grow slowly, and although the tradition is an old one, handed down, unbroken, through the centuries, many will find it difficult to believe that a tree which must have been a considerable one when Kett and his followers foregathered here would not now have a greater girth than this.

The village green of Hethersett was enclosed, together with its large common, in 1800. The parish at that time claimed, and was allowed, a portion of the vast common of Wymondham, on the curious plea that it had buried, at the expense of the community, the body of a dead man found there and refused interment by the parish of Wymondham.

A local jape, which we may be sure will not willingly be let die, makes a play upon the name of Hethersett. It dates from many years ago, when the railway through the village to Norwich was new, and the train service incredibly slow. “Hethersett,” cried the porters at the station when a train stopped on one of those weariful occasions. “Here they set,” indignantly rejoined an old woman in one of the third-class carriages; “yes, and here they’re likely to set!”

The old church of this scattered village looks down upon the road from its slightly elevated situation at a point where the remains of the old highway, re-modelled over two hundred years ago, may yet be seen. The name of “highway” in a descriptive sense is, however, wholly misleading, for it plunges down between the church and the present road in the likeness of a broad and deep ditch. This hollow way, with its overhanging banks, proclaims, more than anything else can do, the dangers of bygone times, when travellers “travailed,” and a journey was really and truly what that word etymologically means, an expedition made by day. In these hollow ways lurked of old those outlaws who made even daylight travel perilous, and we can readily believe it was with dismay that benighted travellers saw the sun go down, and, simultaneously with its disappearance below the horizon, felt their courage ooze out at their boots. Trees and bushes now grow in the hollow where our forefathers of more than two centuries ago went so fearfully. It is long since it was used, and all who used it are gone, but Romance lives there, immortal, with the mud of years and the decaying leaves of autumn past.

The curious device of a dove and two serpents forms the weather-vane of Hethersett church. The living is in the gift of Caius College, Cambridge, and the vane displays the crest of Dr. John Caius, the re-founder of the College, officially and fully styled “Gonville and Caius.”

It was in 1561 that the Heralds’ College found a crest for that worthy man: “a clove argent, bekyd and membred gewles, holding in his beke by the stalke, flower gentle in proper colour, stalked vert.” “Flower gentle” is the old heraldic term for the wild amaranth, the “love lies bleeding” of old-fashioned gardens. In heraldic lore, it signified, as the grant of arms to Caius states, “immortalite that shall never fade.” The two serpents denote wisdom and grace.

An amusing record of old country superstition survives in the proceedings arising out of the theft of seven cheeses at Hethersett in 1797. A Mrs. Wissen, whose cheeses had mysteriously disappeared, instead of consulting a magistrate, a lawyer, or even the parish constable, went to a “cunning woman,” or white witch, who, after much supernatural mystification, told her that the missing cheeses had been stolen by a woman with a prominent mark on her nose. Whether the “cunning woman” really meant any particular person or not does not appear, but there unfortunately was a woman, a Mrs. Bailey, so nasally decorated, living hard by. The owner of the cheeses thus spirited away must have known the owner of that carbuncly, or otherwise, marked organ, but she seems to have been loth to act upon her information, or to do more than talk about it. At any rate, we do not hear any more of her; but the affair was not ended at that, for one Chamberlain, a local shoemaker, coming on one occasion into violent dispute with the unfortunate Mrs. Bailey, taxed her with the robbery, saying, “she showed her guilt in her nose and couldn’t get it off.” The owner of that compromising nose was naturally indignant, and brought an action for slander against the shoemaker at the Norwich Assizes; but the jury of country folk, equally susceptible to superstition, looked with suspicion upon that organ, and brought in a verdict for the defendant.

From Hethersett we make for Cringleford, and down the winding, tree-shaded descent past Cringleford church to the level where Cringleford mill sits serenely beside the weedy river Yare. Not only is the descent winding, but it is narrow as well. Yet, not so very long ago, it was narrower still, for a tablet in the wall at the foot of the hill tells us, rather grandiloquently, that—

Prodigious! Careful pacing discovers the fact that it is only twenty-five feet wide even now. By what careful driving, or special interposition of Providence, did the Norwich Mail and the stage-coaches succeed in escaping disaster at this point, when the road measured only twelve feet in breadth? One accident is, indeed, recorded to have happened to a coach described as the “Newmarket Mail” in 1846. It was an overturn at Cringleford Gate, and was not very serious, the only results being a general distribution of bruises, and a broken arm and collar-bone.

The situation of Cringleford church is sufficiently pretty, but examination proves it to be uninteresting, and its churchyard deformed with huge polished granite memorials to the undistinguished rich. More satisfaction comes from a lazy sojourn in the sunlight upon the old bridge that spans the Yare. The subdued rumbling of the mill, the leisured loading of a waggon with sacks of flour, and the evolutions of a boat’s crew among the weedy shallows of the Yare, induce a laziness which the certainty that Norwich is only two miles distant does much to intensify. It increases one’s sense of the permanency of things to learn that the floury miller, who comes out and casts an approving eye upon his fat sacks, is but the latest of a long line of his trade who have been following the art of grinding corn, by aid of the river Yare, for nine hundred years. How do we know that? By the evidence of Edward the Confessor’s Domesday Book, when the mill was stated to be worth 20s. a year, and by the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror, when the annual value had risen to 40s.

By all means let the pilgrim linger here, for he shall no sooner have climbed yonder rise, through that steep and narrow street of Eaton which is clearly visible from this point, than old Romance flies, ashamed, before the terminus of the electric tramways which reach out from Norwich and serve the discreet suburbs that now spread out from the city and threaten to absorb and transform Eaton itself.

It is a pleasant strip of valley thus set between the not very Alpine heights of Cringleford and Eaton; but here, in East Anglia, we call those hills which we should disregard in the precipitous West. The valley broadens out on the right, where it meets that of the Tase, and from that confluence the combined streams, under the name of the Yare, flow onward through a widening valley that eventually loses itself in flat marshlands, to Yarmouth.

This bridge that spans the Yare, and is continued as a causeway over the flat, often flooded, water-meadows, although of a considerable age, is but the successor of a very ancient structure, once in charge of a succession of hermits, licensed by the Priors of Norwich to reside here and to solicit alms of travellers crossing by it. A history of these worthies would be a very desirable thing, but it is not likely ever to be produced. They have mostly gone their ways unchronicled; all, indeed, save Roger de Brugge, whose memory only lives because he was so robustious and insistent a person. We have no means of learning whence Roger came, or what his real name was, “de Brugge” being merely “of the bridge.” He flourished about 1390, and was a very troublesome person, who does by no means realise for us the usual picture of a hermit. Instead of living in a damp cell, unwashed and uncombed, in the verminous condition proper to all hermits of right feeling, he appears to have obtained a commercially good thing in his licensed wardenship of the bridge, and to have employed toll-collectors of his own, who were not content with soliciting alms, but demanded money at the point of the cudgel of all those whom it seemed safe to threaten in that way. Unfortunately for one of these eremitical under-strappers who did their soliciting with the persuasive advocacy of a big stick, he tried the method with a man who proved to be a soldier, unused to taking treatment of that kind quietly, and who punched him in the eye, stole his money-pouch, and dropped him into the river, where he was drowned, much to the consternation of his companion, who, early in the proceedings, had beaten a retreat to Eaton, whence he saw all these developments. Roger de Brugge, who was an absentee hermit, and lived amid much evil company at Norwich, was deprived of his post, which was given to another, and, let us hope, more worthy person.

The name of Cringleford has puzzled many. Blomefield thought it meant “Shingleford”; some moderns think it derives from Kringel, said to be Norse for a curve or loop, and point to the many-looped windings of the Yare; but we can never know.

The meaning of Eaton is, however, self-evident. The place is first cousin to all the other Eatons and Etons (sometimes, I am ashamed to say, they are spelled Heaton, which is of course a h’error) in this country: places that obtained their name, as this does, from being situated beside streams. Eatown, the “water town,” is the signification of the name, and Eaton here dabbles its feet in the overflow of the Yare, just as Eton next Windsor does in that of the Thames, or the Cheshire Eaton in the overrunnings of the Dee.

Here, when once up the rise through Eaton village street, past the Dutch-like “Red Lion,” the old highway to all intents and purposes ends, and it is only a suburban two miles, travelled by electric trams, by which you enter the City of Norwich. It is a noble road, bordered by young avenues and lined with private residences, but still suburban, and out of key with old road romance. Along it we come to the junction of roads opposite the fine Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, where the road from London, through Colchester and Ipswich, falls in, and both go forward together down St. Stephen’s Street into the City.