Saffron Walden lies a mile distant, on a ridge overlooking a wide stretch of country, and is one of the prettiest and neatest of rural corporate towns. To the whole countryside it is merely “Walden.” No local person would ever think of saying “Saffron” Walden; and really, now there is no longer any saffron grown here, why should he? Prominent, far and near, is the great Perpendicular church, bracketed with that of Thaxted as the finest in Essex. Not a little of its proud dominance over neighbouring hill and dale is due to the tall, tapering crocketed spire, added so late as 1831, and one of the earliest and most successful efforts of the Gothic revival. The very late Perpendicular clerestoried nave, with noble timbered roof, is singularly like the great Gothic Guildhall Library in London, which would almost seem to have been designed by its modern architect after this ancient model.

Walden is, and has always been, a great stronghold of the Friends, and the Friends’ Schools are among the most prominent of the public buildings in the town. It is a town of old and new in just proportions, and with a staid prosperity not pushful enough to be vulgar, nor so allied to modernity that it must needs sweep away its old relics. In Church Street, indeed, is to be found one of the most curious old plaster houses that any town or village can boast. This is the old “Sun” inn, an inn no longer, decorated with two gigantic armed figures in plastiferous relief. For whom they may be intended, only the designer of them could say, and he cannot tell us, for if we may believe the date of 1670 on the wall, he must have been gathered to his fathers quite two centuries ago. Another very old inn, the “Eight Bells,” still looks prosperous, at the corner of Castle Street, in which long thoroughfare the stranger, by dint of earnest enquiry, may find the shy retiring entrance to that delightful pleasaunce known as “Fry’s Garden.” I do not know who Fry was, but doubtless he was one of that famous Quaker family, and certainly not only loved gardens, but created one here that in all the quaint circumstances of the formal walks, lawns, and terraces fashionable in the gardener’s art of much more than a century ago, has now become a treasure to the people of Walden, to whom he gave it.

There is little left of the great castle of Walden, the chief fortress of those Magnavilles, Earls of Essex, of whom Geoffrey, lord of a hundred and seventeen manors in the troublous reigns of the Empress Maud and Stephen, was the third.

There is no more striking figure in the history of these East Anglian districts than that of this third Geoffrey. Not even Hereward, that earlier hero of the Fens, made a deeper impression; but while Hereward was a patriot, fighting the hopeless cause of his people, Geoffrey de Magnaville became a murderous bandit, whose hand was against every man. Succeeding to the family honours in 1130, he took up arms for the Empress Maud when England was plunged into Civil War between the rival claims of herself and Stephen, at the death of Henry I., in 1135; but he was arrested at St. Albans, his castles at Walden and Pleshey seized, and his high office of Constable of the Tower of London stripped from him.

Unfortunately for the welfare of this part of the kingdom, the mild policy of Stephen aimed at nothing more, and the broken Earl was set free. Some men take their misfortunes with a heroic calm, but Geoffrey de Magnaville was not of that kind. We are told how he “burst forth from the presence of the King like a riderless horse, kicking and biting,” and so made for the Fens, where during a series of years, to the ruin of the realm, he made his armed support of Maud an excuse for giving full rein to his native ferocity. As robber and bandit, he was probably as much feared by those with whom he sided as by his opponents. The trembling clergy and peasantry knew him well, and feared him with a deathly fear, for murder and sacrilege were his sport. By an easy twist of his name they came to know him as “Man-devil,” which is in itself a kind of backhanded and sinister testimonial to his character, and long before he met his death he was placed by the outraged Church outside the pale of salvation. It was at Burwell, whose church tower stands prominently in the view from Newmarket Heath, his furrow came to an end, in 1144. It was time. He had for so long been the scourge of these wilds that at length the King made a determined effort to keep him in check by building a castle at Burwell and holding it in force. By this plan he hoped to keep that strenuous evil-doer shut up in his chosen haunt among the swamps of the Cam, where he might mudlark at will, and it was in attacking this castle, in an attempt to break through, he was mortally wounded by a bolt in the head, and died the next day at Mildenhall, eight miles distant, whither his fellow-outlaws had carried him. He died, in the language of that time, “excommunicate and unabsolved, nor was the earth suffered to give a grave to the sacrilegious offender.” For twenty years, in fact, his body was unburied, remaining meanwhile soldered in lead, in an orchard belonging to the Templars in London. At the end of that time, upon some flimsy proof being given of his having in his last moments made some expressions of repentance, his spirit received absolution, and the body was buried beside that of his fathers in the Temple Church. There, on the pavement, in company with seven others, his effigy may yet be seen, cross-legged and mailed. He wears a more than usually dour expression of countenance. His head is represented encased in a helmet in shape something midway between a saucepan and a frying-pan: possibly a rendering in stone of that headgear he wore at Burwell, and removed in the midst of that fray, to get the air, when the missile struck him.

This full-blooded scoundrel’s keep, or robber’s hold, stood upon an eminence known as Bury Hill. The massive walls, long since robbed of all architectural features, still show how securely he built, even though they are at this day only shapeless lumps of rubble. In one corner the stocks and pillory of Walden are still preserved.

It is a castle without a history. No one knows who destroyed it, and no tale has ever been told of those great earthworks, once connected with the fortress, which now, emerald green with luxuriant grass and spangled in springtime with wild flowers, once defended his market-town of Walden against surprise. These serried ranks of rampart and ditch were probably, like the hill on which he built his stronghold, much older than his time, and merely strengthened for the occasion, but they remain mystic to this day, and own a very large selection of names, being “Battle,” “Repel,” “Peddle,” “Pell,” and “Paigle” Ditches in the mouths of the country folk.

Walden, which owned but that single style before it became in the long ago the seat of saffron culture, derives its name from “Weal-den,” the wooded hollow, or perhaps “the hollow in the woods,” and was anciently situated in the dense glades of the great Forest of Essex. When Geoffrey de Magnaville obtained the grant of a market for his town it became “Chipping,” or Market Walden, and it was not until the reign of Edward III. that this style and title was changed for the name it now bears. The seal of the borough, dating from the time of Elizabeth, still alludes to that much-prized plant, and perpetrates the lamentable pun of three saffron flowers “walled in” by a castle; while the badge of the mayor’s chain, made in 1873, repeats that hoary play upon words.

Saffron, long since disappeared from local ken, is said to have been introduced to England from Palestine so early as the times of the Crusaders, and to have been brought over, originally a single bulb, hidden in a palmer’s staff. Its name is a corruption of the Arabic “sahafaran,” but to botanists it is Crocus sativus, the cultivated, as opposed to Crocus agrestis, the wild crocus. It was the supposed medicinal virtues of the plant that made it so much in request and so largely cultivated here in the latter part of the sixteenth century, when Fuller, writing of the town, speaks of it as one “which saffron may seem to have coloured with the name thereof.” Those old curative properties are now quite disregarded, but they were once considered potent. The very least of the benefits it conferred was the exhilaration of the spirits, so that the old proverb for a merry fellow was “He hath slept in a bag of saffron,” and Gerard, in his herbal, says: “The moderate use of it is good for the head, maketh the sences more quicke and lively, shaketh off heavie and drowsie sleepe, and maketh a man merrie.” But other and more convivial things have long been found to produce the same results. While it was thought to relieve hysterical depression, it was good also for the small-pox. Placed in bags under the chins of sufferers from that fearful disease, it was supposed to bring on the eruptions, and so quickly relieve the patients. Fuller gives very emphatic testimony to its virtues. “Under God,” he says, “I owe my life, when sick of the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof.”

So beneficent a plant, of course, commanded a high price. In Fuller’s time saffron sold at £3 a pound, and in 1665, the year of the Great Plague of London, it rose to £4 1s. 10d. Those were, by consequence, the times of saffron adulteration.

“No precious drug,” he says, “is more adulterated with cartamus, the inward pilling of willow,” and suggests that dealers should look carefully into the matter.

Of its high qualities he was, as we have seen, fully convinced, but another proof he advances, is not, to a sceptical modern world, altogether conclusive. The Age of Faith is past, but it was current in Fuller’s era. He, at any rate, had the capacity for infinite belief, as we shall see. “In a word,” he sums up, “the sovereign power of genuine saffron is plainly proved, for the crocodile’s tears are never true, save when he is forced where saffron groweth (whence he hath his name of ‘croco-deilos,’ or the saffron-fearer), knowing himself to be all poison, and it all antidote.” The logical conclusion of this belief would have been that wholesale saffron-buyers should have kept a staff of crocodiles as (so to speak) tasters, and by their tears, or the want of them, have gauged the purity of those purchases.

Hollingshead, writing of saffron cultivation, calls the farmers of it “crokers.” It was a culture that must then have earned many a fortune, and so late as 1717 it was worth £1 6s. 6d. a pound; but, what with that curse of all industries, over-production, the carelessness of the growers, and shameless adulteration, price and quality declined. Then, too, the dependence of medicine upon the old herbalists began to decay, and the reputation of saffron fell off to such an extent that by 1790 it was no longer cultivated at Walden, and the “crokers” were in another sense justified of their name.

Nowadays saffron is chiefly used as a colouring material for aromatic confections, for liqueurs and varnishes. Put in common cakes, that prove to have been made of something suspiciously like sawdust and paste, the yellow hue it gives produces a specious and illusory richness only discovered too late