desired retirement and solitude, with which, being
enclosed, they have no occasion for the privacy of a wilderness.' Before
the monks came the place was held by the Iceni--a stout and valiant
people, as Tacitus describes them. In the time of the Heptarchy, King
Uffa was their lord and master. In later times Suffolk, when explored by
Camden, was celebrated for its cheeses, which, to the great advantage of
the inhabitants, were bought up through all England, nay, in Germany
also, with France and Spain, as Pantaleon Medicus has told us, who
scruples not to set them against those of Placentia both in colour and
taste. To the Norfolk people, it must be admitted, Camden gives the
palm. The goodness of the soil of that country, he argues, 'may be
gathered from hence, that the inhabitants are of a bright, clear
complexion, not to mention their sharpness of wit and admirable quickness
in the study of our common law. So that it is at present, and always has
been, reputed the common nursery of lawyers, and even amongst the common
people you shall meet with a great many who (as one expresses it), if
they have no just quarrel, are able to raise it out of the very quirks
and niceties of the law.' In our time it is rather the fashion to run
down the East Anglians, yet that they have done their duty to their
country no one can deny. 'They say we are Norfolk fules,' said a waiter
at a Norfolk hotel, to me, a little while ago; 'but I ain't ashamed of my
county, for all that.' Why should he be, the reader naturally asks?

The Saxons of East Anglia gave the name of England to this land of ours;
but before this time East Anglia had attained, by means of its sons and
daughters, to fame far and near. If we may believe Gildas, a Christian
church was planted in England in the time of Nero. Claudia, to whom Paul
refers in Philippians and Timothy, was a British lady of great wit and
greater beauty, celebrated by the poet Martial. She may have been
converted by Paul, argued the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, a local historian,
Rural Dean and Rector of Stowmarket; nor is it at all improbable, he
adds, 'that Claudia, the British beauty, may have been an Iceni, or East
Anglian lady, as her brilliant complexion, for which so many in these
counties are celebrated, had caused a vivid feeling of sensation and
curiosity and envy even among the haughty dames of the imperial city of
Rome.' The Romans were glad to make terms with the Iceni till the
unf