XXXIII
The 3¾ miles onwards to Thetford were known and dreaded in the old days as “Thetford Heath.” Elveden Gap, passed on the way, is the name of a clump of firs, marking where the boundaries of estates and parishes run. Beyond it stretches the lonely heath. Pollard, in his terrifying print of the “Norwich Mail in a Thunderstorm,” makes this the scene of a very dramatic picture, with the lightning horribly forky and the rain very slanty and penetrating. Thetford Heath was an ill place on such an occasion; but the elements were not the chiefest of its dangers, which in any year from mediæval times until modern were rather to be expected at the hands of man.
ELVEDEN GAP.
There still exists in the old church of St. George Colegate, Norwich, a tragical epitaph to the memory of a traveller slain on these wild wastes in those dangerous times. It is engraved on a ledger-stone forming a part of the flooring at the west end of the nave, and is hidden from the gaze of the casual visitor only by the matting. A skull and cross-bones are placed above the inscription, which runs:—
The register of St. George’s, which records the burial of the unfortunate Bryant Lewis on September 19th, six days following the murder, is at curious variance with the epitaph, for it makes the date 1697.
We do not hear anything of the circumstances under which Bryant Lewis was killed, nor does it appear that his murderers were ever caught.
Thetford must have been a welcome sight to the timorous travellers of old, and surely no place of pilgrimage was hailed with more delight than that with which they first glimpsed the tower of St. Mary’s and the outlying houses of the Suffolk suburb of the town.
One comes downhill into Thetford: down into the valley of the Thet and Lesser Ouse, which divide the county of Suffolk and the land of the Norfolk Dumplings. The flint-towered church that thus heralds the town is the oldest of the remaining three, and was severely handled in Cromwellian times, when it was converted for a while into a stable. It had, until 1850, a thatched roof. Here the road from Bury St. Edmunds falls in, a junction of roads still known by some of the older generation as “Cockpit Corner,” a name that marks the site of the cockpit which stood here in those brutal days of yore and moved a letter-writer of 1785 to say, “I believe most of the young Thetford people are dissipated, simple, ignorant young men (what a nice ‘derangement of epitaphs’!) that mind nothing but the low and insipid sport of cock-fighting.” From this point, into the town across the Town Bridge, the road narrows amazingly, and, arrived at the “Bell” inn, and St. Peter’s Church, it wears almost the appearance of a lane