Two Suffolk Friends | Page 6

now," said my grandfather,
and proceeded to take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind
came and blew the hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire
stories that recur to my memory; but neither here is the interest of
Suffolk. So to Suffolk we will come back, like my father in 1845, in
which year he succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham.
Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants.
{20} It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-Reformation times,
when it was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were
sent for rustication. Hence its name (the "south village of the monks");
and hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory gardens.
Three of them enclose the orchard, which is planted quincunx-wise,
with yew hedge and grass-walk all round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk"
that grass- walk should be named, for my father paced it morning after
morning. The pike and roach would plash among the reeds and
water-lilies; and "Fish, fish, do your duty," my father would say to
them. Whereupon, he maintained, the fish always put out their noses
and answered, "If you do your duty, we do our duty,"--words fully as
applicable to parson as to sultan.
{"Fish, fish, do your duty.": p20.jpg}
The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas
Rogerson, was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife
and children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which,"
Walker tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very
mean Cottage upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and
miserable Condition." But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St
Peter's, is striking even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the
chancel, the great traceried east window, and the font sculptured with
the Seven Sacraments. The churchyard is pretty with trees and
shrubs--those four yews by the gates a present from FitzGerald; and the

rectory, half a mile off, is almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and
limes, all of my father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon
will be treeless. It was not so when my father first came to it. Where
now there is one huge field, there then would be five or six, not a few
of them meadows, and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two
"Greens" then--one has many years since been enclosed; and there was
not a "made" road in the entire parish--only grassy lanes, with gates at
intervals. "High farming" has wrought great changes, not always to the
profit of our farmers, whose moated homesteads hereabouts bear
old-world names--Woodcroft Hall, Blood Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows
Hall, Windwhistle Hall, and suchlike. "High farming," moreover, has
swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were
ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its resident tenant;
now the number is reduced to less than half. It seems a pity, for a
twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus loses all chance of
advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon
as extinct as the bustard.
Tom Pepper was the last of our Monk Soham yeomen--a man, said my
father, of the stuff that furnished Cromwell with his Ironsides. He was a
strong Dissenter; but they were none the worse friends for that, not
even though Tom, holding forth in his Little Bethel, might sometimes
denounce the corruptions of the Establishment. "The clargy," he once
declared, "they're here, and they ain't here; they're like pigs in the
garden, and yeou can't git 'em out." On which an old woman, a member
of the flock, sprang up and cried, "That's right, Brother Pepper, kitch
'em by the fifth buttonhole!" {22} Tom went once to hear Gavazzi
lecture at Debenham, and next day my father asked him how he liked it.
"Well," he said, "I thowt I should ha' beared that chap they call Jerry
Baldry, but I din't. Howsomdiver, this one that spook fare to laa it into
th' owd Pope good tidily." Another time my father said something to
him about the Emperor of Russia. "Rooshur," said Tom; "what's that
him yeou call Prooshur?" And yet again, when a concrete wall was
built on to a neighbouring farm-building, Tom remarked
contemptuously that he "din't think much of them consecrated walls."
Withal, what an honest, sensible soul it was!

Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the "Guildhall," an
ancient house, though probably far less ancient than its name. It is
parish property, and for years has served as an almshouse for ten or a
dozen old people. My father used to read the Bible to them, and there
was a