88 BIEDS OF NOEFOLK. 



all we ever beheld or heard of, if generally taken, and 

 comprehending all swans, or of all places, we cannot 

 assent thereto." 



SWAN "UPPINQ" ON THE YARE. 



The annual swan " upping " or " hopping," as it is 

 variously termed, is fixed by ancient custom on the 

 second Monday in August, and but once in the 

 last twenty years has it been postponed through a 

 cold backward season. Whatever may have been 

 the pageantry of the occasion in olden times — or 

 at least prior to the passing of the Municipal 

 Reform Act, in 1835, and the abolition of the Guild- 

 day and other festivities — of late years, .the proceed- 

 ings have had no special feature beyond the swan- 

 hunt itself; and even the time-honoured dinner at 

 Coldham Hall to the swanherds and other corporate 

 officials, at which the Mayor occasionally presided, 

 has been discontinued, I believe, since 1845. In this 

 strictly utilitarian age, also, the office of swanherd to 

 the corporation was not likely to pass long unchal- 

 lenged, and from somewhere about the above date, no 

 such official has been elected by the Town Council, the 

 corporation swans having been placed entirely in the 

 hands of Mr. Simpson, the governor of St. Helen's 

 Hospital* in this city, who, from the Swan-pit, on those 



* St. Helen's Hospital, or Almshouse, for aged men and 

 women, in Bishopgate Street, known also as the Great, St. Giles', 

 and the Old Men's Hospital, occupies the site of the dissolved 

 hospital of St. Giles', founded by Walter Suffield alias Calthorp, 

 Bishop of Norwich, in 1249, but which, in IS-i?, was granted by- 

 Edward yi., in accordance with the will of his late father, to " the 

 mayor, sheriffs, citizens, and commonalty," with all the revenues 

 belonging thereto, " to be henceforward a place and house for the 

 relief of poor people, and to be called God's House, or the House 

 of the Poor in Holmstreet." — See " Blomefield's History of 

 Norwich," 8vo, vol. ii., pp. 376-391 . 



