BEDINGHAAf, DITCHINGHAM 6^ THE FARMS ^ 



during their long peaceful day of more than two centuries. I am 

 not aware that the commissioners reported their establishment for 

 riotous or unseemly practices ; indeed it seems difficult to connect 

 such fast doings with Bedingham or its inhabitants, clerical or lay, 

 although this may be mere Arcadian prejudice. Therefore, as there 

 is no fishing in the neighbourhood, I have come to the conclusion 

 that the old monks must have been great farmers, and probably 

 very good ones according to their lights and opportunities. 



I make no excuse for these remarks on the history of Beding- 

 ham, introduced into a description of a farm in the parish, since I 

 believe that most readers will agree with me that there is some- 

 thing almost fascinating about such records and the speculations 

 to which they give rise. The crown and charm of rural England 

 is its antiquity. Our American relations may bring these villages 

 to poverty by swamping the markets and thus destroying our 

 agricultural prosperity, but in a certain sense we are avenged 

 upon them. I wonder what they would give for a few hamlets 

 with a pedigree like that of Bedingham. Here such places and 

 their pasts are quite unnoticed ; yonder, where they have more 

 taste and sympathy for what is bygone, they would be prized 

 indeed. But so it is. If, like the present writer, a man has 

 lived in new countries, and been more than satisfied with their 

 unshaped crudity, he turns home again with a quickened appetite 

 for things hoar with age, and with a gathered reverence towards 

 that which has been hallowed by the custom of generations. 

 Indeed the lives of us individuals are so short that we learn to take 

 a kind of comfort in the contemplation of communities linked 

 together from century to century by an unbroken bond of blood, 

 and moulded to a fixed type of character by surroundings and daily 

 occupations which have scarcely varied since the days of Harold. 

 The Moat Farm at Bedingham is a heavy-land farm, in fact it 

 would be difficult to find a heavier. Walk over it in wet weather, 

 and five minutes of hard work will scarcely clean your boots, so 

 'loving' is the country ; walk over it in dry before the frost has 

 broken up the clods in winter, or rain has slaked them in summer, 



