viii ' Travels in France 



The old Bradfield Hall, among whose spacious rooms and 

 rambling passages their younger boy passed his childhood, has 

 given place to a more modem edifice, but its fair setting among 

 East-Anglian scenery, the trees he and his father planted, still 

 remain ; for to this day the Western Hundreds of Suffolk have 

 retained much of their old charm, lying as they do outside the 

 scarred manufacturing districts of modem England. If the 

 population of Bradfield has remained stationary — in 1801 it 

 was 1 25 ; in 190 1 , 123 — the rental value has fallen with startling 

 incidence. According to Rider Haggard ^ the Bradfield acres 

 which Young farmed and which in the good old times were 

 sold for £']0 an acre fetched in 1 898 only ■£'] an acre. 



Few spots in rural England touch the traveller from a 

 modem manufacturing city with a profounder regret for her 

 vanished beauty than the quaint little village of Bradfield and 

 the more important but equally picturesque old market to^vn of 

 Lavenham — Lanham as the local folk call it — with its massive 

 church tower standing four-square to the winds, unrivalled in 

 East Anglia for noble simplicity and austere beaut\'. The 

 grammar school at which Arthur's education was formed, no 

 longer serves its founder's intention. The foundation has 

 been transferred to Bury and the old fabric serves as a horse- 

 hair weavers' workshop. ^ Of the three ancient Guild Halls 

 of the Clothworkers, one, that of Corpus Christi, yet remains, 

 so does many another fine old timbered house with admirable 

 decorative carvings, telling of prosperous and happy times 

 when local builders inherited artistic traditions and expressed 

 their sense of beauty and love of good craftsmanship in 

 domestic architecture. " For over six hundred years," says 

 Sir William Brampton Gurdon, " Suffolk stood second only to 

 Middlesex in importance. It wa^ populous; it abounded in 

 industries and manufactures, and was the home of great 

 statesmen." ^ 



At this fine old town of Lavenham, once so rich and pros- 

 perous, to the care of an indulgent mother succeeded the rule 

 of an indulgent pedagogue. Young writes with much con- 

 tempt of the " wretched place " and of the meagre results of 

 his schooling there. The little pony that should have carried 

 the lad every Monday morning along the few miles of road 

 between Bradfield and Lavenham proved a laggard, un- 



^ Rural England, ii. 389. 



* Or was so occupied when the present writer was there a few years since. 



^ Memoirs of old Suffolk, p. vii. 



