president’s address. 
521 
that nothing can be added to the general outlines which he has 
sketched with such a masterly hand ; but I think we may profitably 
spend the brief half-hour allotted to us in trying to realise the 
picture presented by some of these highly interesting tracts of 
country before drainage and enclosure had reduced their area, and 
shorn them to a great extent of their natural wildness. I own, the 
material at our disposal, out of which to reconstruct the picture is 
small indeed, and therefore, if only for that reason the more precious; 
but it may be that a tine line introduced here and there will enable 
us with greater ease, mentally, to recall to some extent a condition 
of things which has passed away never to return. 
This dearth of early records as to the state of the County of 
Norfolk in times past is remarkable, for surely a tract of country 
so diversified as to call forth Fuller’s oft-quoted remark that all 
England might be constructed out of it, “ not only as to kinds but 
degrees thereof," or as Spelman puts it in his Icenia, “ Huntingdon 
is rather hilly ; Cambridgeshire is entirely cam pagne ; Suffolk well 
furnished with woods ; and Norfolk partakes of all these several 
features,” * must have been possessed of great diversity of surface, 
and we know with such attractions it could not fail to become the 
resort of countless hosts of feathered fowls and four-footed 
beasts, whilst its abundant waters must have teemed with fish 
innumerable. 
“ Could the England of 1 G85,” says Macaulay, + “be by some magic 
process, set before our eyes, we should not know one landscape in 
a hundred, or one building in ten thousand, .... many thousand 
square miles which are now rich corn-land and meadow, intersected 
by green hedgerows, and dotted with villages and pleasant country 
seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens aban- 
doned to wild ducks, .... many breeds now extinct or rare, both 
* All the extracts given here from Sir Henry Spelman's Icenia. are from 
a MS. English translation, made by the late Rev. George Munford, author 
of ‘ An Analysis of the Domesday Book of Norfolk,’ and of ‘ Local Norfolk 
Names,’ which was kindly lent me by his sou, the Rev. E. E. Montford, of 
S wanton Abbot. 
f Hist. vol. i. p. 2S1. 
