ugh its hospitality was fully
maintained. It had little subsequent history. The abbey was garrisoned
by the Royalists, and captured by Cromwell in 1643, after which it fell
into ruin. Such has been the fate of almost all the religious houses in
the Fens, the merits of which the people in the olden time judged
according to a local rhyme which yet survives:

"Ramsay, the bounteous of gold and of fee;
Crowland, as courteous as courteous may be;
Spalding the rich, and Peterborough the proud;
Sawtrey, by the way, that poor abbaye,
Gave more alms in one day than all they."

NORWICH.

Proceeding eastward out of the Fenland and among the hills of Norfolk,
the little river Wensum is found to have cut a broad, deep, and
trench-like valley into the chalk and gravel plateau. Upon the elevated
bank of the river is the irregularly picturesque town of Norwich, with
the castle keep rising above the undulating mass of buildings, and the
cathedral and its noble spire overtopping the lower portion of the city
on the right hand. Norwich is an ancient town, but very little is known
with certainty about it anterior to the Danish invasions. We are told
that its original location was at the more southerly castle of Caister,
whence the inhabitants migrated to the present site, for--

"Caister was a city when Norwich was none,
And Norwich was built of Caister stone."

Canute held possession of Norwich and had a castle there, but the
present castle seems to date from the Norman Conquest, when it was
granted to Ralph de Quader, who turned traitor to the king, causing
Norfolk to be besieged, captured, and greatly injured. Then the castle
was granted to Roger Bigod. The town grew, and became especially
prosperous from the settlement there of numerous Flemish weavers in the
fourteenth century and of Walloons in Elizabeth's reign. It managed to
keep pretty well out of the Civil Wars, but a local historian says, "The
inhabitants have been saved from stagnation by the exceeding bitterness
with which all party and local political questions are discussed and
contested, and by the hearty way in which all classes throw themselves
into all really patriotic movements, when their party feeling
occasionally sleeps for a month or two." Norwich is pre-eminently a town
of churches, into the construction of which flint enters largely, it
being dressed with great skill into small roughened cubical blocks.

[Illustration: NORWICH CASTLE.]

T