e
plentiful and supplied capital--you can find their traces in the name
of the "Jews' Lane Ward"--and then came the industrious Flemings, who
brought with them the art of weaving cloth and peculiar modes of
building houses, so that Lynn looks almost like a little Dutch town.
The old guild life of Lynn was strong and vigorous, from its Merchant
Guild to the humbler craft guilds, of which we are told that there
have been no less than seventy-five. Part of the old Guildhall,
erected in 1421, with its chequered flint and stone gable still stands
facing the market of St. Margaret with its Renaissance porch, and a
bit of the guild hall of St. George the Martyr remains in King Street.
The custom-house, which was originally built as an exchange for the
Lynn merchants, is a notable building, and has a statue of Charles II
placed in a niche.

This was the earliest work of a local architect, Henry Bell, who is
almost unknown. He was mayor of King's Lynn, and died in 1717, and his
memory has been saved from oblivion by Mr. Beloe of that town, and is
enshrined in Mr. Blomfield's _History of Renaissance Architecture_:--

"This admirable little building originally consisted of an open
loggia about 40 feet by 32 feet outside, with four columns down
the centre, supporting the first floor, and an attic storey above.
The walls are of Portland stone, with a Doric order to the ground
storey supporting an Ionic order to the first floor. The cornice
is of wood, and above this is a steep-pitched tile roof with
dormers, surmounted by a balustrade inclosing a flat, from which
rises a most picturesque wooden cupola. The details are extremely
refined, and the technical knowledge and delicate sense of scale
and proportion shown in this building are surprising in a designer
who was under thirty, and is not known to have done any previous
work."[5]

[5] _History of Renaissance Architecture_, by R. Blomfield.

A building which the town should make an effort to preserve is the old
"Greenland Fishery House," a tenement dating from the commencement of
the seventeenth century.

The Duke's Head Inn, erected in 1689, now spoilt by its coating of
plaster, a house in Queen's Street, the old market cross, destroyed in
1831 and sold for old materials, and the altarpieces of the churches
of St. Margaret and St. Nicholas, destroyed during "restoration," and
North Runcton church, three miles from Lynn, are other works of this
very