During the interval between the first and second tours in East Anglia many books, more or less promising of material, were read. Of these books it will be prudent to say a little before recording an expedition in which East Anglia was attacked, so to speak, amidships. Many of them it is needless to mention, though some will come in for passing reference. The first was Murray's Handbook to Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire, which is well-planned, having regard to the needs of its age, and well, no less than learnedly, written; but it was published more than thirty years ago, and is therefore rather out of date as to some of its facts, and for motorists absolutely obsolete in its method. It proceeds, for the most part, county by county; its routes are railway routes; it almost ignores roadside scenery, and it enlarges, very usefully sometimes, upon the internal details of churches and of other edifices, with which the motorist can rarely be concerned; for, as it is not intelligent to hurry through the country always, so it is not motoring to "potter" at every place. The good "Murray" is really rather embarrassing to the motorist. Let me illustrate. Scole, mentioned in the last chapter, is a little more than two miles from Yaxley, on the Roman road. A brief account of Scole is found on p. 183. If Yaxley were mentioned at all (and it is worth mentioning, for the sake of its church, in a guide-book pure and simple) it would find a place in some Suffolk route, for only very occasionally does the guide-book writer allow even a railway to transport him across a county boundary. Amongst other books studied were Leland's Itinerary, the Paston Letters, in five stately quarto volumes, and Arthur Young's Six Weeks' Tour. These studies were not quite in vain, for they will at least show a reader what to avoid. Young's Six Weeks' Tour is most consumedly dull, reeking of turnips, sticky with marl, and the accounts of "the seats of the nobility and gentry, and other objects worthy of notice, by the author of the Farmers' Letters," are very rarely interesting. Some of them which are to our purpose—for of course the tour was not confined to East Anglia—shall be quoted in due season. To reading Leland, stimulated by many quaint quotations in later works, I had looked forward for years, but the second edition in nine volumes of "The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, Oxford; Printed at the Theatre, for James Fletcher, Bookseller in the Turl, and Joseph Pott, Bookseller at Eton. 1745," was a grievous disappointment. The plums seem all to have been picked out by guide-book writers; few of them, if any, relate to East Anglia. The only things worthy of note were an account, perfectly straightforward, and to be quoted in its place, of the Dunmow Flitch, and some doggerel concerning the "properties of the counties of England." The material ones for us are:—
Essex, ful of good hoswyves,
*....*....*....*
Northfolk, ful of wyles,
Southfolk, ful of styles,
Huntingdoneshyre corne ful goode,
*....*....*....*
Cambridgeshire full of pykes.
Leland, in fact, cannot be commended, but that is only because he planned his magnum opus, like many a good man before him and after, without regard to the allotted span of human life, not to speak of its uncertainty. In his "Newe Yeare's Gyft to King Henry the viii in the xxxvii Yeare of his Raygne," Leland talks of his studies, of his six years of travel, and then sketches his plan. It is "to write an History, to the which I entende to adscribe this Title, De Antiquitate Britannica or els Civilis Historia. And this Worke I entende to divide yn to so many Bookes as there be Shires yn England and Sheres and greate Dominions in Wales. So that I esteme that this Volume will include a fiftie Bookes, wherof each one severally shaul conteyne the Beginninges Encreaces, and memorable Actes of the chief Tounes and Castelles of the Province allottid to hit." Leland died when he was forty-six, but if he had lived another century he could hardly have achieved his self-imposed task, even if he had been miraculously endowed with a Mercédès; and he cherished divers other projects. As it is, his so-called Itinerary is, at best, but a collection of rough notes, having frequently no sort of coherence, often corrected or added to later in a distant geographical connection. In spite of a taste for antiquity it may be put down as stiff and heavy to read, and not sufficiently abounding in quaintness to repay the trouble of the reader.
The Paston Letters on the other hand, are the best of reading, giving a wonderfully vivid idea of life in East Anglia at a singularly troublous period, and there will be occasion to quote them more than once. The edition by the worthy Sir John Fenn, stately as it is, and a joy to handle, is far from being the best. Posterity owes to him a deep debt for rescuing the letters from oblivion, but he omitted as uninteresting precisely the little fragments upon private and domestic affairs which we value most now in later editions. His notes, too, prove him to have been a rather dull dog and lacking in a sense of humour. Sometimes he scents impropriety where there is clearly none, at others he misconstrues the most obvious badinage. Thus, where John Paston is addressed in the phrase, "Wishing you joy of all your ladies," Fenn suggests a reference to the Virgin Mary, Heaven knows why. Still, Fenn rescued the letters, and the latest edition—far more complete than his—is at once one of the most entertaining and valuable of historical documents and essential to the right understanding of life in old Norfolk. In fact, the Paston Letters is one of the few really old books which a man not too studiously inclined may not prudently be contented to take as read. It is vastly entertaining, but, it must be said, it is not for the young person. A spade was not called a horticultural implement in those days, and there are many spades, and some knaves of spades too, in the Paston Letters.
Fortified with this literary foundation, and a good deal more of minor importance, I left my Berkshire home near Abingdon on 9 March in a 30-h.p. Rolls-Royce car, six-cylindered and equipped with every luxury in the shape of glass-screens and a cape hood, and driven by Mr. Claude Johnson. For companions we had my two daughters, and for assistance, if it were needed, a mechanic. As it happened there was not a particle of trouble with tires, engine, or apparatus of any kind during the 300 miles and more of this expedition, and we might have dispensed quite well with the mechanic, and with his weight. Indeed, at the end of the little tour, and for that matter after the next on another car, arose a feeling that the days of the uncertainty of motor-cars were over. Need it be said that Nemesis was in waiting for this sanguine feeling, and that, before my "travelling days were o'er" in East Anglia, one of those extraordinary runs of misfortune came, which, in motoring more than in any other pastime, justify the sayings that troubles never come singly, that it never rains but it pours? It is perhaps wise to make this statement now, for a record of motoring wherein all was plain sailing—the metaphor is hardly mixed, for there is kinship between the motion of a sailing craft running free and that of a car in good tune—might run the risk of being dull. How our troubles were turned into a positive pleasure, at the time as well as in retrospect, by the skill, patience, and good humour of this same Mr. Claude Johnson, shall be told in its proper place in another chapter.
One thing, however, may be said by way of preliminary to the account of this particular tour. There was much controversy at the beginning of 1905 upon the question whether the movement of a six-cylinder petrol car is, or is not, more luxurious than that of a four-cylinder car of first-rate design and construction. A prolonged match, not entirely free from flukes,