The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe

  A town it is that in rich situation exceedeth many cities, and without the which, caput gentis,23 the swelling battlements of Gurguntus,24 a head city of Norfolk and Suffolk, would scarce retain the name of a city, but become as ruinous and desolate as Thetford25 or Ely; out of an hill or heap of sand reared and enforced from the sea most miraculously, and by the singular policy and uncessant inestimable expense of the inhabitants, so firmly piled and rampiered against the fumish26 waves’ battery, or suing the least action of recovery, that it is more conjectural of the twain, the land with a writ of an Eiectione firma27 will get the upper hand of the ocean than the ocean one crow’s skip prevail against the continent. Forth of the sands thus strugglingly as it exalteth and lifts up his glittering head, so of the neighbouring sands no less semblably, whether in recordation of their worn-out affinity or no, I know not, it is so inamorately protected and patronized, that they stand as a trench or guard about it in the night, to keep off their enemies. Now, in that drowsy empire of the pale-faced Queen of Shades, malgre28 letting drive upon their barricadoes, or impetuously contending to break through their chain or bar, but they entomb and ballast with sudden destruction.

  In this transcursive reportory,29 without some observant glance I may not dully overpass the gallant beauty of their haven, which, having but as it were a welt of land, or, as Master Camden30 calls it, lingulam terrae, a little tongue of the earth betwixt it and the wide main, sticks not31 to manage arms and hold his own undefeasibly32 against that universal unbounded empery of surges, and so hath done for this hundred year. Two mile in length it stretcheth his winding currents, and then meets with a spacious river or backwater that feeds it. A narrow channel or isthmus in rash view33 you would opinionate it. When this I can devoutly aver, I beholding it with both my eyes this last fishing, six hundred reasonable barks and vessels of good burden,34 with a vantage, it hath given shelter to at once in her harbour, and most of them riding abreast before the quay betwixt the bridge and the south gate. Many bows’ length beyond the mark my pen roves not, I am certain. If I do, they stand at my elbow that can correct me. The delectable lusty sight and movingest object methought it was, that our Isle sets forth, and nothing behind in number with the invincible Spanish Armada, though they were not such Gargantuan boisterous gullyguts35 as they, though ships and galliasses36 they would have been reckoned in the navy of King Edgar, who is chronicled and registered with three thousand ships of war to have scoured the narrow seas and sailed round about England every summer. That which especiallest nourished the most prime pleasure in me was after a storm when they were driven in swarms, and lay close pestered37 together as thick as they could pack. The next day following, if it were fair, they would cloud the whole sky with canvas, by spreading their drabbled sails in the full clew38 abroad a-drying, and make a braver show with them than so many banners and streamers displayed against the sun on a mountain top.

  But how Yarmouth, of itself so innumerable populous and replenished, and in so barren a plot seated, should not only supply her inhabitants with plentiful purveyance of sustenance, but provant and victual39 moreover this monstrous army of strangers, was a matter that egregiously bepuzzled and entranced my apprehension. Hollanders, Zelanders, Scots, French, Western men, Northern men, besides all the hundreds and wapentakes40 nine miles compass, fetch the best of her viands and mangery from her market For ten weeks together this rabble rout of outlandishers are billeted with her; yet in all that while the rate of no kind of food is raised, nor the plenty of their markets one pint of butter rebated, and at the ten weeks’ end, when the camp is broken up, no impression of any dearth left, but rather more store than before. Some of the town dwellers have so large an opinion of their settled provision that, if all Her Majesty’s fleet at once should put into their bay, within twelve days’ warning with so much double beer, beef, fish and biscuit, they would bulk them as they could wallow away with.

  Here I could break out into a boundless race of oratory, in shrill trumpeting and concelebrating the royal magnificence of her government, that for state and strict civil ordering scant admitteth any rivals; but I fear it would be a theme displeasant to the grave modesty of the discreet present magistrates, and therefore consultively41 I overslip42 it. Howsoever, I purpose not in the like respect to leap over the laudable pedigree of Yarmouth, but will fetch her from her swaddling clouts or infancy, and reveal to you when and by whom she was first wrought out of the ocean’s arms, and start up and aspired to such starry sublimity; as also acquaint you with the notable immunities, franchises, privileges she is endowed with beyond all her confiners, by the descentine43 line of kings from the Conquest.

  There be of you, it may be, that will account me a palterer, for hanging out the sign of the red herring in my title page, and no such feast towards for ought you can see. Soft and fair, my masters, you must walk and talk before dinner an hour or two, the better to whet your appetites to taste of such a dainty dish as the red herring. And that you may not think the time tedious, I care not if I bear you company and lead you a sound walk round about Yarmouth and show you the length and breadth of it.

  The masters’ and bachelors’ commencement dinners at Cambridge and Oxford are betwixt three and four in the afternoon, and the rest of the antecedence of the day worn out in disputations. Imagine this the act or commencement of the red herring, that proceedeth bachelor, master and doctor all at once, and therefore his disputations must be longer. But to the point, may it please the whole generation of my auditors to be advertised how that noble earth where the town of Great Yarmouth is now mounted, and where so much fish is sold, in the days of yore hath been the place where you might have catched fish and as plain a sea within this six hundred year as any boat could tumble in, and so was the whole level of the marshes betwixt it and Norwich. An. Do. 1000 or thereabouts (as I have scraped out of worm-eaten parchment) and in the reign of Canutus (he that died drunk at Lambeth44 or Lome-hith), somewhat before or somewhat after, not a prenticeship of years varying, Caput extulit undis,45 the sands set up shop for themselves; and from that moment to this sextine century (or let me be not taken with a lie, five hundred ninety-eight, that wants but a pair of years to make me a true man) they would no more live under the yoke of the sea, or have their heads washed with his bubbly spume or barber’s balderdash,46 but clearly quitted, disterminated,47 and relegated themselves from his inflated capriciousness of playing the dictator over them.

  The northern wind was the clanging trumpeter, who, with the terrible blast of his throat, in one yellow heap or plump,48 clustered or congested them together, even as the western gales in Holland right over against them have wrought unruly havoc and threshed and swept the sands so before them that they have choked or clammed up the middle walk or door of the Rhene, and made it as stable a clod-mould or turf-ground as any hedger can drive stake in. Caster, two mile distant from this new Yarmouth we entreat of, is inscribed to be that old Yarmouth whereof there are specialties to be seen in the oldest writers, and yet some visible apparent tokens remain of a haven that ran up to it, and there had his entrance into the sea (by aged fishermen commonly termed ‘Grub’s Haven’), though now it be gravelled up and the stream or tide-gate turned another way. But this is most warrantable: the alpha of all the Yarmouths it was, and not the omega correspondently, and from her withered root they branch the high ascent of their genealogy. Omnium rerum vicissitudo est:49 one’s falling is another’s rising, and so fell it out with that ruined dorp50 or hamlet which after it had relapsed into the Lord’s hands for want of reparations,51 and there were not men enough in it to defend the shore from invasion, one Cerdicus, a plashing52 Saxon, that had revelled here and there with his battleaxe, on the bordering banks of the decrepit over-worn village now surnamed Gorlstone, threw forth his anchor, and, with the assistance of his spear instead of a pikestaff, leapt aground like a sturdy brute, and his yeomen bold cast their heels in their neck,53 and frisked it after him, and thence sprouteth that obscene appellation of Sarding54
Sands, with the draff of the carterly hoblobs55 thereabouts concoct56 or disgeast57 for a scripture verity, when the right Christendom of it is Cerdick Sands, or Cerdick Shore, of Cerdicus so denominated, who was the first maylord or captain of the morris dance that on those embenched shelves58 stamped his footing, where cods and dogfish sworn (not a warp of weeks59 forerunning), and till he had given the onset, they balked60 them as quicksands. By and by, after his jumping upon them, the Saxons, for that Garianonum, or Yarmouth, that had given up the ghost, in those slimy plashy fields of Gorlstone trowelled up61 a second Yarmouth, abutting on the west side of the shore of this Great Yarmouth that is. But feeling the air to be unwholesome and disagreeing with them, to the overwhart62 brink or verge of the flood, that writ all one style of Cerdick Sands, they dislodged with bag and baggage, and there laid the foundation of a third Yarmouth Quam nulla potest abolere vetustas,63 that I hope will hold up her head till doomsday.

  In this Yarmouth, as Master Camden saith, there were seventy inhabitants, or householders, that paid scot and lot in the time of Edward the Confessor, but a chronographical Latin table, which they have hanging up in their Guildhall, of all their transmutations from their cradlehood, infringeth this a little, and flatters her she is a great deal younger; in a fair text hand texting unto us how, in the Scepterdom of Edward the Confessor, the sands first began to grow into sight at a low water, and more shoulder at the mouth of the river Hirus or Jerus, whereupon it was dubbed Iernmouth or Yarmouth. And then there were two channels, one on the north, another on the south, wherethrough the fishermen did wander and waver up to Norwich and divers parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, all the fenny Lerna betwixt, that with reeds is so embristled, being (as I have forspoke or spoken tofore) Madona Amphitrite, fluctuous demeans or fee simple.64

  From the City of Norwich on the east part, it is sixteen mile disjunct or dislocated. And though betwixt the sea and the salt flood it be interposed, yet in no place about it can you dig six-foot deep, but you shall have a gushing spring of fresh or sweet water for all uses, as apt and accommodate as Saint Winifred’s Well,65 or Tower Hill water at London, so much praised and sought after. My tables66 are not yet one quarter emptied of my notes out of their table, which because it is, as it were, a sea rutter67 diligently kept amongst them from age to age, of all their ebbs and flows, and winds that blew with or against them, I tie myself to more precisely, and thus it leadeth on.

  In the time of King Harold and William the Conqueror, this sand of Yarmouth grew to a settled lump, and was as dry as the sands of Arabia, so that thronging theatres of people, as well aliens as Englishmen, hived thither about the selling of fish and herring, from Saint Michael to Saint Martin, and there built sutlers’68 booths and tabernacles, to canopy their heads in from the rheum of the heavens, or the clouds-dissolving cataracts. King William Rufus having got the golden wreath about his head, one Herbertus, Bishop of the See of Norwich, hearing of the gangs of good fellows that hurtled and hustled thither as thick as it had been to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket or our Lady of Walsingham, builded a certain chapel there for the service of God and salvation of souls.

  In the reign of King Henry the First, King Stephen, King Henry the Second and Richard de corde Lion, the apostasy of the sands from the yalping world was so great that they joined themselves to the mainland of Eastflege, and whole tribes of males and females trotted, barged it thither, to build and inhabit, which the said kings (whiles they wielded their swords temporal) animadvertized of, assigned a ruler or governor over them, that was called the King’s Provost; and that manner of provostship or government remained in full force and virtue all their four throneships, alias a hundred year, even till the inauguration of King John, in whose days the forwritten Bishop of Norwich, seeing the numbrous increase of souls of both kinds that there had framed their nests, and meant not to forsake them till the Soul Bell69 tolled them thence, pulled down his chapel, and what by himself and the devout oblations and donatives of the fishermen upon every return with their nets full, re-edified and raised it to a church of that magnitude as, under minsters and cathedrals, very queasy it admits any hail-fellow-well-met.70 And the Church of St Nicholas he hallowed it, whence Yarmouth Road71 is nicknamed the Road of Saint Nicholas. King John, to comply and keep consort with his ancestors in furthering of this new water-work, in the ninth year of the engirting his annointed brows with the refulgent ophir circle, and Anno 1209, set a fresh gloss upon it, of the town or free borough of Yarmouth, and furnished it with many substantial privileges and liberties, to have and to hold the same of him and his race for fifty-five pound yearly. In Anno 1240 it perched up to be governed by bailies, and in a narrower limit than the forty years undermeal72 of the seven sleepers,73 it had so much tow to her distaff and was so well lined and bumbasted,74 that in a sea battle her ships and men conflicted75 the cinq ports, and therein so laid about them that they burnt, took and spoiled the most of them, whereof such of them as were sure flights (saving a reverence of their manhoods) ran crying and complaining to King Henry the Second, who, with the advice of his council, set a fine of a thousand pound on the Yarmouth men’s heads for that offence, which fine in the tenth of his reign he dispensed with and pardoned.

  Edward the First and Edward the Second likewise let them lack for no privileges, changing it from a borough to a port town, and there setting up a custom house with the appurtenances for the loading and unloading of ships. Henry the Third in the fortieth of his empery cheered up their bloods with two charters more, and in Anno 1262 and forty-five of his court-keeping, he permitted them to wall in their town and moat it about with a broad ditch and to have a prison or jail in it. In the swinge of his trident he constituted two Lords Admirals over the whole navy of England, which he disposed in two parts: the one to bear sway from the Thames’ mouth northward, called the northern navy, the other to shape his course from the Thames’ mouth to the westward, termed the western navy. And over this northern navy, for Admiral, commissionated one John Peerbrown, burgess of the town of Yarmouth, and over the western navy one Sir Robert Laburnus, knight.

  But Peerbrown did not only hold his office all the time of that king, doing plausible service, but was again re-admiral’d by Edward the Third, and so died. In the fourteenth of whose reign he met with the French King’s navy, being four-hundred sail, near to the haven of Sluse, and there so sliced and slashed them and tore their planks to mammocks76 and their lean guts to kite’s meat that their best mercy was fire and water which hath no mercy, and not a victualler or a drumbler77 of them hanging in the wind aloof, but was rib-roasted or had some of his ribs crushed with their stone-darting engines, no ordinance then being invented. This Edward the Third, of his propensive mind towards them, united to Yarmouth Kirtley Road, from it seven mile vacant, and, sowing in the furrows that his predecessors had entered, hained78 the price of their privileges and not brought them down one barley kernel.

  Richard the Second, upon a discord twixt Leystofe and Yarmouth, after divers lawdays and arbitrary mandates to the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk directed about it, in proper person 1385 came to Yarmouth, and, in his parliament the year ensuing, confirmed unto it the liberties of Kirtley Road, the only motive of all their contention. Henry the Fifth, or the fifth of the Henries that ruled over us, abridged them not a mite of their purchased prerogatives, but permitted them to build a bridge over their haven and aided and furthered them in it. Henry the Sixth, Edward the Fourth, Henry the Seventh and King Henry the Eight, with his daughters Queen Mary and our Chara deum soboles,79 Queen Elizabeth, have not withered up their hands in signing and subscribing to their requests, but our virgin rectoress most of all hath showered down her bounty upon them, granting them greater grants than ever they had, besides by-matters of the clerk of the market-ship,80 and many other benevolences towards the reparation of their port. This and every town hath his backwinters or frosts that nip it in the blade (as not the clearest sun-shine but hath his shade, and there is a time of sickness as well as of
health). The backwinter, the frost-biting, the eclipse or shade, and sickness of Yarmouth was a great sickness or plague in it 1348, of which in one year seven thousand and fifty people toppled up their heels there. The new building at the west end of the church was begun there 1330, which, like the imperfect works of King’s College in Cambridge, or Christchurch in Oxford, have too costly large foundations to be ever finished.

  It is thought, if the town had not been so scourged and eaten up by that mortality, out of their own purses they would have proceeded with it, but now they have gone a nearer way to the wood, for with wooden galleries in the church that they have, and stairy degrees of seats in them, they make as much room to sit and hear as a new west-end would have done.

  The length and breadth of Yarmouth I promised to show you. Have with you,81 have with you! But first look wistly82 upon the walls, which, if you mark, make a stretched-out quadrangle with the haven. They are in compass, from the south cheans83 to the north cheans, two thousand, one hundred and fourscore yards. They have towers upon them sixteen; mounts underfonging84 and enflanking them two of old, now three, which have their thundering tools to compel Diego Spaniard to duck and strike the wind cholic in his paunch if he prance too near them and will not vail85 to the Queen of England. The compass about the wall of this new mount is five-hundred foot, and in the measure of yards eight-score and seven. The breadth of the foundation nine foot; the depth within ground eleven. The heighth to the setting thereof fifteen foot, and in the breadth, at the setting of it, five foot three inches, and the procerous86 stature of it (so embaling87 and girdling in this mount) twenty foot and six inches. Gates to let in her friends and shut out her enemies Yarmouth hath ten; lanes sevenscore. As for her streets, they are as long as threescore streets in London, and yet they divide them but into three. Void ground in the town from the walls to the houses, and from the houses to the haven, is not within the verge of my geometry. The liberties of it on the fresh water one way, as namely from Yarmouth to St Toolies88 in Beckles water, are ten mile, and from Yarmouth to Hardlie Cross another way, ten mile. In all which fords or meanders none can attach,89 arrest, distress, but their officers; and if any drown themselves in them, their crowners90 sit upon them.