XIII BURY TO STOWMARKET 379 leaved yarrow, downy hawkweeds, purple vetches, and large leaved burdocks vary the floral pattern on a groundwork of green. Wild convolvulus trails its pink bell-blossoms over the banks; bright blue eyes of veronica peer from amid the drooping brome grasses, patches of sheep's sorrel here and there stain the banks a deep wine-red. The metallic murmur of a mowing machine betokens that "haysel" is still in progress in meadows not far from the road; now and again I pass a waggon heaped 380 A ROADSIDE SCENE CHAP. high with fragrant hay. Meadows, fields, and hamlets are steeped in summer sunshine; over them broods the hush of summer noon. Only the swallows darting by me, and the martins rising up to and dipping down from the cottage eaves seem uninfluenced by the noontide heat, and are ceaselessly active. Beighton Green is tenanted only by a team whose driver is probably eating his midday meal in a roadside inn; between Beighton and Woolpit I meet only two pedestrians, a dilapidated tramp carrying a fiddle made of a cigar box, and an urchin whose lagging steps suggest that he would willingly be late for school. Only two pedestrians, I say; but not far out of Beighton, resting on a bank shaded by a high hawthorn hedge, is a little group which I, if invited, would gladly join. It is a group of three persons: two ancient labourers, ruddy-faced and grey-haired, and a clergyman equally ruddy and grey. Evidently the three are cronies, for they are quite at home in each other's company and laughing heartily at something one of them has just said. I imagine the jollylooking clergyman one of the best type of country parsons, the sort of man who, while not neglecting the obvious and especial duties of his charge, can enjoy a game of bowls on his village bowling-green as heartily as he can enter into the proceedings of a meeting of antiquaries or the opening of a barrow. The pipe he is smoking, and his well-worn tobacco pouch, from which one of the labourers is filling a short-stemmed black clay pipe, prove him to be a broad-minded man, a fact which his wearing a straw hat with a college band round it (probably, for it is a new one, his son's) and the absence of any indication of clericalism in his clothes except a square-cut vest collar, go far to emphasise. Unless I am much mistaken, he knows how to cast a fly, bring down a rocketing pheasant, and handle a man as skilfully as he can rod and gun; and he is just the kind of man who, if there were signs of rain coming, would take off his coat, seize a hayfork, and help to load a waggon with hay or corn. I fancy he has done so more than once, XIII THE WOOLPIT FAIRIES 381 and that the old farm-hands who are sharing his tobacco and enjoying his jokes worked beside him. Beighton is a pretty village; but leafy Woolpit is far prettier, and its church, a decorated building with some fine perpen、 dicular additions, is one of the most interesting in Suffolk. Before the dissolution of the monasteries it belonged to St. Edmundsbury Abbey. It then contained an image of "Our Lady of Woolpit," which, with a Holy Well near by, was much resorted to by pilgrims and persons afflicted with failing eyesight. The St. Edmundsbury monks looked upon it and its shrine as one of their most valuable properties, and it was to obtain possession of it from the Pope that the monk Sampson, afterwards the famous abbot, made a journey to Rome. The manor is a very old one, mentioned in Domesday Book as Wolfpeta, a name which indicates that in the days when this part of the country was covered with forest there was a wolf pit here. Formerly there were a number of ancient trenches known as the Wolf Pits near the village; and it was in connection with them that a story was told which carries us back to the days when the Suffolk country folk believed in the existence of fairies. The tale, which is told by William of Newburgh, is to this effect. On an autumn day many years ago, some reapers at work in one of the Woolpit fields saw two children, a boy and a girl, come out of the old Wolf Pits. Something strange in their appearance caused the men to leave their work and approach them. It was then seen that the faces, hands, and all the rest of their bodies, not covered by a dress of some unknown material, were of a bright green colour. When work was over for the day the reapers took the children to Woolpit, where the good villagers found a home for them and provided them with food. But for several months they would eat nothing except beans. At length, however, they were persuaded to partake of a more varied diet, with the result that their skins gradually lost their greenness and became as fair as those of the rest of the village children. At first it 382 THE WOOLPIT FAIRIES CHAP. was impossible to converse with them, for they knew no word of English; but when they had learnt the language they told a strange story. They were children, they said, of the Land of St. Martin, but where that land was they could not say. It was a Christian land with many churches in it; there was no sun there and the inhabitants lived in a continual twilight; but beyond a broad river which bordered the country was a land of light. Most of their own time there had been spent in tending their father's flocks; and it was while doing this one day that they heard a noise which they compared to the ringing of the St. Edmundsbury bells. What it is they could not say, for as soon as they heard it they became unconscious and knew no more until they found themselves among the reapers in the corn. For some time the children lived happily at Woolpit, and then the boy died; but the girl grew up to womanhood and married a man who lived at Lynn. What became of her afterwards is not recorded. That the children were fairies there can be no doubt, for does not Reginald Scot tell us, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, that "the fairies do principally inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth whose nature is to make strange apparitions on the earth, in meadows or in mountains, being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies, children, and horsemen clothed in green." Unfortunately William of Newburgh neglects to give the date of their appearance at Woolpit. The Woolpit fairies are not the only ones which have been met with about here. In the middle of the eighteenth century fairies frequented some houses in Tavern Street, Stowmarket. They were never seen in the daytime; but people who kept watch for them at night often saw them. They were very tiny people and behaved in an exceedingly frolicsome fashion: often a large company of them would sing and dance together; but they vanished as soon as they discovered any one observing them, and then "sparks of fire as bright as stars used to appear under the feet of the persons who disturbed them.” XIII SUFFOLK FAIRIES 383 Even so recently as the early part of the nineteeth century the "good people" haunted the meadows bordering the Bury road, and a statement made by a man who saw them there is printed in Hollingsworth's History of Stowmarket. The man was going home one bright moonlight night when he saw them. "There might be a dozen of them," he said, "the biggest about three feet high, the small ones like dolls. Their dresses sparkled as if with spangles like the girls at shows at Stow Fair ; they were moving round hand in hand in a ring; no noise (came) from them. They seemed light and shadowy (!), not like solid bodies. I passed on, saying The Lord have mercy on me, but them must be the fairies, and being alone there on the path over the field could see them as plain as I do you. I looked after them when I got over the stile, and they were there just the same, moving round and round. I might be forty yards from them, and I did not like to stop and stare at them. I was quite sober at the time." Mr. Hollingsworth was greatly interested in local fairy tales, and made a note of all he heard. Several besides the two just quoted, are reproduced in his History. They all deal with comparatively recent appearances of the "good people" so go far to confute Chaucer's assertion that 66 "Now can no man see non elves mo; As thikke as motes in the sonne beme, Blessing halles, chambers, kichenes and bowres, This maketh that there ben no fairies; For thir as wont to walken was an elf, At Haughley, says a new guide book I picked up at Bury, are some very extensive ruins of an old and strongly fortified castle," so I am tempted to leave for a while the main road to |