"Were I in my castle of Bungay
Upon the river of Wavenay,
I would not care for the King of Cokenay
Nor all his bravery."

The Baily he rode, and the Baily he ran,
To catch the gallant Lord Hugh,
But for every mile the Baily rode,
The Earl he rode more than two.

When the Baily had ridden to Bramfield oak,
Sir Hugh was at Ilksale bower,
When the Baily had ridden to Holsworth cross,
He was singing in Bungay tower.

We regret, however, to state that the bold
Bigod, spite of all his bragging and his five
hundred soldiers from Framlingham, proved
dunghill at last, and instead of replying to the
king with arrows and crossbow bolts, craftily
capitulated after the following unworthy
manner. When the king arrived,

Sir Hugh took threescore sacks of gold
And flung them over the wall,
Says, "Go your way in the devil's name,
Yourself and your merry men all;
But leave me my castle of Bungay
Upon the river of Waveney,
And I'll pay my shot to the King of Cokenay."

St. Mary's church at Bungay once formed
part of a Benedictine nunnery, founded by
Roger de Glanvil and his Countess Gundrida,
in the reign of Henry the Second, that very
reign in which Bigod was besieged by the King
of Cockayne. In Edward the First's time, this
nunnery contained a prioress and fifteen
religious sisters, but at the Dissolution there were
only seven nuns there living on a yearly
income of sixty-two pounds two shillings and
fourpence. Henry the Eighth gave this
nunnery to the Duke of Norfolk. It was upon
this same St. Mary's church that a tremendous
storm of thunder and lightning broke, August
4, 1577. Several persons were struck. In
this same awful storm—which burst out
between nine and ten A.M., during divine
service, which was earlier in those days than
now—forty persons were struck down by
lightning at the church in the adjoining village
of Blythburgh. The superstition of the Suffolk
people was roused to the utmost by this falling
of fire from heaven, and some excited
imaginations declared they saw between the flashes
a huge black dog, of Satanic origin, rush down
the aisle and gripe one person in the back, and
wring the necks of two others. The Waveney,
at Bungay, is the boundary of Norfolk and
Suffolk, and the small barges upon its waters
bring from and carry into Suffolk stores of
corn, malt, flour, coal, and lime. Bungay,
quiet and even sleepy as it is now, has had its
deep sorrows and its stormy troubles. In
March, 1688 (James the Second), an
irresistible fire destroyed, in four hours only, the
church, the market cross, and four hundred
houses, leaving only one small street and a few
cottages standing.

On to Lowestoft, that first
    Of all old England's busy towns, uplifts
    Its orisons and greets the rising morn.

According to Mr. Walcott, the name of the
town in Domesday was Lother-Wistoft, that
is, the toft or cluster of houses by the Loth
(low) river, and he supposes that Lother and
Irling, the Danes, after the conquest of Essex,
in 1047, established a station here to receive
Danish colonists. The old Danish fishing
town, on which a modern watering place
has engrafted itself, stands on an eminence
backed by hills and with broad sands at its
feet. Below the houses on the brow of the
ridge, hanging gardens slope to the alluvial
land lying between Lake Lothing and the sea.
Beyond this flat land the ground rises at
Kirkley into another line of cliffs, which stretch
along the Suffolk coast, broken through here
and there by rivers. The beach along the
shore is a strip of shingle, from which runs the
great shoal called the Pakefield Flats, probably
submerged land; but the sands of the denes,
in front of Lowestoft, are never overflowed.
The flood-stream and the ebb-tide have both
scooped out bays and formed shoals of the
displaced material.

The legends of Lowestoft are chiefly of a
naval and piscatorial kind. In the Civil War
times the Cavaliers of Lowestoft were always
privateering against Yarmouth, and the cliffs
between the rival towns were constantly vibrating
to the sound of their cannons. There has,
indeed, always been a jealousy between the
two places, and it existed even in the times
of old Potter (1789–1804), the worthy and
learned vicar of Lowestoft, gratefully known
to us in our school days for those flowery
translations of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,
handy "cribs" much resorted to by "first-
form" boys. Old Potter was jealous for the
honour of Lowestoft, and when the primate of
those days once wrote to him, and addressed
the letter "Lowestoft, near Yarmouth," the
vicar expostulated in his grand and flowing
manner: "The next time your grace will be
pleased to write simply Lowestoft. Lowestoft
does not want Yarmouth for a direction post,
for Lowestoft was ere Yarmouth rose out of
the azure main."

The Swan Inn on the east side of High-street
is still pointed out as the head-quarters of
Cromwell in 1644. Short as that visit was,
the bronze face, the plain steel corselet, and
the simple, soldierly dress will always haunt
the memory of Lowestoft. The fishing people
here were always proud of their sea trophies;
formerly at weddings, rows of ship flags used
to be hung across the streets, and some of
these had been captured by Arnold, a Lowestoft
man, from the Royal Philip, a Spanish
man-of-war. Close by Lowestoft at Barsham
rectory house, Catherine, Lord Nelson's
mother, was born, 1725. Admiral Sir Thomas
Allin, who, in the time of the Commonwealth,
snapped up the rich Smyrna fleet,
was a Lowestoft man; and from the same
part of the coast came also those two brave
seamen, Sir John Ashby and Sir Andrew Leake:
the latter, "the handsome captain," admired
by Queen Anne, who assisted Rooke in the
taking of Gibraltar from the Spaniards (1704).
He was desperately wounded in an action off