END OF DUNWICH

Shannon News, 2 March 1926, Page 4

END OF DUNWICH

ANCIENT SUITOIiK TOWN. j DEVOURED BY THE SEA. STRANGE TALE OF THE ENGLISH i COAST. All Saints' Church, the last place : of worship remaining to the ancient ; tovcr. of Dunwich on the coast of Suffolk, has recently fallen into the sea's devouring maw. All that now remains of this once great town is a tiny corner of the churchyard, with the grey walls of a Franciscan convent behind it I The history of Dunwich is strange J indeed, writes Rufus H. Mallinson, in the 'Manchester Guardian,' a tale of persistent warfare between its inhabitants and the sea. No .war has ever been carried on so relentlessly as this attack on Dunwich, for it began in the year 1200, and is only now finishing. The victory is to the sea —a victory foreseeen hundreds of >ears ago, and conceded successively by generations of the besieged as their town gradually disappeared before them. Dunwich is a sad place to-day. When, after cycling or motoring over interminable stretches of those wre|ch ed Suffolk roads, one comes on the cliff, with its hanging masonry and its danger signs, one experiences a sinking of the heart. Everywhere is sadness and melancholy. Even the "new" village of Dunwich lying well back from the sea, snuggles its one tiny street tightly within itself as though to hide from that terrible enemy out there. No sign, of life is to be seen. Yet the cliff top is planted out with pathetic little vegetable gardens carelessly planned and tended. Half of them will disappear in the next g,ale. Kapid Erosion. On the highest portion of the loose j sandy cliff is the last little corner j of All Saints' Churchyard, with its two remaining gravestones, one of which was erected, apparently, in 1841. "Looking seawards from this point, one finds it almost impossible to believe that a great town once stretched out into that empty space and that, with its market place and cross, its many places of worship and its gates, it is ground to sand down tjiere under those pleasantly-lapping wavelets. The destruction has been very rapid. Only twenty years ago All Saints' Church stood intact in its churchyard, and a portion of a field separated the churchyard from the cliff top. Such rapid erosion could not take place on a rocky coast, and it is only possible here because these crumbling cliffs were themselves deposited by the tides ages ago. The sea is merely removing its former deposit, which is easily disintegrated

Dunwch seems to have been an important town as far back as the year 600, for when Felix of Burgundy came over to take charge of the bishopric of East Anglia he made it his headquarters. His successors could not .manage so large a diocese, so it was divided, Norwich becoming the see for vhe north folk and Dunwich remaining for Suffolk. In 840 both dioceses were united at Norwich, and Dunwich lost its ecclesiastical status. But its trade had by this time made it the wealthiest town in East Anglia.. William of Newbury, in the time of Henry 11., comments on it as a town abounding in riches. It was in Henry ll.'s reign that the Dunwich fee farm rent to the Crown Was raised from £SO, which had obtained in William I.'s reign, to £l2O/3/4, and when the King's daughter was married the inhabitants of the town were called upon to pay. an "aid" three times that of Ipswich. As a fortified town it was considered impregnable. A manuscript in the ! British Museum describes how "Robert, Earl of Leicester, came to the said' town cjf Dunwich to have taken it against the King. But when he came nearer and

beheld the strength thereof, it was terror and fear unto him to behold it; and soe retyred both he and his people." In the twelfth century the men of Dunwich built at their own cost oieven men-of-war and equipped them with munitions and men "without pay." "A Rotten Borough." By this time the sea seems to have , taken a hand in the town's history. The harbour works were the first to gc and though they were apparently repaired in the thirteenth century the ravages of the sea could not be resisted. The harbour was choked up with silt from the crumbling coast, and finally washed 'away altogether. Then the town itself began to be attacked. It was apparently surrounded by an earthen wall, having three gates—St. James's Gate, the 'Glyding Gate, and the South Gate —and when the writer of the British Museum manuscript visited it in the sixteenth

century great inroads had been made. Four churches —St. Leonard's, St. Martin's St. John's and St. Nicholas's -—had been "drowned in the sea," and the wall as far as the Glyding Gate had entirely disappeared on both sies. Many great buildings remained including the Hospital of Holy Trinity, with its church, the monasteries of the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Hospital of St. James, "which | church is a great one, and large after the eld fashion," and a very ancient church called the Temple. But the town must have suffered considerably by this time for no less than 400 houses were destroyed by terrible storms in the fourteenth' century. Many visitors to the disappearing town have left records of an interesting if gruesome nature regarding the actual cliffs. The chronicler Stow in the sixteenth century, and Gardner in 1740, both comment on the strange appearance of tall, circular towers at the foot of the cliffs, which turned out to be the lining of wells denuded of the surrounding earth. Remains of the dead havo been exposed from time to time in the crumbling cliffs. Gard- N ner records in great detailthe havoc wrought by Storms in 1740, 1746, and 1749. "The Cock and Hen Hills," he say.;, 'which the preceding summer j were up upwards of 40ft. . . this i year had their heads levelled withj their bases, and the ground about them so rent and torn that the foundations of St. Francis Chapel .were discovered. The bounds of the cemetery were staked, and the repositories of the dead were exposed to view, several skeletons on the doze divested of their coverings,' some Vying in pretty'good'order, others scattered as the suges carried them. Also a stone coffin wherein were human bones covered with tiles." In spite of the total destruction of the town, Dunwich. remained a borovgli surely, the rottenest of "rotten bojougha"-—until ■ 1832, returning two members to Parliament