An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1 49 All my rather large collection of record dictionaries, and such like books as Ducange, Madox, &c., I later on gave to the Record Room at the Norwich Castle Museum, under the impression they would be useful to students there, a gift which I afterwards regretted, for under the new regulations as to access to the Records, to which I will refer hereafter, they are practically inaccessible, and would be much better in the Free (now Public) Library. My collection of athletic books I gave to the Guildhall Library of London, as mentioned before. Mr. Purdy having obtained the loan from Sir E. Birkbeck of an old map of Hautbois, which showed the site of the old castle and the ruined village of Great Hautbois, we arranged for its reproduction, and he wrote .an excellent paper on it which appeared in the Norfolk and Norwich Arcbceological Society's Transactions, vol. xvi., pp. 147-52. We tried also to identify the site of the alleged castle of the Morleys at Buxton, but differed as to it, for the supposed site is in a very wet marsh, and to my mind does not agree with Blomefield's idea, which better fits the banks behind the Mill House. At Easter, as usual, we had a family gathering at Lammas, but did only garden– ing. I kuocked my second finger against a flint and brought on local gout, which stopped my archery for a long while. On the 13th May was incessant rain and thunder– storms from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m., the heaviest rain I ever saw until the "flood" rain in 1912. Nearly all the year I was seedy and out of sorts, and did very little archery. The East Dereham Meeting on 15th May was postponed on account of General Bulwer's death. Always ready for au experiment I got a Norwich chemist to make me up a gout prescription about a century old, and must say it proved that our ancestors had dura ilia with a vengeance, for it nearly killed me ! My old friend E.B.G.'s wife died in hospital on the 31st May, she had never recovered from the shock of her husband's death, and suffered under the hallucination she could talk to him through his grave. The Norfolk and Norwich Archceological Society's excursion was the 14th June to Merton Hall, and the district round. I was glad to renew my acquaintance with