An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

AUTOBIOGRAPHY to the Local Collection, including the completiou of a Card .Catalogue of it. I have also done a little in clearing up Chaucer's ancestry, exposing the Squire Letters fraud, and Cromwell's royal descent, and have collected much material on "Amy Robsart," and the probable collusion of Queen Elizabeth in her murder, also ou the history of the early Jews in England, and especially in Norwich. I may give vent to a grumble that no oue has noticed my suggesti_on that the key to the autho1 ship of Junius is to be found in the fact that there baj been a writer "Franciscus Junius," who supplied the necessary cryptogram to Sir Philip, or my suggestion that the poet Spenser is more likely to have come from Norfolk than Lancashire. 1 have also done some useful work in expos– ing many genealogical myths, e.g., the valour at Agiucourt of John Wodehouse, who never was there at all, the wild fictions of Cromwell's royal descent, of the emerald ring of the Preston's, and the fiction of many Norfolk pedigrees, and especially of the Gurneys. One thing which I discovered when calendaring the contemporary fines, viz., the extraordinary difference of the early Christian and forenames of Cambridge and Norfolk, which suggests an early tribal division between the two counties. This has never been acknowledged or txplained. Nor do I think I ever got sufficient credit for my theory that so many of our English place-names show they were transplanted by a race of Scandinavians who came over before the Roman Conquest. In local public matters in Norwich I have done my best to stay the hands of the vandals, and take to my credit the restoration of the "Maid's Head," of Anguish's House, of Bacon's House in Colegate, and the salvation of the Norman leper chapel at Magdalen Gates. How much money I have wasted in the operation I do not like to think. Late in my life I filled the office of Mayor of the City, when I had the pleasure of receiving the late King Edward VII., the first King who had visited Norwich since 1671, and of collecting the biggest subscription 011 record for the orwich Unemployed, and I did a good deal to help the freeing of the Broads to the public. I can't say I have ever regretted leaving London, or of having spent all my spare time in one county. Of