Town Hall is just old enough to have heard of the burning of the
cathedral and monastery by the citizens in 1272, and to have seen the
ringleaders executed. Often was there fighting in the city, and this
same old building witnessed in 1549 a great riot, chiefly directed
against the religious reforms and change of worship introduced by the
first Prayer Book of Edward VI. It was rather amusing to see Parker,
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, addressing the rioters from a
platform, under which stood the spearmen of Kett, the leader of the
riot, who took delight in pricking the feet of the orator with their
spears as he poured forth his impassioned eloquence. In an important
city like Norwich the guild hall has played an important part in the
making of England, and is worthy in its old age of the tenderest and
most reverent treatment, and even of the removal from its proximity of
the objectionable electric tram-cars.

As we are at Norwich it would be well to visit another old house,
which though not a municipal building, is a unique specimen of the
domestic architecture of a Norwich citizen in days when, as Dr. Jessop
remarks, "there was no coal to burn in the grate, no gas to enlighten
the darkness of the night, no potatoes to eat, no tea to drink, and
when men believed that the sun moved round the earth once in 365
days, and would have been ready to burn the culprit who should dare to
maintain the contrary." It is called Strangers' Hall, a most
interesting medieval mansion which had never ceased to be an inhabited
house for at least 500 years, till it was purchased in 1899 by Mr.
Leonard Bolingbroke, who rescued it from decay, and permits the public
to inspect its beauties. The crypt and cellars, and possibly the
kitchen and buttery, were portions of the original house owned in 1358
by Robert Herdegrey, Burgess in Parliament and Bailiff of the City,
and the present hall, with its groined porch and oriel window, was