It had been a mansion of
considerable pretension and two stories high; on the ground-floor the
doors were all gone; on the upper floor the windows were open to the
air; the chamber "vocata ladyes chambre" was roofless, the offices
were too dilapidated to be worth repair. The enclosing walls and the
moat had been utterly neglected. The offices had formerly been
adapted for a large establishment; there had been extensive farm
buildings, and at least six substantial houses for the bailiff and
other farm servants. Among other buildings there were two
_fishouses_ built of timber and _daubur_, in which apparently
the keeper of the fishponds lived, and some elaborate arrangements
had existed for keeping up the supply of fish in the ponds by methods
of pisciculture to us unknown. The windmill had long ceased to be
used, its very grinding stones had disappeared. Worse than all,
there was no more any gallows or pillory, or even stocks, _pro_
_libertate servanda_, as the jurors quaintly remark. Yet the records
show that at Hockham things had gone on pretty much as before
since the big house was deserted. The courts were held with
exemplary regularity, the fees had been exacted with unwavering
rigour, the homagers settled their own affairs in their own way; but
there was this difference, that for a generation the tenants had been
living under an absentee landlord, who so far from being the poorer
because the big house had been tumbling down, was the richer,
inasmuch as he had one mansion the less to keep up out of his income.
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