Page:Views in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Northamptonshire.djvu/30

, and had seventeen children alive at one time, of whom James, the youngest, and by a second marriage, was father to Mr. Charles Blomfield, who keeps a very respectable school at Bury St. Edmunds, and is at this time a capital Burgess of that town. The difference in the orthography of the names by the omission of an o, is known to have been occasioned by a quarrel between old Isaac Bloomfield, and a brother of his, who afterwards settled in the neighbourhood of Colchester, where many of his descendants are now living. This Isaac Bloomfield was accustomed to tell a story of his childhood, which has been regularly transmitted to his great-grandson Robert, and is to this effect; that, "he remembered being at a house at Framlingham, surrounded by a moat, and that a party of horse soldiers were lodged there who were in the interest of Charles the First, but that the partisans of Cromwell overpowering them, the people of the house fled, and in the confusion the maid gave him a handful of silver spoons, and told him to throw them into the moat to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy: he did so, and then ran away himself:'" and this he would observe, on concluding his tale, "was the downfal [sic] of our family." What his particular meaning was by this dark