his note-books, he gave them to Le Neve in exchange for anything Le Neve found about Norwich.
Blomefield was about halfway through his third volume when he died, literally in harness; for coming up to London to see some deeds in the Rolls Chapel he caught the smallpox, and died of it on Thursday, 16 Jan. 1752, at the early age of forty-seven. It is said he had always refused to be inoculated, thinking it was wrong to attempt to avoid evils sent by his Creator. He was buried on the Saturday following in the south side of the chancel of Fersfield Church. Little is known of his personal appearance, but though there is no portrait of him extant, he is said to have so much resembled John Flamsteed that ‘honest Tom Martin’ of Thetford preserved and valued a portrait of the astronomer for no other reason, and a copy of it is prefixed to the octavo edition of Blomefield. It is of a man with a good forehead, fine eyes under rather beetle brows, a prominent nose, and a firm mouth. There seems no doubt that he died in debt, for by his will, dated shortly before he died, he directed all his personal property to be sold and applied towards payment of his debts, and the winding up of his estate seemed so formidable a matter to his executors, that they declined to act and renounced probate; administration was therefore granted to his two principal creditors. Whether his great work cost him more than he expected one cannot say, but one of his female relations, who lived to be very old, told Mr. Freeman, now living at St. Giles, Norwich, that he was very fond of foxhunting, kept a pack of hounds, and got into difficulties thereby, and had to retire to Norwich, where he lived in Willow Lane. That he was a tory we know from his voting for Bacon and Wodehouse in 1734, and that he was of a jovial way of living may be supposed from his being a boon companion of Martin, who was notorious for his love of drinking.
It is difficult to say whether he had original collections for the rest of the county on a similar scale to what he printed. If he had, they were not made much use of by the Rev. Charles Parkin, who, though a most incompetent man, was entrusted with the completion of the history of Norfolk, and who, according to Craven Ord, died before he sent any (all?) of his work to the press, the book being ultimately finished by some bookseller's hack employed by Whittingham of Lynn. The third volume was published in folio at Lynn in 1769; the fourth and fifth volumes at Lynn in 1775. These were described as ‘continued by the Rev. Charles Parkin.’ The whole work was republished in London in eleven octavo volumes between 1805 and 1810. A very good index of the names mentioned in the octavo edition of the ‘History’ was prepared by J. N. Chadwick and issued by him at King's Lynn in 1862.
Blomefield probably worked on the principle of taking Le Neve's collections as the backbone of his history, and working up each parish as he came to it. Certain it is that in the five folio volumes there is vastly more of Le Neve's work than Blomefield's, and to the former, therefore, should more justly be given the credit of being the county historian of Norfolk. Indeed, if we were to analyse the book and eliminate Le Neve's, Tanner's, and Kirkpatrick's work, there would be very little of Blomefield's left. Some of Blomefield's unpublished manuscripts were taken possession of and sold by Martin, who thus acted as the literary wrecker of two fine collections, Le Neve's and Blomefield's. Others of them passed into the hands of the descendant of one of Blomefield's daughters, a Mr. Robert Martin, of Bressingham, who buried ‘a large mass of them in the earth’!
One can hardly estimate the real value of the great work which, rightly or wrongly, bears Blomefield's name, and which, had he lived, would have been so much larger and better. It is full of errors, its descriptions of all buildings singularly scanty and bald, and its attempts at etymology ludicrous in the extreme; both Blomefield and his continuator apparently having ‘water on the brain,’ for they attempt to derive nearly every place-name from some word or another which they allege to mean water. In critical faculty Blomefield was absolutely wanting, and he fell an easy victim to all the monstrous pedigree fabrications of the heralds, his pages chronicling as gospel all the ridiculous family histories of the Howards, the Wodehouses, the Clares, and others, which bear their own contradiction on their faces. Specimens of Blomefield's errors and omissions will be found at p. 318 of the third volume of the ‘East Anglian.’ His book, however, is an enduring monument of hard disinterested work, for it was wholly a labour of love, and as far as the facts chronicled it is usually very trustworthy. It is wonderful indeed how often the searchers among manuscripts of to-day come across Blomefield's private mark or his beautifully legible handwriting on charters or rolls. A very good point in his character was the unselfish readiness with which he imparted his knowledge to others working in the same field.
