Francis Davy Longe

“ In times when it was a common practice for Parliament and the Crown to give special privileges to towns or other bodies, without providing any adequate means for securing their enjoyment, the practice of taking the law into your own hands, which is proverbially a mistake in these days, was the only means by which the possessors of privileges could maintain them, and accordingly we find Yarmouth and the Cinque ports repeatedly engaged in what can only be described as naval wars, arising from some conflict in the provisions of their respective charters. ”

“ The obnoxious charter proved to be perfectly harmless to Lowestoft, if not entirely useless to Yarmouth. It was beyond the power of Yarmouth to enforce it effectually. The statue of Herrings, forbidding the “forestalling” of the Free Fair by buying herrings from ships at sea, applied to the Yarmouth merchants as well as to Lowestoft men. The anomalous right given to the Yarmouth Bailiffs of exacting harbour dues from ships anchored in the sea, at a distance of several miles from their harbour mouth, must have been incapable of enforcement, without a fleet of armed bailiffs. ”

“ The tradition that the Waveney, or a branch of it, used to enter the sea at Lowestoft, has been reproduced by several writers as part of a picture which represents Norwich and Beccles, and other places on the borders of our marshlands, as ports and fishing towns on the shore of a large inland sea or estuary over which ships sailed freely, and to which herrings innumerable used to pay their autumnal visit which they now confine to the sea outside. That the sea at some time flowed over at least a great part of this area is probably quite true. ”

“ We can hardly believe that the richer men undertook a much larger share of the burden than their property demanded, and we may reasonably infer that their assessments did not represent the full value of their property. But anyhow our richest merchants of those days must have been very poor men according to our modern ideas.
Lowestoft was of course still a very small town as compared with Yarmouth. As Yarmouth was exempted from all taxes during Henry VIII.’s reign on account of the expenses of her harbour, the Subsidy Rolls do not enable us to compare the wealth of the two towns. ”

“ The rules as to fasting during Lent, as well as on Fridays and Saturdays in every week during the year, which were strictly enforced at this time by a powerful Church, had rendered the east coast herring trade a matter of national importance. The ability to purchase red herrings for lenten fare was a necessity for the salvation, not only of the lives, but of the souls of the people. Even our soldiers when engaged in war had to observe the rules as to fasting. ”

“ This action of the sea on our eastern coast is due to the inexhaustible supply of sand and shingle which is being constantly pushed along the shore southwards by the tidal wave. How persistent is the action of the sea in blocking up every outlet, whether river or harbour mouth, which man would wish kept open, has been a matter of costly experience to Yarmouth for some 800 years, as it has been to the Great Eastern Railway Company during the short time that they have undertaken the task of keeping open the mouth of Lowestoft Harbour. ”

“ If the low marshland through which the Yare and the Waveney now wind their way to the sea was at the time when the Romans established their system of fortifications, a wilderness of bog and fen, impassable either by ship or on foot, we can understand the importance of these spots on the river-sides where the enemy could get from their boats on to the highlands of Norfolk and Suffolk. The conflict of opinion among antiquarians as to the true site of the Roman Garianonum has made the conditions of the area immediately beneath Burgh Castle in the Roman period, a familiar subject of discussion. ”

“ It is the story of the growth of Lowestoft from a small village into a fishing town of some importance to the country. Her trade was probably growing rapidly during the whole period that the contest lasted. But from the beginning of the 15th century her merchants were free to take their full share in the herring trade, and in any other trade, which the position of the town would enable them to develope; though without a harbour, her merchants, whether as fishing adventurers, or as general merchants, must have had a very limited range for their enterprises. ”

“ A Flemish trader has sailed from Antwerp to Cadiz. Something happens to her on the way, and she never reaches her destination. At midnight carts and horses run down to the sea over the sand at Lowestoft. ”

“ They lived in the same villages, and tilled the same land as the peasantry of the present day, and many of our country parishes must have been in Saxon times very much what they are now, in which the squire and the parson fill the places of the thane and the parish priest and a few farmers holding land under the squire, and agricultural labourers, enough and no more, than are required to cultivate the land, with perhaps a village blacksmith and shoemaker, complete the roll of the resident population. The intellectual condition of our ancestors must have been very low. ”

“ I ascend my ship with my merchandise, and sail over the sealike places, and sell my things, and buy dear things which are not produced in this land, and I bring them to you here with the great danger of the sea, and sometimes I suffer shipwreck, with the loss of all my things, scarcely escaping myself. ”

“ From an estimate given by some shipowners in 1670 of the quantity of beer required for a fishing boat, it appears that each man was supposed to drink a gallon of beer a day (putting the number of the men at 10) . The coopers also were evidently very closely connected with the fishing business. On a later occasion, some hundred years after our period, when Lowestoft had had another bout with Yarmouth about the herring fishery, and the town had a heavy lawyers bill to pay, they decided to defray the expense by a tax on herrings, and a supplementary tax on the brewers and coopers of the town. ”

“ A new regime had been established, under which Saxon and Angle, Dane and Norman, had been welded into one nation, and laws and institutions were in force, which are familiar features in our present legal and political system. Although still 500 years from the present time, England, in Edward III.’s reign, was much more like the England of to-day than the country described in Domesday. Foreign trade had sprung up. Wheat and wool were grown in large quantities and exported from Yarmouth and other ports. ”

“ Lowestoft had been a market town for more than a hundred years, but it does not appear that the market was ever much of a success. There was no large population like that of Yarmouth requiring a large supply of provisions and vegetables in addition to the produce of the townspeople’s own gardens and the neighbouring farms. Nor could a place with only half the environment of an ordinary inland town be a convenient centre for the sale of general agricultural produce, particularly with another large market at Beccles.
Population. ”

“ In order to form a tolerably correct idea of what our old town was at the beginning of the 15th century, we must dismiss altogether from our mind’s eye the large populous town with which we are acquainted, and picture to ourselves a village of small cottages with thatched roofs being gradually improved by the erection of houses of a better class. ”

“ At the early part of Henry VIII.’s reign Lowestoft appears to have been a small town on the cliff, containing some 20 or 30 merchants—in a very small way of business—the richer men among them owning one or two ships; most of them having fish-houses at the bottom of the cliffs, and doing a good deal of business during the autumn season in buying fish from the foreign and west-country fishermen in the Roads, and selling it to fish merchants coming from inland towns. ”

“ In these days trade and the professions furnish such a ladder, but in Saxon times there was no profession but the church, whose members sometimes found remunerative employment as clerks, or by devoting themselves to religious duties rose to the highest offices. The only trades in Saxon times were those of the handicraftsmen, and, except in London and a few other towns, these would be confined to the blacksmith and a few such craftsmen as were indispensable to the smallest agricultural community. ”

“ The sea opposite her shore then called “Kirkley Road” offered the same resting place for wind-bound ships as it does now, and as the mouth of the Haven was always in the condition of being more or less blocked with sand, it only needed a little enterprise on the part of Lowestoft people to get fishing boats bound for Yarmouth to discharge their herrings on the Gunton denes, rather than incur the certain loss of time in waiting for the tide to carry them up to Yarmouth quay, and the danger of being wrecked at the harbour mouth. ”

“ With such evidence of a revival of life and energy in our old Town, and the promise of further growth and commercial development in the future, (a promise since so happily realised) , we may close our sketch of Lowestoft in olden times.
It has given us glimpses of our old townspeople during four centuries of a chequered career during which they established and maintained their position with very little help from natural advantages or local circumstances. Without a harbour they were unable to make any material advance in either wealth or population. ”

“ Speaking of the Dutch fishermen, he says—
“Also to Yarmouth do they daily (i.e. during the season) , come into the haven up to the Key, all the most part of the great fleet of Hollanders, that go in sword-pinks, Holland toads, crab skuits, walnut shells, and great and small yeurs, 100 and 200 sail at a time together, and all the herrings they do bring they sell for ready money to Yarmouth men; and also the Frenchmen of Picardy and Normandy some hundred sail of them at a time, do come hither, and all the herrings they catch they do sell to the Yarmouth herring-mongers for ready gold.” ”

“ In the Parliament of 1386 we find the Commons themselves supporting the cause of Yarmouth, and petitioning the crown to regrant their charter, notwithstanding the persistency with which they had opposed it in previous years. The King of course acceded at once to this petition, and a new charter was granted to Yarmouth, embracing all the provisions of the charter of Edward, and welding more tightly the fetters which were intended to crush the trade of Lowestoft. ”

“ Lowestoft tailors probably met the requirements of the inhabitants of all the Lothingland parishes, and other parishes near. Doubtless they had got a reputation for a better cut than the tailors of either Yarmouth or Beccles; or was a trade in ready-made clothes carried on here? These men, were of course, all journeymen tailors. The materials were probably supplied by some of the merchants mentioned, from Norwich or elsewhere. The persons mentioned as shoemakers, cordwainers, and cobblers (11) are comparatively few. These names represented the same trade with different pretensions. ”

“ If eating fish on Fridays and Saturdays was still inculcated as a duty by Elizabeth’s Government and Elizabeth’s Church, the mass of the people were too strongly Protestant to pay much respect to a rule which was an essential feature in the old religion, if their antipathy to Papism did not even cause an antipathy to fish eating at any time, particularly salt cod. ”

“ The massive fortress of Burgh Castle could be safely held by a small force for a long time against any enemy who might succeed in effecting a landing on Lothingland itself, and if cavalry were kept there, as we are told they were, mounted messengers could be sent off as soon as a hostile fleet appeared, who would be able to carry the intelligence to head quarters at Caister, via Oulton and Beccles or Bungay, before the enemy could get very far up either river. ”

“ It was stated in this Petition that the town had then increased its shipping to the number of 60 vessels—a rapid advance on the 25 ships possessed 9 years before. As we are told by Gillingwater that the number of boats employed at Lowestoft in the herring fishery during the years 1722–1781, averaged about 33, there could have been no further advance in the fishing business until quite recent years. It is evident that our old townspeople had been bestirring themselves, and were making good use of the opportunity which the absence of Dutch busses from this side of the North Sea now offered. ”

“ The person described as a Proctor must have been a local lawyer, affiliated to Doctors’ Commons, and endowed with some special authority in the matter of wills. Only one person’s name appears in our period described as a surgeon. He died in 1585, one of those terrible years when Lowestoft was visited by the plague or some infectious disease, to which he apparently fell a victim. We only notice the name of one chymney-sweeper. There may have been more. But as we shall see further on, chimneys were only now coming into fashion and were as yet only to be found in the newer or best houses. ”

“ With little or no opportunities for selling the produce of their estates, the landowners had little reason to improve them, nor could they increase their land under tillage without interfering with the rights of their tenants on the waste land. The system of serfdom, moreover, whilst it secured a living to a large number of people, bound them and their children to the estates on which they held their land, and must have tended to deprive a large part of the population of the country of any stimulus to enterprise or self improvement. ”

“ As the small sum of £2 is given as the value of the goods lost by some of the smaller sufferers, we must regard the valuation of goods destroyed as sufficiently trustworthy to give an idea of the value of the stock in trade and furniture possessed by the merchants and tradesmen of the town at this period. ”

“ Roger Smith, of Norwich, had arrived; but at 11 o’clock Mr. Roger Smith put in an appearance, and excused the absence of the High Sheriff on the ground that he was at his house about 30 miles away, and not in health.
A long altercation then took place between the Suffolk gentlemen and the Under Sheriff of Norfolk. Mr. Roger Smith took the bold course of denying that the House of Lords had “the power to take away another man’s rights,” and professed to be quite unable to satisfy himself at what point the measurement should commence, etc. ”

“ He writes—
“Instead of the Iceland fleet of Englishmen, which used to supply Normandy and Brittany, as well as England, 500 French vessels, with 30 to 40 men in each of them, go annually to Newfoundland, and even the home fisheries have fallen equally into the hands of strangers. The Yarmouth waters (which certainly included the Lowestoft) were occupied by Flemish and Frenchmen. As remedies for this evil he mentions— (1) Merchandise, (2) Fishing, (3) The exercise of Piracy, which was detestable, and could not last.” ”

“ It was not until trade sprung up that they could sell their surplus produce and spend the proceeds in the purchase of things which would lead to a higher and more civilised standard of living. But during the whole of the Saxon period the monotonous routine of their agricultural occupations was only varied by war, which was frequent enough ”