INDUSTRIES 



rapid growth of Lowestoft, and of the contem- 

 plated development of Southwold as a fishing 

 station, that in the future it may come to take a 

 still higher position. In the earliest times, if we 

 may judge by the number and the magnitude of 

 the herring-rents mentioned in Domesday, Suffolk 

 was inferior to no other county in respect of the 

 productivity of its fisheries, which were then 

 carried on mainly along the northern half of its 

 coast. 1 Throughout the Middle Ages, and down 

 to modern times, fishing fleets have gone out 

 from Gorleston, Kessingland, Lowestoft, South- 

 wold, Walberswick, Dunwich, and Aldeburgh, 

 not only to the North Sea for herring and 

 mackerel, but to far-off Iceland for cod and ling, 

 and the wealthy merchant of Ipswich in the 

 sixteenth century invested much of his capital in 

 these distant expeditions. But two causes have 

 seriously checked the natural development of the 

 industry until quite recent times — the one entirely 

 natural, the other partly social. No county has 

 suffered more than Suffolk from the effects of 

 sea erosion. Dunwich, which had been before 

 the Conquest the principal fishing station in the 

 county, had almost disappeared beneath the sea 

 before the end of the Middle Ages, and Alde- 

 burgh, which was a flourishing port under 

 Elizabeth, had become in the days of Crabbe the 

 mere shadow of its former self. The other cause 

 has been the bitter contention, amounting at 

 times to a kind of civil war, between rival ports. 

 The struggle of Gorleston and Lowestoft with 

 Yarmouth, and of Southwold, Walberswick, and 

 Easton Bavent with Dunwich, was more or less 

 continuous for four or five centuries. Perhaps a 

 curious natural feature of the county had some 

 share in aggravating these differences. No less 

 than three of the rivers of Suffolk turn at a right 

 angle when within a short distance of the sea, 

 and run parallel to the coast from five to ten 

 miles before finding an outlet. In this flirtation 

 with the sea the river itself seems to provoke a 

 struggle for its possession. In the sixteenth 

 century Southwold and Dunwich actually engaged 

 in such a struggle for the mouth of the Blythe, 

 setting bands of diggers to change the channel 

 of the stream by stealth. And in more recent 

 times Lowestoft has compelled the reluctant 

 Waveney to fulfil her early promise, which had 

 been broken in favour of Yarmouth. 



The industrial history of Suffolk falls into 

 three well-defined periods, in each of which the 

 influence of geographical position has operated 

 very strongly, though with widely different 

 results. In the first period, which may be 

 reckoned as lasting from about the beginning of 

 the fourteenth century to about the middle of the 

 seventeenth, the counties on the south-east coast 

 became the chief manufacturing district of 

 England. The main cause of this was proximity 

 to the Continent, which had in the first place 



1 Ellis, Introd. to Dom. i, 140. 



tended to make this part of England the most 

 thickly populated, and for that reason the most 

 naturally disposed to industrial development, and 

 which in the second place led to constant inter- 

 course with a more advanced industrial civiliza- 

 tion. It was not by mere accident that the 

 social discontent which found expression in the 

 rising of 1 38 1 should have blazed most fiercely 

 in the eastern counties. From that time to the 

 Civil War those counties held that kind of 

 political hegemony based on pre-eminence which 

 is now enjoyed by the cities of the Midlands and 

 of the North. The pre-eminence was, of course, 

 a purely relative one. The actual numbers 

 engaged in Suffolk were almost certainly not 

 higher than at the present day. Even the pro- 

 portion of the population fully engaged in industry 

 as compared with that engaged in agriculture 

 was probably never much greater than it is now. 

 It was that proportion, as contrasted with the 

 proportion obtaining in other counties of con- 

 temporary England, which gave a special character 

 to the East Anglia of the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries. From that point of view we may 

 consider the manufacture of woollen cloth as the 

 dominating feature of this period of the economic 

 history of Suffolk, though the industry never 

 thoroughly established itself outside the south- 

 western part of the county. 



After the Civil War the economic conditions 

 of the eastern counties began to be remoulded 

 under the influence of a fuller national develop- 

 ment. The force of the continental influence 

 was spent ; or, rather, it had by this time over- 

 spread the whole country. The advantage of an 

 earlier reception was changed into a disadvantage 

 when an industry hampered by the growth of 

 vested interests and artificial restrictions was forced 

 to enter into free competition with the compara- 

 tively untrammelled industry of the North. But 

 besides this negative factor there was also a 

 positive factor of perhaps even greater importance. 

 The influence of the proximity of the Continent 

 was replaced by the influence of the proximity of 

 London. The enormous growth of the metro- 

 polis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 

 and the necessity of a correspondingly increased 

 food supply, coupled with a policy of high pro- 

 tection, gave a powerful impetus to agriculture in 

 those counties by which the demand could most 

 readily be met. Natural advantages had from 

 the first made Suffolk one of the chief sources of 

 supply, and it is not surprising that under these 

 favouring conditions it became the country of 

 the experimenting landowner and of the enter- 

 prising and progressive farmer, and that industrial 

 interests had to take a secondary place. Many 

 of the weavers emigrated to the North, and 

 those who remained found that the agricultural 

 labourers around them were in a better condition 

 than themselves. It is not improbably true that, 

 as far as mere numbers go, the woollen manu- 

 facture found occupation for as many hands in 



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