A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



these founders. A similar trust was reposed in municipal corporations.'' By 

 a will made in i 509 William Godell, merchant of Southwold, provided for 

 a priest to go to Rome to sing for him in five different churches for a whole 

 year. His wife was to have a Requiem Mass sung in Southwold Church for 

 thirty days, giving alms each day to twelve poor men or women. His 

 executors were to keep his yearday for twenty years at the cost of 20J. per 

 year, and finally after his wife's death the bailiffs and commonalty of South- 

 wold were to find a priest for sixteen years next following to sing for his soul 

 and the souls of his friends.** At Eye in 1479 and 1488 there were two 

 legacies left to the townspeople on condition of their carrying out certain 

 religious observances, one of which was that the sacristan or some other 

 honest man should perambulate the streets of the borough with the little bell 

 known as the ' sowlebelL' At the same time a bequest was made to St. Peter's 

 Gild at Eye to endow a chantry priest on condition of the gild buying land 

 for a similar purpose, and the parish priest has left a pleasant account of how he 

 urged his congregation from the pulpit to complete the bargain he had nego- 

 tiated on the instalment system : ' How saye now saide I unto them if 

 I have bought a ground for you so that ye maye stonde in the church yard and 

 see it, . . . if it be a bargaine because it for the comon wele speake all Una 

 Voce and seye ye this was a godly hearinge every man, woman and childe 

 saide yea yea, dyverse men gave x marke a peice women fower marke xx'- 

 and xK- xK so that I gathered on Candlemas daye above xx^- ' " 



The important part played by Suffolk men at the time of the Reforma- 

 tion was no accident. Nowhere in England were the forces of economic 

 and social progress more active. If the future development of English in- 

 dustry and commerce had been revealed in general terms to one of the 

 numerous political speculators of those times, and the local details left to his 

 imagination, he would very probably have placed Manchester at Lavenham 

 or Hadleigh and Liverpool at Ipswich. As far as Ipswich was concerned, 

 this forecast was indeed frequently made in the days of Elizabeth. But the 

 development of the textile manufacture of Suffolk which has been traced in 

 detail elsewhere had already almost attained its highest point, and the eco- 

 nomic future of the county down to our own day was to depend increasingly 

 on the favourable conditions under which its agriculture was carried on. 

 Those conditions were no new or sudden achievement. The germs of them, 

 as we have seen, are to be found in the Domesday Survey, and their steady 

 growth can be followed through the intervening centuries. The story that 

 is to follow of the development of high farming in modern Suffolk derives all 

 its meaning from its continuity with the past. 



Part II 



When Tusser in 1557 published his Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- 

 bandry,'^^ the forwardness of the county in agricultural improvements was 

 already noteworthy, and the progressive movement had well begun which 

 was to lead Young in 1794 to place Suffolk in the forefront of scientific 

 farming. Tusser wrote his poem during his residence at Brantham in 



" Gasquet, Parish Life, 269. " Gardner, Hist. Account ofDunwich, 248. 



" Hut. MSS. Com. Rep. x, App. iv, 528. " Engl. Dial. Soc. Publ. 1878, p. 14.0. 



660 



