SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



Monday morning (1738);"^ they give permission for the erection of posts 

 and rails at either end of the Market Place, where wagons and carts break up 

 the pavement, on the understanding that a passage is left open for the Friston 

 coach, or those of any other gentlemen coming to town.^'^ 



During the i8th century the interest of social life centres mainly about 

 the towns. The Dutch wars had for a time checked the prosperity of the 

 shipping industry. Defoe"^ points out how Ipswich in particular had suffered 

 by the diminution of the collier fleets plying between Newcastle and London, 

 which its harbour had once entertained, and which had often been built in its 

 yards. Dutch ' fly-boats,' taken in the war, thrust themselves into the coal- 

 trade, and Ipswich men dropped gradually out of it.''' The thinness of the 

 population, owing to this, and, according to another witness,"' also to the 

 passing of the cloth trade to the north and west of England, became a by- 

 word : ' Ipswich a town without people.' But already in Defoe's day things 

 had begun to mend : large quantities of corn grown in the surrounding dis- 

 trict were continually shipped from its quays to London, and also to Holland. ''" 

 If the wealthy manufacturers had deserted it never to return, people of another 

 class ' scrambled ' for houses in the town."' 



There *''' is a great deal of very good company in this town and though there are not 

 so many of the gentry here as at Bury, yet there are more here than in any other town in the 

 county : the company you meet with are generally persons well-informed on the world and 

 who have something very solid and entertaining in their society. This may happen by their 

 frequent conversing with those who have been abroad, and by their having a remnant of 

 gentlemen and masters of ships among them who have seen more of the world than the 

 people of an inland town are likely to have seen. 



Living in Ipswich was particularly cheap, and access to London easy, 

 the coach going through in one day. Woodbridge also was ' full of corn- 

 factors and butter-factors,' some of them very considerable merchants. 



Bungay about 1700 was the subject of an unsuccessful experiment : 

 Mr. King, an apothecary of the town, tried to bring it forward as a spa, 

 pointing out that the chalybeate spring in the old castle possessed valuable 

 properties: he built a bath-house at Earsham (just across the Norfolk border), 

 planted a vineyard, and made walks ; but though the Suffolk gentry for many 

 years resorted to the bath-house, little came of the enterprise."' 



Reyce in his Breviary had written a century earlier of the condition of 

 the Suffolk cottage : — 



' The mean person and the poor cottager thinks he doth very well if he 

 can compass in his manner of building to raise his frame low, cover it with 

 thatch, and to fill his wide panels (after they are well splinted and bound) 

 with clay or culme enough well-tempered . . . over which to bestow a cast 

 of hair, lime, and sand made into mortar and laid thereon rough or smooth.'"* 

 In Arthur Young's day the Suffolk cottage was still built of lath and plaster, 

 or wattle and clay, and was, he adds, deficient in warmth and every conveni- 

 ence of life."' Crabbe's unflinching pen has left a picture of the conditions 

 of life in the lowest stratum of society, as he saw it in his native town of 



■" Add. MSS. 22249, fol. 113. "• Ibid. fol. loi. '" Tour in the Eastern Counties, 83. 



"» Ibid. 84. '«' Kirby, Suff. Traveller (ed. 1784), 51. 



"° Defoe, op. cit. 94. "' Kirby, op. cit. 51. '" Defoe, op. cit. 95. 



"' Suckling, op. cit. i, 128. '" Breviary, 51. ■" Young, op. cit. (ed. 1797), 11. 



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