A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



The ecclesiastical history of Suffolk, like the rest of East Anglia, was 

 singularly uneventful throughout both the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies. The bishops seemed unable to resist the more wealthy attractions of 

 other sees, particularly of the much smaller but much more lucrative one of 

 Ely, and were constantly being translated. Out of the thirteen seventeenth- 

 century bishops of Norwich, eight left for other sees after a brief experience 

 of East Anglia. 



' In Anne's reign,' says Dr. Raven, * Sacheverell had many Suffolk ad- 

 mirers, especially Leman of Charsfield, who had perpetuated the name of 

 that turbulent divine on one of the church bells, cast in 17 lo. 1 



Defoe's account of a journey he made through the eastern counties in 

 1722 gives an interesting picture of Suffolk in the time of George I. He 

 spent a Sunday at Southwold, and found a congregation of only twenty-seven, 

 in addition to the parson and the clerk, though he thought that the building 

 was capable of holding five or six thousand people ; but the meeting-house 

 of the dissenters was full to the very doors. 2 



The Methodist movement that stirred the country so deeply in the 

 south and west in the second half of the eighteenth century made but little 

 impression in East Anglia. John Wesley, the great itinerant evangelist, was 

 always lamenting the sluggishness of the societies he founded at Norwich and 

 Yarmouth. He never tarried in Suffolk during his earlier circuits, and at 

 later dates he was seldom found anywhere in the county save in those parts 

 that bordered on Norfolk. In October, 1764, he proceeded for the first 

 time from Yarmouth to Lowestoft ; he remarks in his journal, ' a wilder con- 

 gregation I have never seen, but the bridle was in their teeth.' On his next 

 visit to the same place, three years later, he preached in the open air, though 

 it was the month of February, for the house would not contain a fourth of 

 the people who had assembled. On 9 November, 1776, the evangelist opened 

 a new preaching house at Lowestoft, which he describes as ' a lighthouse 

 building filled with deeply attentive hearers.' Wesley paid several other 

 visits to Lowestoft up to the year 1790, on two occasions going to North- 

 cove. In 1779 he enters 'a great awakening ' at Lowestoft; in 1781 'much 

 life and much love'; and in 1782 'most comforting place in the whole 

 circuit.' 



In 1776 Wesley preached at Beccles and noted in his journal that 'a 

 duller place I have seldom seen. The people of the town were neither pleased 

 nor vexed, as caring for none of these things ; yet fifty or sixty came into the 

 house either to hear or see.' 



In 1790 the aged Wesley, then in his eighty-eighth year, paid his last 

 visit to the eastern counties. Setting out early on Wednesday, 13 October, 

 from Colchester, he found no post-horses at Copdock, and so was obliged to 

 go round by Ipswich and wait there half an hour; nevertheless he got to 

 Norwich between two and three. This seems to have been his only visit to 

 Ipswich. On the following Friday he went to Lowestoft, where he was 

 cheered by finding ' a steady, loving, well-instructed society.' 



On Wednesday the 2oth of the same month Wesley was at Diss in the 

 morning. It was but rarely that his brother clergy had the courage to admit 



1 Hilt, of Buff. 232. 



' Defoe, Particular and Diverting Account of whatever is Curious and worth Obsetvation (1724). 



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