Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 289

Many a community has moved at some time in its history, leaving its parish church at a distance from its new centre, a phenomenon often erroneously attributed to the Black Death. In the case of the town of Lowestoft, David Butcher shows that the parish church of St Margaret’s – originally the church of the adjoining settlement of Akethorpe – was already being rebuilt in its original position three-quarters of a mile outside the town at the time of the mid fourteenth-century calamity. As a result of the rebuilding, St Margaret’s became one of Suffolk’s great perpendicular glories on a par with Southwold, Blythburgh, Lavenham and Long Melford. It is doubly impressive, the author remarks, that the town’s inhabitants felt able to embark upon the raising of such a large and imposing edifice at the same time that they were relocating their township and that, having recovered from the most disastrous epidemic ever to have hit the country, they were prepared to see the work through to its conclusion.

This is typical of the revelations with which David Butcher assaults his reader. Equally startling is his account of how the original agricultural village was uprooted and moved a mile or so to a new site. At the time of Domesday, Lowestoft was an agricultural settlement with the classic open-field system so widespread in much of lowland England. There were the usual three common fields set out in strips – named in the 1618 manorial roll as the North Field, the South Field and the South West Field – with the township itself sited near the meeting point of the South and South West fields, a situation occupied today by a traffic roundabout.

The 450 acres of cultivated land recorded in Domesday was 75 per cent of the 600 or more acres revealed in the 1617 manor roll, indicating that 150 acres had been put under the plough in the intervening years. It is likely that this increase was achieved by clearing some of the areas of heath that had played an important part in the manorial economy, providing materials such as bracken for animal bedding, gorse and thorn for fuel and also rough grazing for livestock. As the author points out, use of the term ‘waste’ for some of these areas of heathland is misleading; it was anything but.

The relocation of the settlement in the early fourteenth century from a position on the south-facing slope south of the church to a clifftop site that offered facilities for trading and fishing was well planned and efficiently carried out, apparently with the agreement and collaboration of the bailiff or steward of the lord of the manor. Among other things, the relocation involved the management of the cliff face by terracing, a considerable operation both in terms of scale and of the labour involved, and probably carried out before house plots were set out and the clifftop dwellings erected. The result of that work can still be seen today, and is illustrated with a photograph of present-day work which has revealed how the original terracing was done.

The lord of the manor, John de Dreux, Earl of Richmond, whose prime interest lay in receiving the annual income yielded by his estate rather than in having any direct part in its administration, was an absentee at the time of the relocation, which allowed the inhabitants a good degree of self-determination in the conduct of local affairs. At the same time, it allowed local officials, particularly the bailiff, an opportunity to improve their own situation in ways that were not always entirely honest.

Making excellent use of the 1274 Hundred Roll – ‘a second Domesday’ – Butcher shows how Lowestoft gradually came to be as significant as the Domesday hub of the Lothingland manor, Gorleston, though the nine tenants of the Lowestoft glebe still had to take their hens and cockerels to Gorleston on St Stephen’s Day (26 December) and were then provided with a meal.

On its new clifftop site overlooking the sea, Lowestoft became a centre of maritime trade, a fact that led to many years of rivalry with its neighbour a dozen miles to the north, the borough of Great Yarmouth. As head-port Yarmouth claimed jurisdiction over Kirkley Roads, the name given to the extensive anchorage off Lowestoft, and was responsible for collecting customs duties due to the Crown. In a chapter entitled ‘Misdemeanour and mishap in Kirkley Roads’, Butcher tells of the problems Yarmouth faced in its endeavour to maintain its legally granted authority and to collect customs within its jurisdiction. For more than three centuries the head-port viewed its upstart rival as ‘a town of great smuggling’ (p. 144), while the men of Lowestoft sought to bend the rules as far as they were able – or dared. The rivalry between the two towns went on until Lowestoft was granted port status in 1679, and in some respects it still continues.

Often enough, it seems, there was more than a hint of unlawful behaviour, if not outright piracy. As the author says, the government’s encouragement of mariners and fishermen to undertake privateering activities in the national interest during the Hundred Years War surely led to all kinds of illicit activity at sea and schooled English seafarers in the unsubtle arts of maritime plunder.

In adding this book to his earlier volume Lowestoft, 1550–1750, Butcher has performed no small service to the cause of local history. Besides showing how the foundations of the present-day community were laid in the Middle Ages, he provides a fascinating picture of human interaction in the pursuit of economic progress, with a postscript bringing the story up to date. This is supplemented by six appendices including a list of the manorial chief tenements, details of the sixteenth-century merchant fleet and a name analysis of the Lowestoft Hundred Roll tenants, a glossary of medieval terms and three indexes, of people, places and subjects.