Norfolk

In wealth and population seventeenth-century Norwich vied with Bristol for position as England’s second city. Contemporaries described it in utopian terms. Thomas Fuller thought it ‘either a city in an orchard, or an orchard in a city, so equally are houses and trees blended in it; so the pleasure of the country and populousness of the city meet here together’. T. Fuller, Hist. of the Worthies of Eng. ed. P.A. Nuttall (1840), ii. 487. In 1671, when he was shown round by the famous local physician, Sir Thomas Browne, John Evelyn found Norwich to be

Situated at the point where the River Ouse flows into the Wash, King’s Lynn was a seaport of antiquity and the capital of the west Norfolk marshland. Its prosperity depended on its position at the head of a river network which reached far into Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. This enabled it to supply the northern ports of the east coast with corn from the surrounding countryside and ten counties with coal and salt. Fishing was another source of prosperity.

Located where the main London-Norwich road crossed the Little Ouse, Thetford straddled the county boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. The Little Ouse flowed westwards, joining the Great Ouse between Ely and Downham Market. Navigable to Thetford, it could be used for the trade in goods to and from King’s Lynn and those parts of Norfolk and Suffolk that were furthest from the sea. But by the seventeenth century the town had decreased in importance. The main reminder of its former status was that the Norfolk Lent assizes were usually held there.

Twenty miles east of Norwich, Yarmouth was an important trading post and the centre of a vast fishing trade based on herring. Writing during the reign of James I, the former town clerk, Henry Manship, claimed that it had 1,200 householders. Manship, Gt. Yarmouth, 24. Manship’s local pride prompted him to write a history of the town, which repeatedly stressed its natural and man-made advantages.

By the seventeenth century the castle that gave this borough its name was a ruin and what remained of the settlement around it had been cut off from the sea. Enfranchised in 1558, the borough was dominated by the Howards whose dependents and nominees held most of the burgage tenements which carried the franchise, but during this period, probably owing to the family’s financial embarrassment, some of the burgages were sold to neighbouring gentry and villagers. A borough by prescription, the mayor, who acted as returning officer, was chosen at the court leet.

The reaction of the Dutch traveller William Schellinks to the landscape of Norfolk was laconic; visiting the county in 1662, he thought it ‘a large, flat region, which sustains a lot of sheep and rabbits’. William Schellinks Jnl. 154. All those sheep were the key to the local economy. Although the county had substantial areas of arable farming, the wool produced from the sheep was what sustained its major manufacturing industries, the weaving of worsted cloth and the new draperies. This was what had helped make Norwich the second city of the kingdom.

King’s Lynn was dominated by the Turners, a leading town family, in alliance with the Walpoles, each returning one Member.