Lincolnshire

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

Situated on the Great North Road where it crossed the River Welland, seventeenth-century Stamford lay close to the dividing line between the fenlands of Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire to the east and the pastoral uplands of Rutland and Northamptonshire to the west. J. Thirsk, ‘Stamford in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in The Making of Stamford ed. A. Rogers (Leicester, 1965), 62, 66-7. Its economy was based largely on its markets, the leather-working industry, the manufacture of hemp and related products and stonemasonry. R.

Grantham lay on the Great North Road about 20 miles south of Lincoln and 10 miles south-east of Newark-on-Trent. Royal Charters of Grantham 1463-1688 ed. G.H. Martin (Leicester, 1963), 11. In medieval times, the town had been a centre for the wool trade, but by the seventeenth century its economy seems to have been based largely on its markets and fairs, the buying and selling of livestock, and the leather and victualling trades. Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 11; B.

A thriving centre for the wool trade in medieval times, early Stuart Lincoln was a city in decline, with relatively few citizens of any great wealth and beset by problems of vagrancy and poor relief. CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 408-9; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/4 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1599-1638), ff. 271-2; F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956), 22, 134-8; Probate Inventories of Lincoln Citizens 1661-1714 ed. J.A. Johnston (Lincoln Rec. Soc.

After the county capital itself, Boston was the largest and wealthiest town in early Stuart Lincolnshire. Lying on the River Witham at the northern corner of The Wash, it had been a major international port in the medieval period, and although its commercial horizons had narrowed considerably by the 1630s, it retained a lively trade in the import of goods from the Netherlands and the Baltic and the export of grain and other produce from its agricultural hinterland. P. Thompson, Hist. and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), 347; Port Bks. of Boston 1601-40 ed. R.W.K.

Seventeenth-century Grimsby was a town in decline. Lying on the south bank of the Humber estuary, it had at one time been a ‘commodious roadstead for the anchorage of ships’, but by reason of the silting up of the harbour its trade had been swallowed up by Hull, on the north bank, and it had ‘fallen into great decay and poverty’. ‘Grimsby Haven, 1641’, Lincs. N and Q, i. 137-8; G. Holles, Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc. i.), 2; S. H. Rigby, Medieval Grimsby (Hull, 1993), 144; E. Gillett, Hist.

Lincolnshire was the largest county in England after Yorkshire, and like its northern neighbour it was divided into three administrative districts – Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey. Its decay as a producer and exporter of wool and cloth, which was all too apparent by the early sixteenth century, continued to cast a long shadow over the county’s economy. VCH Lincs. ii. 319-20, 332; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Lincolnshire’. Among the communities that were hit hardest by this decline were Lincolnshire’s ports and towns. VCH Lincs. ii.