East Grinstead was a small town on the edge of Ashdown forest, whose significance sprang from its role as a centre of the Wealden iron industry, as well as from its proximity to London, only thirty miles away. J.C. Stenning, ‘Notes on East Grinstead’, Suss. Arch. Colls. xx. 132; E. Straker, Wealden Iron (1931), 223-41; H. Cleere and D.
Sussex was a county split in more ways than one. The Weald in the north and east, and the Downs in the south and west, each had their distinctive topography and economic base, particularly with the concentration of iron works in the Weald. Administratively, the county was also divided between east and west, a situation encouraged by the notoriously poor transport infrastructure, which adversely affected lateral movement; although the county’s four rivers, the Arun, Adur, Ouse and Rother, were all navigable, each ran from north to south.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries New Shoreham, at the mouth of the River Adur and on the narrow coastal plain between the sea and the South Downs, was among the most important Sussex ports, partly because it offered the shortest transit by land from the Channel to London. Like many neighbouring ports, however, it then suffered a devastating decline. William Camden described it as ‘ruined and under water’, and it was reported to have been exceedingly poor. W.
Seaford was an ancient harbour on the south coast of Sussex, on the edge of the South Downs. By the thirteenth century the town’s location at the then mouth of the river Ouse gave it some local importance as both a port and a fort, although it was never a major mercantile centre. Recs. of the Corporation of Seaford ed. F.W. Steer (1959), 52; M.A. Lower, Memorials of Seaford (1855), pp. v, 1. It was the most eminent of the ‘limb’ ports – attached to the Cinque Port of Hastings – and the only one which sent Members to Parliament.
Fowey’s relative prosperity was based on its harbour, which provided a safe and generous anchorage on the otherwise forbidding south Cornish coast. According to Richard Carew†, writing at the turn of the century, the harbour entrance was ‘guarded with blockhouses … as is also the town itself, fortified and fenced with ordnance’. Carew, Survey, 134; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii.
Cornwall, ‘being cast out into the sea, with the shape of a horn’, was one of the most remote counties in England, sharing a land border only with Devon. Carew, Survey, 1v. The county’s distance from London was offset by its mineral wealth, especially in tin, and the richness of its coastal fishing grounds, notably for the pilchard trade with the Mediterranean.
Lostwithiel had been the capital of the duchy of Cornwall from its creation in 1337, and was the centre of the royal administration in the county, the venue for the county court, the stannary court and the elections for the knights of the shire. Despite its status, the town was small and relatively poor.
St Ives was a small port on the north coast of Cornwall, protected from the Atlantic by the peninsula known as Pendinas or St Ives Head. J.H. Matthews, Hist. of the Parishes of St Ives, Lelant, Towedrack and Zennor (1892), 1. Originally a centre for the export of tin, by the seventeenth century St Ives was dependent on fishing, and suffered greatly at the hands of North African pirates in the 1620s and 1630s. Matthews, St Ives, 180-1, 183; Carew, Survey, 154; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii.
St Germans, on the River Tiddy in eastern Cornwall, had been a major ecclesiastical centre in the middle ages, thanks to the wealth and importance of its priory.
West Looe (or Porthbyhan) faced its twin settlement of East Looe across the estuary of the River Looe on the southern coast of Cornwall. The two towns were (according to one contemporary) ‘united and knit together with a fair arched stone bridge’ and shared ‘a pretty little harbour’ which was a centre for the fishing of ‘this silly little fish’, the pilchard. Corporation Chronicles…of East and West Looe ed. A.L.
