The sea had not yet entirely engulfed Dunwich. The constant coastal erosion – which would cause the town to become one of the most notorious of all ‘rotten’ boroughs – had claimed most, though not all, of the old town. A thousand years earlier, Dunwich had been one of the major towns of East Anglia and for the two centuries from 673 had been the seat of a bishop. However, well before 1298, when it began sending Members to Parliament, the disadvantages of its location were apparent.
In the seventeenth century the River Stour was still one of the major trade routes within England. For several centuries much of the cloth which supported the economy of south Suffolk and north Essex had travelled down-river to Harwich to be shipped across to the lucrative export markets on the continent. Located where the river was crossed by the main road running south from Bury St Edmunds to Chelmsford (and on to London), Sudbury could hardly fail to prosper while this trade remained profitable. There was no larger town upstream of Harwich and Manningtree.
For seven centuries the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, centred on the shrine of the saint-king, Edmund the Martyr, had been one of the great churches of the kingdom. The town laid out in the eleventh century to the west of the abbey precincts was entirely a creation of the abbey authorities and, within the limits of the liberty of St Edmundsbury, successive abbots ruled almost unchallenged. As one of the most powerful of the king’s subjects, the abbot had received regular summons to Parliament as a spiritual peer and twice, in 1267 and 1447, he had hosted Parliaments in the town.
The road between Colchester and Norwich served as an unofficial dividing line which split Suffolk in to two equal halves. Roughly speaking, the franchise of Bury St Edmunds, centred on the town of that name, lay to the west of this line and formed what was, for most purposes, a separate administrative unit. Another great liberty, that of St Audrey, situated around Woodbridge, lay entirely to the east. Everything else fell within what was called the Geldable.
The town of Aldeburgh was first and foremost a fishing town. Beyond that, its position as one of the string of ports along the East Anglian coast brought some benefits from passing trade. Reporting to the privy council on the county’s coastal defences during the Spanish invasion scare of 1626, the Suffolk deputy lieutenants described Aldeburgh as
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.
