Suffolk

Situated at the head of the Orwell estuary in east Suffolk, with a population estimated at about 4,300 in 1603, Ipswich was the most important shipbuilding centre in the country after London. It was estimated in 1625 that there had been an annual average of 12 launchings for the past 30 years. A head port with resident customs and Admiralty officials, Ipswich played an important part in the Newcastle coal trade, with 50 colliers of between 200 and 300 tons burthen plying regularly between Tyne and Thames around six times a year. M.

Of the three coastal boroughs of Suffolk, only Aldeburgh retained any economic significance in the seventeenth century. Coastal erosion, which had swept away the greater part of Dunwich and blocked access to Orford, left it open to the sea with deep water at hand. Ships of 200 tons and upwards were built, a fishing fleet of 50 or 60 sail was dispatched every year to Icelandic waters and the Westmann Isles, and the port claimed a share in the Newcastle coal trade. CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 530, 532; APC, 1627, p. 2; HMC Var. iv. 290.

Orford was an important East Anglian port in the early Middle Ages and had received its first its charter in 1256. R.A. Roberts, ‘Bor. Business of a Suff. town’, TRHS (ser. 4), xiv. 95; HMC Var. iv. 256. It was represented in the reign of Edward I, but subsequently ceased to return Members until the early sixteenth century. OR; HP Commons, 1509-58, i.

Dunwich had been one of the most important Saxon ports in East Anglia and the seat of a bishopric, but coastal erosion and the silting of the harbour had reduced it to a shadow of its former self by the early seventeenth century. J.A. Steers, ‘Suff. Shore’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xix. 9-11; T. Gardner, Historical Acct.

Eye is situated in ‘High Suffolk’, the predominantly pastoral region to the north of the county, which takes its name from the honour of ‘Heya’ or Eye, a Crown possession from the mid-sixteenth century. It allegedly first received privileges as early as the reign of King John, but was not incorporated until 1575, under the name of ‘Heya alias Eye’, a formula still sometimes used in the election indentures of the early seventeenth century.

The town of Bury St. Edmunds, having grown up around a Benedictine abbey founded before the Conquest, not only survived but flourished after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, retaining its position as the venue of assizes and quarter sessions and the capital of West Suffolk.R.S. Gottfried, Bury St.

Sudbury is situated in the extreme south of Suffolk on the left bank of the River Stour, which forms the border with Essex. In this period the Stour valley was a major cloth-producing region, which brought considerable wealth to the town. Sudbury was an ancient borough, which first received a charter in the mid-thirteenth century, but despite having a mayor by 1331 it was not incorporated until 1554, when the town was rewarded for its support of Queen Mary at her accession. W.W. Hodson, Short Hist. of Bor. of Sudbury comp. C.F.D.

William Cobbett†, who in March 1830 lectured at Eye, a market town affording employment in brewing, flaxwork, boot and stay making, thought it ‘a beautiful little place, though an exceedingly rotten borough’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 618; Eye Guide ed. L.J. Morley (1949), 16-18. In 1831 the boundary commissioners described it as a large and ‘irregularly built’ village, unpaved, unlit and unwatched with ‘neither trade nor manufacture’. PP (1831-2), xxxix.

The open and venal burgh of Sudbury, where the freemen had been polled at every opportunity since 1747, was situated on the Suffolk bank of the River Stour, which separated it from its suburb of Ballingdon in Essex. Famous for centuries for its woollens and bunting, it benefited in the early nineteenth century from the high labour costs in Spitalfields, whose silk manufacturers took advantage of its pool of skilled labour and good communications with London and the east coast to establish velvet, silk and satin factories in the town.

Commercially impoverished and reduced to ‘the ranks of a small and insignificant fishing town’ by repeated encroachments of the North Sea, Aldeburgh was the inspiration for its erstwhile Member Charles Arbuthnot’s* ‘Harmony in Uproar’ and the poetry of its freeman by birth George Crabbe.Suff. RO (Ipswich), J. Glude, ’Materials for Hist. Aldeburgh’, 165; H.P. Clodd, Aldeburgh, 69. It was becoming popular in the 1820s as a summer residence for ‘families of distinction’.