The Historians and Histories of Great Yarmouth, (with reference to Kent, Durham, Fordwich, Cornwall, Surrey, and other places).

The coast was protected by sand banks some three miles out to sea, so that a safe passage existed inshore from the south and the north - the famous Yarmouth “roads”.  Sailing ships could weather a storm in the roads with relatively little risk of being driven ashore, and there were no rocks to founder upon.  Slipping into the river afforded safe mooring.

Yarmouth had more than a mile of quay side within the river, and splendid houses owned by the merchants who traded with the continent and victualled the naval vessels moored in the roads.  The houses of these merchants were erected along the quay, where their owners could keep a close eye upon the crews and the gangs loading and unloading their ships.  Several of these men became very rich indeed.  As well as trading in wool and cloth, they landed and exported vast quantities of herring which after smoking or salting in barrels, went to Russia and Germany.

Some of the Yarmouth merchants developed a beer trade, and there were no less than sixty four malt houses in the town in the seventeenth century.  Every street had public houses by the dozen, there were over a hundred within a town that measured 2,238 yards around the three sides of the wall.^[5]

When visiting Yarmouth in 1671, King Charles II described the town, saying that he “had not known that such a place existed in all his kingdom”.^[6]

Daniel Defoe visited Yarmouth upon his tour in 1722, describing the place in glowing terms:

and the town facing to the west also and open to the river, makes the finest quay in England, if not in Europe, not inferior even to that of Marseilles itself.

The ships ride here so close and as it were keeping up one another, with their head-fasts on shore, that for half a mile together they go across the stream with their bowsprits over the land, their bows, or heads, touching the very wharf, so that one may walk from ship to ship as on a floating bridge, all along by the shore side.  The quay reaching from the drawbridge almost to the south-gate is so spacious and wide that in some places it is near one hundred yards from the houses to the wharf.  In this pleasant and agreeable range of houses are some very magnificent buildings, and among the rest, the custom house and town hall, and some merchants’ houses which look like little palaces, rather than the dwelling houses of private men.

The greatest defect of this beautiful town seems to be that though it is very rich and increasing in wealth and trade, and consequently in people, there is not room to enlarge the town by buildings, which would certainly be done much more than it is, but that the river on the land side prescribes them, except at the north end without the gate, and even there the land is not very agreeable, but had they a larger space within the gates there would, before now, have been many spacious streets of noble fine buildings erected, and as we see is done in some other thriving towns in England, as in Liverpool, Manchester, Frome, etc.^[7]

In 1849, while he was writing David Copperfield, Charles Dickens stayed in the town and it featured in the earlier part of his novel.  Yarmouth then was bustling with life, with seafarers and ships filling the river.  The Scots fishermen came down with their families and furniture and trunks and boxes strapped upon their little yawls, and stayed in the close-packed houses that filled the area between the three main streets.  The houses were arranged in the “Rows” as they were called: 150 or so narrow passages running from east to west, many only three feet wide, with an open drain in the centre, along which were ranged the timber-framed and flint-faced houses.

The town became independent in 1209, when a charter of King John created the borough.  Being self governing, a large archive of public documents was preserved in the parish church and at the guildhall. Yarmouth was blessed with four monasteries, but all had disappeared by 1725, when the Blackfriars Church and friary were destroyed by fire.  If any of the monastic libraries survive, they have not been located, although there is a Psalter in the British Library from the nearby monastic cell at Gorleston.  Another illuminated manuscript (a Hebrew text, illuminated upon a vellum roll) in the library of the Rev. Dr. Macro at the vicarage in 1740, is now in the archives of St. Nicholas Church.  Huge collections of documents amassed, and remain preserved.  There are private and public collections at Yarmouth relating to the town’s history, whilst others have been dispersed to places such as London and Oxford.^[8]

The earliest historians could only pass on small numbers of copied manuscripts, and so the scope for peer influence was limited. With the advent of printing however, there was ready access to the work of others, and a current style of historical text was able to develop.  Caxton found historical texts to be a ready source for his printing press, and provided readily saleable material for commercial use (laws of copyright were not established until 1709).^[9]  Caxton thus disseminated the works of the earliest writers, and the process of development of historical writing was greatly boosted. Nevertheless, many early historians were more antiquarian collectors of documents and information than true historical writers, and this only changed with the initiative of William Dugdale who established a style of writing and presentation which prevailed until the twentieth century.  How his work influenced others working subsequently on their histories of various towns and counties will be examined in some detail in the main chapters of this dissertation.

The great national historians began with Caxton, who was responsible for taking the French “The Brut”, translating it, and publishing it as the Chronicles of England, in 1480.  Leland (1503-1552) had great designs on completing a History of England, collected vast amounts of materials, and made accurate descriptions on his tours, but was unable to complete his task.  Sir Thomas More produced his great work, a History of Richard the Third, in 1543, and as the first to produce a truly great text, has not been credited enough.  Stow wrote in 1565, A Summarie of Englishe Chronicles. Hollinshed produced the first substantive History of England in 1577.His narrative was dry and dull, and was the work of a syndicate comprising also, Hooker, Stow, Harrison and Stanyhurst.^[10] Bale rewrote it, and his work has been much criticised.^[11] John Speed (1552-1629, produced his History of Great Britaine in 1611, a year after William Camden's Britannia was first published in English.  Camden's work is considered the great achievement of Elizabethan times.^[12] It had been written in Latin, in 1586.  Dugdale (1605-1686) followed Camden, and developed the techniques of historical writing and presentation to a new level.  Sir Henry Spelman (1564-1641) of Narborough in Norfolk, never achieved the same level of prominence in terms of published works, but did produce a description of the county “Icenia Sive Norfolkiae Descriptio Topographica”, and had an influence upon his contemporary William Dugdale, who he corresponded with.  County history writing, in general preceded works on specific towns. Stow’s Summarie of English Chronicles (1565) precedes his great work on London by as much as thirty years.^[13] Before that the individual county or town history was a rarity.

The seventeenth century saw a great increase in the production of such works, but the printing of very few. Camden led the way, and enormously stimulated interest in county projects.  Although his manuscript existed in Latin from 1586, the published history in was not printed until 1610. In fact county surveys began to appear from the beginning of the century, for example, Richard Carew The Survey of Cornwall, 1602; History of Chester 1609, by Robert then David Rogers;^[14] then came the influential John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611).  In Devon, following Hooker's steps, came Sir William Pole and Thomas Westcote.  These three authors all failed to get into print in their lifetimes and much of their work was used by others and printed only centuries later. In Huntingdon, Robert Cotton was collecting material for a history, but even he failed to produce one, though of course the materials that he collected were vast, and provided the basis for the British Museum. Cotton’s materials were the basis for John Speed’s work, and Cotton wrote the piece in it on Huntingdonshire.^[15]

The eighteenth century was also a difficult time for authors, when the book trade was heavily centred upon London, paper was scarce and expensive, and the copyright of books was bought and sold as a commodity by a select few.^[16] During this period many historical authors had great difficulty in getting their work into print.  Those that did, often did all the work themselves.  An example of the enterprise shown by such men was Francis Blomfield, who converted part of his house and installed his own press.  Nevertheless, despite the difficulty he produced “one of the greatest county histories”, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (1739).^[17] Other examples of successful publishing include T.Phillips’ History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury (1779), and Charles Seymour in Kent, with the New Topographical, Historical and Commercial Survey (1776).  In Huntingdon there were problems for Benjamin Hutchinson, who attempted a “Natural History and Antiquities of Huntingdonshire” collecting the materials from about 1770 to the 1790’s, but going mad in his attempt.^[18] Often work was passed from one historian to another.  John Ogilby’s Britannia was a three-volume work on Surrey begun in the 1670’s, but not printed until 1718 by Richard Rawlinson, who came across the manuscript in the Ashmolean in 1714.^[19] Similarly Smyth’s and Hutchinson’s manuscripts were for sale, and acquired by John Simmons of Paddington, who advertised them as ready for the press, but could find no takers.  They have now been lost, and it is fortunate therefore that in Yarmouth in the same period the work of Henry Swinden passed to John Ives who was in a position to effect publication, for again the original manuscript has long since vanished.^[20]

The nineteenth century was a period when publication was much more easily pursued. There were many more outstanding successes. Robert Surtees’ Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham is a notable example, although many counties such as Huntingdonshire, as related above, had no significant written history prior to the Victoria County History (1926-38). In Norfolk, William Worcester (1415-?1482) had gathered material for his itinerary in his travels in around 1470, but again, it came to nothing in terms of a printed work, which did not appear until the publication of Blomefield's history of the county.  Nothing of substance followed in Norfolk on a county-wide scale, but town histories such as Hillen’s King's Lynn (1907) appeared. Likewise in Kent, although Ireland’s History of Kent appeared in 1828, it was in large part a reproduction of Hasted’s earlier county history, and the works of substance were the town histories, such as Dunkin’s History and Antiquities of Dartford (1844), and Woodruff’s History of the Town and Port of  Fordwich. In Great Yarmouth it was Charles Palmer who brought the earlier histories from manuscript into print, and produced the exceptional work, The Perlustration of Great Yarmouth. As many historians had before, he published his books by public subscription, the profit being insufficient to cover the costs.  As if the task of producing the work were not enough, historians have generally had to apply themselves to financing the enterprise, and even to do the work of the printer and publisher. The pursuit of history has seldom reaped any reward. The following chapters will show how the historians were devoted to the task, regardless of the cost, both financial and personal. Successive historians have passed on their materials unwittingly, having been unable to complete their intended scheme.  Each successive historian picked up the scheme in his own way.  Many historians have set themselves impossible tasks, and failed to complete them.  There being no overall scheme and no appointed successor the outcome in such cases has been left to fate.

The Historians and Histories chapter 1.htm