A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK these founders. A similar trust was reposed in municipal corporations. By a will made in i 509 William Godell, merchant of Southwold, provided for a priest to go to Rome to sing for him in five different churches for a whole year. His wife was to have a Requiem Mass sung in Southwold Church for thirty days, giving alms each day to twelve poor men or women. His executors were to keep his yearday for twenty years at the cost of 20J. per year, and finally after his wife's death the bailiffs and commonalty of South- wold were to find a priest for sixteen years next following to sing for his soul and the souls of his friends.** At Eye in 1479 and 1488 there were two legacies left to the townspeople on condition of their carrying out certain religious observances, one of which was that the sacristan or some other honest man should perambulate the streets of the borough with the little bell known as the ' sowlebelL' At the same time a bequest was made to St. Peter's Gild at Eye to endow a chantry priest on condition of the gild buying land for a similar purpose, and the parish priest has left a pleasant account of how he urged his congregation from the pulpit to complete the bargain he had nego- tiated on the instalment system : ' How saye now saide I unto them if I have bought a ground for you so that ye maye stonde in the church yard and see it, . . . if it be a bargaine because it for the comon wele speake all Una Voce and seye ye this was a godly hearinge every man, woman and childe saide yea yea, dyverse men gave x marke a peice women fower marke xx'- and xK- xK so that I gathered on Candlemas daye above xx^- ' " The important part played by Suffolk men at the time of the Reforma- tion was no accident. Nowhere in England were the forces of economic and social progress more active. If the future development of English in- dustry and commerce had been revealed in general terms to one of the numerous political speculators of those times, and the local details left to his imagination, he would very probably have placed Manchester at Lavenham or Hadleigh and Liverpool at Ipswich. As far as Ipswich was concerned, this forecast was indeed frequently made in the days of Elizabeth. But the development of the textile manufacture of Suffolk which has been traced in detail elsewhere had already almost attained its highest point, and the eco- nomic future of the county down to our own day was to depend increasingly on the favourable conditions under which its agriculture was carried on. Those conditions were no new or sudden achievement. The germs of them, as we have seen, are to be found in the Domesday Survey, and their steady growth can be followed through the intervening centuries. The story that is to follow of the development of high farming in modern Suffolk derives all its meaning from its continuity with the past. Part II When Tusser in 1557 published his Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- bandry,'^^ the forwardness of the county in agricultural improvements was already noteworthy, and the progressive movement had well begun which was to lead Young in 1794 to place Suffolk in the forefront of scientific farming. Tusser wrote his poem during his residence at Brantham in " Gasquet, Parish Life, 269. " Gardner, Hist. Account ofDunwich, 248. " Hut. MSS. Com. Rep. x, App. iv, 528. " Engl. Dial. Soc. Publ. 1878, p. 14.0. 660
