SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY Monday morning (1738);"^ they give permission for the erection of posts and rails at either end of the Market Place, where wagons and carts break up the pavement, on the understanding that a passage is left open for the Friston coach, or those of any other gentlemen coming to town.^'^ During the i8th century the interest of social life centres mainly about the towns. The Dutch wars had for a time checked the prosperity of the shipping industry. Defoe"^ points out how Ipswich in particular had suffered by the diminution of the collier fleets plying between Newcastle and London, which its harbour had once entertained, and which had often been built in its yards. Dutch ' fly-boats,' taken in the war, thrust themselves into the coal- trade, and Ipswich men dropped gradually out of it. The thinness of the population, owing to this, and, according to another witness,"' also to the passing of the cloth trade to the north and west of England, became a by- word : ' Ipswich a town without people.' But already in Defoe's day things had begun to mend : large quantities of corn grown in the surrounding dis- trict were continually shipped from its quays to London, and also to Holland. " If the wealthy manufacturers had deserted it never to return, people of another class ' scrambled ' for houses in the town."' There * is a great deal of very good company in this town and though there are not so many of the gentry here as at Bury, yet there are more here than in any other town in the county : the company you meet with are generally persons well-informed on the world and who have something very solid and entertaining in their society. This may happen by their frequent conversing with those who have been abroad, and by their having a remnant of gentlemen and masters of ships among them who have seen more of the world than the people of an inland town are likely to have seen. Living in Ipswich was particularly cheap, and access to London easy, the coach going through in one day. Woodbridge also was ' full of corn- factors and butter-factors,' some of them very considerable merchants. Bungay about 1700 was the subject of an unsuccessful experiment : Mr. King, an apothecary of the town, tried to bring it forward as a spa, pointing out that the chalybeate spring in the old castle possessed valuable properties: he built a bath-house at Earsham (just across the Norfolk border), planted a vineyard, and made walks ; but though the Suffolk gentry for many years resorted to the bath-house, little came of the enterprise."' Reyce in his Breviary had written a century earlier of the condition of the Suffolk cottage : — ' The mean person and the poor cottager thinks he doth very well if he can compass in his manner of building to raise his frame low, cover it with thatch, and to fill his wide panels (after they are well splinted and bound) with clay or culme enough well-tempered . . . over which to bestow a cast of hair, lime, and sand made into mortar and laid thereon rough or smooth.'"* In Arthur Young's day the Suffolk cottage was still built of lath and plaster, or wattle and clay, and was, he adds, deficient in warmth and every conveni- ence of life."' Crabbe's unflinching pen has left a picture of the conditions of life in the lowest stratum of society, as he saw it in his native town of ■" Add. MSS. 22249, fol. 113. "• Ibid. fol. loi. '" Tour in the Eastern Counties, 83. "» Ibid. 84. '«' Kirby, Suff. Traveller (ed. 1784), 51. "° Defoe, op. cit. 94. "' Kirby, op. cit. 51. '" Defoe, op. cit. 95. "' Suckling, op. cit. i, 128. '" Breviary, 51. ■" Young, op. cit. (ed. 1797), 11. 675
