Let This Be a Warning to You! 

Quarter Sessions Punishment (Lowestoft)

With so much material being available for study of misdemeanour and nuisance (as shown elsewhere in these LO&N pages, in Manorial Governance), the ability to assess the degree of felony among Lowestoft’s inhabitants is made a great deal more difficult by fewer records and by the difficulty of accessing those that do exist. There are a number of bundles of indictments relating to the Norfolk Assize (the county of Suffolk forming part of that circuit) during the 17th Century in the National Archives, Kew. However, they are not indexed and there has never been time or opportunity for this writer to sift through them to see if any Lowestoft people feature there. 

            A certain, limited amount of information is to be had from the Suffolk Quarter Sessions order records, deriving from sittings held at three-monthly intervals (Easter, Midsummer, Michaelmas and Epiphany), which were legal assemblies handling crimes below the level of the most serious offences adjudicated upon at Assize level – as well as dealing with a whole range of local administrative matters such as licensing inns and ale-houses, fixing wage-rates, authorising road and bridge repairs, levying local taxes, and the committal of lunatics to safe supervision. Suffolk had four centres for the holding of Sessions (Ipswich, Woodbridge, Bury St. Edmunds and Beccles), thus covering its area of jurisdiction on a sectorial basis, and order books for a period of over one hundred years relevant to this piece (1639-1747) have survived as Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), series B105. Microfilm copies of the documentation are also available as Acc. 11/M1 (1639-83) and Acc. 11/M2. (1683-1747). Unfortunately, there are no accompanying formal indictments and their absence makes it sometimes difficult to gain any detailed idea of either the nature of crimes committed by Lowestoft people or of the degree of criminal behaviour. 

The town did not begin to stage quarter sessions of its own until 1748 (alternating with those held at Beccles), and it may well have become the venue for petty sessions at about the same time. Though Edmund Gillingwater, in his An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), p. 419, states that 1756 was about the first year in which the latter were held – these being mainly concerned with minor acts of criminality (such as low-level physical assault, drunkenness and lesser criminal damage, plus the hiring of servants. Both sittings were held in the so-called Shire House, a building on the northern side of Swan Lane(now Mariners Street) at its original western end near Park Road. It had originally been erected by Sir Thomas Allin (local merchant and seafarer, who became one of the leading admirals in Charles II’s navy) and was the house identified in the 1674 Hearth Tax as having eleven fire-places. The town also got its own bridewell, or lock-up, at about the same time as it was granted Sessions – a small building erected on Goose Green/Fair Green (not far from the Shire House), leading to the area of location becoming known as Cage Green during the later part of the eighteenth century and for some years thereafter. As best described today, the building stood at the eastern end of St. Margaret’s Plain.

            Thus, effectively, for most of the Early Modern period, Lowestoft had no real status as a centre for legal matters. Beccles, with its quarter sessions and petty sessions, its courthouse and its gaol, was very much the focal point of law enforcement locally where second-tier felony was concerned. Furthermore, the position of Lowestoft was further diminished, legally speaking, by its never having a resident Justice of the Peace within the parish. There was a Justice for Lothingland Half-hundred, but he never lived in Lowestoft, and the next nearest J.P. was to be found in Beccles.

            One problem with quarter sessions order books as a source of information is that, in the absence of indictments, there is no way of ascertaining how many of these became the subject of orders made in the books. At least one leading commentator on social behaviour during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Keith Wrightson, in the course of correspondence with this writer, some considerable time ago) expressed the opinion that justices usually made an order only when they thought that exemplary punishment was required. Thus, the fact that only two specific cases of felony involving Lowestoft people are recorded in the order books need not be particularly surprising. Furthermore, it is also possible to detect, in both instances, the exemplary nature of the punishment meted out, both in terms of its effect upon the criminals themselves and upon any potential transgressors.

            The first case appears on 9 January 1688, when Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Clarke (mariner), was convicted of stealing one pound’s weight of candles from John Aldred (grocer). Her punishment was “to be whipped from the middle upward and publicly whipped in the Market place of Lowestoft until her body be bloody”. After the flogging had been carried out (by the parish constable), she was to be released – but she and her husband had to pay 2s. 4d. gaol fees for the time she had spent in the lock-up at Beccles. Her punishment would have been carried out on market day (Wednesday), at a whipping-post which would have been located somewhere in the trading area. Seven years after this incident, in 1695 – no date given – John Trussell was convicted of petty larceny. What he had stolen is not recorded, but he admitted his wrong-doing and, on agreeing to join the Royal Navy, was exempted from corporal punishment. His period of service was not specified, but it was to be without pay and he was to sail under the command of a Captain Pacy. This may have been John Pacy, one of the sons of Samuel Pacy deceased, Lowestoft’s wealthiest merchant of the 17th Century.

            The majority of Lowestoft cases recorded in the order books during the later part of the seventeenth century and the first three or four decades of the eighteenth are concerned with removal orders from the town concerning those people who had arrived there without certification from their parishes of origin (see Human Migration into Lowestoft, 1696-1735). Next in number are those which record social or moral offences of one kind or another. Thus, on 5 October 1696, Alice Garnett, having been committed to the Beccles quarter sessions as a disorderly person, was to “Remain in Gaol till next sessions the Inhabitants of Lowestoft by consent are to pay 2s. a week for her maintenance”. The next year, on 11 January, John Ditcham (mariner) was ordered to be detained in the Beccles gaol until he had admitted his parental responsibilities with regard to the bastard son fathered on Mary Carre of Kirkley. Ditcham was contesting paternity at the time and already had a wife and two year old son. A second child (a daughter) was baptised in March 1697 and three further children were born to him and his wife, so he apparently managed to resolve his difficulties one way or another with regard to Mary Carre.

            On 12 July 1714, Thomas Denney (alias Johnson and Drake), Edmund Grimston and Samuel Mingay were sentenced to remain in gaol “till they severally find sureties for their good behaviour and respective appearances at next sessions”, but there are no further references to them. Grimston was the twenty-year-old son of Edward Grimston, a Lowestoft innkeeper, who kept The George on the east side of the High Street, opposite the market (the site of present-day No. 87), but the other two wrongdoers are not traceable in the Lowestoft family reconstitution material. Denney’s two aliases suggest that he was a shady character who used alternative names for his own particular purposes. There is nothing equivocal, however, about the entry of 6 April 1730, which declared Edward Dixon to be an “Incorrigible and Lewd Vagrant” and ordered him to be “whipped publicly at the market place in Lowestoft between the hours of 12 and 1 on Wednesday next (being market day) till bloody and then passed away”.

Even though comparatively low in number, the cases cited above do serve to give some idea of the summary justice handed out to wrongdoers of three centuries and more ago – aimed at influencing others not to commit the same kinds of crime.

CREDIT: David Butcher