Ship Money Levy (1636)

So-called “Ship Money” had its roots in Late Medieval times, when coastal towns and counties in England were periodically called upon to supply vessels to the Crown for use in naval warfare during times of conflict – mainly with the French. After having suspended Parliament in 1629, following a series of disputes, and not reconvening it again until 1640, Charles I had to find ways of creating revenue other than the rents yielded by the Royal Estate. Starting in 1634, with coastal communities only, he went on to issue a series of six annual writs imposing the tax on inland places also (1635-40). This, being ostensibly to raise money for the building of ships on the possibility of war rather than on there being genuine hostilities at the time. The levy became a source of great resentment and resistance.

Among the documents found by this writer in the safe of St. Margaret’s Church, while studying and reconstituting the early Lowestoft parish registers during the mid-1980s, was a surviving handwritten Ship Money collection list written on vellum or parchment (memory fails to remember which). This is now lodged in the Norfolk Record Office, at Norwich, with the archival reference number of PD 589/178. Eventually, all of the parish records located in the safe, were removed to NRO in its capacity as the repository of all parochial material in the Diocese of Norwich – Lowestoft, of course, included through being part of the Lothingland Deanery. This occurred under the terms of the Parochial and Records Measures Act of 1978, passed by the General Synod of the Church of England, which required that all ancient documentation lodged in parish churches up and down the length of the land should be transferred to the relevant diocesan repositories, unless the individual churches themselves could provide suitable and secure archival storage conditions themselves. Something which few, if any, could manage.

The introduction to the Lowestoft collection of funds, using the original spelling and bold font for effect, runs thus: “Lowestoft Sufk [Offset from what follows] A rate made by the constables and chiefe inhabitants of Lowestoft aforesaid, the nynt [ninth] & twentyeth day of December, Anno Dom 1636 For the Collectinge of the Som [sum] of £xxxiiij xiijs iiijd, there, Towards the provydinge & setting forth of a Shipp of warre of the burden of 800 tunnes, for his Maties[Majesty’s] service, as Followeth

Robt Allin   
John Arnold    
Israell Munds    
John Mason    
Mark Pacye   
John Gardiner  
This rate is confirmed for the Leavinge  
the some [sum] of £xxxiiij xiijs xiiijd  
Phil Parker pic

• The sum total in the table above finishes at 2 shillings (2s) short of the declared total given in the introduction. And that is as much as can be said in the matter. Whoever Philip Parker, the commissioner supervising the collection was, he was not a resident of Lowestoft.
• Use of the lower-case j to represent the figure 1 in Roman numerals (as seen in both the introduction and signing-off) was common practice at the time.
• The reference to a ship of 800 tunnes [tuns] burden, in the introduction, has nothing to do with weight.A tun was a large cask of 252 gallons (1140 litres) cubic capacity, mainly used for the bulk storage of wine. The size and carrying capability, below decks, of Medieval and Early Modern trading vessels was reckoned in terms of the number of tuns able to be carried– even though such casks were far too large to be used for carriage. It was simply a means of measurement. Thus, a vessel of 800 tuns was a large one. The term tun itself (as “ton”) remains in use today for the cubic size of ships, below decks, with a gross tonbeing an enclosed space of 100 cubic feet of the total area and a net ton one of the same capacity, but related to passenger accommodation space and/or stowage for cargo only.
•  Square brackets are mainly used to clarify people’s names or give more common versions of them.
•  Use of an asterisk in the table above indicates the names of people found referred to jn an incomplete Ship Money list of 1640 (referred to later on, below), which run in much the same sequence as the one here. The said list ends with William Frarye.
• The description of Robert Hawys as “clerke” identifies him as an ordained Church of England minister. The term “clerk in holy orders” is still used of Anglican priests. 
•  The “Tythes Impropriate” refer to the so-called “great tithes”: annual payments once taken by the Church from parishes as a ten per cent proportion of the value of the grain, timber and hay produced there– as and where appropriate. In Lowestoft’s case it was grain only, the most valuable crop in the parish. When Lowestoft parish came under the control of St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Smithfield, at some point between 1123-35, the great tithes were taken by the Priory itself, as a source of income, and the vicars subsequently appointed by it to St. Margaret’s Church had the lesser tithes of field crops (other than grain), livestock and associated products, and a small share of the profits made from fishing– referred to as Christ’s half-dole– to serve as their stipend (salary). Often taken in kind (hence the presence in parishes of tithe barns, in which to store produce and even temporarily keep livestock), many such payments were commuted into monetary sums in lieu simply for convenience.
•  After the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40), the lands, assets and privileges of these institutions were sold off (or given away, in some cases) by Henry VIII to a wide range of people– who, then, had the right (in hundreds of cases) to appoint parish clergy and to keep the great tithe payments as their own. The right to do this was known as “impropriation”. St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Smithfield, was acquired by Sir Richard Rich and the Lowestoft great tithe income passed from him or his successors, at some stage, to a London family named Burnell. It had some kind of connection with Lowestoft, with one of its members (named Richard) owning two houses in Lowestoft on plots of land immediately to the north of what is now No. 27 High Street (Royal Falcon inn) during the second decade of the 17th century.
• At some point, the Burnells (or unknown successors) sold the Lowestoft great tithes to a branch of the local Mewse family which had moved from the town and settled in Bermondsey. They, in turn, later on during the 17th century, sold them to the Church family of Kirkley – members of which put them on the market during 1718 as a means of raising money to settle debts owing. They were purchased in 1719-20 by the Revd. John Tanner, who raised the £1,000 required (plus £251 5s 1d fees and other charges) to acquire them for the benefit of future Lowestoft incumbents, rather than for himself, as it wasn’t until 1749 that he cleared himself of the debts incurred in raising the purchase-money and enjoyed the increased revenue. Until the great tithes payment of £70 per annum “kicked in”, the lesser tithes yielded about £40-£60 annually – depending on the variability of the weather affecting both agriculture and fishing. John Tanner died at Christmas 1759, so he enjoyed the increased salary for the last ten years only of his long incumbency – which had begun in 1708.
• This writer hopes that the departure, here, from the 1636 Ship Money levy itself is not without interest– and the fact that the great tithes monetary value was included as part of the tax imposed on the community (as it also was in 1640) is certainly of interest. The holders of the tithes (Burnells or Mewses?) would have been responsible for payment.
•  The occupations appended in brackets derive mainly from parish register entries and probate material (wills and inventories), with some input from manorial sources also.
•  The term “yeoman” may indicate an involvement in farming as a man’s primary occupation (as was the case with John Soane), but it was also used on a personal level to elevate the social standing in the community of both craftsmen and tradespeople. A good example of this are members of the Ward family-group, some of whom were mariners, others involved in the malting and brewing trades.
•  The Lowestoft merchants were mainly involved in fishing activity, the curing of red herrings and maritime trade. Some of the younger ones (such as Thomas Allyn – the surname usually found as Allin and, later, as Allen) would also have gone to sea regularly, in command of their own vessels.
•  The occupational term fisherman/mariner, used in places, reflects the fact that the Lowestoft vessels of the time were dual purpose– switching from one use to the other as opportunity and need dictated. Towards the end of the 17th century, two different types of craft began to emerge, to engage in one practice or the other.
• The first year of Ship Money collection (1635) was a bad one for Lowestoft, in that it had experienced its second worst recorded epidemic after the “great sickness” of 1603 (which features elsewhere in these pages). Between 29 March and 30 October, 154 of its inhabitants had died of bubonic plague– which was about 13% of an already depleted population (c.1,200 in number) resulting from the earlier epidemic.
•  An incomplete list of 26 March 1640, with sixty-one people named (fifty-four of whom are to be found in the 1636 list), features in V.B. Redstone (ed.) The Ship-Money Returns for the County of Suffolk, 1639-40 (Ipswich, 1904), p. 127. Published by the Suffolk Institute for Archaeology and Natural History and available for study on the Internet Archive.

CREDIT: David Butcher