The Nature of Farming in Lowestoft – 17th & 18th Century  

The type of agriculture practised in Lowestoft during the Early Modern era was of mixed variety, as was the case with most other communities in lowland England. And it was not only mixed in combining crops and livestock; it was also mixed in the sense that many of the people who farmed the land had other interests. It is unfortunate that the two key documents which reveal so much about conduct of agriculture in the parish stand in isolation from each other. The Manor Roll of 1618 – Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 194/A10/73 – gives a full account of who held the land and what the field-system was like, but does not reveal who was doing the farming; the Tithe Accounts of 1698-1787 – Norfolk Record Office, PD 589/80 – show who the farmers were and what crops they were growing, but do not divulge who owned the land and what the field-pattern had developed into. In spite of this, it is possible to bridge the eighty-year gap and establish certain characteristics regarding agricultural practice.

For instance, if a comparison is made between the fifty-six private individuals named as holders of land in the Manor Roll and the various yeomen and husbandmen identifiable during the first half of the 17th century, there is very little overlap at all. This presumably means that, in most cases, the landowners rented out to the people who farmed. The era in which the Manor Roll was compiled happened to be the one which saw the largest number of husbandmen ever recorded in the parish registers – a development resulting from men switching employment from sea to land at a time when fishing was in decline. In addition to the people identified as yeomen or husbandmen, there were also substantial numbers of merchants, tradespeople, seafarers and craftsmen having some kind of interest in farming. The impression gained at this time is that much of the agriculture was comparatively small in scale, with a wide variety of people involved. This is not to say that it was inefficient. It was more a case of the sum of little parts constituting a not inconsiderable whole. Most merchants who made money in Lowestoft during the Early Modern period did it by combining agricultural and maritime interests.

Eighty or ninety years after the Manor Roll was drawn up, the Tithe Accounts show the degree of diversity in the number and type of people involved in agriculture. As a generalisation, the first quarter of the 18th century had about sixteen or seventeen substantial farmers in the parish, about ten of whom were yeomen or husbandmen, the other six or seven merchants or brewers. The tier below them consisted of about the same number of middling men, the great majority of whom were either merchants, brewers, innkeepers or carters. Next came twenty or so small farmers, including seven or eight husbandmen, with the rest being largely composed of merchants, innkeepers and seafarers. And finally, at the bottom of this hierarchy, were seven or eight very small men: largely husbandmen, but with an innkeeper and a seafarer or two included. These sixty or more people were not all operating at the same time, but they were the ones who carried out farming over the twenty-five year period assessed. There was, in addition to them, a further body of men (about thirty or so in all) from all the various occupation groups, including labourers, who farmed at occasional intervals by hiring a yard or piece of ground somewhere and growing a crop of hay or turnips on it. The practice has an air of opportunism about it: the chance for both affluent and poor alike to make some money.

The number of men involved in agriculture as a primary occupation was about twenty, which constituted about 5% of family heads of the time – a proportion which increases to 14% if all sixty or so agriculturalists are considered and to 22% if the thirty occasional operators are added to the list. The Tithe Accounts make no reference to people who owned the land, just those who worked it – though, in a number of cases, they were almost certainly one and the same. On the evidence of wills of the time much of the parish’s farmland seems to have been concentrated in the hands of merchants, brewers, yeomen and seafarers. Those people who hired land at this time usually paid £1 an acre per annum for arable use and 10s. for meadow or pasture. The usual term (nominally, at least) was seven years, but the period often fell short of this – especially among the less wealthy lessees. Lands for hire show a considerable and rapid turnover, with people often moving from one field or yard to another at annual or two-yearly intervals. 

Essential differences in the nature of the 1618 Manor Roll and the parish Tithe Accounts are as important with regard to rental values as they are to land-use. The former document reveals that the various holders of land paid an annual lord’s rent of 2d per acre, but does not divulge how much they leased it out for; the latter discloses the rental charges levied by the people who owned the land, but does show how much they paid annually to the Lord of the Manor. On the evidence of a rental of 1675-6 – Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 194/A10/122 –  lord’s rent on the farmland must have increased by about 50% to 3d. per acre at that stage – a development that was contrary to the trend observed throughout much of England, where freehold rents were fixed and not able to be increased. It is possible to reach this conclusion because the overall value of the manor’s rental had increased by £4 4s 0d from that of 1618, and it is known from the Revd. John Tanner’s copyhold listing of properties in town (1725) – Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 454/1 – that the customary rents there had not increased from the level of one hundred years earlier. Therefore, the increase must have come from freehold land in the parish, which had produced a sum just short of £8 in 1618.

As far as farm sizes are concerned, it is difficult to give an overall view. Both Manor Roll and Tithe Accounts seem to suggest five or six nucleated holdings, plus a similar number which had lands located in different places – these ten or twelve units constituting the main farms in the parish. Thus, although the cultivated acreage had increased by about 25% between 1618 and 1700, the basic pattern of farm location had probably not changed a great deal. Only two specific acreages of the larger farms are known: the 123 acres of Magdalen College’s Akethorpe estate and the sixty acres which constituted the holding at Smithmarsh. The Akethorpe estate (located in the north-western sector of the parish) also had forty acres situated in the adjoining parish of Gunton. The Smithmarsh holding (farmhouse and yard standing at what is now the junction of Rotterdam Road and Norwich Road) does not feature as one of the nucleated ones in the 1618 Manor Roll, so it must have developed after this time – perhaps originating in part from land taken into cultivation as the 17th century wore on. In the case of the former, the land was sometimes leased to a single individual, such as John Jex (merchant) during the 1720s, but at other times it was split between two or three different lessees. 

Once the corn tithes began to be paid to the incumbent, in 1749, it can be seen that seven individuals produced the whole of the income deriving from grain production –with six of them producing 95% of it. The particular men named are those who owned or rented the nucleated holdings and who, by the standards of the parish at least, were farming on a considerable scale. A typical English farm of the 17th century has been described as being somewhere between fifty and one hundred acres. Lowestoft had only five or six units of that size between about 1600 and 1750, and these correspond with the nucleated holdings previously referred to. Even some of the more substantial farmers revealed in the Tithe Accounts probably worked no more than thirty to thirty-five acres. And at the other end of the spectrum were the small men, who moved from field to field and yard to yard, making a living as best they could and filling in slack times with labouring work of different kinds – men like James Tuck, who was exempted from paying some of his tithe in 1724 because he was poor.

There is also evidence in the Tithe Accounts to show that crop rotation was being practised on larger farms by the first quarter of the 18th century. The payment of the non-grain small tithes (sometimes referred to as herbage) by men such as John Peach, William Utting and William Woodthorpe show that turnips, clover and sown grass were being grown on a rotational system, with intervals of one, two or three years between each crop – years in which corn would have been produced, though there is of course no mention of the crop until 1749, when the great tithes (of grain) began to be paid to the incumbent. With up to 700 acres devoted to grain (out of the 800 or so available for arable cultivation), such rotation could only have been partial on the annual cycle. However, it was certainly a feature of farming practice in Lowestoft – though without the emphasis on sheep, which characterised what was to become known as the Norfolk four-course model.

Of the five or six nucleated holdings previously referred to, only three were centred on a dwelling house and buildings located out of town. These were situated as follows: in the south-west corner of the former South Field (Smithmarsh), at the south-western extremity of the former South-west Field, and in that part of the South-west Field close to the junction of Beccles Way with the track across Skamacre Heath. Using the topography of today, they were located as follows: at the junction of Norwich Road and Rotterdam Road (Smithmarsh), on the site of the Shell filling-station at the Normanston Drive/Gorleston Road roundabout, and at the top end of Normanston Park near the Normanston Drive/Fir Lane roundabout (referred to as Nomanstowne in contemporary documents).

There was very little other building in the parish at large, which means that much of the farming operation must have been conducted from out of the built-up area on a daily basis, with carts and other equipment moving from their owners’ premises out into the fields and back again. Some sense of this is conveyed in the trial of the Lowestoft witches at Bury St. Edmunds, in March 1662 (1663, by updating of the Julian Calendar to Gregorian form in 1752) in the evidence given by one of the chief accusers of the two women, John Soan (yeoman). He testified how one of his carts, on its way from his house and yard in Tylers Lane (now Compass Street) to the North Field, during harvest time, had impacted on the window sill of Rose Cullender’s cottage in Swan Lane (now Mariners Street). She had then cursed him for the damage caused, which he claimed had led to a series of disasters that day involving the cart. 

Both people involved in this trivial incident (which was ultimately fatal for one of them!) lived in that part of town which gradually merged into the adjacent countryside. There was no hard edge on the western perimeter of Lowestoft, but an area where the houses progressively thinned out into Goose Green (the Factory Street/Thurston Road location of today) and the surrounding fields. The many town-dwelling yeomen and husbandmen of the 17th and 18th centuries are a feature of the time across the whole of Lowland England. And Lowestoft had its fair share of them (men like John Soan). Their presence acted as an integrating factor, bringing urban and rural elements together in one location. The town may have looked to the sea for its main economic stimulus, but it would also have been aware of the value of its farmland. It has been argued that the historiographies of urban and rural England have diverged as each has been studied in greater depth. The overall study of Lowestoft’s agriculture might well be said to have produced synthesis of urban and rural elements rather than separation.

CREDIT: David Butcher