Human Migration into Lowestoft – 1696-1735

In 1662, an Act of Settlement for the Better Relief of the Poor was passed by Parliament – a measure soon to become known as the Act of Settlement and Removal, as it aimed at restricting the movement of people from the parishes where they were living in a state of poverty into ones (nearby or further removed) where they believed that they would be better off. Under its terms, if incomers to a parish could not prove their financial security by having rented a dwelling worth at least £10 a year, then they were to inform parish officials (either the two Churchwardens or the Overseers of the Poor) of their presence within forty days of arrival – giving details of where they were living and of family size. This then gave the said officials opportunity to seek removal of the incomers, if it was believed that they would become a financial burden on the local system of poor relief.

The movement of poor people seeking to find a place of greater opportunity for themselves, or at least one where their presence would be treated more sympathetically, had been a problem for well over 100 years. Further Acts of Parliament in 1691 and 1697 aimed at making the 1662 measures of control more workable, by monitoring migration patterns rather than by simply excluding newcomers from the parish(es) of arrival. By the terms of these two acts, outsiders could achieve settlement in a new community through being born or married there, through gaining an apprenticeship, through having regular employment for a year, through renting a house at £10 per annum or more, through paying parish taxes of one kind or another, or through serving as a parochial officer. This flexibility gave migrants a better chance of making a new life for themselves – something which was strengthened by improving the system of certification.

Certificates were issued by the parish of departure with the built-in proviso that, if the person or persons named in it should fall upon hard times in their new home-area, he/she or they would be returned to the former place of residence and seek poor relief there. Removal orders from new home-areas were sometimes issued to migrants who had simply taken up residence there, but after 1697 no certificated person or persons could be removed from a parish until he or she had claimed poor relief. Which gave some degree of protection to people trying to create a better life for themselves and (if married) their families also. Lowestoft has a surviving book of settlement and apprenticeship details, covering the years 1696-1785 (Suffolk Archives, Ipswich – ref. no. 01/13/1/3) and this has been used as the source of information for this particular article.

It is not possible to replicate the exact layout and presentation of this document, but an attempt has been made to go some way towards it. Original spelling is used throughout, with bold font adopted for the communities from which the named migrants had come so as to make them immediately visible. The first two pages of the document mainly had spacing-lines between the separate incomers – but this ceased thereafter and spacing was only used to distinguish between the different years. Analysis of what can be learned from the various entries follows on, at the end of the 165 individual cases recorded.

Certificate Persons

In the year 1696

Gabriel Edmunds Elizabeth his Wife and John his son from St. Peter Mountergate [Permountergate] in ye [the] City of Norwich

• Square brackets are used to indicate accurate or more common forms of the spelling of personal names and place-names.
• Variant spelling is apparent throughout the whole of the transcribed text. English spelling, as we now know it, did not really become standardised until the late 18th-early 19th century. And even underwent further refinement after that. 
• Use of the word ye for the derives from the letter y being used as an abbreviation of th – which goes back to the Runic alphabet and its letter known as “thorn”, which is represented by the symbol Þ and pronounced as “the”. No such letter or symbol existed in early English printing type-faces, and so the letter y was adopted as a substitute. This then transferred to anything written by hand. 
• The entries 1696-1717 were written by John Blaque, parish clerk, whose burial entry is to be found in the parish registers on 9 February 1724. He was followed by a succession of other scribes, whose identity cannot be established – except in one case. This was the Vicar himself, John Tanner (incumbent of St. Margaret’s Church, 1708-59), who made three entries in the 1729 records – the first of which, in using a date of 3 March 1729/30 anticipates replacement of the old Julian Calendar by its Gregorian successor in September 1752. His two other insertions were 22 April 1730 and 24 September 1730, and all three of them appear to have been retrospectively written in a space available below the four previous ones.
• The reference to individual parishes (where more than one of these was present in a community) is evident in a number of cases, from London itself down to the South Norfolk rural settlement of Shotesham. The former had dozens and dozens of them, of course, but the latter at the time was two communities: High Shotesham (All Saints) and Low Shotesham (consolidated St. Mary, St. Martin and St. Botolph).
• Norwich, at the time, had thirty or more parishes of its own and most of those churches are still standing in one form or another. Five of them are referred to in text.
• Bungay had two parishes, St. Mary’s and Holy Trinity – the former of which is mentioned five times.
• The word cum – used for Trowse cum Newton (Henstead Hundred, Norfolk), Redenhall cum Harleston (Earsham Hundred, Norfolk) and Middleton cum Fordley (Blything Hundred, Suffolk) – is Latin for “with” and indicates adjoining communities with a close topographical and social connection. The first and third places have long been known by the first name only, while the second one survives by forming the civil parish of Redenhall with Harleston. There is little of the former village left, except its imposing parish church of St. Mary.
• Heigham, as a community in its own right, ceased to exist on being absorbed by Norwich during the latter’s 18th and 19th century’s out-growth. Its name is perpetuated in Heigham Street and in that part of the city sometimes referred to as Heigham Grove. 
• The reference to Cromer als [alias] Shipden (North Erpingham Hundred, Norfolk) is an interesting one, in being what may be termed a historical “throw-back”. The community of Shipden had been an important one at Domesday (1086), with Cromer not in existence at the time as a place in its own right. Coastal erosion had destroyed Shipden completely by the early 1400s, causing a move inland to a new location which became known as Cromer.
• There is ambiguity in the reference to Fakenham (1718), in the second mention of Sutton (1721) and in the record relating to Hevingham (1730). The first of these is probably the North Norfolk market town of that name, but there is also a village in the West Suffolk breckland which carries it. The Sutton located in Norfolk, named in 1701 – situated in the Broads area – might well be the same place as that featuring in 1721. But, there is also a Sutton in South-east Suffolk – the place where the burial ship of King Raedwald was discovered in 1939. And Hevingham might refer to the parish of that name to the north of Norwich or to Heveningham near Halesworth – with the latter, perhaps, being the more likely.
• All the documentation recreated above, in its transcribed form, relates to the entry of incomers to Lowestoft carrying with them a signed certificate from the parish of origin. Except for a single removal order: that referred to in 1724, in connection with John Cuddon, who was removed to Wrentham and was accepted there (presumably, by certification). He then returned to Lowestoft, as recorded, having undertaken to take financial responsibility for an illegitimate child he had fathered. A copy of the documentation relating to his movement(s) was kept in the parish chest, which would have been located either in St. Margaret’s Church or in the Town Chamber. 
• It will not have gone unnoticed, to the reader, that the name John Cuddon is also to be found for the year 1715, when a man so-called had been admitted from Barsham into Lowestoft with his wife and family. It would seem that he was a different person from the one with Wrentham connections, based on the evidence of parish register entries. He and his wife Emma (with the surname spelled as Cudden) have baptism entries for sons named Edmund (18 January 1715) and John (30 March 1718), with the burial of the latter also recorded on 26 January 1719. These are followed by the burial of Emma Cudden herself on 17 February 1720, at the age of thirty-eight. There is no evidence of her husband remarrying in Lowestoft, following her decease.
• On 8 December 1724, Mary the daughter of John Cudden deceased was laid to rest, followed fourteen days later by Samuel, infant son of Samuel Smithson deceased. Smithson’s own burial was recorded on 5 May 1723, but there is no register entry for John Cudden/Cuddon – which means that he may have died out of parish and been buried where he met his end. Lowestoft has a number of examples of that fate befalling people from other places.
• The final Cudden/Cuddon references to be found in this part of the Lowestoft registers appear on 30 October and 3 November 1725, when “John son of John and [ ] Cuddon” was baptised and then buried four days later – the father alone being named in the second entry. The name of the mother was obviously intended for the baptism, but was never written into the space left.
• Children born out of wedlock are indicated in the Lowestoft registers from the 1560s and 70s onwards and there is one certain candidate for the second John Cuddon’s illegitimate child: William, son of Mary Bateman, widow (baptised 29 December 1723) – this ceremony then to be followed by the marriage by licence of the couple on 14 January 1724, with the husband named as a single man of Wrentham and his wife as a widow from the same place. Therefore, it was the earlier of the two John Cuddons/Cuddens (from Barsham) who was referred to as deceased two notes above.
• The record of 1726 noting the entry into Lowestoft of Thomas Powles, wife Susan and son Thomas from Loddon is a particularly interesting one. The marriage of these adults in St. Margaret’s Church is to be found in the registers, dated 12 July 1726, and worded thus: “Thomas Powles sojourner and Susanna Harwood of this parish Both single”. It would therefore seem that Powles (one of the ten labourers referred to in the next note but one) had formed an attachment with a Lowestoft woman, who was well into a pre-nuptial pregnancy at the time of marriage. The couple must then have moved to Loddon (the husband’s home parish), before moving back to Lowestoft later in the year following the birth of the child – the burial of whom, at the age of fifteen weeks, is recorded in the registers on 14 March 1727.
• Without going into any further details of this particular couple, it is interesting to note that they were the grandparents of the notable Lowestoft artist, Richard Powles (1764-1807), a leading scenic decorator at the Lowestoft soft-paste porcelain factory – he being the son of Richard Powles, born to Thomas and Susanna and baptised on 28 February 1728. Who then, in turn, married Martha Ramsdale on 11 February 1756. 
• An earlier piece of analysis, used in this writer’s book Lowestoft 1550-1750 (Woodbridge, 2008), p. 42, and relating to inward migration 1696-1730, shows that it was possible to attach occupations to thirty-three of the 132 men named in the settlement certificate documentation – this by using parish registers and other sources. There were ten labourers, six mariner-fishermen, two bakers, two cordwainers and one shoemaker (a newer term for the trade), brickmaker, mason, house carpenter, glazier, gardener, maltster, keelman (the keel being the forerunner of the wherry), barber-innkeeper, surgeon, arrerer, chimneysweep and fiddler. The arrerer would have been some kind of legal personage, one of whose specialities was the setting of the level of fines payable for breaches of manorial law.
• Family reconstitution of the parish registers enabled the length of stay in town for the thirty-three men above to be calculated. Nine of the ten labourers settled (remaining in town until they died) and the last stayed for six or seven years. All six mariner-fishermen settled, as did the two cordwainers. One of the bakers remained, but the other seems to have moved out soon after arrival as he does not feature in any parish register entries. The brickmaker, mason and house carpenter all settled, and the glazier was resident for six or seven years. The gardener and maltster became permanent residents, but the keelman stayed for only four or five years. The barber-innkeeper, surgeon, chimneysweep and fiddler settled, but the arrerer seems to have moved on soon after arrival because he is not detectable in the registers (he and one of the bakers were the only people to have their occupations specified in the settlement orders).

The table below shows the overall pattern of settlement deriving from 144 certificated entries for 1696-1730, based on reconstitution of parish register material. It can be seen that 43% of the people recorded as incomers do not feature there at all, while 38% are seen to have settled in town. Short-stay residency (11%) and medium-stay (8%) complete the analysis. The lack of any parish register material for more than half of the certificated entry into town is indicative of the fluidity of population movement at the time – especially in the lower levels of society, which is something indicated in the note immediately above in the types of occupation referred to.

Table 1 Overall Pattern of Settlement

• A further reminder of the general mobility of population during pre-industrial times can be found in the Lowestoft parish registers, relating to the burial of outsiders who had died in the parish. There are 284 of these altogether between 1561 (the first year of surviving record) and 1750, consisting of 226 males and fifty-eight females, and with none of these people featuring in the registers other than having their burials noted. In the main, they were adults (children being no more than 5% of the whole) who had come to the town on business of one kind or another or who were just passing through – and, in a handful of cases, who had either died at sea on board ships close inshore or who had been lost overboard. 
• For the most part, the outsiders can be classified in three broad geographical categories: people from Suffolk (seventy-four) and Norfolk (sixty-eight), with 87% of the combined total emanating from within a fifteen-mile radius of the town; people from other parts of England (102); and people from Scotland, Ireland and the near-Continent (forty). Maritime connections are clearly visible in all three groups, in the place-names given, and the number of women dying in Lowestoft increased noticeably after 1700 – especially those from Great Yarmouth (probably as a result of the upturn in maritime activity caused by Lowestoft being granted port status in 1679). Conversely, the town’s demographic and economic problems of the first half of the 17th century are also reflected in a marked reduction in the number of contacts with people from outside it during that time.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of information revealing attitudes to the perceived (and actual) inward migration of needy people into Lowestoft is to be found in a manorial leet court minute of 1582 – nineteen years ahead of the passing of the formative Poor Law Act of 1601. It is there that the following pronouncement is to be found (modern spelling adopted): “First we do ordain that forasmuch Daily and Do recourse unto to this Town many & sundry poor people out of other Towns & do hire Cottages of the inhabitants here bringing w[i]th them many children to the great Burden of this Town & impoverishing the same if remove be not provided, That therefore none of the Inhabitants of this town shall let at any time hereafter any Cottage or Tenement to any such poor p[e]rson unless the same owner shall enter first under to the churchwardens of Lowestoft getting first the consent of the most p[ar]t of the same Town upon pain to forfeit for every time so letting the contrary to the Lord of this Leet xxxixs [39s] xid [11d].” The proposed fine (being one penny short of the sum of £2) was a prohibitive one, being something like three month’s wages for a craftsman.

 Table 2 Analysis of Places of Origin of Certificated Incomers (1696-1735)

• The sequence of all the communities named in each column follows the order in which they were first mentioned in the documentation.
• As referred to earlier, in the eleventh note following the transcribed Settlement Order material itself, ambiguity is to be found in three of the place-names. Sutton is likely to have been the one located in Norfolk in both cases, while the sole reference to Fakenham almost certainly relates to that county’s market town. Given the local topography of both counties, Hevingham is more likely to relate to Heveningham, near Halesworth, than to Hevingham to the north of Norwich. In the interests of clarity, these three communities are placed in the county which seems the strongest candidate for location.
• Of the 165 certificates recorded, seventy-nine related to families, four to women with children (one of them widowed), forty-six to husband and wife, four to widows, twenty-eight to single men and four to single women.
• Family connections with people already living in Lowestoft seems to have been a minor factor at best in the pattern of migration.
• A very small number of certificated single men are noted in the parish register marriage entries, taking Lowestoft women as their wives, with the description “sojourner” appended to their names. This term indicated someone living/staying in a place temporarily, before moving on. A greater number of them bearing the title in the early eighteenth century marriage entries have no settlement certificates recorded for them. This is likely to have been the result of them arriving in town with a skills-set (as it would be described today) suited to them finding employment locally and therefore not requiring poor relief.
• The pattern of migration distances for the 159 certificated incomers from Suffolk and Norfolk shows that 124 of them originated from places within a fifteen-mile radius of Lowestoft, with the most obvious influence of “urban pull” (in terms of numbers of communities) exerted on Suffolk parishes lying within a five-mile distance.

With nearby coastal settlements such as Corton, Hopton and Gorleston to the north and Kirkley, Pakefield, Kessingland and Benacre to the south, a maritime connection of some kind (fishing or coastal trade) may have been the motivation to migrate. And this might also have applied to places further removed. Both Great Yarmouth and Southwold obviously spring to mind, but there were also Cromer and King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and Hollesey and Woodbridge (Suffolk) to be considered – to stay nothing of Harwich and Colchester (Essex), and even London itself (with the parishes of St. Giles Cripplegate and St. Botolph Bishopgate only half a mile or so to the north of the River Thames).

 CREDIT: David Butcher