1500s

The first almshouses in Lowestoft were provided by John Manyngham, the parish vicar from 1457-78. The exact year of institution is not known, but they were located on the north side of Fair Lane (now Dove Street) near its junction with West Lane (now Jubilee Way). And they seem to have remained in operation, in some form – undoubtedly with alterations made – into the final quarter of the 19th century, when White’s Directory of Suffolk (1874), p.

For centuries, the use of alms boxes in parish churches throughout the whole of England was a means of collecting sums of money for charitable purposes – particularly the relief of poverty where it was known or seen to exist. During the 16th century, as a result of general cost inflation (aggravated by Henry VIII’s mindless extravagance and debasement of the coinage, to say nothing of the social and economic problems caused by the Dissolution of the Monasteries), the alleviation of financial distress in the lower levels of society became more and more of a challenge.

(Parish Register Entries)

The register entries below are presented in as close a way as possible to the original handwritten ones

Authorisation for this Elizabethan taxation was granted by Parliament on 18 December 1566 and the official date of collection was 24 February 1568. Lowestoft’s stated contribution of £34 19s 8d was 47% of the Lothingland total of £74 8s 6d and its 112 tax-payers constituted 42% of the half-hundred’s contributors (267 in number). These figures confirm the town’s dominant position in its local area, just as those of the 1524-5 collection did over forty years earlier. The 1568 Subsidy was structured differently from its predecessor in the way that the assessment was made.

Comparisons of Lowestoft with other Suffolk communities

Suffolk’s Top 25 Townships (1524-5 Lay Subsidy) (2)  see also (1)

Order by wealth

Lowestoft Rental (1545) – Suffolk Archives, Ipswich 194/A10/71

(Formerly North Suffolk Record Office, Lowestoft) 

A Lowestoft rental renewed there on the first day of June, in the thirty-seventh year of the reign of our Lord King Henry VIII, by the grace of God King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith in the said land(s) and Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland – relating to the annual rents of the town of Lowestoft, Shadingfield, Ellough and Willingham. [Translated from Latin]

The Town of Lowestoft c. 1720

This map was created by Ivan Bunn (former archival assistant at the North Suffolk Record Office, Lowestoft) and the writer, working in collaboration and using manorial documentation as the primary source. See end of text for numbered locations, which are also referred to in the narrative.  

Roger Hill was a Lowestoft merchant of the second half of the sixteenth century, whose burial was recorded in the parish registers on 13 September 1588. He had made his will (Norfolk Record Office, 296 Homes) on 20 August and the inventory of his possessions (NRO INV 4/45) was taken on 16 September. He lived in what is now 31-32 High Street (not at No. 30, as I wrote in error in the LA&LHS Annual Report No.

Much is heard today regarding illegal immigration into the UK from across the English Channel and occasionally the North Sea - most of it driven by difficult and dangerous conditions in the particular home countries of origin or by the perceived opportunity to start a more financially rewarding lifestyle than is possible in those same nations.

One of the many interesting features to emerge from the study of Lowestoft’s history over the years, and the attempts to reconstruct aspects of its past arising from the evidence discovered, is the town’s occupational structure. As can be seen in the table below, the main source in all four fifty-year blocks is parish register material, followed by probate documentation (wills and inventories of goods & chattels), with various other sources following on and with the Tithe Accounts featuring strongly in the last sub-period of all.