Reasons for the move

It is perhaps unwise to single out any one particular event in the life of a community over a period of about 1,500 years as being the crucial or formative one (other than its founding), but there is a good case for doing so where Lowestoft is concerned. The town's change of location, from its original site to one slightly less than a mile to the east-north-east, was of key importance in its subsequent development, as this allowed it to take advantage of both the land-based and maritime opportunities that were available to it. The cliff-top position was bleaker and more exposed to the elements than its predecessor, but it gave the local people greater flexibility in more conveniently pursuing a range of economic activities based on the products of land and sea.

Both the Domesday Survey (1086) and the Hundred Roll enquiry (1274) give the sense of a place founded on, or grounded in, agriculture – and there is no doubt that the soil was instrumental in feeding the population and providing it with a range of materials with which to make many of the necessary utensils and tools required to maintain a basic standard of living. Yet the ocean was only a short distance away and it, too, was capable of both providing food and creating a highway on which all kinds of goods and commodities could be conveyed both inwards and outwards. Herrings shoaled close to shore in both the autumn and the spring, and would certainly have been netted by small boats working off the local beach – and other species too, both pelagic and demersal, would have been caught by either net or line at other times.

There is no direct reference to fish or fishing in the Domesday information relating to Lowestoft, though Gorleston is recorded as having twenty-four fishermen who worked in Great Yarmouth but belonged to the Lothingland manor. And there is ample evidence for the catching of herrings locally to be found in data relating to Mutford Half-hundred. A number of its manors (both coastal and inland) paid herring rents of varying value to the lord, Hugh de Montfort, who probably took quantities of salted fish to supply his household.