Close to a thousand years of Lowestoft's past are contained within the preceding pages and, given that length of time, any statement regarding the community's origins and subsequent development has of necessity to be an incomplete one. At the same time, it is hoped that the reader has gained some notion of the human activity which laid the foundations of the town of today. The process would not have been sensed by the people responsible for it in the earliest phase of development; their only concern was to take the physical environment in which they found themselves and shape it to their own requirements. Day-to-day living was the priority, with the provision of food, shelter and clothing being the main considerations. Once the settlement had become established and viable, it would have been possible for its inhabitants to take a broader view of their situation and see themselves as part of a social fabric transcending their own immediate surroundings – one that was founded, no doubt, on the model left behind on the North European mainland.

There is no means of accurately assessing at what point Lowestoft gained a sense of what may termed civic identity, whereby its people saw themselves as being an integral part of a social unit based in a specific location and with its own distinguishing features. The Anglo-Saxon period probably did not generate this, for the township was an outlier to the hub-manor located in Gorleston, without any freemen of its own and with a workforce dedicated to supplying the lord and his household with agricultural produce – perhaps even before their own immediate needs had been met. By the time of Domesday, the manor of Lothingland was one of the many held by Gyrth Godwinson, younger brother of Harold, whose only interest would have been in receiving the rents due to him, so the thegn Wulfsi (acting as surrogate for Gyrth) would have been the dominant presence in the jurisdiction. Lowestoft probably played little part in the monthly hundred court (both criminal and civil cases being handled there), because it was freemen who formed the juries and made the decisions, and its people would have appeared there only if they had offended in some way.