Economic progress

It is clear that the first two decades of the seventeenth century saw the start of a new economic phase in Whitby, together with the demographic change necessarily accompanying it. It was in the next forty years that, despite all the vicissitudes of a period that was very hard for much of the whole country, Whitby managed to progress, to make political and economic decisions, and to increase the size of both population and fleet, and its consequent prosperity. During those years there was both foreign and civil war, in the second of which the Cholmleys were heavily embroiled, as were their kin.

As with the earlier period, evidence is still spasmodic, but it increases and diversifies, partly because of Whitby's increased economic activity and partly because Whitby had once more ascended the national stage rather than the local one where the town had spent the years since the dissolution of the abbey. For the first time it is possible to find more than one source for a single event or a sequential change and therefore to begin to understand the complex nature of Whitby's development.

Such simple, but in truth misleading, evidence is to be found in the Scarborough Pierage Accounts of 1614–36. There are no more Whitby vessels recorded as leaving the Tyne at the end of the series than at the start, suggesting little growth in Whitby's involvement in the coal trade. The trade from the Tyne was dominated, then, as later in the century, by the ancient East Anglian ports of King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich, as well as by London and by Newcastle itself. However, in the later 1630s, it becomes clear, from Port Books once more extant, from the sources associated with the alum industry and from the first known voyage book for a Whitby vessel, that the Whitby fleet did undertake a considerable trade in coal, but with Sunderland, on the Wear, where the alum investors had by the 1630s already bought a colliery at Harraton. The investors were then shipping their Harraton coal from Sunderland, thus avoiding the payment of dues to the Hostmen of Newcastle.