Restoration to Glorious Revolution

The thirty years following the end of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy are the years in which Whitby at last became established as a major port on the east coast. Sufficient evidence survives from different sources to make this apparent.

After the restoration of Charles II in 1660 a much clearer picture emerges of the consolidation of Whitby's fleet, and the effect of that development on the community. Parish registers from this time have survived almost without a break, and it is much easier to observe the demographic patterns and to see how the growth of the shipping industry affected them. Some of the travel writers whose commentaries on English communities give us insight into late seventeenth-century life visited Whitby and were considerably impressed. Probate evidence and transfers of property give a picture of a thriving community. Fiscal evidence provides some unexpected contrasts with the wealth of other, better known, port towns.

Whitby expanded its long tradition of what the French call ‘la vie associative’, which has characterised the town's society to the present day, with the provision of a charity for ‘decayed and distressed mariners’. Any community which had been run by a combination of manorial homage, Easter vestry and the remnants of a burgess court must have been well conditioned to the idea of committees and trusteeship. Periodicals such as the early nineteenth-century Whitby Panorama have reports from many charitable and other societies. The various private Acts of Parliament which controlled the harbour and street lighting and paving, as well as other minutiae of urban life, all had their boards of Trustees.

The coal trade

The growing domination by Whitby of the vital coal trade during this period is revealed in a recently discovered ledger recording the dues paid for the privately owned Winterton Lights, the ‘leading lights’ for the major port of Great Yarmouth. This small volume demonstrates the swings in the importance of coal-carrying ports during the seventeenth century. There were two sets of lights on Winterton Ness, acting as leading lights for Yarmouth Roads, Yarmouth being a long-designated ‘harbour of refuge’.