Description
Completely new edition, with additional content
Wells-next-the-Sea has become a much sought-after holiday resort, so much so that many of those who come for a holiday want to buy into the town so that they can stay whenever they want. But its character is in good part due to its having been for a long time a port, a fishery and an industrial town set in rich farmland.
The fishing has changed its character over centuries. Its major fishery is shellfish – crabs, lobsters and pre-eminently whelks. When the first written record of its fishing appeared in 1337 it had thirteen boats fishing by line or net for anything there was: herring, cod and their allies, rays, even eels. Fish migrate as they wish and competing fishing boats – from different countries – must follow them as they can. Thus in the fifteenth century there grew up the vast industry of cod fishing, first in the middle of the North Sea and thence to Iceland. The decline of both herring and cod fishing had, in those days, little to do with scarcity, more to the mysterious movements of fish but most of all to governments and wars.
The same boats that went for fish might make a living by trade. By the sixteenth century vessels from Wells were routinely bringing coal from the north-east of England and taking grain, barley, wheat and malt, to provide for the miners of those same ports and their populations at large. The trade was regular and important. It accounts for the number of merchants’ houses in the town, as the many yards which run down to the quay housed mariners, fishermen, maltsters, shipbuilders, agricultural labourers and their families.
Wells has also always been a country town as Norfolk was an agricultural county. The happy combination of sheep farming and barley growing – the sheep fertilised the thin soil as well as providing cheese, fleece and meat – led both to the growth of the Norfolk wool industry as well as the trade in malt. So successful was it that by the eighteenth century, a third of the exports of malt to the continent passed through Wells customs. By the nineteenth century malting had become commercialised and industrialised, based on the town itself.
The signs of the town’s past are less visible than they once were; a number have disappeared over the last fifty years. Even until the 1990s there was evidence of the commercial and industrial character of the town, as a port, as a manufactory of malt and a processor of animal feed.
This book gives some visual clues as to what it looked like in times not so long past and how it came to be as it is.
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