Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722

rather than people to fill it, as I have observed above.

The streets are all exactly straight from north to south, with

lanes or alleys, which they call rows, crossing them in straight

lines also from east to west, so that it is the most regular built

town in England, and seems to have been built all at once; or that

the dimensions of the houses and extent of the streets were laid

out by consent.

They have particular privileges in this town and a jurisdiction by

which they can try, condemn, and execute in especial cases without

waiting for a warrant from above; and this they exerted once very

smartly in executing a captain of one of the king’s ships of war in

the reign of King Charles II. for a murder committed in the street,

the circumstance of which did indeed call for justice; but some

thought they would not have ventured to exert their powers as they

did. However, I never heard that the Government resented it or

blamed them for it.

It is also a very well-governed town, and I have nowhere in England

observed the Sabbath day so exactly kept, or the breach so

continually punished, as in this place, which I name to their

honour.

Among all these regularities it is no wonder if we do not find

abundance of revelling, or that there is little encouragement to

assemblies, plays, and gaming meetings at Yarmouth as in some other

places; and yet I do not see that the ladies here come behind any

of the neighbouring counties, either in beauty, breeding, or

behaviour; to which may be added too, not at all to their

disadvantage, that they generally go beyond them in fortunes.

From Yarmouth I resolved to pursue my first design, viz., to view

the seaside on this coast, which is particularly famous for being

one of the most dangerous and most fatal to the sailors in all

England – I may say in all Britain – and the more so because of the

great number of ships which are continually going and coming this

way in their passage between London and all the northern coasts of

Great Britain. Matters of antiquity are not my inquiry, but

principally observations on the present state of things, and, if

possible, to give such accounts of things worthy of recording as

have never been observed before; and this leads me the more

directly to mention the commerce and the navigation when I come to

towns upon the coast as what few writers have yet meddled with.

The reason of the dangers of this particular coast are found in the

situation of the county and in the course of ships sailing this

way, which I shall describe as well as I can thus:- The shore from

the mouth of the River of Thames to Yarmouth Roads lies in a

straight line from SSE. TO NNW., the land being on the W. or

larboard side.

From Wintertonness, which is the utmost northerly point of land in

the county of Norfolk, and about four miles beyond Yarmouth, the

shore falls off for nearly sixty miles to the west, as far as Lynn

and Boston, till the shore of Lincolnshire tends north again for

about sixty miles more as far as the Humber, whence the coast of

Yorkshire, or Holderness, which is the east riding, shoots out

again into the sea, to the Spurn and to Flamborough Head, as far

east, almost, as the shore of Norfolk had given back at Winterton,

making a very deep gulf or bay between those two points of

Winterton and the Spurn Head; so that the ships going north are

obliged to stretch away to sea from Wintertonness, and leaving the

sight of land in that deep bay which I have mentioned, that reaches

to Lynn and the shore of Lincolnshire, they go, I say, N. or still

NNW. to meet the shore of Holderness, which I said runs out into

the sea again at the Spurn; and the first land they make or desire

to make, is called as above, Flamborough Head, so that

Wintertonness and Flamborough Head are the two extremes of this

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