From other information it appears that several of these merchants, if not all, were engaged in the fish trade and were owners of fish houses, at the bottom of the cliff, still represented by buildings occupying the same sites.
At a meeting of the inhabitants in the year 1596, called to consider a proposal to take some of the rents of the Town Lands to defray the expense incurred in litigation with Yarmouth about the herring fishery, it was stated that out of 200 persons who reaped advantages from this fishery, many were unable to contribute towards the above expense, and that if the fishery was not supported, the town would inevitably be ruined. It appeared that before this meeting, the inhabitants (probably the merchants referred to above), had already subscribed £120. This statement is at once evidence of the importance of the herring trade to Lowestoft at this period, and at the same time limits the number of merchants, fishermen, and other persons employed in it, to 200. Assuming this number mainly represented heads of families, we should have some 900 persons or about half the population of the town dependent on the herring fishery. Some of these merchants doubtless owned ships, but it appears from other information that the number of fishing boats then belonging to Lowestoft must have been very few, probably 20 at the outside. We find it stated, some 100 years after, in a petition to Charles II., that the number of Lowestoft ships engaged in all the several voyages in the year was 25. Previous to Elizabeth’s reign, Lowestoft used to send several ships to Iceland in the spring to catch ling and codfish. You have already heard that as many as 14 ships were employed in the time of Henry VIII. in this fishery. The dissolution of monasteries and the neglect of the rules as to fasting, introduced by Protestantism, appears to have affected the trade in salted codfish very seriously, and we find it stated that in 1566 the number of Lowestoft Boats going to Iceland was reduced from 14 to 1.
The decay in the fishing trade, as regards the employment of English ships and sailors, was not confined to Lowestoft. It was felt in every English port in the West as well as on the East Coast. Protestantism in the main meant progress and commercial activity, but it did not mean this with our fishermen. If eating fish on Fridays and Saturdays was still inculcated as a duty by Elizabeth’s Government and Elizabeth’s Church, the mass of the people were too strongly Protestant to pay much respect to a rule which was an essential feature in the old religion, if their antipathy to Papism did not even cause an antipathy to fish eating at any time, particularly salt cod. At all events, there was such a diminution in the demand for salt fish as to throw a large number of sailors previously engaged in fishing voyages out of employment, and to leave this occupation almost entirely in the hands of the French and Dutch. The English sailors, at least a great many, found employment of a more exciting and remunerative character, as privateers—in other words, buccaneers, pirates, or sea robbers. Our Protestant sailors in Elizabeth’s time considered themselves as doing God’s work in robbing and scuttling any merchant ship belonging either to France or Spain which they could come across on the high seas; nor were they always very particular as to either the nature or the religion of their victims.