History

• Fiennes was the daughter of the Civil War parliamentarian Nathaniel Fiennes, and was able to travel freely because although she was from a gentry family, she never married and was not required to run an estate
• Fiennes wrote a travel memoir in 1702, but it was not published in her lifetime
• Colchester


  • The whole town is employed in washing, drying and dressing their cloth
  • There are paths of wood in the town
  • The town has substantial houses, well built, and a few houses built of brick
• According to Fiennes, the entire town of Colchester was employed in the cloth industry resulting in apparent prosperity for the inhabitants
• In reality, the population and way of life in towns like Colchester changed very little in the Stuart period, with the majority of economic migrants choosing to move to London
• Some historians, such as Barry Coward, are careful not to overstate the importance of the development of provincial towns before the Industrial Revolution
• Coward believed that English agriculture had not been efficient enough to feed a large urban population, and the manufacturing sector of the economy had not diversified enough to support the number of towns to develop as industrial centres
• Even in counties where fewer people were employed in agriculture, it was still at the heart of all local economies
• Around 9,000,000 acres of English land were devoted to the growing of crops, the majority consisting of wheat and barley
• After 1650, inflation meant that many small landowners were unable to invest in their farms and had no choice but to sell their land, leaving the wealthy aristocracy and higher gentry as the only landowners able to invest in improving their yield from agriculture
• As the population increased, more farms were amalgamated and enclosed in order to make larger farms that could focus on the production of a single crop or few animals
• The owners of small farms who were pushed out as a result of this drive for efficiency would often become eligible for poor relief, and some even joined the ranks of the vagrants
• The number of people living in towns was growing, reaching around 15 percent of the population by 1701, up from 12 percent a century earlier
• Large landowners and some town councils invested in improving the condition of rivers and roads to support the growth of towns and new markets
• The early Stuart period was marked by population growth, falling wages and rising prices, leaving many people vulnerable, with little to fall back on
• Contemporary writers believed that the numbers of poor were huge, with some estimating that half of the population fell into this category
• Taxation records from the 1670s show that the real figure was certainly more than one-third of the population
• Types of poor


  • Settled poor
  • Vagrant poor
• The settled poor made up around one-quarter of the population
• The vagrant poor were traditionally those who travelled in order to sustain themselves, and were treated as criminal under the law
• It is known that 26,000, or roughly 0.5 percent of the entire population, were arrested for vagrancy in the 1630s, although many more undoubtedly escaped and were not recorded
• The poor got poorer in the 17th century and, without government help they may well have threatened the social and political order