The illustration above shows Celia Fiennes (s.p.b.) riding side-saddle through the Norfolk countryside, her elegance perhaps exaggerated and no accompanying servant. The landscape is stylised also, jagged mountain peaks not being typical of East Anglia. The church on the right I cannot place but think it may be Castle Acre, although there is no wide river flowing past Castle Acre’s church. The illustration was scanned from a site entitled Norfolk Tales, Myths and More – an excellent county History site with many well researched and carefully written articles.
Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), the last of Dr. Woodward’s travel writers (s.p.b.s), was such a prolific writer and polymath that Dr. Woodward’s extract from his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain is but a fraction of his total output. Defoe probably visited Hull about 1720 and his whole Tour was first published in three volumes between 1724 and 1726.
Like Celia Fiennes, and others before, Defoe travelled from York to Beverley and then on to Hull. He gives the most comprehensive description of the town and its trade of any of the writers covered previously. Defoe was particularly well-informed about Hull’s trade claiming it to be equal in volume to that of ‘Hamburgh or Dantzick or Rotterdam’ (Defoe was well travelled) ‘I believe there is more business done in Hull than in any town of its bigness in Europe’. He notes the trade of Hull as a trans-shipment port, the goods manufactured in Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax ‘of which I have spoken so justly’, lead from the East Midlands, cheese barged down the River Trent and butter from the East and North Ridings all were trans-shipped at Hull. Although a point not mentioned by Defoe, it is often stated that the Humber drains between one sixth and one fifth of England so Defoe is stating that Hull controlled the trade on navigable rivers across this proportion of England.
(to be continued for one more blog).