5 - Overview of the Seventeenth Century

Summary

The first ninety years

During the first ninety years of the seventeenth century Whitby had established itself as a thriving port and town. It had weathered the catastrophe of the dissolution of the monasteries, and had found and exploited a new source of wealth in the alum industry. Within that industry its inhabitants had either learned new skills or recalled to mind skills existing only in the collective memory of the older residents. They had seen further opportunities tangential to the alum industry, and from them in turn had discovered a talent for networking which gave an impetus to the development of a fleet serving many distant and even international ports rather than the limited horizons of the north-east coast of Yorkshire.

While there is no evidence for the response of individual townspeople to the loss of the abbey, it is quite likely that there was a sense of freedom from the constraints it had imposed on this seigniorial borough. However, there would also have been a sense of loss of its several centuries of managerial skill, and of its links to the wider world. These skills had to be rediscovered and redeveloped, and it is clear that the alum industry played a major part in this. The industry, eventually a Crown monopoly, was leased to a series of ‘farmers’ who ran it on behalf of the Crown. Since many of these had experience of large-scale investment and of complex trading patterns involving such stratagems as bartering when there was a slump in demand, these skills would have rubbed off on local employees.

In 1633, for example, Timothy Johnson, and Martha, his wife, who was ‘sole heir and Administratrix of the estate of Richard Johnson deceased, Merchant and Alderman of the Citie of London’ made a return to the Exchequer for the year 1619. In it they recorded the total amount received from the alum vend both overseas and in England; it came to £17,534.33, which would have seemed a colossal sum when the details were whispered to men used to working in an economy of often casual work, in which even a skilled tradesman could earn only 13d (5½p) a day.