Abstract
Henry Manship served as a town clerk of Great Yarmouth in the later 16th and the early 17th centuries, which was the greatest herring port in England and one of the most important trading ports in East Anglia. He completed History of Great Yarmouth in 1619, which was one of the most remarkable achievements in historical writing in the seventeenth-century England. History of Great Yarmouth is not only a chronicle of a provincial town; it also offers a detailed narrative description of the town’s natural and built environment, the town’s relations with the rival ports, and the origins and authority of Yarmouth’s government. Manship places a special emphasis on the importance of the ruling elites in the town to the well-ordered commonwealth. He offers a detailed description of Kett's Rising in 1549, demonstrating how bailiffs, the heads of the town, took command of the troops of townsmen and drove the rebels back. He gives us a full narrative of the several successive efforts by ruling elites to rebuild the haven of the town. And he gives grounds for the oligarchic rule of the town by citing and making use of a number of classical writers including Aristotle. On the other hand, he does not mention any divisions among the ruling elites between Puritan and non-Puritan factions, which would fatally deepen a few years after he put down his pen. In conclusion, Manship’s history must certainly be seen as an effort to use the past as a means of legitimizing the prevailing distribution of power in the government of Great Yarmouth in his own time.
