It is in the middle of Edward III.’s reign that Lowestoft appears for the second time in our national records. But she is no longer the insignificant agricultural village of Domesday. She is evidently a rising little town, in the modern sense of the word, carrying on a sea trade of some importance in fish and other light merchandise. She had ceased for some years to be “Royal demesne,” and was now the property of the King’s cousin—John, Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond—to whom the manor of Gorleston and the rest of the Royal estates in this neighbourhood had been given by the King’s grandfather, Edward I. It was at this time that she was brought into prominence by a long Parliamentary contest with Yarmouth about the right to buy and land herrings at Lowestoft from foreign and west country fishermen anchored in the roads opposite her shore, then called Kirkley Road. That you may understand the full import of the circumstances which brought about this contest with Yarmouth we must take a glance at the history of that town up to that period. RISE OF YARMOUTH. The origin of Yarmouth is unique; the bar of a wide Estuary, a sandbank in the sea, seized upon for human habitation before even nature herself had trusted it with any vegetation beyond a few patches of marram grass to bind the sand together. Who the bold fishermen were—whether Angles or Danes (probably Danes) who first dared to build cottages on such a site we know not, nor when the occupation of this sandbank first began. The name of the “Cerdick Sands” which the Saxons had given it, implies that it was well above water in the earliest part of the Saxon period, whether Cerdick did or not pay his traditionary visit to this spot. It must have been in that condition several years before the time of Edward the Confessor, when, as we have already learnt from Domesday, Yarmouth was a town of some wealth and importance. The following well approved tradition of the origin of Yarmouth is given by an old writer (Jeakes) in his History of the Cinque Ports. “Beside the staple trade of these towns (the Cinque Ports) consisting much in fishing, not only of fresh fish at home, but of herring every year in the season thereof at Yarmouth, where bringing them ashore in the sale and delivery among the multitude, divers differences and stirs arose for want of a settled order in that town, or as tradition still reports, before there was any town or any show of a town than some huts and cabins set up near the waterside like the booths and huts in a fair; and that during the time of the herring fair there the Ports were forced to agree and join together yearly to elect and send thither their Bailiffs to abide there during the herring season allowing them a certain sum for their expenses.”