To commence with the Church; we find that the “minister” of the parish, during the first 16 years of our period, was Mr. Nayshe. He was not the Vicar. The Vicar was Mr. Thomas Downing, who was also the Rector of Besthorpe, near Attleborough, in Norfolk. He was allowed to hold the Vicarage of Lowestoft (as stated in the register) to make up for the small income of Besthorpe—a most scandalous arrangement surely—a populous town deprived of its proper clergyman for the sake of improving the income of the rector of a small country parish far away in another county. The arrangement, however, was made in the Roman Catholic days of Queen Mary; three years before Queen Elisabeth had re-established the Protestant religion in the country. The Bishop of Norwich, who allowed it (he did not nuke the appointment himself), was the notorious John Hopton, described as a most sanguinary persecutor of the Protestants. Witness the burning of three men at Beccles as recorded on the tablet on the Meeting House in the road leading from the Station to the Market Place; and of many others in the Norwich Diocese. It was probably a happy thing for Lowestoft that Bishop Hopton did not make this appointment. It was said that when Elizabeth came to the throne Bishop Hopton died from terror of her taking vengeance on him for his cruelty to her co-religionists. What Mr. Nayshe’s views were, we know not, but he appears to have been a good Protestant during the 13 years of his ministry under Elizabeth. He must have been the first minister of the parish for many hundred years who was a married man. He lost his first wife soon after coming here, and then married, apparently, a Lowestoft lady. He was succeeded in 1574, by Mr. William Bentley, who was duly appointed vicar by the new Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Parkhurst. He also married twice; his second wife being the widow of Mr. John Arnold. He held the living to the last day of our period, when he apparently fell a victim to the terrible epidemic of that year. The entry of his burial appears in the register in large letters—“Mr. Willyam Bentlye, Pastor,” one of the 55 of our old townspeople who were buried in the month of August in this year. There are two other persons described as “ministers.” They could hardly be Protestant Nonconformists in these early days. The first dissenting chapel in Lowestoft was not built till quite a hundred years after (1695). These “ministers” out of office were not improbably clergymen who were too much attached to the old religion to accept appointments under the new regime.