The decay in the fishing trade, as regards the employment of English ships and sailors, was not confined to Lowestoft. It was felt in every English port in the West as well as on the East Coast. Protestantism in the main meant progress and commercial activity, but it did not mean this with our fishermen. If eating fish on Fridays and Saturdays was still inculcated as a duty by Elizabeth’s Government and Elizabeth’s Church, the mass of the people were too strongly Protestant to pay much respect to a rule which was an essential feature in the old religion, if their antipathy to Papism did not even cause an antipathy to fish eating at any time, particularly salt cod. At all events, there was such a diminution in the demand for salt fish as to throw a large number of sailors previously engaged in fishing voyages out of employment, and to leave this occupation almost entirely in the hands of the French and Dutch. The English sailors, at least a great many, found employment of a more exciting and remunerative character, as privateers—in other words, buccaneers, pirates, or sea robbers. Our Protestant sailors in Elizabeth’s time considered themselves as doing God’s work in robbing and scuttling any merchant ship belonging either to France or Spain which they could come across on the high seas; nor were they always very particular as to either the nature or the religion of their victims. You will not think that this reference to the piratical practises of our seamen in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign is foreign to our subject—when I tell you that Mr. Froude has given a story of piracy at Lowestoft in 1561, as an illustration of its prevalence. He thus tells the story: “A Flemish trader has sailed from Antwerp to Cadiz. Something happens to her on the way, and she never reaches her destination. At midnight carts and horses run down to the sea over the sand at Lowestoft. The black hull and spars of a vessel are seen outside the breakers, dimly riding in the gloom, and a boat shoots through the surf, loaded to the gunwale. The bales and tubs are swiftly shot into the carts. The horses drag back their loads, which before daybreak are safe in the cellars of some quiet manor-house. The boat sweeps off, the sails drop from the mysterious vessel’s yards, and she glides away in the darkness to look for a fresh victim”—MSS. Elizth. Vol. XVI. He gives his authority for this story, and there must have been some foundation for it. I am afraid that some of the mariners whose names appear in our register must have been on board this black ship; but I refrain from offering any conjecture as to which of the quiet manor-houses in our neighbourhood was the depository of the spoil.