Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722Defoe, Daniel
History
Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722
Defoe, Daniel
England -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
I cannot omit, however little it may seem, that this county of Suffolk is
particularly famous for furnishing the City of London and all the
counties round with turkeys, and that it is thought there are more
turkeys bred in this county and the part of Norfolk that adjoins to it
than in all the rest of England, especially for sale, though this may be
reckoned, as I say above, but a trifling thing to take notice of in these
remarks; yet, as I have hinted, that I shall observe how London is in
general supplied with all its provisions from the whole body of the
nation, and how every part of the island is engaged in some degree or
other of that supply. On this account I could not omit it, nor will it
be found so inconsiderable an article as some may imagine, if this be
true, which I received an account of from a person living on the place,
viz., that they have counted three hundred droves of turkeys (for they
drive them all in droves on foot) pass in one season over Stratford
Bridge on the River Stour, which parts Suffolk from Essex, about six
miles from Colchester, on the road from Ipswich to London. These droves,
as they say, generally contain from three hundred to a thousand each
drove; so that one may suppose them to contain five hundred one with
another, which is one hundred and fifty thousand in all; and yet this is
one of the least passages, the numbers which travel by Newmarket Heath
and the open country and the forest, and also the numbers that come by
Sudbury and Clare being many more.
For the further supplies of the markets of London with poultry, of which
these countries particularly abound, they have within these few years
found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot too, as well as the
turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up to London in droves from
the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from the fen country about Lynn,
Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as also from all the east side of
Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet droves with
a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove. They begin to drive them
generally in August, by which time the harvest is almost over, and the
geese may feed in the stubbles as they go. Thus they hold on to the end
of October, when the roads begin to be too stiff and deep for their broad
feet and short legs to march in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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