Here is one of the finest market-places and the best served with
provisions in England, London excepted; and the inhabitants are so
multiplied in a few years that they seem to want room in their town
rather than people to fill it, as I have observed above.
The streets are all exactly straight from north to south, with
lanes or alleys, which they call rows, crossing them in straight
lines also from east to west, so that it is the most regular built
town in England, and seems to have been built all at once; or that
the dimensions of the houses and extent of the streets were laid
out by consent.
They have particular privileges in this town and a jurisdiction by
which they can try, condemn, and execute in especial cases without
waiting for a warrant from above; and this they exerted once very
smartly in executing a captain of one of the king's ships of war in
the reign of King Charles II. for a murder committed in the street,
the circumstance of which did indeed call for justice; but some
thought they would not have ventured to exert their powers as they
did. However, I never heard that the Government resented it or
blamed them for it.
It is also a very well-governed town, and I have nowhere in England
observed the Sabbath day so exactly kept, or the breach so
continually punished, as in this place, which I name to their
honour.
Among all these regularities it is no wonder if we do not find
abundance of revelling, or that there is little encouragement to
assemblies, plays, and gaming meetings at Yarmouth as in some other
places; and yet I do not see that the ladies here come behind any
of the neighbouring counties, either in beauty, breeding, or
behaviour; to which may be added too, not at all to their
disadvantage, that they generally go beyond them in fortunes.
From Yarmouth I resolved to pursue my first design, viz., to view
the seaside on this coast, which is particularly famous for being
one of the most dangerous and most fatal to the sailors in all
England--I may say in all Britain--and the more so because of the
great number of ships which are continually going and coming this
way in their passage between London and all the northern coasts of
Great Britain. Matters of antiquity are not my inquiry, but
principally observations on the present state of things, and, if
possible, to give such accounts of things worthy of recording as
have never been observed before; and this leads me the more
directly to mention the commerce and the navigation when I come to
towns upon the coast as what few writers have yet meddled with.
