The government of the county of Essex, 1603-1642

• Main Author: Quintrell, B. W.
• Published: Royal Holloway, University of London 1965
• Subjects: 942.6706
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307777

Contemporary commentators were quick to notice the prosperity of late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart Essex: John Taylor in 1636 thought it 'a good, a great and a rich county...stored plentifully with...all things needful', while to Norden earlier it had seemed 'to deserve the title of the Englishe Goschen, the fattest of the Lande'. The Privy Council agreed with them; when Ship Money was first imposed on a national scale in 1635-6, the proportion on Essex was the third highest in England. A large county of almost a million acres, Essex lies between London and the North Sea and, except for the short boundary with Cambridgeshire in the north-west, is bounded on all sides by water: the Thames separates it from Kent which like Suffolk, Essex's northern neighbour across the valley of the Stour, shared in the general prosperity of eastern England, while to the west the Lee and the Stort divide it from Middlesex and Hertfordshire. Despite its overwhelming flatness Essex was not lacking in topographical variety: in the west, the royal Forest of Waltham was a reminder of the time when much of Essex had been heavily wooded, while beyond it in the north and north-west, on a mantle of boulder clay, lay the highest parts of the county and the richest arable land; to the south and east this mantle gave way to heavier London clay which was harder to work and much less profitable until, as it approached the coast, it degenerated into fenland. 1 The marshes which fringed the ragged coastline from West Ham to Harwich gave the region an air of desolation - and a reputation for unhealthiness 2 - which it still retains; but they also provided valuable pasture for sheep and cattle and were jealously guarded by the parishes and individuals, among them London merchants, who held the grazing rights