aid in the hour of national danger.
Successive Royal Charters had accorded to the town markets, with other
important rights and privileges. It had returned two members to
Parliament since early in the days of Elizabeth, and indeed continued to
do so until the Reform Bill of 1831. But, in common with Dunwich, and
other once flourishing ports on the same coast, Aldeburgh had for its
most fatal enemy, the sea. The gradual encroachments of that
irresistible power had in the course of two centuries buried a large
portion of the ancient Borough beneath the waves. Two existing maps of
the town, one of about 1590, the other about 1790, show how extensive
this devastation had been. This cause, and others arising from it, the
gradual decay of the shipping and fishing industries, had left the town
in the main a poor and squalid place, the scene of much smuggling and
other lawlessness. Time and the ocean wave had left only "two parallel
and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses." Nor
was there much relief, aesthetic or other, in the adjacent country,
which was flat, marshy, and treeless, continually swept by northern and
easterly gales. A river, the Ald, from which the place took its name,
approached the sea close to the town from the west, and then took a
turn, flowing south, till it finally entered the sea at the neighbouring
harbour of Orford.

In Aldeburgh, on Christmas Eve 1754, George Crabbe was born. He came of
a family bearing a name widely diffused throughout Norfolk and Suffolk
for many generations. His father, after school-teaching in various
parishes in the neighbourhood, finally settled down in his native place
as collector of the salt duties, a post which his father had filled
before him. Here as a very young man he married an estimable and pious
widow, named Loddock, some years his senior, and had a family of six
children, of whom George was the eldest.

Within the limits of a few miles round, including the towns and villages
of Slaughden, Orford, Parham, Beccles, Stowmarket, and Woodbridge, the
first five-and-twenty years of the poet's life were spent. He had but
slight interest in the pursuits of the inhabitants. His father, brought
up among its fishing and boating interests, was something nautical in
his ambitions, having a partnership in a fishing-boat, and keeping a
yacht on the river. His other sons shared their father's tastes, while
George showed no aptitude or liking for the sea, but f