Essex

Essex originated as a kingdom. Cunobelinus moved the capital of the Catuvellauni from Verulamium to Colchester, subduing the Trinovantes before Caesar's invasion. The Romans took over the site and made it the provincial capital, Camulodunum, sacked in Boudicca's rebellion in AD 61. In the 5th cent. the area fell to the Saxons, and a kingdom of the East Saxons was in existence by the early 7th cent. It maintained a somewhat precarious existence, and by the 9th cent. had become a client state, first of Mercia, then of Wessex. In the late 9th cent. it was overrun by the Danes and allotted to them at the peace of Wedmore in 878. It was reconquered by Edward the Elder, and shired. The county town was Chelmsford rather than Colchester, perhaps because it was more central. For centuries Essex remained something of a backwater. Colchester was a sizeable town, the centre for a vigorous cloth trade, but most of the other towns—Saffron Walden, Thaxted, Braintree, Romford, Waltham Abbey, Dunmow, Halstead, and Ongar—were of only local importance. The shire provided London with fresh vegetables, but for many years the marshes remained a barrier to urban expansion. As late as 1907, the Victoria County History could write that Essex was ‘one of the purely agricultural counties of England, depending almost entirely upon tillage for its prosperity’.

The chief characteristic of the shire was religious nonconformity. Proximity to the continent made for easy access to reforming ideas in the Tudor period and the Essex towns provided a number of protestant martyrs during Mary's reign. Its puritan sympathies made it come down heavily in the 1640s for Parliament against the king. In 1698 Celia Fiennes noted that Colchester was ‘a town full of dissenters, besides Anabaptists and Quakers’.

Economic transformation came in the 19th cent. with the overflowing of London, first along the docks of the Thames, then following the railway from Shoreditch to Romford in 1839, which built an important junction and repair works at Stratford. Dockers and railwaymen replaced farmers in the streets of south-west Essex. In 1801, Dagenham, Barking, Ilford, Walthamstow, East and West Ham were still separate villages or small towns. But for a time the increase in population was the fastest in the whole country. West Ham had fewer than 5, 000 inhabitants in 1801 but 267, 000 in 1901, dwarfing the county town, which had 13, 000. The taste for sea-bathing gave prosperity to Southend, which became Londoners' favourite resort. The arrival of the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham in 1929 created a great new borough. Though suburban growth declined after the Second World War, the new towns at Harlow and Basildon and the airport at Stansted kept numbers increasing, while Epping, Braintree, and Chelmsford became commuter towns, disgorging into Liverpool Street. In the 1980s the concept of ‘Essex man’, upwardly mobile, fast-driving, Tory-minded, brought the shire back into national consciousness.