Situated
twenty-five miles from London on the banks of the Thames,
opposite Dartford in Kent. In the early nineteenth century
it was renowned for its yearly fair on the 23rd May for
pedlary, and a weekly market at which a considerable quantity
of grain was sold to the London factors.
The
town was small, and pleasantly situated on the side of
a hill. It had a good market place and market house over
which was a large sessions house. It also had a spacious
wharf, which lay on the river about halfway between Purfleet
magazines and Tilbury Fort.
Gray's
Thurrock took its name from its ancient owner, Henry Grey,
during the reign of Richard I. The family continued to
hold it until the reign of Henry VIII, when it was sold
out of family hands.
One
mile from Gray's Thurrock was Belmont Castle which was
in the early 1900s the property of one Zachariah Button,
who had finished it in a costly style of gothic architecture.
A
large part of the lands held in the levels, especially
those on this side of East Tilbury, were held by farmers,
cow keepers and butchers who lived in and near London,
and who stocked the fields with Lincolnshire and Leicestershire
wethers (which they purchased in Smithfield in September
and October when the graziers sold off their stock). They
then fed the wethers until Christmas or Candlemas, and
then sold the sheep on for some considerable profit. Mutton
was always cheapest to buy at Michaelmas and dearest at
Candlemas, and the farmers who bought cheap, fattened
up, and then sold when dearest called this 'right marsh
mutton'.
