page_title: Surrey
section_title: Early Modern Surrey
hierarchical_section_title: Surrey / History / Early Modern Surrey
caption_attribution_description: Cropped detail of George Abbot (1562-1633), Archbishop of Canterbury, by unknown artist. See source website for additional information.
context_page_description: Surrey is a county in South East England which borders Kent to the east, East Sussex to the southeast, West Sussex to the south, Hampshire to the west, Berkshire to the northwest, and Greater London to the northeast. With about 1.2 million people, Surrey is the twelfth most populous English county, the third most populous home county, after Kent and Essex, and the third most populous in the Southeast, after Hampshire and Kent.
  Surrey is a relatively wealthy county. It has the highest proportion of woodland of counties in England. It has four horse racing courses, and golf courses including the international competition venue at Wentworth.
  Guildford is popularly regarded as the county town, although Surrey County Council is based extraterritorially at Kingston upon Thames. Surrey is divided into eleven districts.
context_section_description: Under the early Tudor kings, magnificent royal palaces were constructed in northeastern Surrey, conveniently close to London. At Richmond an existing royal residence was rebuilt on a grand scale under King Henry VII, who also founded a Franciscan friary nearby in 1499. The still more spectacular palace of Nonsuch was later built for Henry VIII near Ewell. The palace at Guildford Castle had fallen out of use long before, but a royal hunting lodge existed outside the town. All these have since been demolished.
  During the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, the rebels heading for London briefly occupied Guildford and fought a skirmish with a government detachment on Guildown outside the town, before marching on to defeat at Blackheath in Kent. The forces of Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554 passed through what was then northeastern Surrey on their way from Kent to London, briefly occupying Southwark and then crossing the Thames at Kingston after failing to storm London Bridge.
  Surrey's cloth industry declined in the 16th century and collapsed in the 17th, harmed by falling standards and competition from more effective producers in other parts of England. The iron industry in the Weald, whose rich deposits had been exploited since prehistoric times, expanded and spread from its base in Sussex into Kent and Surrey after 1550. New furnace technology stimulated further growth in the early 17th century, but this hastened the extinction of the business as the mines were worked out. However, this period also saw the emergence of important new industries, centred on the valley of the Tillingbourne, south-east of Guildford, which often adapted watermills originally built for the now moribund cloth industry. The production of brass goods and wire in this area was relatively short-lived, falling victim to competitors in the Midlands in the mid-17th century, but the manufacture of paper and gunpowder proved more enduring. For a time in the mid-17th century the Surrey mills were the main producers of gunpowder in England. A glass industry also developed in the mid-16th century on the southwestern borders of Surrey, but had collapsed by 1630, as the wood-fired Surrey glassworks were surpassed by emerging coal-fired works elsewhere in England. The Wey Navigation, opened in 1653, was one of England's first canal systems.
  George Abbot, the son of a Guildford clothworker, served as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1611–1633. In 1619 he founded Abbot's Hospital, an almshouse in Guildford, which is still operating. He also made unsuccessful efforts to revitalise the local cloth industry. One of his brothers, Robert, became Bishop of Salisbury, while another, Maurice, was a founding shareholder of the East India Company who became the company's Governor and later Lord Mayor of London.
  Southwark expanded rapidly in this period, and by 1600, if considered as a separate entity, it was the second-largest urban area in England, behind only London itself. Parts of it were outside the jurisdiction of the government of the City of London, and as a result the area of Bankside became London's principal entertainment district, since the social control exercised there by the local authorities of Surrey was less effective and restrictive than that of the City authorities. Bankside was the scene of the golden age of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, with the work of playwrights including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Webster performed in its playhouses. The leading actor and impresario Edward Alleyn founded the College of God's Gift in Dulwich with an endowment including an art collection, which was later expanded and opened to the public in 1817, becoming Britain's first public art gallery.
  Surrey almost entirely escaped the direct impact of fighting during the main phase of the English Civil War in 1642–1646. The local Parliamentarian gentry led by Sir Richard Onslow were able to secure the county without difficulty on the outbreak of war. Farnham Castle was briefly occupied by the advancing Royalists in late 1642, but was easily stormed by the P
caption: George Abbot
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