Few counties saw more of royalty than Hertfordshire, especially during the reign of James I. Royston, amid the unenclosed downlands of the north, was James’s favourite centre for hunting and hawking, and to it he added Theobalds, by exchange with his chief minister the 1st earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†) in 1607, thereby acquiring a palace within easier access of Whitehall.VCH Herts. ii. 346-8, 363-4; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 452; 1611-18, pp. 109, 488; 1619-23, p. 416; Illustrations of Brit. Hist. ed. E. Lodge, iii.

Originally a Roman settlement, Dorchester returned two Members to the Model Parliament, and received its first charter in 1337. It was described in 1610 as ‘an ancient and populous borough where the assizes for the county are usually holden, and whither the knights and gentlemen of the shire do often repair upon sundry occasions of service of the king’s majesty and the county’, including the Dorset elections. As the shire town, it housed the county gaol, rebuilt in 1624. It also boasted a free school, a bookseller, and, from around 1631, a municipal library. D.

Bridport received its first charter in 1253, and was represented in the Model Parliament. Cordage and linen thread formed the town’s staple products, and the Act of 1529 requiring local farmers to sell all their hemp there was among the statutes renewed in 1624 and 1628. Though Bridport hosted the Dorset quarter sessions until its incorporation in 1619, and was home to nearly 1,500 communicants, its houses were ‘more old than fair’, and its harbour ‘altogether choked with the sands’ by the early seventeenth century.Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 7; T.

Situated on a creek to the east of Falmouth Harbour, St. Mawes was a small fishing village notable only for its ancient chapel dedicated to St. Maudutus, and the royal castle built in the 1540s to protect the bay from French raiders. Although one indenture in 1625 referred to ‘St. Maudes’, the chapel was derelict by 1621, when Parliament was petitioned unsuccessfully for its restoration. Local government was limited to a manorial court leet, held before a portreeve chosen annually by the manor’s tenants.

The shire town of Berkshire, Abingdon lay astride a major north-south trade route and was regarded as one of the most beautiful towns in England by some. As well as being a noted centre of the malt trade, it was also an important market for horses, and despite economic decline in the mid-sixteenth century it remained a centre of the cloth trade. C.G. Durston, ‘Berks. and the County Gentry, 1625-49’, (Univ. of Reading Ph.D. thesis, 1977), i. pp. 4, 17, 22; Travels through Stuart Britain: the Adventures of John Taylor, the Water Poet ed. J. Chandler, 161; VCH Berks. iv.

Situated on the River Arun and the edge of St. Leonard’s forest in the west Sussex rape of Bramber, Horsham prospered in Elizabethan times as a centre of the Wealden iron industry. It was also the seat of the county gaol and sometimes hosted the summer assizes and quarter sessions. VCH Suss. vi. pt. 2, pp. 129-35, 178. The manor and borough of Horsham descended with the barony of Bramber in the Howard family until it passed to the Crown on the attainder of the 4th duke of Norfolk in 1572.

Wendover’s development as a market town during the early medieval period was assisted by its location on the high ground at the western edge of the Chilterns and the fact that the main road from Aylesbury to London passed through the parish. VCH Bucks. iii. 20-31. Under the Tudors and early Stuarts it increased in prosperity. By 1620 its houses were concentrated around West Street, with further dwellings in North Street and South Street; the church and former manor house lay half a mile to the west. M. Summerell, B. Samuels, A. Mead and P. Eckett, Bk.

Described by Camden as ‘in form of a lozenge, broader in the midst and growing narrow at the ends’, Staffordshire ‘for the most part consisteth of barren land’ and ‘doth … abound with poor people’, or so said the county’s magistrates on attempting to obtain a reduction in the county’s Ship Money quota in 1637. While the northern part of the county was certainly hilly, ‘and so less fruitful’, the central region was, according to Camden, ‘more plentiful, clad with woods and embroidered gallantly with corn fields and meadows’, being ‘watered with the river Trent’.

Cardiganshire, a ‘proto-county’ under royal control from the 1240s, was given formal status by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284.J.G. Edwards, ‘The Early Hist. of the Cos. of Carm. and Card’, EHR, xxxi. 90-8. Its boundaries largely followed the native territory of Ceredigion, but it was somewhat enlarged by the Henrician Acts of Union. Most commentators concurred that it was sparsely populated and difficult to farm: with forbidding uplands in the north and east and open pasture to the south and west, the local economy was dominated by cattle farming.

From its foundation in the twelfth century, Dartmouth was important for its deep natural harbour, in a sheltered location close to the Dart estuary. A base for major mercantile and military voyages during the Middle Ages, the town first returned Members to Parliament in 1298, and secured the right to elect its own mayor in 1341. W.G. Hoskins, Devon, 179, 382-3; P. Russell, Dartmouth, 10. As the Dart silted up during the sixteenth century, Dartmouth prospered at the expense of Totnes, further upstream.