Prior to James I’s accession in 1603, Northumberland’s history was dominated by its location on England’s northern border. Following centuries of intermittent war with Scotland, the county was run effectively as a military zone, divided into Marches, and exempted from national taxation so that local resources could be utilized for defence purposes. Under the early Stuarts, with peace now supposedly assured, serious efforts were made to develop a more conventional administrative framework.

Dominated by its Norman castle and cathedral, Rochester was linked to neighbouring Strood by an 11-arch stone bridge, described by one visitor in 1635 as ‘fair, stately, long and strong’ and ‘not much inferior’ to that of London.‘Relation of a short survey of the western counties, 1635’ ed. L.G. Wickham Legg, in Cam. Misc. xvi. (Cam. Soc. ser. 3. lii), 8. The bridge and its estates were administered by two wardens and 12 assistants, who enjoyed parliamentary authority to raise taxes within a seven-mile radius of the city to help cover the costs of maintenance.

Carmarthen was founded by the Romans and reoccupied by the Normans, who built a castle to secure their dominion over the Welsh. The borough served as the administrative centre of the principality of South Wales down to the Stuart period.R.A. Griffiths, ‘Carmarthen’, in Medieval Bor. Wales ed. R.A. Griffiths, 132-52. The town enjoyed good trading links, both by land and via the navigable River Tywi (Towy): it was the staple port for Welsh wool from 1353, and in return for the wool and cloth shipped to Bristol and the Continent, French wine was imported.Ibid.

Buckinghamshire, a grazing county, was geographically divided into two distinct regions, with the ‘mountainous, or rather hilly’ Chilterns to the south-east, and the Vale to the north.W. Camden, Britannia (1722), i. 308. During the medieval period quarter sessions and most of the county’s administrative functions had migrated away from the nominal capital, Buckingham, situated in the north-west, to the more centrally located and prosperous town of Aylesbury, where they remained throughout the early Stuart period.VCH Bucks. iv.

Originally an Anglo-Saxon foundation, Taunton was dominated throughout the Middle Ages by the bishops of Winchester, who owned the principal manor of Taunton Dean. J. Toulmin, Hist. Taunton ed. J. Savage, 18, 47. Accordingly, at the start of the seventeenth century, the town’s considerable economic prosperity and regional importance contrasted sharply with its primitive municipal government.

Somerset was a wealthy and exceptionally populous county with a wide range of economic interests. The vale of Taunton Deane was well known for its cattle; and inferior Irish imports were resented less as competition than as a threat to the breed. The shire’s most celebrated product, Cheddar cheese, was used by local politicians to gratify their metropolitan contacts.

The four contributory towns of the Denbigh Boroughs seat were all founded in the aftermath of the conquest of 1282 and prospered to varying degrees as centres of clothmaking and tanning. The boroughs gradually declined under the Tudors with the movement of the cloth industry into the countryside and the shift of the staple for Welsh cloth to Oswestry.

Denbighshire was created by the 1536 Act of Union, which amalgamated those of the Marcher lordships of North Wales that had not already been assigned to existing shires. However, the lordship of Mold and the parishes of Hawarden and St. Asaph were surrendered to Flintshire only five years later.SR, iii. 568, 849; G. Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c.1415-1642, pp.

Early Stuart Cambridgeshire was, in many respects, two counties in one. The northern hundreds of Wisbech and Witchford comprised the Isle of Ely, a thinly populated area of fenland, large parts of which were wholly inundated during winter, so that, as Camden observed in 1637, it ‘resembleth in some sort a very sea’. South of the Ouse, fen gradually gave way to chalk and clay uplands, most of which was flat and laid out into fields for growing corn and saffron.

Dominated by its Norman keep and cathedral, and bounded by medieval walls and the meandering River Wensum, Norwich was the second largest city after London, and one of the major provincial capitals of England. It boasted over 30 churches, and supported a growing population, which rose from about 12,000 in the 1580s to approximately 20,000 in 1620.J.T. Evans, Seventeenth Cent. Norwich, 4-5; P. Corfield, ‘Provincial Capital of Norwich’, Crisis and Order in Eng. Towns ed. P. Clark and P.