A low-lying, though comparatively sparsely populated island off the north coast of Wales, Anglesey was commended by the Beaumaris-born merchant Lewes Roberts as ‘having plenty of all food and other provision necessary to preserve the life of man, out of which is yearly sent 3,000 head of cattle to supply the wants of other countries adjoining, together with a good quantity of corn, butter, cheese’.L. Roberts, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (1638/9), pp. 219-20; Welsh Port Books, 1550-1603 (Cymmrodorion Soc. rec. ser. xii), pp. xix-xxxviii; Agrarian. Hist. Eng.

Pembrokeshire was among the smallest of the Welsh counties, having been reduced in size by statute in 1543. In 1626 its magistrates claimed, with only slight exaggeration, that it was nowhere more than 18 miles wide.SP16/33/57. However, the county’s smallness was not always appreciated.

Breconshire was one of the counties created by the Henrician Acts of Union, centred on the old lordship of Brecon, which had escheated to the Crown following the attainder of the 3rd duke of Buckingham (1523). The county was dominated by the upland ranges of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, one seventeenth-century author observing that the ‘high hills’ were ‘so thick together … in a manner of high bulwarks and compact joints of this county’ that it was a ‘fit place of refuge for the Britons’.Harl. 7017, f.

Situated in south-eastern Glamorganshire, near the mouth of the River Taff, Cardiff flourished during the medieval period as the commercial centre of the lordship of Glamorgan,D.G. Walker, ‘Cardiff’, in Bors. of Medieval Wales ed. R.A. Griffiths, 125-6. but was sacked during Glynd?r rebellion and had not recovered its prosperity by the sixteenth century.W. Rees, Cardiff, 1-15; I.

Lincoln’s first extant charter dates back to 1157, and the town first returned MPs to Parliament in 1265. The borough was governed by a mayor, 12 aldermen, and a common council varying in size from about 30 to 48.W. de Gray Birch, Royal Charters of Lincoln, 1-2, 74; Lincs. AO, L1/1/1/4, f. 214. By the early seventeenth century the decay of the wool trade had left the city in economic decline despite its role as the county’s administrative centre.J.W.F.

Wigan’s history during this period is dominated by disputes between the corporation and the rector of the local parish, who was also the lord of the manor. At issue were such matters as tithes, market tolls, corn mills, charitable uses and, by 1628, control of the borough’s parliamentary elections.

Lancashire owed its special status as a semi-autonomous palatinate to the fact that it had once been a border territory, vulnerable to invasion from Ireland or Scotland.B. Coward, ‘Lieutenancy of Lancs. and Cheshire in the 16th and early 17th Centuries’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxix. 39-64; J.J. Bagley, Hist.

Described as ‘seated among most pleasant meadows and as plentiful corn fields, compassed almost round by rivers’, W. Camden, Britain (1610) trans. P. Holland, 618. Hereford is situated on the River Wye at the point where it could be forded at two separate places. M.D. Lobel, ‘Hereford’, in Historic Towns, ed. M.D. Lobel, 1. The population grew from about 4,000 in the 1520s to about 5,000 in 1700, even though Speed’s map suggests that by 1610 there had been little suburban development. A. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns, 73; P.

A small market town on the east bank of the River Nene, Higham Ferrers received a charter in 1556 which vested government of the town in a corporation consisting of a mayor, seven aldermen and 13 ‘capital burgesses’; it also conferred upon the borough the right to send one Member to Parliament.VCH Northants. iii. 269-71. Before 1640 the franchise rested exclusively with the corporation. Northants. RO, FH3467; A.N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers Election in 1640’, Northants. P and P (1958), pp.

East Grinstead, situated close to the Surrey border, was only 30 miles from London. Thanks to the notoriously impassable Sussex roads it accordingly shared the assizes with Horsham (and occasionally, in dry summers, with Lewes). In addition the town lay on the edge of Ashdown forest, a centre of the Wealden iron industry.A. Fletcher, County Community in Peace and War, 136; E. Straker, Wealden Iron, 238-41. An unincorporated borough, East Grinstead had returned Members since 1301, the right of election being in the inhabitant burgage-holders.