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.

By the early seventeenth century Grimsby, long in decline as a port, had been eclipsed by Hull, across the Humber, in both commercial and political importance. Gervase Holles†, who was born in the town in 1607, observed that ‘the haven hath been heretofore commodious, [but] now decayed; the traffic good, now gone’. He described Grimsby as ‘mean and straggling by reason of depopulation, and the town very poor’.G. Holles, Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc.

Although the second smallest county in England, seventeenth-century Huntingdonshire contained three distinct agricultural economies: cattle fattening on the fens in the east; corn and sheep farming on the heavy clay uplands in the north and west; and a mixture of the two in the Ouse valley in the south.

Of the three coastal boroughs of Suffolk, only Aldeburgh retained any economic significance in the seventeenth century. Coastal erosion, which had swept away the greater part of Dunwich and blocked access to Orford, left it open to the sea with deep water at hand. Ships of 200 tons and upwards were built, a fishing fleet of 50 or 60 sail was dispatched every year to Icelandic waters and the Westmann Isles, and the port claimed a share in the Newcastle coal trade. CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 530, 532; APC, 1627, p. 2; HMC Var. iv. 290.

The larger of the twin settlements at the mouth of the Looe, East Looe existed as a market town and port by the late thirteenth century, and was accounted sufficiently important in 1341 to send a representative, jointly with Fowey, to an assembly at Westminster. T. Bond, E. and W. Looe, 1-2, 6. In the early seventeenth century the local merchants traded with France, the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula, but they could no longer compete with their rivals at Fowey in terms of the volume of traffic.

Rutland is, by a considerable margin, the smallest county in England. Part of the jointure estate of three late Saxon queens, it acquired shire status only after the Conquest, and returned two knights to Parliament from 1295.VCH Rutland, i. 134-6; ii. p.

Founded in Saxon times at the head of the Taw estuary, Barnstaple developed into north Devon’s principal town, and indeed the county’s third richest urban community after Exeter and Plymouth. Although its medieval walls had crumbled by the early seventeenth century, the contemporary historian Thomas Risdon described it as ‘fair built, and populous withal, … pleasantly and sweetly situate[d] …; whose streets, in whatsoever weather, are clean and fairly paved’. In 1634, the population was estimated to be almost 8,000. W.G. Hoskins, Devon, 327-8; T.

Aldborough enjoyed its heyday as the residence of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes, and then as a Roman town, but declined after the main bridge over the river Ure was re-sited a mile upstream, at Boroughbridge, in the twelfth century.

Lying on the Hampshire coast opposite the Isle of Wight and almost surrounded by the New Forest, Lymington was known chiefly for its salterns, which in this period supplied nearly all the west of England. R. Warner, Colls. for Hist. of Hants, iv. 16. Although granted a seigneurial charter before 1216, the borough was never incorporated, and first sent Members to Parliament in 1584. It was governed by a mayor, who was assisted by a town clerk, serjeant, and recorder. VCH Hants, iv.