Morpeth grew up in the shadow of the Norman castle constructed to guard the Great North Road’s crossing over the River Wansbeck. The town was granted a fair and market in 1199, and achieved borough status by 1382. In the early seventeenth century Morpeth boasted a tollbooth, a moot-hall and a grammar school. A post-town on the main route from the Scottish border to London, it was a regular meeting-place for Northumberland’s magistrates and deputy lieutenants.
Truro sprang up in the early twelfth century at the juncture of two major roads and a navigable tributary of Falmouth Haven, and began sending burgesses to Parliament in 1295. A key factor in the borough’s development was its close proximity to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Tywarnhaile. From around 1300 Truro was west Cornwall’s principal location for ‘coinage’, the obligatory pre-sale testing of the metal’s purity, and when tin production in this part of the county dramatically increased in the sixteenth century the town’s prosperity rose commensurately.
The county town, Brecon was a fairly prosperous market town located in the centre of post-union Breconshire at the confluence of the Honddu and the Usk. Its liberties ran in a rough ellipse outside the walled town some three miles in length and one mile in width, but they also comprehended the detached ward of Llywel, some 11 miles to the east. In the early seventeenth century Brecon’s population numbered around 2,000, making it one of the largest of early modern Wales’s small urban centres. N.M. Powell, Urban Hist. xxxii.
Cambridge became a royal borough under Henry I and returned Members to Parliament from at least 1295, but the town was not formally incorporated until 1605. The composition of the town assembly was not specified in the charter of incorporation, nor was the extent of the franchise.F.W. Maitland and M. Bateson, Camb. Bor. Charters, 116-37. Until 1625, when the corporation resolved that all freemen could vote, Cambridge had one of the most unusual election procedures in the country.
A preponderantly rural county supporting a typical East Midland mixture of sheep and corn farming, with grazing for cattle along the Ouse valley, Bedfordshire’s chief products were barley, for malting; woollen yarn for the worsted weavers of Norwich; and butter, sold to London dealers at Woburn.BEDFORD; Agrarian Hist. of Eng. and Wales ed. J. Thirsk, iv. 491; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.
A small town in south-west Wiltshire lying on the principal road between Warminster and Salisbury, Heytesbury was, like many settlements in the region, dependent upon the cloth trade. As part of the royal forest of Selwood, there was also some trade in timber. At its heyday in the late Middle Ages the town had a market, and two annual fairs.E.D. Ginever, Ancient Wilts. Village of Heytesbury, 23-5; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii. 283. Enfranchised as a proprietary borough in 1449, it had never been incorporated.R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts.
Although a flourishing market town which returned Members from 1295, Bletchingley was never incorporated and had no governing body other than the manorial court. There was a bailiff but he was not a public officer, being described in 1624 as ‘only a rent-gatherer’ for the lord of the manor. The returning officer was the sheriff, who exchanged indentures with the burgage-holders – the resident owners of property by burgage tenure – who held the franchise. The manor of Bletchingley was purchased by William Howard, 1st Lord Howard of Effingham, in 1560.
A ‘demi-island … besieged … with the ocean’, early seventeenth-century Cornwall largely depended economically on its proximity to the shipping routes between Wales, Ireland, Spain, France and the Netherlands. Despite its poor agricultural land and insubstantial towns, this most westerly of English counties boasted two major trading commodities. The waters around its extensive coastline teemed with pilchards, the bulk of most catches being packed for sale in France and Spain. Equally significant was the mining of tin, England’s most important export after cloth at this period.
Lichfield lies in south-east Staffordshire, between the high ground of Cannock Chase to the west and the Tame valley to the east. The origins of its name are obscure. Once thought to signify ‘a field of corpses’, after the massacre of early Christians by the Romans, a more likely meaning is ‘a common pasture in (or beside) a grey wood’.T. Harwood, Hist. and Antiqs. of Lichfield, 2; VCH Staffs. xiv.
Writs were issued to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge for the Parliament of 1301, and after the failure of several petitions during the reign of Elizabeth they were re-enfranchised by letters patent on 12 Mar. 1604, exactly a week before the meeting of the first Parliament called by James I.OR; K. Fincham, ‘Oxf. and the Early Stuart Polity’, Hist. Oxf. Univ. iv: Seventeenth-Cent. Oxf. ed. N. Tyacke, 196-9; M.B. Rex, Univ. Representation in Eng. 1604-90, pp.