Bewdley is situated where the River Severn meets the Forest of Wyre as it enters north-western Worcestershire. ‘Not anciently famous’, as a contemporary remarked, the town owed its rise to prominence to the construction of the bridge over the Severn in the mid-fifteenth century. The bridge wardens, who were responsible for the upkeep of bridge, managed the finances of the borough. Survey of Worcs. by Thomas Habington ed. J. Amphlett (Worcs. Hist Soc. 1893-5), i. 530-2; P. Styles, ‘Corporation of Bewdley under the later Stuarts’, in P. Styles, Studies in Seventeenth-Cent.

Ludlow Castle was built at the end of the eleventh century on high ground by a crossing of the River Teme, and the town first appears in Exchequer records in 1169. A borough by prescription, municipal government was established over 150 years before the first surviving charter, of 1449, which confirmed the existing structure of two bailiffs, drawn from a corporation of 12 aldermen and 25 common councillors.

According to the terms of the 1536 Act of Union, every Welsh county (except Merioneth) was to have an MP returned by the burgesses of all the shire’s chartered boroughs. This enfranchised six towns in the east of Montgomeryshire, along the upper reaches of the Severn valley. Two of these, Llanfyllin and Welshpool, were prosperous market towns with substantial populations of 1,000 each.

Early modern Merioneth was the poorest and most isolated shire in Wales, a fact which induced the architects of the 1536 Act of Union to deny the county a borough seat in Parliament. Its population of about 19,500 was smaller than any except Anglesey and Radnor, and the assessment quotas imposed upon the county after 1640 were lower than elsewhere.

Leominster was the market centre for a farming area famed for the quality of its wool, considered the best in the country, which was used to make high quality cloth in Worcester, Coventry, Ludlow, Gloucester, Hereford and Leominster itself. M. Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612), p. 105; E. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern Eng. 20-1; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.

Situated on the south-east corner of the Wash, King’s Lynn is ‘flanked to the east by the dry sandy loams of Norfolk, and bounded to the south and west by marsh and fen’. V. Parker, Making of King’s Lynn, 3. Lynn derives the second part of its name from ‘Lun’ or ‘Lena’, an ancient British word meaning lake. F. Blomefield, Hist. Norf. viii. 476. The town was principally founded by the bishop of Norwich in the eleventh century, Parker, 1. when it was known as Bishop’s Lynn.

Located at the southernmost point of Northamptonshire, about half way between Banbury and Buckingham, Brackley was a small agricultural town that in its medieval heyday had served as ‘a famous staple for wool’. However, by the turn of the seventeenth century, as William Camden noted, it could ‘only boast how great and wealthy it once was by its ruins’.Baker, Northants. i. 567, 573-4. The town was governed under a seigneurial charter granted in 1260 by the earl of Winchester to the mayor and around 32 ‘burgesses’. Northants. P and P, iii.

Situated on the Avon 12 miles south-east of Bristol, and described by a local doctor in 1628 as ‘a well compacted city, … beautified with very fair and goodly buildings for the receipt of strangers’, Bath was already famous for the healing powers of its waters, which were visited by Anne of Denmark in 1613 and 1615, and by Charles I in 1628. T. Vennner, Baths of Bathe (1628), p. 1; Bath RO, ‘Elevation of the status of the mayor of Bath’. Under the terms of a charter granted in 1590, a mayor, between four and ten aldermen and a council of 20 governed Bath. J.

Wiltshire can be divided into two main regions: the chalk downlands of the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain, dominated by sheep-corn husbandry; and the cheese district of the northern and western parts of the county. There was also a separate ‘butter’ region in the south-west, and two royal forests, Savernake in the north, and Clarendon in the south-east. Wiltshire was a major centre for cloth manufacture, concentrated in the west of the county and along the Wyley, Avon and Nadder valleys in the south. D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 73-105; G.D.

Westbury was a small market town in the centre of Wiltshire’s clothing area. The borough, apparently restricted to the precinct in which the ancient burgage tenements lay, was never chartered, but a municipal structure had evolved by the reign of Elizabeth, which included a mayor and a town seal. Enfranchised from 1448, the parliamentary indentures for the early Stuart period were signed by the ‘mayor and burgesses’ and authenticated with the town seal; the 1625 indenture was additionally witnessed by ‘Edward Greenhill, Thomas Style, John Greenhill and others’.