One of the original five members of the Cinque Ports, the ancient coastal town of Hastings can trace its history back to the early tenth century. By the early modern period the town consisted of two parallel streets that met at the upper end. A stream, known as the Bourne, divided the two roads, which were connected by several small lanes.VCH Suss. ix. 5, 8. During the early medieval period Hastings enjoyed great prosperity owing to its natural harbour, and from 1369 it claimed to be chief among the Cinque Ports.K.M.E. Murray, Constitutional Hist.

By the early seventeenth century Preston was already regarded as Lancashire’s centre for local government and administration, and a focal point of county society.VCH Lancs. vii. 73-105; A. Crosby, Hist. of Preston Guild, 34-5. Described by Camden as ‘a great and (for these countries) a fair town, and well inhabited’, the parish had a population of around 3,000 on the eve of the Civil War. W. Camden, Britannia (1610), p. 752; D. Hunt, Hist.

Founded in the early twelfth century, Bishop’s Castle failed to prosper due to its distance from the Severn valley, the key communications route in the region; under the Stuarts it was a local market town with a population of little more than 500. The manor belonged to the bishops of Hereford until 1559, when it was sequestrated by the Crown, and in 1573, amid protests that episcopal charters were being disregarded, a royal charter appointed a corporation comprising a bailiff and 14 capital burgesses.

A settlement existed at Bossiney by the late eleventh century, when a small Norman castle was constructed there. The village was granted in the mid-thirteenth century to Richard, earl of Cornwall, who provided the borough with its first charter. Like many of the earl’s former estates, Bossiney was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337. At that time the borough was flourishing, but decline set in during the next century, and around 1540 Leland observed a substantial number of ruinous buildings.

Old Winchelsea, one of the ancient towns added to the original Cinque Ports, was destroyed by the sea in the thirteenth century and rebuilt on a nearby hill. Although the new town enjoyed a brief period of prosperity based on the wine trade, it fell into decay in the fifteenth century as its haven gradually silted up. By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign there were reportedly not ‘above sixty households standing, and those, for the most part, poorly peopled’. W.D. Cooper, Winchelsea, 107; VCH Suss. ix.

Although little more than an agricultural village lying in the northern ‘cheese’ district of Wiltshire, Wootton Bassett returned Members to the Commons from 1446, at which time it was held by the dukes of York. In 1631 the residents produced a copy of an alleged charter of 1561 which vested authority in a mayor, two aldermen and 12 capital burgesses.

Described by Thomas Fuller in the early 1660s as ‘but the suburbs at large of London’, Middlesex was a small county, ‘scarce extending east and west to eighteen miles in length, and not exceeding twelve north and south in the breadth thereof’. Except near the Thames, where livings were made either by ferrying or fishing, the county’s inhabitants were mainly farmers for, despite its size, Middlesex boasted some of the most fertile soil anywhere in the country.

The ancient market town of Malmesbury, sited on a defensive position on the upper reaches of the Avon, grew up in the shelter both of its castle and a Benedictine abbey founded in the mid-seventh century. The development of the town’s clothing industry, which processed wool produced in north Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire, was facilitated by its good trade links, for the main road between Bristol and Oxford ran through Malmesbury, while other routes linked it to nearby Chippenham and Tetbury.

Located five miles inland on the River Parrett, Bridgwater owed its early prosperity to the manufacture and export of cloth, principally lightweight broad cloths known as Bridgwaters, but also coarser, narrow cloths, or kerseys, which were exported to France, Spain and Ireland.

Minehead probably derived its name either from a Celtic phrase meaning ‘the haven under the hill’ or from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘main head’, which alluded to its location on one of Somerset’s most prominent coastal headlands. Following the Norman Conquest, the settlement enjoyed manorial status, and became part of the honour of Dunster. Although well placed for trade with Wales and Ireland, Minehead played only a limited role as an outport. F. Hancock, Hist.