Northamptonshire, situated according to Camden ‘in the very middle, and heart, as it were, of England’, was divided by the River Nene into eastern and western divisions. To the east lay the soke of Peterborough, much of it fenland, and the royal forest of Rockingham; to the west rich farming country ‘beset with sheep’.W. Camden, Britannia (1772), i. 402. Traditionally one Member was elected from each division, although exceptions occurred.J.E. Neale, Eliz.

Hythe received its first charter in 1156, and in 1575 became the first Cinque Port to be formally incorporated, under a mayor, nine jurats, and an undefined common council in whom the franchise was vested. By the early seventeenth century the obstruction of the haven by shingle had reduced the town, described in 1613 by the mayor and jurats as ‘much decayed’, to a mere fishing port. E. Hasted, Kent, viii. 236-7; HCA 30/4, unnumb. item, 19 Apr.

Wells had long been dominated by the bishops of Bath and Wells, lords of the manor, liberty and hundred. In 1201 a royal charter vested municipal authority in an annually elected master (or steward) and a council of Twenty-Four. Successive bishops aimed to erode this independent jurisdiction, forcing the cancellation of the town’s first two charters of incorporation (1341 and 1574).

Situated in north-east Wiltshire, Great Bedwyn at the time of the Domesday survey was a thriving community with its own mint. However, the local economy, based on the wool and clothing industries, went into severe decline in the Middle Ages.VCH Wilts. xvi. 11. Despite being incorporated by charter in 1468, the borough dwindled into insignificance, and was described as ‘a poor thing to sight’ by John Leland in the early sixteenth century.

Marlborough was founded by the Saxons on the site of a Roman fortified settlement. Situated on the River Kennet, the town was an axis for communications between London and Bristol, and from the southern ports via Winchester and Salisbury to Gloucester. Its favourable location enabled the town to develop into one of the principal trading centres in the area, while its strategic importance was recognized in the eleventh century with the construction of a castle, which was also used as a provincial mint and treasury.A.

Situated on a strategic promontory where the River Swale emerges from the Pennines, Richmond was founded in 1071 as the administrative centre of the vast honour of Richmond. The town became the focal point for the distribution of corn from the Vale of York to the Dales, and for the collection of Pennine wool for export through Newcastle, Hartlepool and Hull. The town’s population reached 1,600 in 1563, but was thereafter affected by repeated plague epidemics, the worst of which, in 1597-8, carried off at least 1,050 victims.R.T. Fieldhouse and B. Jennings, Hist.

St. Ives derives its name from a fifth-century Irish missionary, St. Ia, whose shrine stood in the church there until the Reformation. The peninsula which protects St Ives’s harbour from the Bristol Channel attracted settlement from prehistoric times, but the town developed slowly, lacking its own market until the late fifteenth century, and achieving full parochial status only in 1576. Some 20 years later Carew described it as ‘of mean plight’, and in need of a new pier.

Situated on a rocky outcrop in the centre of Wiltshire, Devizes was described by Thomas Fuller in the mid-seventeenth century as ‘the best and biggest town for trading’ in the county next to Salisbury. VCH Wilts. x. 225; T. Fuller, Worthies of Eng. ed. J. Freeman, 609-10. The town was celebrated for its twice-weekly markets, at which corn, wool, yarn, fish, butter and cheese were sold, VCH Wilts. x. 264; E. Bradby, Bk. of Devizes, 51; Wilts. Arch. Mag. i.

Eye is situated in ‘High Suffolk’, the predominantly pastoral region to the north of the county, which takes its name from the honour of ‘Heya’ or Eye, a Crown possession from the mid-sixteenth century. It allegedly first received privileges as early as the reign of King John, but was not incorporated until 1575, under the name of ‘Heya alias Eye’, a formula still sometimes used in the election indentures of the early seventeenth century.

A county of striking geographical diversity, Kent is bisected from west to east by the chalk ridge known as the North Downs, which provided the best agricultural land in the shire, and was used mainly to grow wheat, the county’s chief crop.C.W. Chalklin, Seventeenth-Century Kent, 9; P. Clark, Eng. Prov. Soc. 6. Running parallel with the chalk ridge, sloping southwards and slightly lower, is a narrower sandstone ridge that in the early seventeenth century mainly lay wild as heath or woodland.