The English plantation borough of New Radnor had taken over the mantle of its declining neighbour, Old Radnor, in the thirteenth century. It suffered badly during the Glynd?r rebellion, and did not receive a full charter until 1562, when the townsmen apparently joined with the Anglesey borough of Beaumaris to lobby for incorporation. The charter provided for a council of 25 capital burgesses, from which a bailiff and two aldermen were selected annually.

Radnorshire was created from an agglomeration of several marcher lordships by the Act of Union of 1536. As practically all of these territories had been held by the monarch, the Crown enjoyed an enduring presence in the post-Union shire, but there is no evidence that this landholding was ever translated into electoral influence. Under the second union statute of 1543 the venue of the county court was meant to alternate between Presteigne and New Radnor.

Early Stuart Shropshire enjoyed a rapidly expanding agricultural economy: the lowland plains in the north produced beef and cheese, while the southern hills specialized in high-grade wool. Meanwhile, Ludlow’s dwindling broadcloth industry was surpassed by Shrewsbury’s booming trade in the finishing of Welsh cottons; the coal measures at Broseley began to be exploited on an industrial scale; and the iron industry on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire spilled over into the eastern fringes of the shire.

Founded at the mouth of the River Adur in the eleventh century, New Shoreham soon became one of the most important of the Channel ports, though it suffered a severe decline in the fourteenth century. In the late sixteenth century Camden reported that ‘the greatest part’ of it was ‘ruined and under water, and the commodiousness of its port … wholly taken away’, and one of its own Jacobean Members called it ‘a town as poor and poorer than any in the realm’. It was nonetheless then entering upon a new period of prosperity.

Situated in north-west Staffordshire, close to the borders with Cheshire and Shropshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme grew up around a castle built in the 1140s in a lake fed by Lyme Brook, a tributary of the Trent. The town, which lay on the main road from London to the north-west, hosted a weekly market, three annual fairs, and perhaps also a separate corn market. VCH Staffs. viii. 2, 45, 47; Pape, 1. In the seventeenth century the dominant industry was the making of felt hats, but iron-working and tanning were also important. VCH Staffs. viii.

Camelford grew up where the main road traversing north Cornwall crosses the River Camel. Established as a borough by Richard, earl of Cornwall in 1259, in the following century it was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall, along with the manor of Helston in Trigg to which it had formerly belonged. Despite its strategic location and privileges, Camelford failed to prosper. At the end of the sixteenth century Richard Carew† described it as ‘a market and fair (but not fair) town’, which ‘steppeth little before the meanest sort of boroughs for store of inhabitants, or the inhabitants’ store’.

Helston grew up at a strategic crossroads some eight miles north of the Lizard in western Cornwall, receiving its first borough charter in 1201. Its importance as a trading centre derived largely from the town’s proximity to the tin-producing zone, or stannary, of Penwith and Kerrier. Privileged from 1305 as one of the county’s five ‘coinage’ centres, where tin was assayed before sale, Helston had already begun sending representatives to Parliament seven years earlier. In 1337 the local manor became a founding component of the duchy of Cornwall. H.S. Toy, Hist.

Cirencester had flourished as a centre of the woollen industry under the firm control of the local Augustinian Abbey.VCH Glos. ii. 80-83. Wool continued to play a vital part in the local economy, and therefore the town suffered badly from the trade depression of the 1620s: in 1628 it was reported to have 1,200 poor in need of relief. W. St. Clair Baddeley, Cirencester, 242; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 568. The parish of Cirencester, which included a significant part of the surrounding countryside, had a population of about 2,760 in 1603. P.

Clitheroe, a small and unimposing borough, was considered poor and remote even within Lancashire. Its population has been estimated at not much above 600 at the turn of the seventeenth century. W.S. Weeks, Clitheroe in Seventeenth Cent. 5-6. The castle and honour of Clitheroe, which date back to Domesday, passed into the control of the earls of Lancaster in the late thirteenth century, and so became part of the duchy of Lancaster. VCH Lancs. vi. 361-4; W.A. Abram, Hist. Blackburn, 48-53; R. Somerville, Hist.

Lancaster claimed to be the most ancient borough in Lancashire. Founded on a Roman settlement, the medieval town grew up around a Norman castle erected in around 1102. It received its first known charter from John, earl of Mortain (later King John) in 1193, which granted the inhabitants the same liberties as Bristol. Between 1295 and 1331 it was represented in Parliament.