Winchester, a ‘venerable and interesting’ cathedral city in the centre of Hampshire, stood ‘on the east declivity of a hill, gradually sloping to the River Itchen, navigable for barges’. Although it was the county town, it had been eclipsed by Southampton and Portsmouth in economic importance by the 1820s, when it was said to have ‘very little trade’. An attempt to establish a small silk manufacturing industry had apparently foundered by 1831. T.W. Wilks, Hist. Hants, i. 9; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 345; (1830), 477; PP (1831-2), xxxviii.

The borough of Great Bedwyn, ‘a group of shabby houses upon a hill’ which together were ‘not intrinsically worth a thousand pounds’, was composed of a small and wholly agricultural town and the two tithings of Bedwyn Prebend and Stock and Ford, and lay in the hundred of Kinwardstone on the eastern edge of Wiltshire. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 13; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 790, 791; PP (1831-2), xxxvi. 112; (1833), xxxvii. 700; VCH Wilts. xvi.

The constituent burghs of this volatile district were widely scattered over four counties. Linlithgow, the most northerly, was 16 miles west of Edinburgh. Once a royal residence (Mary Queen of Scots was born there), it had declined in importance since the Union. Its chief industry was tanning and the preparation of leather. The burgh had a population of 3,112 in 1821 and 3,187 in 1831, and the self-electing council had 27 mostly resident members.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), iv. 515-21; PP (1823), xv. 709; (1830-1), x. 182; (1831-2), xlii. 127; (1836), xxiii.

Maldon was a market town and port in eastern Essex, situated at the influx of the River Chelmer into the Blackwater estuary. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 297-8. By the new charter of 1810 almost 1,500 freemen, mostly non-resident, and qualified by birth, apprenticeship, marriage, purchase or gift, had been added to the moribund and dwindling electorate of less than 70.

Carlow, a county town situated on the River Barrow at a point ‘navigable for barges’, was a ‘considerable mart for agricultural produce’, from which ‘vast quantities of corn and butter’ were ‘transmitted to Waterford for exportation’. Charles William Bury, 1st earl of Charleville, retained complete control over the representation and management of its self-elected Protestant corporation of 13 burgesses, in whom the right of voting had been ‘exclusively vested’ by royal charter, 24 Dec. 1674.

The representation of Norwich was dictated by long-established rivalries in municipal politics, fluctuations in party funds and commercial considerations, notably the demise after 1825 of its textile industry, whose productivity consistently failed to match that of the Yorkshire manufactories. Norwich in 19th Cent. ed. C. Barringer, 119-60; PP (1835), xxvi. 379-430. As the banker Hudson Gurney* commented in 1832, Norwich voters were ‘not counted in ones or twos’. Norf.

Helston, a ‘thriving’ market and stannary town in the south-west of the county, on the London to Land’s End road, consisted chiefly of four ‘wide and well paved’ streets, which crossed ‘at right angles’. It was the focus for an extensive and fertile agricultural region to the south and east and a highly productive tin and copper mining district to the north and west, and its market was ‘justly ranked among the principal ones of Cornwall’.

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk’s second largest town and principal port, 19 miles south-east of Norwich and nine miles north of its rival, the Suffolk port of Lowestoft, had been ‘irregularly built’ on a narrow five-mile strip of land that created a haven between the North Sea and the estuaries of the Rivers Bure and Yare.

Mitchell was little more than a hamlet situated five miles south-east of Truro, consisting of ‘between 20 and 30 houses’ of which ‘about one-half’ were inhabited. The borough limits were not clearly defined but encompassed ‘considerable’ portions of the parishes of Newlyn and St. Enoder, an ‘almost entirely ... agricultural and mining district’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 170; PP (1830-1), x. 99; (1831-2), xxxvi.

County Dublin, the small area of mostly coastal plain enclosing the metropolis, had a population of only about 150,000 (excluding the city) in 1821. Apart from Dublin itself, which naturally dominated local affairs, and its suburb of Kilmainham, where county elections were held, the main towns were the disfranchised boroughs of Newcastle and Swords, the ports of Dunleary and Howth, and the fishing villages of Rush and Skerries, near Balbriggan in the north-east.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.