In an Elizabethan account of Glamorgan towns, Cardiff was ‘the chiefest and therefore accounted the shire town’. Except where it bordered the River Taff, it was a walled town, and with a certain amount of local chauvinism Rice Merrick described it as ‘very well compacted, beautified with many fair houses and large streets’, on one of which stood ‘a fair town hall’. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.
Glamorgan’s topography made an impression on every visitor, its coastal plain of Y Fro (the vale of Glamorgan) in sharp contrast to the more northerly hills of Y Blaenau. The portway, the main road followed westwards from Cardiff, marked roughly the borderlands where hills and vale met, ‘the ‘border vale’ as conceptualized by modern historians. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.
Swansea only became a parliamentary borough in its own right for Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. Previously it had been a contributory borough to the Cardiff constituency. It subsequently resumed this role until 1832, when it was again permitted to return its own Member under the Reform Act. The privilege of returning an MP was an addition by virtue of a grant of 1658 to a new charter bestowed on the town in 1656.