Commons 1604-1629

Buckinghamshire, a grazing county, was geographically divided into two distinct regions, with the ‘mountainous, or rather hilly’ Chilterns to the south-east, and the Vale to the north.W. Camden, Britannia (1722), i. 308. During the medieval period quarter sessions and most of the county’s administrative functions had migrated away from the nominal capital, Buckingham, situated in the north-west, to the more centrally located and prosperous town of Aylesbury, where they remained throughout the early Stuart period.VCH Bucks. iv.

Originally an Anglo-Saxon foundation, Taunton was dominated throughout the Middle Ages by the bishops of Winchester, who owned the principal manor of Taunton Dean. J. Toulmin, Hist. Taunton ed. J. Savage, 18, 47. Accordingly, at the start of the seventeenth century, the town’s considerable economic prosperity and regional importance contrasted sharply with its primitive municipal government.

Somerset was a wealthy and exceptionally populous county with a wide range of economic interests. The vale of Taunton Deane was well known for its cattle; and inferior Irish imports were resented less as competition than as a threat to the breed. The shire’s most celebrated product, Cheddar cheese, was used by local politicians to gratify their metropolitan contacts.

The four contributory towns of the Denbigh Boroughs seat were all founded in the aftermath of the conquest of 1282 and prospered to varying degrees as centres of clothmaking and tanning. The boroughs gradually declined under the Tudors with the movement of the cloth industry into the countryside and the shift of the staple for Welsh cloth to Oswestry.

Denbighshire was created by the 1536 Act of Union, which amalgamated those of the Marcher lordships of North Wales that had not already been assigned to existing shires. However, the lordship of Mold and the parishes of Hawarden and St. Asaph were surrendered to Flintshire only five years later.SR, iii. 568, 849; G. Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c.1415-1642, pp.

Early Stuart Cambridgeshire was, in many respects, two counties in one. The northern hundreds of Wisbech and Witchford comprised the Isle of Ely, a thinly populated area of fenland, large parts of which were wholly inundated during winter, so that, as Camden observed in 1637, it ‘resembleth in some sort a very sea’. South of the Ouse, fen gradually gave way to chalk and clay uplands, most of which was flat and laid out into fields for growing corn and saffron.

Dominated by its Norman keep and cathedral, and bounded by medieval walls and the meandering River Wensum, Norwich was the second largest city after London, and one of the major provincial capitals of England. It boasted over 30 churches, and supported a growing population, which rose from about 12,000 in the 1580s to approximately 20,000 in 1620.J.T. Evans, Seventeenth Cent. Norwich, 4-5; P. Corfield, ‘Provincial Capital of Norwich’, Crisis and Order in Eng. Towns ed. P. Clark and P.

A low-lying, though comparatively sparsely populated island off the north coast of Wales, Anglesey was commended by the Beaumaris-born merchant Lewes Roberts as ‘having plenty of all food and other provision necessary to preserve the life of man, out of which is yearly sent 3,000 head of cattle to supply the wants of other countries adjoining, together with a good quantity of corn, butter, cheese’.L. Roberts, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (1638/9), pp. 219-20; Welsh Port Books, 1550-1603 (Cymmrodorion Soc. rec. ser. xii), pp. xix-xxxviii; Agrarian. Hist. Eng.

Pembrokeshire was among the smallest of the Welsh counties, having been reduced in size by statute in 1543. In 1626 its magistrates claimed, with only slight exaggeration, that it was nowhere more than 18 miles wide.SP16/33/57. However, the county’s smallness was not always appreciated.

Breconshire was one of the counties created by the Henrician Acts of Union, centred on the old lordship of Brecon, which had escheated to the Crown following the attainder of the 3rd duke of Buckingham (1523). The county was dominated by the upland ranges of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, one seventeenth-century author observing that the ‘high hills’ were ‘so thick together … in a manner of high bulwarks and compact joints of this county’ that it was a ‘fit place of refuge for the Britons’.Harl. 7017, f.