Situated in south-eastern Glamorganshire, near the mouth of the River Taff, Cardiff flourished during the medieval period as the commercial centre of the lordship of Glamorgan,D.G. Walker, ‘Cardiff’, in Bors. of Medieval Wales ed. R.A. Griffiths, 125-6. but was sacked during Glynd?r rebellion and had not recovered its prosperity by the sixteenth century.W. Rees, Cardiff, 1-15; I.
Lincoln’s first extant charter dates back to 1157, and the town first returned MPs to Parliament in 1265. The borough was governed by a mayor, 12 aldermen, and a common council varying in size from about 30 to 48.W. de Gray Birch, Royal Charters of Lincoln, 1-2, 74; Lincs. AO, L1/1/1/4, f. 214. By the early seventeenth century the decay of the wool trade had left the city in economic decline despite its role as the county’s administrative centre.J.W.F.
Wigan’s history during this period is dominated by disputes between the corporation and the rector of the local parish, who was also the lord of the manor. At issue were such matters as tithes, market tolls, corn mills, charitable uses and, by 1628, control of the borough’s parliamentary elections.
Lancashire owed its special status as a semi-autonomous palatinate to the fact that it had once been a border territory, vulnerable to invasion from Ireland or Scotland.B. Coward, ‘Lieutenancy of Lancs. and Cheshire in the 16th and early 17th Centuries’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxix. 39-64; J.J. Bagley, Hist.
Described as ‘seated among most pleasant meadows and as plentiful corn fields, compassed almost round by rivers’, W. Camden, Britain (1610) trans. P. Holland, 618. Hereford is situated on the River Wye at the point where it could be forded at two separate places. M.D. Lobel, ‘Hereford’, in Historic Towns, ed. M.D. Lobel, 1. The population grew from about 4,000 in the 1520s to about 5,000 in 1700, even though Speed’s map suggests that by 1610 there had been little suburban development. A. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns, 73; P.
A small market town on the east bank of the River Nene, Higham Ferrers received a charter in 1556 which vested government of the town in a corporation consisting of a mayor, seven aldermen and 13 ‘capital burgesses’; it also conferred upon the borough the right to send one Member to Parliament.VCH Northants. iii. 269-71. Before 1640 the franchise rested exclusively with the corporation. Northants. RO, FH3467; A.N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers Election in 1640’, Northants. P and P (1958), pp.
East Grinstead, situated close to the Surrey border, was only 30 miles from London. Thanks to the notoriously impassable Sussex roads it accordingly shared the assizes with Horsham (and occasionally, in dry summers, with Lewes). In addition the town lay on the edge of Ashdown forest, a centre of the Wealden iron industry.A. Fletcher, County Community in Peace and War, 136; E. Straker, Wealden Iron, 238-41. An unincorporated borough, East Grinstead had returned Members since 1301, the right of election being in the inhabitant burgage-holders.
By the early seventeenth century Grimsby, long in decline as a port, had been eclipsed by Hull, across the Humber, in both commercial and political importance. Gervase Holles†, who was born in the town in 1607, observed that ‘the haven hath been heretofore commodious, [but] now decayed; the traffic good, now gone’. He described Grimsby as ‘mean and straggling by reason of depopulation, and the town very poor’.G. Holles, Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc.
Although the second smallest county in England, seventeenth-century Huntingdonshire contained three distinct agricultural economies: cattle fattening on the fens in the east; corn and sheep farming on the heavy clay uplands in the north and west; and a mixture of the two in the Ouse valley in the south.
Of the three coastal boroughs of Suffolk, only Aldeburgh retained any economic significance in the seventeenth century. Coastal erosion, which had swept away the greater part of Dunwich and blocked access to Orford, left it open to the sea with deep water at hand. Ships of 200 tons and upwards were built, a fishing fleet of 50 or 60 sail was dispatched every year to Icelandic waters and the Westmann Isles, and the port claimed a share in the Newcastle coal trade. CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 530, 532; APC, 1627, p. 2; HMC Var. iv. 290.
