For administrative purposes Lincolnshire was parcelled into three sub-divisions; Lindsey to the north, Kesteven to the south-west, and Holland, the area of coastal marshlands surrounding the Wash, in the south-east. Although each had separate commissions of the peace, this does not appear to have produced any regular pattern in the geographical distribution of knights of the shire during the early Stuart period. Elections were held at Lincoln Castle.
Grantham, a market and postal town on the Great North Road, was incorporated in 1463 and first sent representatives to Parliament in 1467.E. Turnor, Colls. for Hist. Grantham, 56. The corporation consisted of one annually elected alderman and 12 ‘comburgesses’.G.H. Martin, Charters of Grantham, 14-16, 24-47; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Cent. Lincs. 32-3. However, the town also remained under manorial rule, and after the accession of James I it became part of Anne of Denmark’s dower.B.
The 1536 Act of Union enfranchised the shire town of each Welsh county except Merioneth; in the case of Flintshire, representation was extended to include four other boroughs, only one of which, Rhuddlan, was of any consequence.SR, iii.
Thirsk had returned Members to the Parliament of 1295, but was not permanently enfranchised until the reign of Edward VI, shortly after the Crown acquired former monastic property within the town.
A Saxon foundation, sited on Ermine Street where it crossed the River Ouse, Huntingdon was a thriving centre of perhaps 2,000 people in 1086. Chartered in 1205 and served by 16 churches in 1291, its prosperity was eroded by the rise of nearby St. Ives and St. Neots, which took over the local markets in livestock and grain respectively, so that by 1603, with only four churches and a population of about 750, the borough was of little consequence.
Morpeth grew up in the shadow of the Norman castle constructed to guard the Great North Road’s crossing over the River Wansbeck. The town was granted a fair and market in 1199, and achieved borough status by 1382. In the early seventeenth century Morpeth boasted a tollbooth, a moot-hall and a grammar school. A post-town on the main route from the Scottish border to London, it was a regular meeting-place for Northumberland’s magistrates and deputy lieutenants.
Truro sprang up in the early twelfth century at the juncture of two major roads and a navigable tributary of Falmouth Haven, and began sending burgesses to Parliament in 1295. A key factor in the borough’s development was its close proximity to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Tywarnhaile. From around 1300 Truro was west Cornwall’s principal location for ‘coinage’, the obligatory pre-sale testing of the metal’s purity, and when tin production in this part of the county dramatically increased in the sixteenth century the town’s prosperity rose commensurately.
The county town, Brecon was a fairly prosperous market town located in the centre of post-union Breconshire at the confluence of the Honddu and the Usk. Its liberties ran in a rough ellipse outside the walled town some three miles in length and one mile in width, but they also comprehended the detached ward of Llywel, some 11 miles to the east. In the early seventeenth century Brecon’s population numbered around 2,000, making it one of the largest of early modern Wales’s small urban centres. N.M. Powell, Urban Hist. xxxii.
Cambridge became a royal borough under Henry I and returned Members to Parliament from at least 1295, but the town was not formally incorporated until 1605. The composition of the town assembly was not specified in the charter of incorporation, nor was the extent of the franchise.F.W. Maitland and M. Bateson, Camb. Bor. Charters, 116-37. Until 1625, when the corporation resolved that all freemen could vote, Cambridge had one of the most unusual election procedures in the country.
A preponderantly rural county supporting a typical East Midland mixture of sheep and corn farming, with grazing for cattle along the Ouse valley, Bedfordshire’s chief products were barley, for malting; woollen yarn for the worsted weavers of Norwich; and butter, sold to London dealers at Woburn.BEDFORD; Agrarian Hist. of Eng. and Wales ed. J. Thirsk, iv. 491; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.
