Commons 1604-1629

A small town in south-west Wiltshire lying on the principal road between Warminster and Salisbury, Heytesbury was, like many settlements in the region, dependent upon the cloth trade. As part of the royal forest of Selwood, there was also some trade in timber. At its heyday in the late Middle Ages the town had a market, and two annual fairs.E.D. Ginever, Ancient Wilts. Village of Heytesbury, 23-5; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii. 283. Enfranchised as a proprietary borough in 1449, it had never been incorporated.R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts.

Although a flourishing market town which returned Members from 1295, Bletchingley was never incorporated and had no governing body other than the manorial court. There was a bailiff but he was not a public officer, being described in 1624 as ‘only a rent-gatherer’ for the lord of the manor. The returning officer was the sheriff, who exchanged indentures with the burgage-holders – the resident owners of property by burgage tenure – who held the franchise. The manor of Bletchingley was purchased by William Howard, 1st Lord Howard of Effingham, in 1560.

A ‘demi-island … besieged … with the ocean’, early seventeenth-century Cornwall largely depended economically on its proximity to the shipping routes between Wales, Ireland, Spain, France and the Netherlands. Despite its poor agricultural land and insubstantial towns, this most westerly of English counties boasted two major trading commodities. The waters around its extensive coastline teemed with pilchards, the bulk of most catches being packed for sale in France and Spain. Equally significant was the mining of tin, England’s most important export after cloth at this period.

Lichfield lies in south-east Staffordshire, between the high ground of Cannock Chase to the west and the Tame valley to the east. The origins of its name are obscure. Once thought to signify ‘a field of corpses’, after the massacre of early Christians by the Romans, a more likely meaning is ‘a common pasture in (or beside) a grey wood’.T. Harwood, Hist. and Antiqs. of Lichfield, 2; VCH Staffs. xiv.

Writs were issued to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge for the Parliament of 1301, and after the failure of several petitions during the reign of Elizabeth they were re-enfranchised by letters patent on 12 Mar. 1604, exactly a week before the meeting of the first Parliament called by James I.OR; K. Fincham, ‘Oxf. and the Early Stuart Polity’, Hist. Oxf. Univ. iv: Seventeenth-Cent. Oxf. ed. N. Tyacke, 196-9; M.B. Rex, Univ. Representation in Eng. 1604-90, pp.

Bewdley is situated where the River Severn meets the Forest of Wyre as it enters north-western Worcestershire. ‘Not anciently famous’, as a contemporary remarked, the town owed its rise to prominence to the construction of the bridge over the Severn in the mid-fifteenth century. The bridge wardens, who were responsible for the upkeep of bridge, managed the finances of the borough. Survey of Worcs. by Thomas Habington ed. J. Amphlett (Worcs. Hist Soc. 1893-5), i. 530-2; P. Styles, ‘Corporation of Bewdley under the later Stuarts’, in P. Styles, Studies in Seventeenth-Cent.

Ludlow Castle was built at the end of the eleventh century on high ground by a crossing of the River Teme, and the town first appears in Exchequer records in 1169. A borough by prescription, municipal government was established over 150 years before the first surviving charter, of 1449, which confirmed the existing structure of two bailiffs, drawn from a corporation of 12 aldermen and 25 common councillors.

According to the terms of the 1536 Act of Union, every Welsh county (except Merioneth) was to have an MP returned by the burgesses of all the shire’s chartered boroughs. This enfranchised six towns in the east of Montgomeryshire, along the upper reaches of the Severn valley. Two of these, Llanfyllin and Welshpool, were prosperous market towns with substantial populations of 1,000 each.

Early modern Merioneth was the poorest and most isolated shire in Wales, a fact which induced the architects of the 1536 Act of Union to deny the county a borough seat in Parliament. Its population of about 19,500 was smaller than any except Anglesey and Radnor, and the assessment quotas imposed upon the county after 1640 were lower than elsewhere.

Leominster was the market centre for a farming area famed for the quality of its wool, considered the best in the country, which was used to make high quality cloth in Worcester, Coventry, Ludlow, Gloucester, Hereford and Leominster itself. M. Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612), p. 105; E. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern Eng. 20-1; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.