Though challenged for pre-eminence in east Kent by Canterbury,P. Clark, Eng. Prov. Soc. 311. Maidstone remained the official county town of Kent. A royal manor, it was also the county’s principal market town, LR2/219, f. 63; P. Clark and L. Murfin, Hist. Maidstone, 44. and both quarter sessions and parliamentary elections were held at nearby Penenden Heath.
Four miles north-east of King’s Lynn, Rising had during the Middle Ages been an important and prosperous coastal town, dominated by an enormous castle (from which it took its name).J.M. Wilson, Imperial Gazetteer of Eng. and Wales, i. 380; National Gazetteer of Eng. and Wales, iii. 514-15. However, it fell into decay as gradual silting caused the sea to retreat. By the mid-sixteenth century the castle was in ruins and the town had been eclipsed by King’s Lynn. W. Camden, Britannia, i.
Norfolk in the early seventeenth century boasted the second largest city in England (Norwich) as well as two major seaports (Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn). It was also the centre of the new drapery trade, with a large, fertile hinterland criss-crossed with navigable waterways.A.H. Smith, County and Ct. 1-20; R.W. Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, ch. 1. Thomas Fuller noted that ‘all England may be carved out of Norfolk’, T. Fuller, Worthies, ii.
Oxfordshire was described by William Camden as a ‘rich and fertile county’; but it had been troubled by a recent history of agrarian protest against enclosures.W. Camden, Britannia (1772), i. 291. The armed uprising of 1596 was targeted against the modernizing activities of landlords such as Sir William Spencer†; a decade later rumours that Oxfordshire labourers intended to join the Northamptonshire ‘Diggers’ came to nothing, perhaps because the preceding episode had been harshly suppressed. STAC 8/297/4; J. Walter, ‘The Oxon. Rising of 1596’, P and P, clxx.
Set on the west bank of the Tiddy, a few miles upstream from Plymouth Sound, St. Germans existed by 936, when its church became the cathedral of the Anglo-Saxon diocese of Cornwall. Although the bishops relocated to Devon in 1042, St. Germans Priory remained an important religious site during the Middle Ages, affording the town much of its prestige and prosperity. The decline which set in after the monastery’s dissolution in 1539 was noted at the end of the century by Richard Carew†: ‘the church town mustereth many inhabitants and sundry ruins, but little wealth’.
A Saxon foundation sited at one of the main crossing points on the upper Ouse, Bedford was sufficiently wealthy to build a stone bridge in the twelfth century, paid the surprisingly large sum of £40 for its fee-farm from 1190, and returned two Members to Parliament from 1295. The fee-farm was reduced in 1440 on the ground that a new bridge five miles down river at Great Barford had affected its road traffic, but the town revived under the Tudors, and had a population of about 1,500 by 1603.J. Godber, Hist. Beds. 52-6; VCH Beds. iii. 1-3; W.M.
Early seventeenth-century Warwickshire was a divided community, geographically and socially. The southern third of the county, with its ‘fertile fields of corn and verdant pastures’, was notable for its settled communities and traditional manorial structures. To the north, however, lay a heavily wooded region, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, where a more mobile population combined agricultural pursuits with industrial enterprise, particularly around the north-eastern coalfields and the thriving iron-works of Birmingham.
The largest port on Yorkshire’s North Sea coast, numbering about 450 households, Scarborough was governed by two bailiffs, two coroners (by convention, the retiring bailiffs), four chamberlains and 36 common councillors. VCH N. Riding, ii. 551; J.B. Baker, Hist. Scarbrough, 28, 45, 195. The corporation was dominated by merchants and shopkeepers, the most prominent of which, the Thompson family, provided one of the bailiffs at least 18 times between 1603-40; only two non-residents held municipal office during this period. From corp.
Situated close to the River Adur on the boundary between the downland and wealden regions of Sussex, Steyning remained an important market town in this period, with a significant tanning and leather industry. However, as a port it, like Bramber, had long been eclipsed by New Shoreham, situated at the mouth of the river. The population grew from about 300 in 1565 to roughly 1,000 by the early 1640s. VCH Suss. vi. pt. 1, pp. 220-1, 234; J. Pennington and J. Sleight, ‘Steyning Town and its Trades 1559-1787’, Suss. Arch. Colls. cxxx.
Situated four miles from the sea on the west bank of the River Adur, Bramber gave its name to one of the six rapes of Sussex, at a time when it was presumably the principal settlement in the Adur valley. Its prosperity was not of long duration as a port: New Shoreham, situated at the mouth of the river, replaced it and by 1595 it had ceased even to be a market town.
