Commons 1604-1629

Situated on a strategic promontory where the River Swale emerges from the Pennines, Richmond was founded in 1071 as the administrative centre of the vast honour of Richmond. The town became the focal point for the distribution of corn from the Vale of York to the Dales, and for the collection of Pennine wool for export through Newcastle, Hartlepool and Hull. The town’s population reached 1,600 in 1563, but was thereafter affected by repeated plague epidemics, the worst of which, in 1597-8, carried off at least 1,050 victims.R.T. Fieldhouse and B. Jennings, Hist.

St. Ives derives its name from a fifth-century Irish missionary, St. Ia, whose shrine stood in the church there until the Reformation. The peninsula which protects St Ives’s harbour from the Bristol Channel attracted settlement from prehistoric times, but the town developed slowly, lacking its own market until the late fifteenth century, and achieving full parochial status only in 1576. Some 20 years later Carew described it as ‘of mean plight’, and in need of a new pier.

Situated on a rocky outcrop in the centre of Wiltshire, Devizes was described by Thomas Fuller in the mid-seventeenth century as ‘the best and biggest town for trading’ in the county next to Salisbury. VCH Wilts. x. 225; T. Fuller, Worthies of Eng. ed. J. Freeman, 609-10. The town was celebrated for its twice-weekly markets, at which corn, wool, yarn, fish, butter and cheese were sold, VCH Wilts. x. 264; E. Bradby, Bk. of Devizes, 51; Wilts. Arch. Mag. i.

Eye is situated in ‘High Suffolk’, the predominantly pastoral region to the north of the county, which takes its name from the honour of ‘Heya’ or Eye, a Crown possession from the mid-sixteenth century. It allegedly first received privileges as early as the reign of King John, but was not incorporated until 1575, under the name of ‘Heya alias Eye’, a formula still sometimes used in the election indentures of the early seventeenth century.

A county of striking geographical diversity, Kent is bisected from west to east by the chalk ridge known as the North Downs, which provided the best agricultural land in the shire, and was used mainly to grow wheat, the county’s chief crop.C.W. Chalklin, Seventeenth-Century Kent, 9; P. Clark, Eng. Prov. Soc. 6. Running parallel with the chalk ridge, sloping southwards and slightly lower, is a narrower sandstone ridge that in the early seventeenth century mainly lay wild as heath or woodland.

Founded by the Romans, Exeter flourished through its strategic location on the River Exe, which provided ready access to both the English Channel and most of Devon. Probably England’s fourth largest provincial town at the start of the seventeenth century, with a population of around 9,000, it played host to the Devon assizes and Admiralty court, while its cathedral served a diocese covering both Devon and Cornwall. W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640, pp. 6, 8; P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500-1700, p.

Described by Thomas Fuller in 1662 as a county ‘perfect in profit and pleasure’,Fuller’s Worthies ed. R. Barber, 36. Berkshire in the early seventeenth century was one of the wealthiest shires in England, as well as being one of the smallest. It owed its prosperity primarily to the fertility of its two principal agricultural districts, the Vale of White Horse, in the north, and the Vale of Kennet, in the south; the cloth industry centred on Reading and Newbury, so vigorous in the sixteenth century, was badly affected by the trade depression of the 1620s.

The market town of Arundel, in west Sussex, grew up at the lowest point that the river Arun could be bridged. According to a visitor in the 1630s it was ‘relieved with a convenient pretty haven, and graced with an ancient, strong and stately castle’. VCH Suss. v. pt. 1, p. 10; ‘Relation of a Short Survey of the Western Counties’ ed. L.G. Wickham Legg Cam. Misc. xvi (Cam. Soc. ser. 3. lii), pt. 3, p. 30. Despite a lack of social amenities, relatively good communications made it the regular venue for the West Sussex Epiphany sessions. A.

Monmouthshire was created in 1536 by joining the ancient kingdom of Gwent with the cantref of Gwynll?g. The new shire had an anomalous position, however, for although omitted from the jurisdiction of the Welsh Great Sessions courts, placed in the Oxford assize circuit and given two county Members in Parliament like other English counties, it was culturally and linguistically still very much Welsh in character, and many contemporaries continued to consider it part of Wales. A. Clark, Story of Mon. i. 133-4; Law and Disorder in Tudor Mon. ed. B. Howell, pp.

Caernarvonshire is divided into three by the massif of Mount Snowdon: to the east, the Creuddyn peninsula and the Conway valley; Arfon and Arllechwedd Isaf along the Menai Strait to the north; and Eifionydd and the Llŷn peninsula to the south and west. During the early modern period the shire’s economy was of the conventional upland type, mixing subsistence crops of rye and barley with the commercial farming of livestock, a combination which left the freeholders’ ability to meet tax demands heavily dependent upon the state of the cattle trade.