The notoriously bad Wealden roads meant that Sussex was more isolated from London than its geographical proximity would suggest and ensured that the assizes were usually held at East Grinstead, near the Surrey border. For most administrative purposes the county was divided between its eastern and western parts.
The West Sussex market town of Midhurst, situated 11 miles north of Chichester, was an ancient but unincorporated borough, ownership of which was attached to the adjacent manor of Cowdray. It was governed by a bailiff, who was elected by the burgage-holders, seven of whom also enjoyed the right to collect the market tolls and appoint the steward of the borough’s manorial court. The borough first returned Members of Parliament in 1301, but was only consistently represented from 1382.
Founded in 1284 and enlarged in 1541, Flintshire returned a knight of the shire and a burgess to Parliament from 1542. R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415, pp. 364-5; SR, iii. 849. Although one of the smallest counties in Wales, it was among the least mountainous, and its population, perhaps 20,000 in 1600, was larger than that of Merioneth, Anglesey or Radnor. L.E. Owen, ‘Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), pp.
Probably founded by the Normans in about 1090, Caer yn Arfon [the fort in Arfon cantref] quickly reverted to Welsh control until its capture by Edward I, whose heir, the first Plantagenet prince of Wales, was born there in 1284. In the same year the Statute of Rhuddlan established the new town as the administrative centre of the principality of North Wales; hence Sir John Wynn’s† description of the inhabitants as ‘the lawyers of Caernarvon’. Afer a slow start, the town grew under the Tudors, having a population of perhaps 1,000 in 1600.
Sited at the eastern end of the Menai straits, Beaumaris was the last of the Welsh fortresses to be founded by Edward I. Sacked and then captured by Owen Glynd?r in 1403-5, it was quickly repaired. By the sixteenth century the borough, which commanded ‘a fair, safe, and capacious haven and road’, had become the main port on the north coast of Wales, trading with Lancashire for grain, general merchandise from Chester and salt and wine from France, Ireland and Scotland.I. Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, 78-80; E.A. Lewis, Medieval Bors. Snowdonia, 204, 206; L.
The English plantation borough of New Radnor had taken over the mantle of its declining neighbour, Old Radnor, in the thirteenth century. It suffered badly during the Glynd?r rebellion, and did not receive a full charter until 1562, when the townsmen apparently joined with the Anglesey borough of Beaumaris to lobby for incorporation. The charter provided for a council of 25 capital burgesses, from which a bailiff and two aldermen were selected annually.
Radnorshire was created from an agglomeration of several marcher lordships by the Act of Union of 1536. As practically all of these territories had been held by the monarch, the Crown enjoyed an enduring presence in the post-Union shire, but there is no evidence that this landholding was ever translated into electoral influence. Under the second union statute of 1543 the venue of the county court was meant to alternate between Presteigne and New Radnor.
Early Stuart Shropshire enjoyed a rapidly expanding agricultural economy: the lowland plains in the north produced beef and cheese, while the southern hills specialized in high-grade wool. Meanwhile, Ludlow’s dwindling broadcloth industry was surpassed by Shrewsbury’s booming trade in the finishing of Welsh cottons; the coal measures at Broseley began to be exploited on an industrial scale; and the iron industry on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire spilled over into the eastern fringes of the shire.
Founded at the mouth of the River Adur in the eleventh century, New Shoreham soon became one of the most important of the Channel ports, though it suffered a severe decline in the fourteenth century. In the late sixteenth century Camden reported that ‘the greatest part’ of it was ‘ruined and under water, and the commodiousness of its port … wholly taken away’, and one of its own Jacobean Members called it ‘a town as poor and poorer than any in the realm’. It was nonetheless then entering upon a new period of prosperity.
Situated in north-west Staffordshire, close to the borders with Cheshire and Shropshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme grew up around a castle built in the 1140s in a lake fed by Lyme Brook, a tributary of the Trent. The town, which lay on the main road from London to the north-west, hosted a weekly market, three annual fairs, and perhaps also a separate corn market. VCH Staffs. viii. 2, 45, 47; Pape, 1. In the seventeenth century the dominant industry was the making of felt hats, but iron-working and tanning were also important. VCH Staffs. viii.
