Plympton Erle grew up around a castle belonging to the earls of Devon, who granted the settlement’s first borough charter in 1194. It became a coinage town, a centre for processing Dartmoor tin, in 1328, but local production of this metal declined in the late medieval period, when Plympton was also outstripped economically by the nearby port of Plymouth. By the early seventeenth century the castle had fallen into decay, though the townsfolk still enjoyed a measure of prosperity.
Founded by a half-brother of William the Conqueror, Launceston grew up around Dunheved castle, which the Normans built to control the principal northern crossing of the Tamar, Cornwall’s eastern border. The town’s name referred originally to a neighbouring settlement whose population was encouraged to move to the new citadel, and even in the early seventeenth century the parliamentary borough’s official designation remained Dunheved alias Launceston. R. and O.B. Peter, Launceston and Dunheved, 68, 70; I.D. Spreadbury, Castles in Cornw. 17; C.
Lostwithiel was probably founded around the late twelfth century by the Cardinham family, lords of the nearby castle of Restormel, who provided the settlement with its earliest charter. Located on a then navigable stretch of the Fowey river, and near to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Blackmoor, the town enjoyed early prosperity as a prime distribution-point for the tin trade.
Situated on a hill overlooking the confluence of the rivers Blackwater and Chelmer, Maldon was an ancient port town of approximately 1,000 inhabitants. W.J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon, 23. Unlike Colchester or nearby Witham, it failed to develop a significant textile industry, Ibid. 12-13, 109. and its trade with the Continent was on a decidedly small scale. E190/598/14. Though well placed to exploit the North Sea fisheries, Maldon possesed very few vessels.
Newport sprang up in the shadow of Launceston Priory, and seems to have taken its name from one of the monastery’s gateways. In existence by 1274, little more is known about it until 1529, when it was enfranchised. In terms of geography and administration, Newport was the least impressive of the seventeenth-century Cornish parliamentary boroughs. Effectively just a suburb of Launceston, separated from its larger neighbour by only a minor tributary of the Tamar, the village lacked the most basic structures of self-government.
Located in the extreme west of Dorset, Lyme Regis received its first charter in 1284, and sent Members to the Model Parliament. In the early seventeenth century, notwithstanding the town’s frequent pleas of poverty, it was a flourishing community of nearly 2,000 people, ‘well-built, and enriched by the conveniency of the Cobb, which is an harbour that the inhabitants with much industry and charge have built in the sea’. The charges levied for maintenance of the Cobb were confirmed by statute in 1585.
Founded by the Romans at the first easy crossing place above the mouth of the Severn, Gloucester remained ‘at the centre of a communication network stretching north-south along the Severn valley and east-west towards London and Wales’. It suffered from the general decline in the textile industries, but was still the prosperous marketing centre for grain from the vales of Berkeley, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, shipping wheat and malt to Bristol, the West Country, Wales and Ireland. Indeed, it managed to support a dozen great inns and a score of lawyers. P.
Few counties could vie with Gloucestershire in the antiquity of its families. The Berkeleys, the Tracys and the Poyntzes were all well established before the Plantagenets. Throughout the Jacobean period, though not under Elizabeth, the county’s dominant electoral interest was that of the Berkeleys. Henry, 7th Lord Berkeley was a popular local figure, and on James’s accession, doubtless with the aid of his former brother-in-law, Lord Henry Howard, he became Gloucestershire’s lord lieutenant.
At the end of the sixteenth century Derby had a population of between 2,000-2,500 with clothworking as its staple industry.E. Lord, ‘Trespassers and Debtors: Derby at the end of the Sixteenth Century’, Derbys. Arch. Jnl. cxvii. 97. It was a royal borough before the Conquest, though its first surviving charter dates only from 1204. R. Simpson, Coll. of Fragments Illustrative of Hist. and Antiqs. of Derby, 28. Since 1337 the town had been governed by two bailiffs, chosen annually by the freemen.
The mouth of the River Fowey forms the best natural harbour on the English coast between Plymouth and Falmouth. This fact, combined with Fowey’s close proximity to the duchy of Cornwall’s tin coining centre at Lostwithiel, explains the town’s rise in the later middle ages as a base for trade, piracy and, on occasion, military expeditions.
