Commons 1604-1629

Described by Norden as ‘fat, fruitful and full of profitable things’, Essex was one of the richest counties in England. The south-eastern corner was famed for its dairy farming, particularly its huge cheeses, ‘wondered at for their massiveness and thickness’; corn production thrived in the north-west; and the area close to the Suffolk border abounded in hops. The cloth industry, concentrated at Colchester, Witham, Coggeshall, Braintree, Bocking, Halstead and Dedham, was also well represented, forming a sizeable part of the county’s economy.

Newtown, lying east of Yarmouth on the north coast of the Isle of Wight, was sustained mainly by its oyster fishery and saltern. VCH Hants, v. 265, 266, 267. Under the town’s seigneurial charter of 1393, which was confirmed in 1598, the governing body consisted of the mayor, town clerk, sergeant, constable, and an indeterminate number of ‘chief burgesses’, from whose number the mayor was chosen annually. I.o.W.

A settlement from Saxon times, Plymouth derived its prosperity from its strategic location at the head of one of the best natural harbours in south-west England. Its prominence as both a port and a royal naval base dated from the thirteenth century. During Elizabeth’s reign the town came into its own as the launch pad for English exploration of North America, and the regular departure point for military expeditions against Spain, not least the fleet that harried the 1588 Armada.

Tewkesbury lay in a peninsula of Gloucestershire, between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, at the confluence of the Severn and the Avon, and was described by Camden as ‘a large and fair town … famous for the making of woollen cloth and smart-biting mustard’. W. Camden, Britannia (1772) ed. E. Gibson, i.

New Windsor developed as a royal borough in the shadow of the castle. It received its first charter in 1277 and returned Members intermittently from 1302 and regularly from 1447.VCH Berks. iii. 58. A new charter issued in August 1603, on the ‘humble petition and request’ of Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, entrusted its government to some 30 brothers of the guildhall, ‘of the better and more approved inhabitants’, of whom 13 were to be styled ‘benchers’ and to include the ten aldermen from among whom the mayor was to be chosen. Ibid. 61; Bodl. Ashmole 1126, ff.

Situated close to the Buckinghamshire-Berkshire border ‘where the Thames winds itself round the bottom of the hills’, Great Marlow was characterized by Camden as ‘a pretty considerable town’, which owed its importance chiefly to the confluence of river traffic to London and good road connections to both Reading and Chipping Wycombe.W. Camden, Britannia (1722), i. 309; R. Gibbs, Bucks. Misc.

Grampound’s name derived from the bridge, or grand pont, built to carry the main road from St. Austell to Truro across the River Fal. Possibly founded by the earls of Cornwall, who granted it a market and fairs in 1332, Grampound was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337 by Edward III, who provided the borough with its first charter, and made its privileges conditional on payment to the duchy of a yearly fee-farm rent.

The town of Mitchell dates from at least the early thirteenth century, when a weekly market was first held. Its location on the main road from Launceston to St. Ives failed to guarantee prosperity, and the town had declined to little more than a village by the time it was enfranchised in 1547, probably at the request of the lord of the manor, Sir John Arundell† of Lanherne. C.G. Henderson, Essays in Cornish Hist. ed. A.L. Rowse and M.I. Henderson, 54-5; HP Commons, 1509-58, i.