Enveloped by the much larger counties of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, Rutland, at some 97,000 acres, was comfortably the smallest of England’s ancient counties, with Middlesex, the next smallest, not far from twice its size. It was also distinctive for another reason: no other county in England was so dominated territorially by the lands of the greater baronage. This is graphically illustrated by the tax returns of 1412.
The history of Oxford in the later Middle Ages is one of decline, even though it was still by far the biggest and most important town in the middle Thames valley and the seat of the oldest university in the realm. According to one estimate, there were some 3,500 townsmen in 1377; according to another, the population of Oxford might not have exceeded 3,000 in the early 1500s. Whatever the true figures, the municipal authorities were regularly to complain about depopulation in the fifteenth century.
Unspectacular in landscape, Oxfordshire was both fertile and relatively wealthy in comparison to most other shires. The county town of Oxford was by far the biggest and most important urban settlement in the middle Thames valley, even if the later medieval period witnessed a decline in its population and a shift in its economy from traditional manufacturing and commerce to the provision of goods and services to the university of which it was the seat. VCH Oxon. iii. 16-17; iv. 15, 45, 47; Hist. Univ. Oxford, iii. ed. McConica, 71, 73.
To John Leland, the Tudor antiquary, Nottingham was ‘a great market town’. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 16. As the location of a major royal castle, in which the Nottinghamshire county court was convened and the assizes held, and as an important outlet for wool produced in its hinterland, it was certainly an important administrative and commercial centre. With a population probably in excess of 2,000, it was twice as populous as nearby Derby. Its economic fortunes in the period under review are, however, a matter of debate.
Nottinghamshire was in the lower middle rank of counties both in respect of size and wealth. With about 540,000 acres it ranked 26th of the 39 English counties, somewhat smaller than its neighbour Derbyshire, with which it was twinned for administrative purposes by the Crown. Without, however, the extensive tracts of high ground that characterized its neighbour, it was richer. In the subsidy returns of 1451, it ranked, in total assessment, 16th of the 29 counties for which returns survive, against Derbyshire’s 24th. S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist.
The strategic importance of the town and port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne had been recognized since Roman times, and by the early twelfth century a sizeable community had developed around the site of the Norman castle. From 1135, when the townsmen received their first charter, royal grants extended the jurisdiction of Newcastle’s merchants, and in 1213 King John granted the town to its residents to hold at an annual fee farm of £100. The wars with Scotland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries further increased the town’s importance yet also brought closer royal scrutiny.
Northumberland, at nearly 1,300,000 acres, is the fifth largest of England’s ancient counties, stretching some 70 miles at its greatest length and 50 miles at its greatest width. Its borders are largely defined by natural frontiers with the North Sea to the east, the Cheviot Hills to the north, and the northern end of the Pennine Chain and the river Tyne to the west and south. S.R. Haselhurst, Northumb.
The near complete loss of Northampton’s records in the great fire of 1675 puts its fifteenth-century history beyond satisfactory reconstruction. The peak of the town’s medieval prosperity had probably been reached in the first years of the fourteenth century, and thereafter followed a long but ill-documented period of decline.
Northamptonshire borders more counties than any other in England, namely nine (counting clockwise from the north, Rutland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire). As one would expect in the Midlands, no very defined physical boundaries divides it from these neighbours, although the rivers Welland and Nene form part of its northern and eastern boundaries.
One of the most important cities in late medieval England, Norwich was a centre for regional commerce, the seat of an episcopal see, an administrative base for the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and the venue for elections to Parliament of Norfolk’s knights of the shire. Its walls enclosed nearly a square mile in area, making it topographically nearly as large as London, although its population was about a quarter of that of the capital. There were some 6,000 people living there in 1400 – about 25 per cent of the pre-Black Death figure – but this number grew during the fifteenth century.
