Dorset, on the south coast, was not defined by notable geographical features, save for the English Channel itself. Primarily an agricultural and pastoral county, in this period it had few large towns (the most highly populated being Bridport), and no ports comparable in either size or the volume of their trade to Exeter and Dartmouth to the west (in Devon), and Southampton to the east (in Hampshire).
Situated on the estuary of the river Dart, the town of Totnes had a long history, and even in the Anglo-Saxon period had been of some importance. It was one of the fortified burghs of Wessex, and in the tenth century came to house one of the royal mints. After the Conquest, the Normans established their control over the town with a castle, the remains of which still survive, and for a further two centuries Totnes remained a prosperous centre of commerce.
Although the site of the medieval borough of Tavistock had been settled in the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, the borough principally owed its existence to the Benedictine abbey founded there in the tenth century, for it was one of the twelfth-century heads of this house who created the town by separating out part of the abbey’s manor of Hurdwick. For much of the Middle Ages the abbey received an annual rent of over £7 from the borough, the economic status of which had been increased by successive abbots’ grants in 1105 of a weekly market and in 1116 of an annual fair on the feast day of St.
In common with many of their south Devon neighbours, the townsmen of Plympton claimed an illustrious ancestry: according to a legend current by the second half of the fifteenth century, when it was recorded by the antiquary John Rous, it had been at Plympton that a group of Trojan refugees led by Brutus had first landed in the islands that came to be called after him, and had encountered the indigenous race of giants. Most of these had been exterminated by a hail of arrows, but their leader, Gogmagog, had been challenged to single combat by one of the refugees, named Corineus.
According to a legend recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britannie, Plymouth had been the site of the battle between Corineus, a companion of the Trojan refugee Brutus who had settled Britain, and the giant Gogmagog. The tradition was kept alive in the fifteenth century by the burgesses, who paid ‘for þe renewyng of þe pyctur of Gogmagog a pon þe howe’, and its periodic cleaning. Plymouth Mun. Recs. ed.
According to civic legend, Exeter, said to have been originally called ‘Penholtkeyre’, was ‘the most or one of the most auncion cite’ of England. The details of its supposed foundation were lost even by the later Middle Ages, but it was said to have been a walled city even before the birth of Christ. In the first century A.D., it was claimed, Exeter had been besieged by the Emperor Vespasian for a period of eight days, but had held out, causing the Emperor instead to turn his attention to Jerusalem.
One of the principal Channel ports of western England, Dartmouth was in fact a conglomeration of three smaller settlements on the estuary of the river Dart, which even in the fifteenth century continued to be known as Clifton-Dartmouth and Hardness, and by the 1330s the population had expanded into a further suburb known as Southtown. Following the ravages of the Black Death, the population recovered fairly rapidly, and in 1377 some 683 adults were assessed for the poll tax in Dartmouth and Southtown.
Barnstaple was one of Devon’s most ancient parliamentary boroughs, having sent representatives to all of Edward I’s Parliaments for which returns are extant. Unlike the inhabitants of late medieval Exeter or Plymouth, the burgesses did not seek their origins in a mythical Trojan or Roman past, but instead looked in more recent history to King Athelstan as their first benefactor: nevertheless, by the fifteenth century Athelstan’s charter, which the burgesses claimed to have lost, had adopted quasi-mythical status.
The county of Devon which spanned the central third of England’s south-western peninsula owed its character in no small degree to its long northern and southern coastlines. Separated from Cornwall by the river Tamar to the west, and from Somerset and Dorset by Exmoor and the Blackdown hills to the east, its coastline on the English Channel to the south and the Irish Sea to the north was intersected by the estuaries of the rivers Exe, Teign, Dart, Tamar, Torridge and Taw, at whose mouths as well as further inland prosperous harbour towns developed.
For a county town, Derby was small, with a population of only about 1,000, about half that of nearby Nottingham. The records of the poll tax of 1377 suggest that in a list of the 42 most important English boroughs it ranked as low as 35th. It did not achieve formal incorporation until 1612, and in the period under review here it was constitutionally less developed than the neighbouring county towns of Nottingham and Leicester. I.S.W. Blanchard, ‘Economic Change in Derbys.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1967), 317; The Commons 1604-29, ii.
