Carmarthen was thought to be the largest town in Wales in the early seventeenth century, with a population thought to have been more than 2,000 by 1676. Compton Census, 465; Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 13. It served as a regional capital for south-west Wales, if not south Wales as a whole. This primacy reflected the strong agrarian economy of the town’s hinterland, based on dairying and the rearing of cattle, the essence of rural Carmarthenshire’s husbandry for centuries later.
The population of Pembrokeshire in 1670 has been estimated at around 32,000, making it the fifth largest of the Welsh counties by that measure. By size, however, it was small, its county leaders asserting in 1626 that it was at no point more than 18 miles wide. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion, 1959, 113; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Pembrokeshire’. Culturally, it was marked by a linguistic divide established in the eleventh century when the region was subject to Anglo-Norman colonization.
Seventeenth-century Brecon was one of the largest Welsh towns, an administrative and judicial centre with an important, twice weekly, livestock market. While the cattle trade was probably the most valuable, the textile and leather trades were essential to the economic health of the town, which supported six guilds. Though it sustained close communications and trade links with Hereford, Brecon’s economy was robust enough to encourage a growth of population through the early modern period, so that by 1670 it had reached a figure of over 2,000. The Taylors Cussion ed. E.M.
At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs had comprised the shire town and five other ‘ancient boroughs’ – Caersws, Llanfyllin, Llanidloes, Newtown and Welshpool. HP Commons 1509-58. The two most important boroughs were the former marcher towns of Montgomery and Welshpool, lying close to the county’s eastern border with Shropshire.
Radnorshire was one of the smallest and most barren counties in seventeenth-century Wales. K. Parker, Radnorshire from Civil War to Restoration (Logaston, 2000), 1-2; R. Suggett, Houses and Hist. in the March of Wales: Radnorshire 1400-1800 (Aberystwyth, 2005), 3, 6-7, 9. It was described in the 1670s as ‘for soil, very hungry and ungrateful to the husbandman ... being so mountainous and rocky, especially in the west and north parts, which are fit only to feed cattle. And were it not for the many rivers which so plentifully water it ...
The refusal of the Rump Parliament on 1 April 1653 to renew the commission set up in February 1650 for the propagation of the gospel in Wales was not least among the factors which provoked Oliver Cromwell's* dissolution of it on 20 April. Five days later, in the absence of any supreme authority save that of the army, he urged the propagation commissioners to ‘go on cheerfully as formerly’. Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, ii. 282-3; iii.
The constituency of Flint Boroughs comprised the shire town and four out-boroughs, of which the largest was Rhuddlan in the county’s north-western corner, with a population by 1670 of approximately 800. ‘Flint Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 37. Flint itself, on the Dee estuary, was a small, castellated town with no market and an above-averagely poor and ageing population that by 1670 probably numbered no more than 600. R.
What struck contemporary commentators on Cardiganshire was evidently the sparse pasture of the county’s uplands, ‘horrible with the sight of bare stones’. In the eyes of those who measured prosperity by the extent and quality of farming practices, the landscape was rendered even less tolerable by the relative absence of animal husbandry. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland ed. L.
Montgomeryshire was described in the 1670s as ‘very hilly and mountainous but interlaced with many fertile valleys both for corn and pasturage ... It hath for its eastern limits Shropshire, for its southern the counties of Radnor and Cardigan, for its western, Merionethshire, and for its northern, Denbighshire with parts of Merioneth and Shropshire’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 289.
In an Elizabethan account of Glamorgan towns, Cardiff was ‘the chiefest and therefore accounted the shire town’. Except where it bordered the River Taff, it was a walled town, and with a certain amount of local chauvinism Rice Merrick described it as ‘very well compacted, beautified with many fair houses and large streets’, on one of which stood ‘a fair town hall’. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.