Commons 1640-1660

Breconshire lay about half way in demographic size among the Welsh counties, with a population estimated to have been above 27,000 by 1670. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 113. Its topography was dominated by the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, but in the eastern and western fringes of the county there was scope for the growing of wheat to complement the pasturage dictated by the upland conditions. Leland’s Itinerary in Wales ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1906), 104.

At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Denbigh Boroughs had comprised the four chartered boroughs of Denbigh, Ruthin, Holt and Chirk. Located close to the centre of Denbighshire in the Vale of Clwyd, Denbigh and Ruthin were among the county’s three main market towns – the third being Wrexham. Holt, a smaller market town near the county’s eastern border with Cheshire, was falling under the economic sway of nearby Wrexham and reverting to an agrarian community.

One of the most prosperous towns in south Wales, Haverfordwest, a county borough, had by statute in 1543 acquired the privilege of returning a single Member to Parliament. A charter in 1610 clarified the governance of the borough, which lay in a common council of 24 which elected the mayor, two bailiffs and the sheriff, the returning officer, from out of its number. The common council has been described as ‘a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the wealthier and most prominent burgesses’. Cal. Recs.

Adopting the style of the Old Testament jeremiad, John Jones I* asked a correspondent rhetorically ‘where is there more sin to encounter with, where more ignorance, where more hatred to the people of God, where the word saint more scorned, than in Merionethshire?’. ‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 185. The correct answer was of course nowhere, in his eyes, but most of his contemporaries would have been struck more by the county’s remoteness than by its spiritual desolation.

Seventeenth-century Flintshire consisted of a relatively narrow strip of land stretching along the north-Wales coast between Denbighshire and Cheshire, and a detached enclave to the south east, the Maelor Saesneg (English Maelor), that was surrounded by Denbighshire, Cheshire and Shropshire. The county was described in the 1670s as ‘not over-mountainous as the other parts of Wales, and interlaced with fertile valleys both for corn and pasturage, feeding good store of small cattle from which they make plenty of butter and cheese’. R.

By the seventeenth century, Carmarthenshire had through the incorporation of outlying lordships become the largest of the Welsh counties. In 1646 the gentry described the ‘mere commodities’ of their county as ‘butter, cheese, hay, oats etc.’, but insisted that ‘the subsistence of our county consists in stock of cattle not in corn or other commodities’. C108/189, petition of Carm.

Beaumaris had anciently been an English town on a Welsh island, and its only competitor as a settlement to justify the description of borough was Newborough, which probably because of the encroachment of sand-drift had by the mid-sixteenth century become so impoverished as to forfeit any claim to a charter. G. Roberts, ‘Parlty Hist. Beaumaris, 1555-1832’, Trans. Anglesey Antiq. Soc. (1933), 98-9. The importance of Beaumaris lay in its harbour, protected from the ravages of the Irish Sea by the Menai Straits.

Glamorgan’s topography made an impression on every visitor, its coastal plain of Y Fro (the vale of Glamorgan) in sharp contrast to the more northerly hills of Y Blaenau. The portway, the main road followed westwards from Cardiff, marked roughly the borderlands where hills and vale met, ‘the ‘border vale’ as conceptualized by modern historians. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.

At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of New Radnor Boroughs had comprised shire town itself and perhaps as many as seven out-boroughs – a number that by the Restoration period had apparently contracted to the four of Cefnllys, Knighton, Knucklas and Rhayader. ‘New Radnor Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29, HP Commons 1660-90. All but two of the eight towns that may initially have made up the constituency – that is, Cefnllys and Rhayader – lay close to Radnorshire’s eastern borders with Herefordshire and Shrop

The constituency of Caernarvon Boroughs comprised five chartered boroughs that dotted the coastline of north-west Wales from Conwy in the east to Criccieth on the southern side of the Llŷn peninsula. The largest and most important of these boroughs was Caernarfon itself, which served as the county’s administrative and judicial centre, although the second town of the county, Conwy, had periodically pressed its own claims for that role.