The shires of Peebles and Selkirk lay immediately to the south of Edinburgh Shire, separated from the English border only by Roxburghshire and Dumfriesshire. Atlas Scot. Hist. 27. The two shires were similar in size and prosperity, being taxed at almost the same rate in the assessments of the later 1650s. A.
Haddingtonshire (or East Lothian) formed a lozenge of land to the east of Edinburgh, bordered to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the shire of Edinburgh (or Midlothian) and Berwickshire. The majority of Haddingtonshire was coastal plain, rising into the Lammermuir Hills to the south, and it was bisected by the River Tyne, which flowed east-west, linking the towns of Haddington, East Linton and Dunbar. The fishing port of Dunbar was of particular strategic importance, as it guarded a narrow pass on the coast road between Edinburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The constituency known as Wigtownshire, which comprised the shire of Wigtown and the stewartry of Kircudbright, formed the far south-west tip of Scotland. The area had enjoyed a degree of political unity since the twelfth century as the lordship of Galloway, which was held first by the descendents of the first lord, Fergus, and then by the Black Douglases.
The city of Edinburgh owed its importance to three factors: the strength of its castle, sited on an imposing volcanic plug; the richness of the surrounding farmland; and the proximity of a deep-water port at nearby Leith, on the Firth of Forth. The medieval city had grown as a suburb of the castle, gradually extending down the ‘old town ridge’ from the castle gates, along the High Street to the Canongate, with the royal palace of Holyrood lying just outside the city’s boundary.
The Nominated Assembly was the first early modern Parliament to include MPs from Scotland, and represents a staging-post between the limited tender union offered in 1652 and the rather more generous union ordinance of April 1654. There was no attempt to involve the Scots in the nomination of members in 1653, and the choice of MPs seems to have been made by Oliver Cromwell* himself, working on information from English officers serving in Scotland.
Banffshire formed a narrow wedge of land, stretching from the burgh of Banff on the southern shore of the Moray Firth to the Grampian Mountains in the south west. The shire was smaller and less prosperous than its southern neighbour, Aberdeenshire: in the general assessment of 1657 the former was rated at £95 17s. and the latter at £339 16s. 7d. A. and O. ii. 1239. Banffshire had long been dominated by a handful of families: the Ogilvies, Abercrombys, Gordons and Urquharts.
The yoking together of Dunbartonshire, Argyllshire and Bute into a single constituency ignored their great historical and cultural differences. Dunbartonshire formed a crescent-shape, from the banks of Loch Lomond in the north to a lowland belt bounded to the south by the River Clyde, which included the burgh and royal castle of Dumbarton. The whole shire had formed part of the lordship of Lennox in the middle ages. J. Irving, The Book of Dunbartonshire (Edinburgh, 3 vols. 1879), i.
The St Andrews burghs comprised 13 royal burghs mostly scattered along the Firth of Forth and the North Sea coasts of the shire (or ‘kingdom’) of Fife. The 13 varied greatly in size and prosperity, the richest (according to the 1657 assessment rates) being St Andrews, assessed at £33, and Kirkcaldy at £24, while Anstruther Wester, paying £3 9s and Kilrenny £3 were barely more than fishing villages. A.
Aberdeenshire covered a large area of north east Scotland, stretching from the North Sea coast in the east to the highlands of Invernessshire and Perthshire in the west. To the north, the shire was separated from Banffshire by the River Deveron, and to the south its border with Forfar and Kincardine shires mostly followed the River Dee. The shire was bisected by the River Don, which flowed eastwards from Braemar – an area dominated by the Erskines, earls of Mar, to the sea at Aberdeen. Atlas Scot.
The eight ‘Dumfries burghs’ were spread across two shires and a stewartry in the far south west of Scotland: Wigtown and Whithorn were in Wigtownshire; Kirkcudbright and New Galloway on the River Dee in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright; Dumfries on the estuary and Sanquhar much further upstream on the River Nith, and Annan and Lochmaben on the River Annan, were all in Dumfriesshire. Atlas Scot. Hist. 228. For some reason, Stranraer, which had been a royal burgh since 1617, was left off the list. Young, Parliaments of Scot. ii.