Droitwich, or as it was more frequently called at this time Wich, had lived by salt-making from at least the early middle ages and possibly from Roman times. Situated in the Salwarpe valley, six miles north-east of Worcester, it was on the road from that city to Birmingham and could send its salt and cloth, its other main product, to Worcester with comparative ease; much of the salt was then sent down the Severn to Bristol.
Worcestershire fell within the jurisdiction of the council in the marches of Wales, but this met only rarely at Worcester and few Worcestershire men sat on it, although in 1553-5 the bishop of Worcester, Nicholas Heath, was lord president. The crown, the bishop and the duchy of Lancaster held land in the shire, the bishop’s property including Oswaldslow, the largest hundred, but there was no resident temporal peer. Some local families, notably those of Dudley, Lyttelton, Sheldon and Windsor, profited from the Dissolution.VCH Worcs. ii. 197-8, 212; P. H.
The manor and borough of Wootton Bassett were held in jointure by the successive queens of Henry VIII. In July 1547 they were granted to the Protector Somerset in reversion after the death of Queen Catherine Parr; six years later, little more than two weeks before the death of Edward VI, they came into the hands of the Duke of Northumberland’s eldest son, only to return to the crown after the accession of Mary and the fall of the Dudleys.
Once a prosperous clothing town and ‘the head town of Wiltshire’, Wilton had declined with the growth of its neighbour Salisbury. In the 16th century the county court still met at Wilton but the assizes were held at Salisbury. The borough, which was ancient royal demesne and part of the barony of Wilton, was in the hands of the crown at the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, but in 1513 Margaret Pole, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, was restored to the dignity of Countess of Salisbury and to her father’s forfeited lands, including Wilton.
Once a royal manor, Westbury was much subdivided in the 15th and 16th centuries, the most important estates being later named after the families which had held them, Westbury Arundell, Westbury Seymour and Westbury Stourton. In 1549 or 1550 property probably comprising the whole of Westbury Arundell was sold to Thomas Long, a Trowbridge clothier, and in 1557 Westbury Stourton was forfeited to the crown after the 8th Baron Stourton’s murder of his father’s steward William Hartgill.
The city of Salisbury, or New Sarum, sprang up around the cathedral transferred in 1219 from Old Sarum, some three miles distant. The new settlement received a charter from the bishop of Salisbury in 1225 and one from the crown two years later. A centre of the cloth industry, by 1520 Salisbury with a population of some 8,000 ranked among the kingdom’s ten largest cities, but until its incorporation in 1612 it remained under the increasingly irksome lordship of the bishop.
Old Sarum, alias Old Salisbury, once the site of a castle and the seat of the bishopric of Salisbury, never recovered from the removal in the early 13th century of the cathedral from its hilltop position to one some three miles away on the banks of the Avon. Leland reported that there had been residents ‘in time of mind ... but now there is not one house neither within Old Salisbury or without inhabited’.
Marlborough was the second town in Wiltshire and was for a brief period the seat of a suffragan bishopric under the Act for the nomination and consecration of suffragans (26 Hen. VIII, c. 14). The castle, lordship, manor and borough were commonly granted to successive queens in jointure, as they were to all six consorts of Henry VIII.
The prosperous clothing and market town of Malmesbury grew up in the shelter of its castle and Benedictine abbey. The abbot held the castle and town from the reign of John until the abbey’s surrender in 1539: the major abbey buildings were then entrusted to Sir Edward Baynton and the lesser to William Stumpe, perhaps as his deputy, while the lordship was retained by the crown.
Ludgershall had been part of the royal demesne since the 12th century and first returned Members in 1295. No charter is known and it was probably self-governing by prescription, a bailiff being chosen annually at the manorial court leet. In November 1510 Henry Brydges, a gentleman usher of the chamber, was granted custody of the manor, town and park, as previously held by Sir John Langford, for 30 years at an annual rent of £15 and after his death his only son Richard Brydges received a further grant in November 1539 for 40 years at the same rent.
