Commons 1509-1558

At the end of his progress through Lincolnshire in 1532 Henry VIII described the county as ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’. Its poverty was largely the result of erosion and inadequate provision against flooding in the marshlands. The county obtained an Act in 1532 (23 Hen. VIII, c.5) revising the commission for sewers and another in 1550 (3 and 4 Edw. VI, c.8) empowering the commissioners to distrain for money necessary for their work, but these piecemeal reforms achieved little.

Leicester formed the most important part of one of the four demesne manors in the duchy of Lancaster’s honor of Leicester. The town was relatively prosperous for most of the 16th century despite its inclusion in an Act of 1540 (32 Hen. VIII, c.18) among places where ‘many beautiful houses’ were in decay. Although no longer a centre for the wool trade, the town continued to be a prime market for the pasture farmers of the surrounding area, and by 1540 leather work and other crafts were flourishing there.

Tudor Leicestershire was a predominantly agricultural county where the yeomen profited sufficiently from rising prices to buy land extensively. There was little economic or religious disturbance, and despite the local influence of the Grey family Leicestershire men played no significant part in the succession crisis of 1553.

Leland called Wigan ‘as big as Warrington and better builded ... some merchants, some artificers, some farmers’, and spoke of the coal works at Hawe on the Bradshaw land a mile from the borough. Although Wigan was included in a Henrician statute (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) among the towns with many ‘decayed’ buildings, it seems to have been relatively prosperous during the period, having 2,600 communicants in the reign of Edward VI. Its constitution made it a factious borough.

Preston’s central location in Lancashire made it an important borough in county administration; the palatine courts were often held there. Leland had little to say about it except that ‘the market place of the town is fair’ and that the river Ribble ‘goeth round about ... yet it toucheth not the town [it]self by space of almost half a mile’. Since the Ribble could take only small vessels, Preston was not a significant port at this time; its trade was virtually confined to the surrounding district and it was included in a Henrician statute (35 Hen.

In a late Henrician statute (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) Liverpool was included among ‘decayed’ towns, and at the beginning of the period it certainly seems to have been less prosperous than it had been a century before.

Lancaster’s importance as the chief administrative centre of the duchy in the north was not matched by material prosperity. An Act of 1544 (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) included it among the towns where ‘divers ... beautiful houses of habitation have been ... which now are fallen down, decayed’, and half a century later Camden was to describe it as not populous nor much frequented, the inhabitants ‘being all husbandmen’.

A county palatine with three courts of its own, and with an appellate jurisdiction in the duchy of Lancaster court sitting at Westminster, Lancashire was thinly populated, remote from London and unreceptive to the new forces affecting life in the south. Coal-mining had begun there before Leland’s visit but was not to increase markedly until the early 1550s; cloth was manufactured in a number of towns, but agriculture remained the chief occupation.

Placed on a bend of the Medway and on the direct road from East Kent to London, Rochester was visited by many eminent foreigners during this period. In 1522 one of the Emperor Charles V’s entourage wrote that ‘we came to Raygester, a little city and bishopric, and slept there’, and about 1544 the Duke of Najera’s secretary described the city as ‘consisting of about 500 houses; near which flows a beautiful river. There is an elegant stone bridge of eleven arches’.

A flourishing market town with some 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants, Maidstone was becoming the judicial and administrative centre of West Kent, although under Henry VIII it was still only one of six or seven towns where the county assizes were held. Elections of knights of the shire were generally held at nearby Pennenden Heath. Since the river Medway was navigable through Maidstone the ragstone for which the town was famous was both used at Canterbury and shipped further down river; in 1541 Calais was largely repaired from this source.