Commons 1509-1558

Carlisle was the military and administrative centre of the west marches and the seat of a bishopric. Leading military engineers were consulted when Henry VIII undertook to re-fortify the city and its eastern counterpart Berwick-upon-Tweed. The area within the walls was largely unoccupied and derelict, and although the city provided a local market its economy rested on the furnishing of the garrison and of the forces assembled there from time to time. The dissolution of the Augustinian priory and the two friaries deprived the citizens of a minor source of income.

During the early 16th century, and especially under Henry VIII, the old border families, Clifford, Dacre, Neville and Percy, came under mounting pressure from the central government, chiefly through the agency of the elder Sir Thomas Wharton. How far this is reflected in the choice of knights for Cumberland it is not easy to say, both because of the loss of a number of names and because of the degree of intermarriage and interdependence prevailing in the region.

East and West Looe, on opposite banks of the river Looe, were joined in the 16th century by a ‘great bridge of ... 12 arches’. Leland thought East Looe a ‘pretty market town’, but rated West Looe, otherwise Portpighan, a ‘small fisher village hard on the sea shore’. Both boroughs had belonged to the Courtenay family until the execution of the Marquess of Exeter in 1539, whereupon they were annexed to the duchy of Cornwall.

By the early 16th century Truro had lost much of its seaborne trade to other ports on the Fal estuary and its place as the commercial centre of the peninsula had been taken by Lostwithiel; in 1540 it was included in the Act for the re-edification of towns westward (32 Hen. VIII, c.19). Alone among coinage towns in Cornwall, Truro did not belong to the duchy. In the 1150s Richard de Lucy had granted its inhabitants certain privileges, which shortly afterwards were amplified by Reginald, Earl of Cornwall. Of successive confirmations of these grants the most recent was made in 1516.

Saltash, a borough owned by the duchy of Cornwall, lay not far from Trematon castle, which by the 16th century was ruinous and in use only as a prison. Although commercially outstripped by Plymouth at the mouth of the Tamar estuary, the town with its market, port and ferry across the river was a prosperous settlement.

In 1487 the inhabitants of the parish of St. Ives received a charter from Henry VII to hold a weekly market and two fairs a year. The borough, which was conterminous with the parish, was administered by a portreeve assisted by 12 councilmen; it was not incorporated until 1639. No municipal records survive for the early 16th century.J. H. Matthews, St. Ives, 125, 497; C. G. Henderson, Essays in Cornish Hist., 87-92; J. Polsue, Paroch. Hist. Cornw. ii. 261-2.

The borough of Penryn had been established in 1236 by the bishops of Exeter near their palace of Trelivel on the Fal estuary, in an effort to increase revenues from the manor by drawing trade away from Truro. By the 16th century the bishops had long since ceased to visit Trelivel and the palace was in ruins, but they had not parted with palace, manor or borough.

Newport was a suburb of Launceston which had grown up round the priory during the early middle ages. In the 13th century Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, granted the township certain privileges, but the inhabitants do not appear to have received a formal royal charter, although they later claimed that in 1557 King Philip had granted to the ‘town or borough of Newport alias Launceston’ a market and fair. Until the dissolution of Launceston priory in February 1540 Newport remained under the lordship of the prior, but was then annexed to the duchy of Cornwall.

‘Never entitled, by the utmost stretch of courtesy, to be called a town’, Mitchell alias Medishole or Michael, merited virtually no mention by Leland, who remarked only that the road to it was ‘a poor thoroughfare’.

Lostwithiel was the administrative headquarters of the duchy of Cornwall, to which the town belonged. In 1268 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, granted a charter by which the vill of Lostwithiel and the neighbouring village of Penkneth were formed into a borough, and Richard’s son Edmund built there the ‘duchy palace’ which included a shire hall to house the county court, the exchequer of the earldom, the coinage hall and the gaol of the stannary of Cornwall.