Herefordshire

The city of Hereford was remote and on the borders – Welsh was regularly heard on the city streets – but Hereford was of strategic importance in governing the Welsh marches, whether as a centre for criminal justice at quarter sessions and assizes, or during the civil war as a garrison town. Harl. 7189, f. 243. The economy of the town in 1640 was not in a particularly healthy condition.

This place returned Members to Parliament between 1295 and 1306, but then the franchise lapsed until it was restored in 1628. Located 12 miles north west of Hereford, it was a small market centre, no more than a village, which had no corporation. It consisted of one single street. Some 37 names appeared on a rent roll of Humphrey Tomkins in 1630; and in 1663, 42 men and women were rated for contributions towards the militia. The hearth tax returns of 1664 suggest a parish of 126 properties. Glam. Archive Service, CL/manorial box 4, Weobley rent roll ?1630; Herefs.

Herefordshire, according to Sir Robert Harley, was the most ‘clownish’, meaning rustic, county in England. J.S. Levy, ‘Perceptions and Beliefs: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Origins and Outbreak of the First Civil War’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1983), 42. It was certainly remote, but its gentry exercised an influence over the south-eastern counties of Wales, and its importance in Welsh affairs was consolidated by its subjection to the council in the marches of Wales, based at Ludlow.