Borough

Located slightly to the north of, and roughly equidistant between, Manchester and Liverpool, Wigan commanded the point where the Great North Road from London crossed the River Douglas. Wigan parish had around 4,000 inhabitants in the early Stuart period, while the town itself contained 458 households in 1664, suggesting a population of approximately 2,000. Wigan was therefore Lancashire’s largest town after Manchester, although its Ship Money assessment was the highest of any urban centre in the county.

Newton-in-Makerfield – or Newton-le-Willows as it is known today – was described as a ‘little, poor market [town]’ in the 1530s, and it was still ‘hardly more than a village’ a century later. VCH Lancs. iv. 132; C.G. Bayne, ‘The first House of Commons of Queen Elizabeth’, EHR xxiii. 679. Situated within Winwick parish, about half way between Liverpool and Manchester, it lay on the main road between Warrington and Wigan and was the administrative centre for the fee or barony of Makerfield. VCH Lancs. iv.

Lying ‘in the centre and heart of the shire ... in a most rich, delicate and pleasant soil and delicious air (it wants only a navigable river)’, Leicester was ‘one of the ancientest and greatest towns’ belonging to the duchy of Lancaster and the only borough constituency in Leicestershire. E.

Lying in the south-western corner of Northamptonshire, close to the border with Buckinghamshire, early-Stuart Brackley was notable only for past glories. A staple for wool and major commercial centre in the medieval period, it had little more than its (small) weekday market and its corporate status to show for its former size and prosperity. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 178; Bridges, Northants. i. 143; Baker, Northants. i.

Lying on the main London to Leicester road where it crossed the River Nene, Higham Ferrers was part of the duchy of Lancaster and, from the mid-1620s, parcel of Queen Henrietta Maria’s jointure. HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Higham Ferrers’; VCH Northants. iii. 268; A.N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers in 1640’, Northants. Past and Present, ii. no. 5, pp.

Early Stuart Northampton was notable for its extensive town walls and as a bastion of puritan resistance to royal policies. At the heart of the town’s large godly community by 1640 was the combative figure of Thomas Ball, the stridently Calvinist vicar of the principal civic parish of All Saints (patron: Northampton corporation), which was described as the most ‘scornful’ towards Laudian church ceremonies of any in England. CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 278; 1637-8, p. 535; 1640-1, pp. 109, 351-2; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 391-7, 435-7; Diary of Robert Woodford ed. J.

Situated in the far eastern corner of Northamptonshire, on the county’s borders with Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, early Stuart Peterborough lay on the western fringes of the Great Level fen, close to where the Great North Road crossed the River Nene. VCH Northants. ii.

The name said it all. For countless centuries hot water, which had fallen as rain thousands of years earlier in the Mendips, had bubbled up through the underlying limestone mantle at three points close together within a bend of the River Avon. B. Cunliffe, Roman Bath Discovered (2004), 10-12. This is what had attracted the earliest settlers to the site and what had brought innumerable visitors there in every intervening century. Bath in the mid-seventeenth century was very different from the Aquae Sulis of the Romans or its eighteenth-century re-creation.

The principal historical association of Bridgwater in the mid-seventeenth century is as the birthplace and hometown of Robert Blake*, the illustrious admiral who represented it in three Parliaments. Positioned on the River Parret just five miles from the Bristol Channel, it was the county’s principal port, although its potential had long been hampered by its far more successful rival, Bristol. It was governed by a mayor, two aldermen and 24 principal burgesses. One local gentry family, the Wroths, exercised strong electoral influence in the town throughout this period.

Wells, like Bath, the town to which it was linked by the title of their bishop, owed its name to the presence of springs. The crucial difference, however, was that those at Bath were hot. But if Wells had never been able to develop as a spa centre in the way that Bath had done, it had acquired other advantages in its centuries-old rivalry with its neighbour. Bishops of Bath and Wells may have taken their title from both towns and officially Bath was the senior partner, but since the thirteenth century those bishops had preferred to base themselves at Wells.