Carmarthen was thought to be the largest town in Wales in the early seventeenth century, with a population thought to have been more than 2,000 by 1676. Compton Census, 465; Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 13. It served as a regional capital for south-west Wales, if not south Wales as a whole. This primacy reflected the strong agrarian economy of the town’s hinterland, based on dairying and the rearing of cattle, the essence of rural Carmarthenshire’s husbandry for centuries later.
Seventeenth-century Brecon was one of the largest Welsh towns, an administrative and judicial centre with an important, twice weekly, livestock market. While the cattle trade was probably the most valuable, the textile and leather trades were essential to the economic health of the town, which supported six guilds. Though it sustained close communications and trade links with Hereford, Brecon’s economy was robust enough to encourage a growth of population through the early modern period, so that by 1670 it had reached a figure of over 2,000. The Taylors Cussion ed. E.M.
At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs had comprised the shire town and five other ‘ancient boroughs’ – Caersws, Llanfyllin, Llanidloes, Newtown and Welshpool. HP Commons 1509-58. The two most important boroughs were the former marcher towns of Montgomery and Welshpool, lying close to the county’s eastern border with Shropshire.
The constituency of Flint Boroughs comprised the shire town and four out-boroughs, of which the largest was Rhuddlan in the county’s north-western corner, with a population by 1670 of approximately 800. ‘Flint Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 37. Flint itself, on the Dee estuary, was a small, castellated town with no market and an above-averagely poor and ageing population that by 1670 probably numbered no more than 600. R.
In an Elizabethan account of Glamorgan towns, Cardiff was ‘the chiefest and therefore accounted the shire town’. Except where it bordered the River Taff, it was a walled town, and with a certain amount of local chauvinism Rice Merrick described it as ‘very well compacted, beautified with many fair houses and large streets’, on one of which stood ‘a fair town hall’. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc.
At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Denbigh Boroughs had comprised the four chartered boroughs of Denbigh, Ruthin, Holt and Chirk. Located close to the centre of Denbighshire in the Vale of Clwyd, Denbigh and Ruthin were among the county’s three main market towns – the third being Wrexham. Holt, a smaller market town near the county’s eastern border with Cheshire, was falling under the economic sway of nearby Wrexham and reverting to an agrarian community.
One of the most prosperous towns in south Wales, Haverfordwest, a county borough, had by statute in 1543 acquired the privilege of returning a single Member to Parliament. A charter in 1610 clarified the governance of the borough, which lay in a common council of 24 which elected the mayor, two bailiffs and the sheriff, the returning officer, from out of its number. The common council has been described as ‘a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the wealthier and most prominent burgesses’. Cal. Recs.
Beaumaris had anciently been an English town on a Welsh island, and its only competitor as a settlement to justify the description of borough was Newborough, which probably because of the encroachment of sand-drift had by the mid-sixteenth century become so impoverished as to forfeit any claim to a charter. G. Roberts, ‘Parlty Hist. Beaumaris, 1555-1832’, Trans. Anglesey Antiq. Soc. (1933), 98-9. The importance of Beaumaris lay in its harbour, protected from the ravages of the Irish Sea by the Menai Straits.
At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of New Radnor Boroughs had comprised shire town itself and perhaps as many as seven out-boroughs – a number that by the Restoration period had apparently contracted to the four of Cefnllys, Knighton, Knucklas and Rhayader. ‘New Radnor Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29, HP Commons 1660-90. All but two of the eight towns that may initially have made up the constituency – that is, Cefnllys and Rhayader – lay close to Radnorshire’s eastern borders with Herefordshire and Shrop
The constituency of Caernarvon Boroughs comprised five chartered boroughs that dotted the coastline of north-west Wales from Conwy in the east to Criccieth on the southern side of the Llŷn peninsula. The largest and most important of these boroughs was Caernarfon itself, which served as the county’s administrative and judicial centre, although the second town of the county, Conwy, had periodically pressed its own claims for that role.