Staffordshire

Despite its convenient location in the middle of Staffordshire and its status as a county town, Stafford was in decline for much of the seventeenth century. Unlike Lichfield, 15 miles to the south (and described in 1612 as ‘more large and of far greater fame’), Stafford did not lie on a major road and was too distant from the burgeoning Birmingham manufacturing zone to profit from the increased demand for foodstuffs. J. Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), 69; VCH Staffs. vi. 215; K.R. Adey, ‘Seventeenth-century Stafford’, MH ii.

Newcastle-under-Lyme lay on the main road between London and the north-west, close to Staffordshire’s borders with Cheshire and Shropshire. VCH Staffs. viii. 2. The earl of Huntingdon, who passed through Newcastle in 1636, described it as ‘a long town, the street [presumably the high street] very broad, ill paved and houses poor thatched and very few either tiled or slated’. HMC Hastings, iv.

Seventeenth-century Lichfield lay at the intersection of major roads between London and Carlisle and from Bristol to York, about 15 miles north of the small but growing manufacturing town of Birmingham. H. Thorpe, ‘Lichfield: a study of its growth and function’ (Collns. Hist. Staffs. ser. 3, 1950-1), 162. According to Richard Blome, writing in the 1670s, the city was ‘well built, indifferent large, containing three parish churches, besides its cathedral ... and is a place much frequented by the gentry’. R.

‘Situated much about the midst of England’, Staffordshire lies on the south-western edge of the Pennines and is bounded by Cheshire, Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. In the seventeenth century, the northern parts of the county, a hilly region, were full of ‘great heaths and moors’, which afforded ‘good pasturage and breed very good cattle’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 201. The River Trent and its tributaries dominate the county’s central plain, and here there was a largely arable economy. D. Palliser, ‘Dearth and disease in Staffs.

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Newcastle-under-Lyme was always classed as a Leveson Gower borough, and only once during this period was that interest seriously challenged. Yet it had a fairly large electorate, and could not have been easy to manage. In 1767 Lord Clive received a letter from three freemen offering the support of 120 more ’to serve any gentleman... willing to offer himself a candidate in opposition ot the present interest’.Signed by Rich. Rhodes, Geo. Taylor, and Wm. Hill, 20 Nov. 1767, Clive mss. Lord Gower is said to have controlled the borough ’in part by lavish hospitality...