The most important of the Cinque Ports by the early 16th century, Dover had received a number of charters, the earliest known being in 1328. In addition to its long-standing rights and privileges in the Brotherhood of the Cinque Ports the town had a generally effective local government, vested in a mayor, jurats and common council, but limited by the authority of the King’s bailiff.
York, a county of itself from 1396, with two sheriffs, was in this period the seventh largest city in England, with a population of some 8,000. It was governed by a mayor (beginning to be called a lord mayor), 12 aldermen and a council of ex-sheriffs called the Twenty-Four although their actual numbers fluctuated and were usually below this figure. Day-to-day administration was in the hands of the city council so constituted, and a common council representing the freemen was also summoned for elections and for occasional consultation.
The small market town of Thirsk lay on or near two main roads, one running from York to the port of Yarm and the other being the highway to Northallerton and Scotland. By 1509 the town extended on either side of the Cod beck; the term ‘borough’, used as early as 1145, was apparently confined to the settlement on the east bank, but on the other side of the river there was a ‘vill’ which had grown up around Mowbray castle. A mesne borough, Thirsk was held of the lords of the manor of Thirsk, who from the late 15th century were the Stanley earls of Derby.
The situation of Scarborough prolonged the town’s military importance during the era of wars with Scotland and France, and successive constables of the castle wielded influence in the borough beneath its walls. The town was one of those included in an Act (32 Hen. VIII, c.18) for urban renewal. The crown made numerous grants for the repair of the harbour and an Act of 1545 (37 Hen.
Ripon had sent Members to at least two Parliaments between 1295 and 1337, but no further returns are known before the 16th century. After the Pilgrimage of Grace the 3rd Duke of Norfolk promised that the King would shortly summon a Parliament and that Ripon would be represented, but nothing more was heard of this. The re-enfranchisement of 1553 had no economic justification, for the town, once a centre of the cloth trade, had since markedly declined: the numerous tenters or cloth-frames observed by Leland were relics of a departed industry.
In 1521 a royal commission reported:
The King’s town of Hull ... is a proper town and well built. It is as full of fishermen as any in the north of England. Much of it has been destroyed by the waters of the Humber, and much swept away. Much of the King’s land is likely to be damaged. At spring water the danger to houses is worst: a large part of the streets of the town are flooded, and property is swept away ... At least £50 is needed to effect a remedy.E36/150, f. 63.
Knaresborough castle was for centuries the headquarters of the duchy of Lancaster honor of Knaresborough, and in the 16th century the town was still closely involved in duchy administration; its nearness to York also exposed it to the influence of the council in the north.
Earlier a prosperous port, Hedon had suffered from the silting up of its harbour and the growth of Hull. Leland found it to have ‘but a few boats and no merchants of any estimation’ and Camden was later to describe it as ‘so sunk as to have scarce the least traces of its former splendour’.
In the early 16th century Boroughbridge was a small market town, prosperous owing to its situation on a main road to the north where a bridge crossed the Ure near its junction with the Swale.
An old Roman town on the south bank of the river Ure, Aldborough had by 1509 been reduced to a village. After being burnt by the Danes in the 8th century it had never been restored as a walled town, but the main cause of its decline was the building in William I’s reign of a new bridge about three-quarters of a mile upstream, to replace the one destroyed at the Roman site. Around the new bridge the town of Boroughbridge grew up and soon outgrew the ‘old borough’, although it remained within the manor and parish of Aldborough.
