Borough

New Woodstock was incorporated in 1453, when it was granted similar liberties to those of New Windsor but was expressly exempted from the obligation ‘to choose any burgesses from the borough to come to the King’s Parliaments’, although it had done so at least twice in the early 14th century: according to a local historian the charter, with the same concession, was confirmed in 1552. A mayor and a serjeant-at-mace were the only officials mentioned in 1453 but by 1519 there were also four aldermen and 13 councilmen.

Banbury owed its importance to a bridge across the river Cherwell, which divided Oxfordshire from Northamptonshire, and to a castle built there by the bishops of Lincoln. The population has been estimated at about 1,000 at the beginning of Edward VI’s reign, when a chantry certificate recorded that 460 inhabitants were of age to receive the eucharist: in 1549 12 townsmen were assessed for subsidy.Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, ii. 38; A. Beesley, Banbury, 211; E179/162/276.

Described by Leland as a ‘great market town’, Nottingham was a centre for the wool and cloth trade and celebrated for its alabaster carving. It lay not far from the Fosse Way and commanded the river Trent which provided a waterway to the Humber and the port of Kingston-upon-Hull. The castle, owned by the crown, was the meeting-place of the county court and the assizes, and housed the shire gaol: it was outside the jurisdiction of the town, which since 1449 had been a county of itself.

A leading provincial town and port, often used as a base for war against Scotland, Newcastle-upon-Tyne had a population of some 10,000 in 1545. It had returned Members since 1283 and was incorporated as a county of itself in 1400. In 1510, 1548 1554 and 1557 it received confirmation of its charters and in 1516 a Star Chamber decree which settled a dispute between the mayor, aldermen and ‘certain the honest commoners’ of Newcastle and the ‘artificers, burgesses and guildmerchants’ approved its oligarchic constitution.

The barony of Morpeth, with the lordship of the town and castle, passed to the Dacre family after the marriage of Thomas, 2nd Lord Dacre to the heiress of Ralph, 5th Lord Greystoke. Leland observed that Morpeth was a market town ‘long and meetly well builded’ and remarked on its ‘fair castle standing upon a hill’. The town was important enough to serve on occasion as the site of shire elections even after the Act for the keeping of county days (2 and 3 Edw. VI, c.25) had specified Alnwick as the meeting place of the shire court.Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, v. 62-63.

Long in contention between England and Scotland, Berwick-upon-Tweed passed finally under English rule in 1482. It was incorporated by the reign of David I and its charters, granted by English and Scottish kings, were confirmed in 1510, 1547 and 1554.

Medieval Peterborough was controlled by its Benedictine abbey and in 1493 Henry VII granted to the abbot’s bailiff all such rights as elsewhere pertained to the sheriff. The original ‘burgesses’ or burgage tenants of the ‘vill of Burgh’, the capital of the abbot’s demesne, were doubtless craft workers and tradesmen supplying the needs of the monastery or attracted by the market where, as in the abbey fairs, the abbot’s tenants had trading privileges.

Once a mesne borough of the earls of Northampton, Northampton had long been in the lordship of the crown. The town had lost its military importance and although it was still the venue for the county court its wool and cloth trades were in decline and had not yet been succeeded by the leather industry. The fee-farm due to the crown, once £120, was fixed in 1514 at £98.

Higham Ferrers, a small market town on the main road from London to Leicester, lay within a duchy of Lancaster lordship. The borough had been founded in 1251 by two charters from William de Ferrers, 5th Earl of Derby, but the second of these, together with later documents, had been lost when on 14 Mar. 1556 Queen Mary granted incorporation as the mayor, aldermen and burgesses. The new charter was ostensibly granted, first, because ‘the mayor, burgesses and commonalty ...

By the early 16th century Brackley, once prosperous as a wool staple, was small and poverty-stricken. Leland noted ‘divers rows of housing ... about the quarters of the castle, now clean down’; he found the ‘castle plot’ but could not see ‘any piece of a wall standing’ and the former Wednesday market was ‘now desolated’. On the other hand, the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries did not seriously affect the town, since the lands and buildings of the most important chantry, the hospital of St. James and St.