On 14 May 1545 Henry VIII granted Boston a charter of incorporation at the suit of his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who owned property in and near the town. The charter vested authority in a mayor, 12 aldermen and 18 common councilmen chosen from the resident freemen. The mayor was to be assisted by a town clerk, a recorder and a number of minor officials. George Foster was named the first town clerk and William Cecil recorder.
Leicester formed the most important part of one of the four demesne manors in the duchy of Lancaster’s honor of Leicester. The town was relatively prosperous for most of the 16th century despite its inclusion in an Act of 1540 (32 Hen. VIII, c.18) among places where ‘many beautiful houses’ were in decay. Although no longer a centre for the wool trade, the town continued to be a prime market for the pasture farmers of the surrounding area, and by 1540 leather work and other crafts were flourishing there.
Leland called Wigan ‘as big as Warrington and better builded ... some merchants, some artificers, some farmers’, and spoke of the coal works at Hawe on the Bradshaw land a mile from the borough. Although Wigan was included in a Henrician statute (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) among the towns with many ‘decayed’ buildings, it seems to have been relatively prosperous during the period, having 2,600 communicants in the reign of Edward VI. Its constitution made it a factious borough.
Preston’s central location in Lancashire made it an important borough in county administration; the palatine courts were often held there. Leland had little to say about it except that ‘the market place of the town is fair’ and that the river Ribble ‘goeth round about ... yet it toucheth not the town [it]self by space of almost half a mile’. Since the Ribble could take only small vessels, Preston was not a significant port at this time; its trade was virtually confined to the surrounding district and it was included in a Henrician statute (35 Hen.
In a late Henrician statute (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) Liverpool was included among ‘decayed’ towns, and at the beginning of the period it certainly seems to have been less prosperous than it had been a century before.
Lancaster’s importance as the chief administrative centre of the duchy in the north was not matched by material prosperity. An Act of 1544 (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) included it among the towns where ‘divers ... beautiful houses of habitation have been ... which now are fallen down, decayed’, and half a century later Camden was to describe it as not populous nor much frequented, the inhabitants ‘being all husbandmen’.
Placed on a bend of the Medway and on the direct road from East Kent to London, Rochester was visited by many eminent foreigners during this period. In 1522 one of the Emperor Charles V’s entourage wrote that ‘we came to Raygester, a little city and bishopric, and slept there’, and about 1544 the Duke of Najera’s secretary described the city as ‘consisting of about 500 houses; near which flows a beautiful river. There is an elegant stone bridge of eleven arches’.
A flourishing market town with some 2,000 or 3,000 inhabitants, Maidstone was becoming the judicial and administrative centre of West Kent, although under Henry VIII it was still only one of six or seven towns where the county assizes were held. Elections of knights of the shire were generally held at nearby Pennenden Heath. Since the river Medway was navigable through Maidstone the ragstone for which the town was famous was both used at Canterbury and shipped further down river; in 1541 Calais was largely repaired from this source.
From 1461 Canterbury was a county in itself, an elected sheriff replacing the former bailiff. In 1498 a new charter remodelled the governing body headed by the mayor; the number of aldermen was doubled to 12 and the common councilmen reduced from 36 to 24. By the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign the earlier quarrels between the corporation and successive archbishops over their liberties had largely subsided, but a clause saving the archbishop’s rights was repeated in the confirmatory charters of 1522 and 1548. Civic records survive from the period.J. Brent, Canterbury, 108; C.
Little can be said about the municipal history of Huntingdon in the early 16th century owing to the paucity of its records. The town’s link with the duchy of Lancaster dated from 1267 when its fee-farm of £45 had been included in Henry III’s grant of the duchy to Edmund Crouchback: Richard III reduced the fee-farm by 21 marks. Although favourably situated ‘on the highway from the north to London by means of the river Ouse’, by 1500 the town had been overtaken by St. Ives as the centre of local trade.
