Borough

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.

St. Albans grew up under the protection of the Benedictine abbey and remained under the lordship of the abbot until the abbey was surrendered in 1539. A borough in the Domesday survey, the town was hampered in its constitutional development by the insistence of successive abbots on the servile status of the inhabitants. It returned Members to at least ten Parliaments between 1310 and 1337, but the concessions extracted from a weak abbot in 1327 were revoked by his successor.M. Beresford, New Towns in the Middle Ages, 326; VCH Herts. iv.

Leland described Leominster as ‘meetly large’, with ‘good building of timber’. The wool produced in the area was of such high quality that it was known as ‘Leominster ore’, and the borough had a prosperous clothmaking industry as well as being, according to the Edwardian chantry commissioners, ‘the greatest market town within the county of Hereford’.

Leland noticed that the walls and gates of Hereford ‘be right well maintained by the burgesses of the town’, although the castle ‘tendeth toward ruin’. By 1509 the city was a flourishing market for the produce of the surrounding arable and orchard districts and for the renowned Herefordshire wool; early in the 16th century clothmaking was an industry there.

By 1509 Winchester had been in decline for two centuries. Leland remarked on the number of old buildings in the city, with its many churches and hospitals, and the ancient walls, and Winchester was included in the Act for urban renewal of 1540 (32 Hen. VIII, c.18). A petition of 1450 claiming that over 900 houses had fallen down was probably exaggerated, but in 1524 the city had only 329 taxpayers with another 266 or more in the suburbs.

Leland admired the appearance of Southampton, with its ‘fair and right strong wall’ and ‘fair square quay’; he also remarked on the number of large houses, mainly belonging to merchants. Yet the town was already encountering serious difficulties. Although Hampshire was one of the pioneers in producing the ‘new draperies’ to offset the falling demand for broadcloths, the wool and cloth trades were finding other ports, such as Poole in Dorset, more convenient than the Hampshire coastal towns.

Portsmouth, a dockyard town and naval station, was a ‘member’ of the older port of Southampton, which in 1447 was erected into the county of Southampton and Portsmouth, but Portsmouth made its returns to Parliament through the sheriff of Hampshire. The town was the object of much official concern during the reign of Henry VIII, when large sums were spent on the dockyard, and it was included in the Act of 1540 for urban renewal (32 Hen. VIII, c.18).

Lying on the high road between London and Portsmouth, Petersfield was a prosperous market town whose clothiers and merchants specialized in serges and other ‘new draperies’: in 1534 it was not listed in a report on decayed towns which included Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester. At the beginning of the 16th century the 3rd Duke of Buckingham was lord of the borough and manor of Petersfield.

Possessing charters from the reign of John, the royal borough of Gloucester was created a county of itself in 1483 and became a city in 1541 with the establishment of the bishopric, the former monastic church of St. Peter becoming the cathedral. The charter of 1483 incorporating Gloucester as the mayor and burgesses was confirmed six years later when the fee-farm was fixed at £60, and again in 1510 and 1553. The mayor was assisted by a town clerk, two sheriffs, 12 aldermen, a common council and, among minor officials, a chamberlain, constable, coroner and steward.

The town of Cirencester was a prosperous centre for wool and cloth, yet until the Dissolution it remained a manorial borough belonging to the local abbey. Founded by Henry I, the abbey had taken advantage of the financial needs of the Angevin kings to establish its powers over ‘the whole manor of Cirencester with the seven hundreds pertaining to the manor and its farm’. During the later middle ages the townsmen tried repeatedly to establish their right to a separate municipal authority. In 1403 Henry IV granted them a guild merchant, but in the next reign the abbot had this grant annulled.