Borough

Reading owed its prosperity to the abbey founded there in 1121, and in particular to the cloth trade which flourished under monastic protection. The abbot of Reading became lord of the town but his rule was resisted by the merchant guild whose master was by 1301 also the mayor; this office the abbot refused to recognize until it was agreed that he should appoint to it from those candidates presented by the town. After being challenged in the reign of Henry VII, this method of appointment was observed from 1509 until the abbey’s dissolution in 1538.

New Windsor is so called to distinguish it from an older settlement two miles away, forming part of a manor briefly held by Westminster abbey before the Conquest. The new town grew up in the shadow of the castle and was a royal borough by the reign of Henry I. A charter of 1277 was confirmed in 1316 and later, and in 1466 the mayor, bailiffs, burgesses and inhabitants were incorporated. Municipal offices were monopolized by the brethren of the guild of the Holy Trinity.

The town of Abingdon grew up around the Benedictine abbey and under its rigorous and much resented control. Cloth and malt were the staple manufactures. In 1542 Leland reported that the town ‘standeth by clothing’, but by then the surrender of the abbey (1538) had threatened its markets and the surveyor of the abbey found the town ‘sore decayed and like daily more to decay’. At the beginning of Edward VI’s reign the confiscation of the property of the town guilds of the Holy Cross and of Our Lady hastened this decline.J. Townsend, Abingdon, 4; VCH Berks. iv.

The burgesses of Bedford held the town of the crown at a fee-farm said to be £46 in 1447, when it was reduced by £22 for 60 years. In 1504 the remission (then stated to be £26) was made permanent, the burgesses arguing that if they had to pay in full ‘they would necessarily be obliged to retire from thence and leave the town totally destitute’. Bedford was included in the Act of 1540 for re-edifying of towns (32 Hen. VIII, c. 18). A borough by prescription, it had charters dating back at least to the 12th century and these were confirmed in 1509, 1515, 1547 and 1557.

The new town of Winchelsea had been founded on a hill-top site by Edward I in the 1280s, following the destruction of the original town by stormy seas. The following half-century was a period of prosperity, but thereafter Winchelsea declined. By 1342 its population had shrunk noticeably, and the widespread destruction done by the French, when they captured and sacked the town in 1360 and again in 1380, led to further decay.

One of the five original Cinque Ports, Sandwich was under an obligation to render to the Crown the same ship-service as Dover, that is, 20 ships for 15 days each year. Its early development as an important port was due to its excellent harbour and to the formation of the Wantsum channel (providing vessels with an easy route from London to the straits of Dover).

Rye had been founded in the 11th century on a manorial estate belonging to the Norman abbey of Fécamp. Its name, meaning ‘the island’, reflects its situation at the confluence of rivers and the sea which formed the natural harbour known as the Camber. The proximity of Rye to Winchelsea, coupled with the fact that until 1247 they were both under the lordship of the same abbey, caused them to be long treated for administrative purposes as a unit, and their interests remained closely linked.

New Romney had been founded in the tenth century to take the place of the port of Old Romney, which had silted up. The retreat of the sea from New Romney in its turn, hastened in the late 13th century by the effects of great storms which blocked the mouth of the river Rother, so causing it to break through to the sea at Rye instead of at Romney, meant that by 1400 the silting up of the harbour had become irreversible, despite the efforts of the local people to dredge channels.

In Anglo-Saxon times the port had been situated at West Hythe, but the retreat of the coastline prompted the development of Hythe itself some time before the Conquest. Hythe was unable as a consequence of poverty to produce a warship for the King’s service in 1341, but thereafter it apparently maintained a modest prosperity as a market town and fishing port until, in May 1401, it suffered a severe fire in which, it was reported, more than 200 houses were burnt down and goods to the value of £600 destroyed.

Hastings, initially one of the foremost of the Cinque Ports, was by this period the furthest decayed of them, owing to the early silting of its harbour. So far as ship-service to the Crown was concerned, it had long since passed on the bulk of its contribution of 21 vessels to its former members, or limbs, Rye and Winchelsea; and, under an agreement made in 1392, it was now required to find only five ships, and even two of these were in fact to be supplied by other members.