Borough

The area around Reigate was occupied from prehistoric times, although the town owed its origins to William de Warenne, earl of Surrey, who built a castle on his land there at the end of the 11th century. He was lord of the manor of Reigate, or Cherchfelle, as the small agricultural settlement was then known, and his newly built castle, which lay within the confines of the manor but some distance from the existing village, soon attracted a community of tradespeople, labourers and husbandmen from the surrounding countryside.

Although its early history remains obscure, Guildford had clearly achieved considerable importance as a market centre by the mid tenth century, by which time it had become one of the two towns in Surrey to possess a mint. Geographical factors hastened this development and ensured continued prosperity during the later Middle Ages. The original settlement had grown up as a fording place over the Wey and, because of its strategic position in a gap in the chalk uplands, it was able to command the main line of communication across England south of the capital.

Although the site of the medieval borough of Bletchingley was not settled until Anglo-Saxon times, there is evidence of Roman occupation in the neighbouring manor of Pendell and of prehistoric fortifications on the crest of the chalk downs a few miles to the north. The heavy clay and dense forest of the Surrey Weald formed an impenetrable boundary to the south, and may well have deterred the Romans from cultivating the lighter belt of greensand on which Bletchingley stands.

By 1377 Ipswich had a population of about 2,260; but although it was probably the largest town in Suffolk, it was only half the size of Colchester, its geographically nearest rival as a port. Its charter of 1200 permitted the burgesses to elect two bailiffs (who until 1317 were required to take their oaths of office in the Exchequer), two coroners, and 12 portmen to govern the town. In 1256 the bailiffs were granted the right of return of royal writs, and after 1291 they became responsible for payment to the Crown of the fee farm, then fixed at £60 a year.

Dunwich was a royal borough paying fee farm to the Crown. Its earliest charter, for which the inhabitants were charged 300 marks by King John, dates from 1199; in May 1421 the town procured a second copy after accidentally losing the original.Rot. Chart. ed. Hardy, i. 51; Pipe Roll 1 John (Pipe Roll Soc. n.s. x), 290; CPR, 1416-22, p. 363. Dunwich was one of the 27 towns summoned to the Council of 1286, and it returned Members to Parliament from 1296.

During the Middle Ages Stafford occupied an important strategic position on the major route from London to Chester and the north-west. Standing at a crossing-place on the river Sow at the junction of several small valleys, it was chosen in 913 by Aethelflaeda of Mercia as the site of a ‘burh’, and by 1016 it had assumed the status of a county town with a royal mint.Eng. Med. Bors. ed. Beresford and Finberg, 163-4; W.H. Duignan, Notes on Staffs. Place Names, 141. The years immediately after the Norman Conquest proved a troubled period in its history.

Taking its name from the ‘new castle’ built by the Crown in the mid 12th century, the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme began as a small settlement designed to serve the needs of the garrison, but because of its situation on the main route between London and Chester it soon became a flourishing market town. The burgesses obtained their first royal charter in about 1173, and although this document was later lost, it seems to have made provision for the holding of regular markets.

By the late 14th century Wells was one of the largest of Somerset towns: its population in 1377 was estimated to be about 1,352. The main cathedral town of a large diocese, it was under the lordship of the bishop of Bath and Wells, to whom, no communal fee farm having ever been established, its people still individually paid their fixed rents. The borough owed its privileges originally to a series of episcopal grants, these, however, being subsequently confirmed and extended by royal charters.

In 1377 Taunton’s taxable population of those over 14 years of age was estimated to be 539. This indicates a smaller town than the nearby port of Bridgwater or than the cathedral city of Wells. However, Taunton still seems to have been commercially prosperous in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The charter exempting its burgesses from tolls throughout England, originally granted by Stephen, was confirmed to Taunton’s lord, Bishop Wykeham of Winchester, in 1381, and regulations affecting trade were prominent in the town’s custumal which dates from about the same time.

Bridgwater was a thriving port situated a few miles up the navigable Parrett. In 1377 it had an adult population of over 850, comparable with that of Bath, but the lay subsidy returns of the earlier 14th century suggest that it had then been the wealthiest of the Somerset towns, higher in the list than Bath, Wells and Taunton, and perhaps this was still the case. ‘Bridgwater’ was the name given to a kind of broadcloth manufactured locally, and the port had trading connexions with Bayonne, Bordeaux and Ireland as well as a share in the coastal traffic.