Banbury, a small market town, was enfranchised as a single member constituency and incorporated by a charter of 1554.A. Beesley, Banbury, 219-22. Twelve aldermen, one of whom served as bailiff, and 12 capital burgesses together constituted both the common council and the electorate. VCH Oxon. x. 73-4; R.K. Gilkes ‘Banbury: the Pattern of Local Govt.’, Cake and Cockhorse, v.
Positioned astride the River Welland, Stamford occupied an anomalous geographical position, as it was situated where the counties of Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Rutland met. The borough was incorporated in 1462, with a council consisting of an annually elected ‘alderman’, 12 other ‘comburgesses’, and 12 ‘capital burgesses’. Its record of regular representation in Parliament began five years later. HP Commons 1558-1603, i.
Commanding the shortest sea passage to France, Dover, described by one observer in 1635 as a ‘long town … indifferently well built’, was the only Cinque Port to retain much economic importance, boasting as it did a substantial fleet of trading vessels. ‘A Relation of a Short Survey of the Western Counties’ ed. G. Wickham Legg, in Cam. Miscellany XVI (Cam. Soc. ser. 3. lii), 26. For the size of Dover’s fleet, see SP14/140/68; Eg. 2584, ff. 375-80v. Its prosperity, however, was achieved only at the price of constant maintenance work on pier and harbour.
Under the Tudors much of the Yorkshire woollen industry migrated to the Pennines, a source of abundant water power. Pontefract – frequently pronounced Pomfret – lay just outside the principal industrial area, ‘in a very pleasant place that bringeth forth liquorice and skirrets [parsnips] in great plenty’. It contained ‘fair buildings, and hath to show a stately castle as a man shall see, situated upon a rock no less goodly to the eye than safe for the defence’. The honour of Pontefract, consisting of 18 manors reaching to the Lancashire border, was a fiefdom of the duchy of Lancaster.
