Borough

Warwick’s strategic location on a ‘rocky ascent’ above the Avon made it an important military and administrative centre from Saxon times. As the county town of seventeenth-century Warwickshire, it played host to the quarter sessions and assizes, and housed the local militia’s magazine. However, although it possessed a thriving market in local agricultural produce, it lagged behind both Coventry and Birmingham in terms of commercial and industrial development. The growing population stood at around 3,000 in 1600, but poverty levels were relatively high. W. Dugdale, Antiqs.

Sited on a ridge west of the Severn, Much Wenlock’s prosperity was founded upon the sale of March wool from sheep grazed on Wenlock Edge. However, the town itself, with a population of no more than 600-700 in the early Stuart period, was in decline: the prosperity which had built its magnificent market hall in the fifteenth century was but a memory, while the borough was not even designated a staple market for the wool trade in 1617. Meanwhile, such industry as the town did possess was being eclipsed by the growth of coalmining at nearby Broseley. VCH Salop, x. 429-30; J.U.

Situated at the mouth of the Yare on the southern border of Norfolk, Yarmouth had been an important fortified town and a major fishing port since Saxon times. The epithet ‘Great’ was added during Edward I’s reign, probably to distinguish it from Little Yarmouth, in Suffolk. F. Blomefield, Hist. Norf. xi. 255. Built around a large central marketplace, the town’s most unusual feature was that it comprised a single parish. Cott. Augustus I (i), no. 74. In the nineteenth century the huge church of St.

Monmouth was established around a Norman castle situated at the confluence of the rivers Monnow and Wye. It thus occupied a significant strategic and cultural position on the boundary between Wales and England. In the thirteenth century the borough passed into the hands of the house of Lancaster, and thereafter it remained a duchy possession down to 1631. The town enjoyed good trading contacts by river and land, and possessed a market by the end of the eleventh century, but suffered severely in the Glynd?r rebellion and struggled to recover economically.K.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century the decline of the Lincolnshire cloth industry and the silting of the River Witham had reduced Boston’s importance as an international port, though the town still enjoyed a modest prosperity as a centre for local trade.Port Bks. of Boston ed. R.W.K. Hinton (Lincoln Rec. Soc. l), pp. xviii-xxxix; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Cent. Lincs. 13-14; P. Thompson, Hist.

Originally the administrative centre for the Lacy Marcher lordship, Weobley declined as Ludlow rose. Nevertheless, the borough sent Members to the Model Parliament, and continued to do so until 1306, when Bromyard, Ledbury, and Ross-on-Wye were also represented, but thereafter only Hereford and Leominster regularly returned.

Originally a Roman settlement, Dorchester returned two Members to the Model Parliament, and received its first charter in 1337. It was described in 1610 as ‘an ancient and populous borough where the assizes for the county are usually holden, and whither the knights and gentlemen of the shire do often repair upon sundry occasions of service of the king’s majesty and the county’, including the Dorset elections. As the shire town, it housed the county gaol, rebuilt in 1624. It also boasted a free school, a bookseller, and, from around 1631, a municipal library. D.

Bridport received its first charter in 1253, and was represented in the Model Parliament. Cordage and linen thread formed the town’s staple products, and the Act of 1529 requiring local farmers to sell all their hemp there was among the statutes renewed in 1624 and 1628. Though Bridport hosted the Dorset quarter sessions until its incorporation in 1619, and was home to nearly 1,500 communicants, its houses were ‘more old than fair’, and its harbour ‘altogether choked with the sands’ by the early seventeenth century.Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 7; T.

Situated on a creek to the east of Falmouth Harbour, St. Mawes was a small fishing village notable only for its ancient chapel dedicated to St. Maudutus, and the royal castle built in the 1540s to protect the bay from French raiders. Although one indenture in 1625 referred to ‘St. Maudes’, the chapel was derelict by 1621, when Parliament was petitioned unsuccessfully for its restoration. Local government was limited to a manorial court leet, held before a portreeve chosen annually by the manor’s tenants.

The shire town of Berkshire, Abingdon lay astride a major north-south trade route and was regarded as one of the most beautiful towns in England by some. As well as being a noted centre of the malt trade, it was also an important market for horses, and despite economic decline in the mid-sixteenth century it remained a centre of the cloth trade. C.G. Durston, ‘Berks. and the County Gentry, 1625-49’, (Univ. of Reading Ph.D. thesis, 1977), i. pp. 4, 17, 22; Travels through Stuart Britain: the Adventures of John Taylor, the Water Poet ed. J. Chandler, 161; VCH Berks. iv.