The 1536 Act of Union enfranchised the shire town of each Welsh county except Merioneth; in the case of Flintshire, representation was extended to include four other boroughs, only one of which, Rhuddlan, was of any consequence.SR, iii.
Thirsk had returned Members to the Parliament of 1295, but was not permanently enfranchised until the reign of Edward VI, shortly after the Crown acquired former monastic property within the town.
A Saxon foundation, sited on Ermine Street where it crossed the River Ouse, Huntingdon was a thriving centre of perhaps 2,000 people in 1086. Chartered in 1205 and served by 16 churches in 1291, its prosperity was eroded by the rise of nearby St. Ives and St. Neots, which took over the local markets in livestock and grain respectively, so that by 1603, with only four churches and a population of about 750, the borough was of little consequence.
Morpeth grew up in the shadow of the Norman castle constructed to guard the Great North Road’s crossing over the River Wansbeck. The town was granted a fair and market in 1199, and achieved borough status by 1382. In the early seventeenth century Morpeth boasted a tollbooth, a moot-hall and a grammar school. A post-town on the main route from the Scottish border to London, it was a regular meeting-place for Northumberland’s magistrates and deputy lieutenants.
Truro sprang up in the early twelfth century at the juncture of two major roads and a navigable tributary of Falmouth Haven, and began sending burgesses to Parliament in 1295. A key factor in the borough’s development was its close proximity to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Tywarnhaile. From around 1300 Truro was west Cornwall’s principal location for ‘coinage’, the obligatory pre-sale testing of the metal’s purity, and when tin production in this part of the county dramatically increased in the sixteenth century the town’s prosperity rose commensurately.
The county town, Brecon was a fairly prosperous market town located in the centre of post-union Breconshire at the confluence of the Honddu and the Usk. Its liberties ran in a rough ellipse outside the walled town some three miles in length and one mile in width, but they also comprehended the detached ward of Llywel, some 11 miles to the east. In the early seventeenth century Brecon’s population numbered around 2,000, making it one of the largest of early modern Wales’s small urban centres. N.M. Powell, Urban Hist. xxxii.
Cambridge became a royal borough under Henry I and returned Members to Parliament from at least 1295, but the town was not formally incorporated until 1605. The composition of the town assembly was not specified in the charter of incorporation, nor was the extent of the franchise.F.W. Maitland and M. Bateson, Camb. Bor. Charters, 116-37. Until 1625, when the corporation resolved that all freemen could vote, Cambridge had one of the most unusual election procedures in the country.
A small town in south-west Wiltshire lying on the principal road between Warminster and Salisbury, Heytesbury was, like many settlements in the region, dependent upon the cloth trade. As part of the royal forest of Selwood, there was also some trade in timber. At its heyday in the late Middle Ages the town had a market, and two annual fairs.E.D. Ginever, Ancient Wilts. Village of Heytesbury, 23-5; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii. 283. Enfranchised as a proprietary borough in 1449, it had never been incorporated.R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts.
Although a flourishing market town which returned Members from 1295, Bletchingley was never incorporated and had no governing body other than the manorial court. There was a bailiff but he was not a public officer, being described in 1624 as ‘only a rent-gatherer’ for the lord of the manor. The returning officer was the sheriff, who exchanged indentures with the burgage-holders – the resident owners of property by burgage tenure – who held the franchise. The manor of Bletchingley was purchased by William Howard, 1st Lord Howard of Effingham, in 1560.
Lichfield lies in south-east Staffordshire, between the high ground of Cannock Chase to the west and the Tame valley to the east. The origins of its name are obscure. Once thought to signify ‘a field of corpses’, after the massacre of early Christians by the Romans, a more likely meaning is ‘a common pasture in (or beside) a grey wood’.T. Harwood, Hist. and Antiqs. of Lichfield, 2; VCH Staffs. xiv.
