Wallingford owed its origins and early importance to a ford across the Thames, dominated by a medieval castle. It received its first charter in 1156 and returned Members from 1295. The population was declining in this period and in 1636 was described as only ‘a good market town’. VCH Berks. iii. 523, 532, 534, 536; J.K. Hedges, Wallingford, ii.
Reading, with a population of about 7,000 in the 1630s, was still a prosperous clothing town at the opening of this period, producing high quality woollen fabrics much in demand on the Continent. One of the 23 staple towns created for the wool trade in 1617, it suffered heavily from the trade depression of the 1620s. John Kendrick, a wealthy London cloth exporter who came from a prominent Reading family, bequeathed £7,500 to the borough in 1624, intending to encourage the industry, but the funds were, in the event, misused. N.R. Goose, ‘Decay and Regeneration in 17th Cent.
Dunwich had been one of the most important Saxon ports in East Anglia and the seat of a bishopric, but coastal erosion and the silting of the harbour had reduced it to a shadow of its former self by the early seventeenth century. J.A. Steers, ‘Suff. Shore’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xix. 9-11; T. Gardner, Historical Acct.
A village existed at Tavistock by the tenth century. An important Benedictine abbey was founded there in late Saxon times, and the monks encouraged the settlement’s development, obtaining grants of markets and fairs. Borough status was probably achieved during Henry II’s reign. Located on the western edge of Devon’s tin-mining zone, Tavistock was a stannary town from 1305. In the early Stuart period it was still the county’s busiest centre for coinage, the official processing of tin for sale, even though production in Devon had now significantly declined.
Hythe received its first charter in 1156, and in 1575 became the first Cinque Port to be formally incorporated, under a mayor, nine jurats, and an undefined common council in whom the franchise was vested. By the early seventeenth century the obstruction of the haven by shingle had reduced the town, described in 1613 by the mayor and jurats as ‘much decayed’, to a mere fishing port. E. Hasted, Kent, viii. 236-7; HCA 30/4, unnumb. item, 19 Apr.
Wells had long been dominated by the bishops of Bath and Wells, lords of the manor, liberty and hundred. In 1201 a royal charter vested municipal authority in an annually elected master (or steward) and a council of Twenty-Four. Successive bishops aimed to erode this independent jurisdiction, forcing the cancellation of the town’s first two charters of incorporation (1341 and 1574).
Situated in north-east Wiltshire, Great Bedwyn at the time of the Domesday survey was a thriving community with its own mint. However, the local economy, based on the wool and clothing industries, went into severe decline in the Middle Ages.VCH Wilts. xvi. 11. Despite being incorporated by charter in 1468, the borough dwindled into insignificance, and was described as ‘a poor thing to sight’ by John Leland in the early sixteenth century.
Marlborough was founded by the Saxons on the site of a Roman fortified settlement. Situated on the River Kennet, the town was an axis for communications between London and Bristol, and from the southern ports via Winchester and Salisbury to Gloucester. Its favourable location enabled the town to develop into one of the principal trading centres in the area, while its strategic importance was recognized in the eleventh century with the construction of a castle, which was also used as a provincial mint and treasury.A.
Situated on a strategic promontory where the River Swale emerges from the Pennines, Richmond was founded in 1071 as the administrative centre of the vast honour of Richmond. The town became the focal point for the distribution of corn from the Vale of York to the Dales, and for the collection of Pennine wool for export through Newcastle, Hartlepool and Hull. The town’s population reached 1,600 in 1563, but was thereafter affected by repeated plague epidemics, the worst of which, in 1597-8, carried off at least 1,050 victims.R.T. Fieldhouse and B. Jennings, Hist.
St. Ives derives its name from a fifth-century Irish missionary, St. Ia, whose shrine stood in the church there until the Reformation. The peninsula which protects St Ives’s harbour from the Bristol Channel attracted settlement from prehistoric times, but the town developed slowly, lacking its own market until the late fifteenth century, and achieving full parochial status only in 1576. Some 20 years later Carew described it as ‘of mean plight’, and in need of a new pier.
