Borough

Founded as a Saxon burh, Totnes benefited from its strategic location at the western end of Foss Street, eight miles from the sea on a navigable stretch of the River Dart. The main outlet for tin coined at the nearby stannary town of Ashburton, Totnes also became a centre of cloth production, particularly of Devon ‘straits’. For much of the sixteenth century it was accounted the second wealthiest community in the county, its merchants trading with western France and the Iberian peninsula in particular. W.G. Hoskins, Devon, 504; T.

Situated in south-eastern Somerset, Milborne Port was recorded as a substantial borough in the Domesday book, and returned Members to the Commons five times under Edward I. It declined thereafter as nearby Sherborne, Dorset, grew. By the time Leland visited Milborne in the 1530s, its market was defunct, although it ‘retaineth privileges of a franchised borough’. A century later a local man observed that ‘there remains nothing but a straggling town’, the population of which was probably around 400-500 in the seventeenth century.S.G.

The borough of Saltash was created in the thirteenth century out of the great feudal honour of Trematon, and formed part of the ancient demesnes of the duchy of Cornwall. The town grew up on the western bank of the Tamar, below Trematon castle, and this favourable location on the edge of Plymouth Sound ensured its status as one of Cornwall’s principal ports. Parl. Survey of Duchy of Cornw. i. ed. N.J.G. Pounds (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. n.s. xxv), 126; R. Pearse, Ports and Harbours of Cornw. 13; I.D. Spreadbury, Castles in Cornw.

A substantial medieval town, Wareham was important enough to begin sending representatives to Parliament in 1302. However, by the early seventeenth century it had long been superseded as a port by Poole, and was noted chiefly for ‘fair houses inhabited as much by gentlemen almost as by tradesmen’. The continuing existence of five parishes attested to its former prosperity, but these benefices now provided only a meagre living for most of the incumbents. OR.; T. Gerard, Survey of Dorset, 57; Procs. Dorset Nat. Hist. and Arch. Soc. lxxv.

Callington was the last of the old Cornish boroughs to be enfranchised, and physically was one of the least impressive. Despite being a market town since 1267, and the customary meeting-place for official assemblies within Cornwall’s East hundred, the borough was never incorporated, and the chief officer, although known as the mayor, was in reality a manorial reeve. In ecclesiastical terms, Callington was merely a chapelry of the neighbouring parish of South Hill, with which it was also merged for taxation purposes.

Early Stuart York, still reckoned the second city of England, had a population of around 10,000. Its archbishop, styled ‘primate of England’, supervised four northern dioceses, while the Council in the North, a small but permanent bureaucracy based at the King’s Manor, managed civil affairs north of the Trent. The city, chartered under Henry II, sent two citizens to the Model Parliament of 1295, who by custom sat next to the privy councillors and London citizens in the Commons.

Old Sarum was an ancient hill-fort known to the Romans as Sorbiodunum. A military refuge for the residents of nearby Wilton during Saxon times, a mint was established there by the late tenth century. After the Conquest a royal castle was constructed, to which William I famously summoned all the landowners of England to swear fealty to him in 1086. A cathedral was built inside the walls following the creation of the diocese of Sarum in 1075, and this in turn encouraged the development of a town. A market existed by 1130, and Henry I granted a charter around the same time.

Situated in the north of Westmorland, Appleby received its first royal charter in the late twelfth century, and sent two Members to the Model Parliament.M. Weinbaum, Brit. Bor. Charters, 118; M.W. Holdgate, Hist. Appleby, 22-3, 26. Geographically and politically dominated by its castle, one of the many homes of the Clifford earls of Cumberland and hereditary sheriffs of Westmorland, the town had, by the early Stuart period, been outstripped by Kendal, both as an economic and administrative centre.Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. xi.

New Romney lost its access to the sea after the violent storm of 1286, and dwindled into a mere market town, often at odds with its ‘limb’ of Lydd. It nevertheless served as the meeting place of the Cinque Ports’ two representative assemblies, the Brotherhood and the Guestling, received a charter in 1352, and in 1563 was incorporated under a governing body consisting of a mayor and a maximum of 12 jurats. E. Hasted, Kent, viii. 447; W. Holloway, Romney Marsh, 81; CPR, 1560-3, p. 499; M. Teichman Derville, Annals of New Romney, 5, 10; K.M.E.

The little town of Corfe was dominated by its castle, which Elizabeth I granted to her favourite Sir Christopher Hatton†. At his request the town was enfranchised in 1572 and incorporated four years later. The corporation consisted of a mayor and a bailiff, elected annually, and an uncertain number of ‘barons’, the title given to all those who had served as mayor. The Isle of Purbeck, in which Corfe is situated, still provided excellent sport, including red deer, and there were a number of resident gentry families, notably the Dackombes.