The pocket borough of Yarmouth, an obsolete port close to the western extremity of the Isle of Wight, was described in 1823 as
a neat little market town, standing on a bank sloping to the sea, in a healthy situation, with pleasant views of the Channel ... [but] much diminished from its ancient consequence. Its many narrow streets, destitute of buildings, clearly point to its former enlarged site.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 348.
Founded by a half-brother of William the Conqueror, Launceston grew up around Dunheved castle, which the Normans built to control the principal northern crossing of the Tamar, Cornwall’s eastern border. The town’s name referred originally to a neighbouring settlement whose population was encouraged to move to the new citadel, and even in the early seventeenth century the parliamentary borough’s official designation remained Dunheved alias Launceston. R. and O.B. Peter, Launceston and Dunheved, 68, 70; I.D. Spreadbury, Castles in Cornw. 17; C.
Lostwithiel was probably founded around the late twelfth century by the Cardinham family, lords of the nearby castle of Restormel, who provided the settlement with its earliest charter. Located on a then navigable stretch of the Fowey river, and near to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Blackmoor, the town enjoyed early prosperity as a prime distribution-point for the tin trade.
Situated on a hill overlooking the confluence of the rivers Blackwater and Chelmer, Maldon was an ancient port town of approximately 1,000 inhabitants. W.J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon, 23. Unlike Colchester or nearby Witham, it failed to develop a significant textile industry, Ibid. 12-13, 109. and its trade with the Continent was on a decidedly small scale. E190/598/14. Though well placed to exploit the North Sea fisheries, Maldon possesed very few vessels.
Newport sprang up in the shadow of Launceston Priory, and seems to have taken its name from one of the monastery’s gateways. In existence by 1274, little more is known about it until 1529, when it was enfranchised. In terms of geography and administration, Newport was the least impressive of the seventeenth-century Cornish parliamentary boroughs. Effectively just a suburb of Launceston, separated from its larger neighbour by only a minor tributary of the Tamar, the village lacked the most basic structures of self-government.
Located in the extreme west of Dorset, Lyme Regis received its first charter in 1284, and sent Members to the Model Parliament. In the early seventeenth century, notwithstanding the town’s frequent pleas of poverty, it was a flourishing community of nearly 2,000 people, ‘well-built, and enriched by the conveniency of the Cobb, which is an harbour that the inhabitants with much industry and charge have built in the sea’. The charges levied for maintenance of the Cobb were confirmed by statute in 1585.
Founded by the Romans at the first easy crossing place above the mouth of the Severn, Gloucester remained ‘at the centre of a communication network stretching north-south along the Severn valley and east-west towards London and Wales’. It suffered from the general decline in the textile industries, but was still the prosperous marketing centre for grain from the vales of Berkeley, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, shipping wheat and malt to Bristol, the West Country, Wales and Ireland. Indeed, it managed to support a dozen great inns and a score of lawyers. P.
At the end of the sixteenth century Derby had a population of between 2,000-2,500 with clothworking as its staple industry.E. Lord, ‘Trespassers and Debtors: Derby at the end of the Sixteenth Century’, Derbys. Arch. Jnl. cxvii. 97. It was a royal borough before the Conquest, though its first surviving charter dates only from 1204. R. Simpson, Coll. of Fragments Illustrative of Hist. and Antiqs. of Derby, 28. Since 1337 the town had been governed by two bailiffs, chosen annually by the freemen.
The mouth of the River Fowey forms the best natural harbour on the English coast between Plymouth and Falmouth. This fact, combined with Fowey’s close proximity to the duchy of Cornwall’s tin coining centre at Lostwithiel, explains the town’s rise in the later middle ages as a base for trade, piracy and, on occasion, military expeditions.
Newtown, lying east of Yarmouth on the north coast of the Isle of Wight, was sustained mainly by its oyster fishery and saltern. VCH Hants, v. 265, 266, 267. Under the town’s seigneurial charter of 1393, which was confirmed in 1598, the governing body consisted of the mayor, town clerk, sergeant, constable, and an indeterminate number of ‘chief burgesses’, from whose number the mayor was chosen annually. I.o.W.
