A settlement from Saxon times, Plymouth derived its prosperity from its strategic location at the head of one of the best natural harbours in south-west England. Its prominence as both a port and a royal naval base dated from the thirteenth century. During Elizabeth’s reign the town came into its own as the launch pad for English exploration of North America, and the regular departure point for military expeditions against Spain, not least the fleet that harried the 1588 Armada.
Tewkesbury lay in a peninsula of Gloucestershire, between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, at the confluence of the Severn and the Avon, and was described by Camden as ‘a large and fair town … famous for the making of woollen cloth and smart-biting mustard’. W. Camden, Britannia (1772) ed. E. Gibson, i.
New Windsor developed as a royal borough in the shadow of the castle. It received its first charter in 1277 and returned Members intermittently from 1302 and regularly from 1447.VCH Berks. iii. 58. A new charter issued in August 1603, on the ‘humble petition and request’ of Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, entrusted its government to some 30 brothers of the guildhall, ‘of the better and more approved inhabitants’, of whom 13 were to be styled ‘benchers’ and to include the ten aldermen from among whom the mayor was to be chosen. Ibid. 61; Bodl. Ashmole 1126, ff.
Situated close to the Buckinghamshire-Berkshire border ‘where the Thames winds itself round the bottom of the hills’, Great Marlow was characterized by Camden as ‘a pretty considerable town’, which owed its importance chiefly to the confluence of river traffic to London and good road connections to both Reading and Chipping Wycombe.W. Camden, Britannia (1722), i. 309; R. Gibbs, Bucks. Misc.
Grampound’s name derived from the bridge, or grand pont, built to carry the main road from St. Austell to Truro across the River Fal. Possibly founded by the earls of Cornwall, who granted it a market and fairs in 1332, Grampound was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337 by Edward III, who provided the borough with its first charter, and made its privileges conditional on payment to the duchy of a yearly fee-farm rent.
The town of Mitchell dates from at least the early thirteenth century, when a weekly market was first held. Its location on the main road from Launceston to St. Ives failed to guarantee prosperity, and the town had declined to little more than a village by the time it was enfranchised in 1547, probably at the request of the lord of the manor, Sir John Arundell† of Lanherne. C.G. Henderson, Essays in Cornish Hist. ed. A.L. Rowse and M.I. Henderson, 54-5; HP Commons, 1509-58, i.
Beverley, the administrative and social centre of the East Riding, noted for its splendid minster, was a prosperous and ‘most respectable’ market town nine miles north of Hull, to which it was connected by road and a navigable canal creek. It had ‘no manufactures’ of significance, but the presence of four linen manufactories, a paint making business and an iron foundry presaged its slow development as a minor industrial town from the mid-1830s. There was also some small-scale boat and ship building.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), pp. 592, 593; PP (1831-2), xl.
New Radnor (Maesyfed), situated 30 miles north north-east of Brecon, was the old county town of Radnorshire, probably its only chartered borough, and the polling town of the contributory boroughs constituency to which it gave its name. It comprised ten scattered hamlets and extended, in a five-mile radius from the castle, over a fifth of the county’s 272,128 acres. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iv.
Haverfordwest, the normal venue for Pembrokeshire assizes and county meetings and the centre of hospitality at shire elections, was an incorporated town and a county in its own right that had developed around a Norman castle overlooking the Western Cleddau, eight miles north-north-east of Milford and ten miles north-east of the old county town of Pembroke. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), ii. 286; Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dict. of Wales (unpaginated); R. Lewis, ‘Towns of Pemb. 1815-74’, Pemb. Co. Hist. ed. D. Howell, iv.
Pembroke, an integral part of the earldom of Pembroke comprising the parishes of St. Mary and St. Michael, was a chartered castellated borough, trading centre and old county town situated on the south side of the Cleddau estuary (Milford Creek), ten miles south-east of Haverfordwest and 13 by road and ferry from Milford. Its decline had been arrested in 1814 by the removal of the naval dockyard from Milford to Pater (Pembroke Dock). It was the polling town and its nominally elected mayor and bailiffs were the returning officers and assessors for the constituency.
