Bewdley, a market town situated on the Severn with a large carpet manufactory, carried on a ‘considerable trade’ in salt, glass, ironware and ‘Manchester goods’, but ‘changes in the internal navigation of the country’ increasingly deprived it of its former commercial importance.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 568; PP (1831-2), xl. 137. The representation had not been contested since 1768, when 45 freemen had polled.
Salisbury, a cathedral city in the hundred of Underditch, was the principal town in the southern division of Wiltshire. It boasted cutlery production ‘brought to the highest degree of perfection’, and the remnants of a cloth industry, and was otherwise in a prosperous condition. The parliamentary borough comprised most of the area covered by its three parishes, but excluded The Close, which had a population of over 500. J. Easton, Salisbury Guide (1825), 22; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 809, 810; PP (1831-2), xl. 113-15; (1835), xxiv.
In his radical youth, Robert Southey* wrote an inscription for a proposed monument at Old Sarum:
Morpeth, a 7,600-acre parish and market town on the River Wansbeck, centrally situated some 17 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 18 south of Alnwick, was an important staging post on the Newcastle-Edinburgh road. Ecclesiastically comprised of the townships of Morpeth, Buller’s Green, Catchburn, Hepscott, High Church, Newminster Abbey, Shilvington, Tramwell, Twizell and Ulgham, the parliamentary borough was generally considered to extend northwards from Morpeth to Cottingwood and eastwards to Wansbeck, but excluded Buller’s Green. Parl.
The pocket borough of Higham Ferrers remained under the complete control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, who owned all but ‘five or six’ of its 171 houses and dominated the corporation of a mayor (the returning officer), seven other aldermen and 13 capital burgesses, which kept a tight rein on freeman admissions. Ibid. (1835), xxvi. 204. Fitzwilliam, the town’s recorder, continued to use the seat to accommodate friends or Members useful to the Whigs until the borough’s disfranchisement.
Brackley, a small market town in an agricultural district, had little to recommend it to contemporary observers, one of whom commented that ‘its buildings have no pretension to uniformity or architectural taste’. Formerly ‘a great mart for wool’, by 1831 its ‘only manufacture’ was ‘that of lace’.Pigot’s Northants. Commercial Dir. (1831), 156. The return of its Members was under the patronage of the 2nd marquess of Stafford, whose family had maintained an influence there for 200 years.
Whitchurch, ‘a small irregularly built town’ in ‘a low but pleasant situation’ under the chalk hills of north Hampshire, was located at a crossroads on the London to Salisbury road. For many years it served as the market town for the surrounding agricultural district, though by 1823 ‘scarcely anything’ was brought in on the appointed day. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 344; R.
The market town of Bridport continued to prosper mainly because of its harbour, which lay about a mile to the south, particularly after the passage, sponsored by the Members, of the Bridport Harbour Act of 1823. To the traditional production of rope and fishing-nets were by this period being added the new manufactures of sailcloth and shoe thread, and the port’s commerce consisted of extensive coastal and Newfoundland trades. Western Flying Post, 17 Nov. 1823; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 278; PP (1835), xxiv. 487-8; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist.
Tiverton, a large market town situated near the confluence of the Rivers Exe and Loman, about 13 miles north-east of Exeter, had been ‘the most considerable industrial town in Devon’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, its manufacture of serges and other woollen cloths had gradually declined during the eighteenth and it suffered an economic collapse when export markets in northern Europe were lost as a result of the French wars.
The castellated cathedral city and county town of Durham, 14 miles south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was built on a high rocky outcrop overlooking a bend in the River Wear, and connected by bridges to its suburbs of Elvet and Framwellgate. Gas lighting was introduced in 1823, a new Framwellgate bridge opened in 1828 and the town’s commerce and prosperity were affected by the construction in this period of the Stockton-Darlington railway and a steam packet service to Newcastle. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales, ii. 639-70; VCH Dur. iii.
