Great Yarmouth, Norfolk’s second largest town and principal port, 19 miles south-east of Norwich and nine miles north of its rival, the Suffolk port of Lowestoft, had been ‘irregularly built’ on a narrow five-mile strip of land that created a haven between the North Sea and the estuaries of the Rivers Bure and Yare.
Mitchell was little more than a hamlet situated five miles south-east of Truro, consisting of ‘between 20 and 30 houses’ of which ‘about one-half’ were inhabited. The borough limits were not clearly defined but encompassed ‘considerable’ portions of the parishes of Newlyn and St. Enoder, an ‘almost entirely ... agricultural and mining district’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 170; PP (1830-1), x. 99; (1831-2), xxxvi.
St. Ives, a prosperous seaport and market town situated on the western angle of a ‘fine bay’ on the Bristol Channel, in the north-west of the county, was ‘large but irregularly built’, consisting of ‘narrow and intricate’ streets. Its principal sources of employment were in the pilchard fishery, the most extensive in Cornwall, and the neighbouring tin and copper mines; in 1830 both industries were said to be ‘flourishing’, but they were prone to fluctuations. The construction of a pier and lighthouse in the 1760s had made St.
Clitheroe, a growing manufacturing centre, noted for its Dissenting past and the production of cotton and lime, was a 3,000-acre township and chapelry on the River Ribble in the parish of Whalley, in Lancashire’s Pendle district. A borough by prescription, its government was vested locally in two bailiffs (one resident and one non-resident) elected at the annual court leet, who had the power of one magistrate and acted as the returning officer. E. Baines, Hist. Lancs. (1824), i. 608, 610, 612; Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.
Leominster, a market town on the River Lug, 13 miles north of Hereford and 11 miles south of the Shropshire borough of Ludlow, lay in the hundred of Wolphy in Herefordshire’s golden vale. Its trades were mainly agricultural, but glove making, organized under a putting-out system employing female labour, afforded considerable employment and the town teemed with attorneys. Ibid. (1831-2), xxxviii. 393. R.C.
Coventry, an important manufacturing town where out-working prevailed, was situated locally in the county of the city of Coventry, a separate jurisdiction within Warwickshire. Its economy and politics were influenced by its three main industries or trades - silk (including the weaving of ribbon and election cockades), watchmaking and cordwaining - of which silk was overwhelmingly the most important, and by its proximity to the large unrepresented town of Birmingham, 18 miles to the north-east.
Wallingford was a ‘neat country town, respectably inhabited’, on the Thames, five miles north-west of Reading; it was notable for fluctuating unemployment and poverty among those whose living depended on agriculture. Its corporation consisted of a mayor and five other aldermen, chosen from the 18 burgesses. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 138-9; PP (1835), xxiii. 273. The borough was a byword for electoral corruption. PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 31-33; (1835), xxiii. 273; N.
Boston’s growth in the early nineteenth century was steady but undramatic. It had a prosperous agricultural market, dealing in mainly in grain and flour, and a considerable number of people were engaged in manufactures and handicrafts, but its port suffered as a consequence of the country’s general economic depression, despite improvements to the harbour.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 640; W. White, Lincs.
Thirsk was a market town in the North Riding of the county, 23 miles north-west of York. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 1112. The borough boundary was ‘entirely unknown’ and was taken to encompass ‘merely that part of the town in which the burgage houses are found’. All but one of these properties, in which the franchise was vested, were owned by Sir Thomas Frankland† of nearby Thirkleby Park, whose family had had an interest in the borough since the Restoration. He appointed the bailiff, the returning officer for parliamentary elections.
Commercially impoverished and reduced to ‘the ranks of a small and insignificant fishing town’ by repeated encroachments of the North Sea, Aldeburgh was the inspiration for its erstwhile Member Charles Arbuthnot’s* ‘Harmony in Uproar’ and the poetry of its freeman by birth George Crabbe.Suff. RO (Ipswich), J. Glude, ’Materials for Hist. Aldeburgh’, 165; H.P. Clodd, Aldeburgh, 69. It was becoming popular in the 1820s as a summer residence for ‘families of distinction’.
