Borough

The small irregularly built town of Bishop’s Castle was situated in the Clun hills in the hundred of Purslow, 20 miles south-west of Shrewsbury and 17 north-west of Ludlow. It comprised four townships, Broughton, Colebatch, Lea and Oakley, and Woodbatch. S. Bagshaw, Salop Dir. (1851), 696. The proprietorial interest exerted by the Clives as owners since 1763 of the Walcot estate had latterly been severely challenged by an alliance of ‘independent’ burgesses and wealthy candidates.

Wigan was a rapidly expanding manufacturing town 18 miles west-north-west of Manchester: its population, which included a large Irish Catholic element, almost doubled between 1801 and 1831. Its main industries, which had been stimulated by local improvements in canal transport, notably the Douglas navigation (1732-42) and the Leeds-Liverpool canal (1770-7), were coal mining and metal and textile manufacture.E. Baines, Hist. Lancs. (1825), ii. 602, 611; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 205; J.

Ashburton, a stannery and market town situated on the south-eastern border of Dartmoor, in a ‘fertile valley’ suited to livestock farming, had prospered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a centre of woollen cloth manufacturing and as ‘a great thoroughfare’ for traffic between Plymouth and London. The production of a coarse cloth known as long ells continued to be the town’s ‘staple trade’, employing ‘a great many hands’, but this had reached its peak by the 1820s and depended heavily on access through the East India Company to the Chinese market.

Shrewsbury, a castellated marcher and county town, was built on the north bank of the navigable River Severn, traversed to its east and west by the English-bridge and the Welsh-bridge. William Hazeldine had a large iron foundry in the town, the Mucklestons a shoe factory, and textile production persisted; but Shrewsbury remained primarily an administrative and commercial centre and its nineteenth century growth was modest compared to that of its industrial hinterland. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iv. 116-20; PP (1831-2), xxxvi. 170-81; xxxix. 201; H.

Coleraine, on the east bank of the Bann, was a town of rising commercial importance, particularly through the trade in its eponymous linens. J. C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), i. 211, 212; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 226-8; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 384-6; PP (1831-2), xliii. 33; (1836), xxiv.

An old cathedral city situated on the eastern bank of the Severn, Gloucester was said in 1820 to be ‘as pleasant and healthy a place as any in England’. The pin making and wool stapling industries were in serious decline, but this was partially compensated for by the growth of rope making, brush making and tanning. However, the city owed its prosperity chiefly to its position as a distribution centre supplying coal, corn, timber and other imported commodities to the surrounding region and to Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Buckingham was a small market town on the River Ouse in the north-west of the county. Lace making had been ‘carried on to a great extent’, but was in decline in this period. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 150; (1830), 75-76. The borough remained under the control of the 2nd marquess of Buckingham, the high steward, whose principal residence at Stowe lay three miles away.

Winchelsea, a decayed port, was in this period ‘a mere village’, situated on a hill a mile and a half inland from the east Sussex coast. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 523; VCH Suss. ix. 523. It was part of the electoral empire of the Whig 3rd earl of Darlington, who had bought control of both seats in 1804. Freemen were admitted purely with reference to the parliamentary interest and their number ‘kept as low as would secure the existence of the corporation’, which consisted nominally of a mayor and 12 jurats. Oldfield, Key (1820), 249-52; W. D.

I’ll sing you a song of a comical town
Though its boundary’s small yet great its renown.
For eating and drinking and voting well fam’d
And the place from its bridges has Stockbridge been named. Bodl. Clarendon dep. c.369, bdle. 5.

Trinity College, which was established by Elizabeth I in 1592 and enfranchised by James I in 1613, was the alma mater of the Protestant Ascendancy, its spiritual bedrock and political forcing ground.This and the following paragraph are based on R.B. McDowell and D.A. Webb, Trinity Coll.