Borough

By 1820 St. Albans, a stagnant market town and centre of coaching traffic, had become a largely unmanageable borough: of the 16 elections which occurred between 1784 and 1832, only three were uncontested.PP (1835), xxvi. 2930; W. Page, St. Albans, 100. The strongest natural interest belonged to James Walter Grimston†, 1st earl of Verulam, an anti-Catholic Tory and brother-in-law of the prime minister Lord Liverpool, whose residence at Gorhambury lay two miles west of the town. His ancestors had supplied several Members for St.

Hertford, a prosperous market town and centre of the corn and malt trades, had a reputation in the early nineteenth century for electoral independence.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 354; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iv. 31. The corporation, which consisted of a mayor and nine aldermen, could make no more than three honorary freemen, and was therefore unable to impose itself on the inhabitants. The freedom was obtainable by purchase, apprenticeship or gift, and recipients were required to have been resident for 40 days before their admission.

The borough of Malmesbury, ‘very pleasantly situated on an eminence’ in the hundred of the same name, comprised the parish of the Abbey and parts (known as ‘in-parishes’) of St. Paul, Malmesbury and St. Mary, Westport. According to the boundary commissioners, it was

Cobbett remarked of ‘that villainous hole’ Cricklade, a market town on Wiltshire’s northern border, that ‘certainly, a more rascally place I never set my eyes on’. The countryside around he found pleasant enough, but the people were in a wretched condition, and ‘everything had the air of the most deplorable want’.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 15; ii. 414; Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Ireland’s ‘second city’ of Cork, a county of itself, boasted an ‘almost matchless’ natural harbour, in which a vast shipbuilding and naval supply industry had developed during the Napoleonic wars, situated around the victualling yards at Cobh (Cove) on Great Island, providing local contractors with large fortunes. The impact of the navy’s gradual withdrawal during this period was countered by the growth of an ‘extensive trade in corn and flour’ and the establishment of cutlery, glass and glove manufactories. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

The borough of Carrickfergus, the county town of Antrim, was coextensive with the parish of the same name and formed a county of itself. A seaport eight miles north-west of Belfast, it was largely dependent on its fisheries. By the 1830s it was ‘of no importance whatsoever’ and it was remarked that ‘it is the situation, more than anything within the town, that renders the place interesting’.PP (1831-2), xliii. 21; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 270, 271; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.

The county corporate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the county and assize town of Northumberland, was an important port, commercial, cultural and manufacturing centre on the north bank of the River Tyne. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iii.

The small and nondescript town of Wareham, which had a ‘particularly neat appearance’, sent clay to the Potteries, but its port was too shallow for it to compete with its larger neighbour Poole. The inhabitants consisted of ‘persons of middling circumstances, and a few retired officers and independent persons, retail tradesmen and those deriving a subsistence from the small craft’.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 297-8; PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 151-2; (1835), xxiv. 699, 702; J. Hutchins, Dorset, i (1861), 77-78; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist. and Antiq.

Weymouth, as this constituency was usually known, and Melcombe Regis, which was in fact the larger and more important of the two towns, lay on either side of the River Wey, on a handsome bay at the centre of the Dorset coast. Though the port’s trade had much declined, improvements were made by the Acts of 1820, by which was rebuilt the bridge (opened in 1824) linking the two banks, and of 1825, by which the damage done to the harbour in the storm of November 1824 was repaired.G. Kay, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis New Guide (1823), 3-4, 11-12, 15-18; G.A. Ellis, Hist.

Rochester, which had long been a significant strategic and commercial port, was part of one continuous settlement that included the much larger Chatham, the site of the expanding naval dockyards, directly to the east, and the smaller Strood across the Medway to the north. The three towns were generally regarded as one entity and, despite mutual rivalries, their inhabitants often petitioned Parliament together. In the absence of any manufactures, most inhabitants were engaged in crafts, retailing or the local fisheries.PP (1831-2), xxxix. 19-21, 29-31; (1835), xxiv.