Borough

Steyning, a ‘neat’ market town several miles north-west of Brighton, was said in 1823 to have ‘no manufactory of any description’ and trade ‘entirely of a domestic nature’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 522. The borough covered only a small part, about 20 acres, of the parish, which extended over some 3,100 acres. The franchise was in the resident ratepayers and it was reported in 1831 that, in addition to the 118 eligible voters, there were ‘about 16 borough houses which have the right of voting, at present occupied by paupers’.

Cockermouth, the birthplace of the poet William Wordsworth and Cumberland’s election town, lay in the parish of Brigham at the confluence of the Rivers Cocker and Derwent, eight miles east of Workington and 25 south-west of Carlisle, with which it shared the quarter sessions. Dominated by its ruined castle, its boundaries were co-extensive with those of the ancient barony of Allerdale. The main employment was in weaving shops or factories and tanneries, and Quakers and Independents had been influential locally since the early eighteenth century. Parl.

St. Germans, an ‘inconsiderable town’ with ‘no claims to notice but its antiquity’, was situated on the side of a valley next to a creek, on the south-eastern coast of the county. Most of the inhabitants were fishermen, the houses were said in 1824 to be ‘continually decreasing’ in number and the weekly market was merely ‘nominal’. S. Drew, Hist. Cornw. (1824), i. 651-2; ii. 278-84; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 163; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii.

Cirencester, a market town situated ‘on the borders of the Cotswold country’ and ‘intersected by branches of the River ... Churn’, had been a major fortified settlement in Roman times. By the early nineteenth century it had lost its prominent position as a centre of the wool trade, while wool combing and cloth making were in decline and the carpet and edge tool manufactories were soon to be supplanted by those of the West Midlands.

Dartmouth, a seaport and market town situated on a ‘steep hillside rising from the west bank of the Dart estuary’, about one mile from the English Channel, had prospered for several centuries thanks to its ‘capacious’ natural harbour. However, the damage inflicted by wars on the Newfoundland fishing fleet and the Portuguese wine trade, and the decline of the woollen textile industry in Devon, meant that Dartmouth’s economy was stagnant by the early nineteenth century and depended heavily on its coastal trade; even this had ‘lately been diminished by the rivalry of neighbouring ports’.

The county town of Monmouth was situated on the Rivers Monnow and Wye between the ironworks of Wales and the coalfield of the Forest of Dean. It gave its name to, and was the polling town for, a contributory boroughs constituency of the Welsh type which, as the Commons had determined in 1680, included rapidly industrializing Newport and the small agricultural borough of Usk, 25 and 12 miles to its south-west, and excluded Abergavenny, Caerleon, Chepstow and Trellech. HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 407-9; CJ, ix.

A populous cathedral city and port, situated on the rivers Avon and Frome about eight miles from the Severn, Bristol had been ‘the commercial capital of the West of England’ until the onset of relative economic decline in the late eighteenth century, when it was overtaken by Liverpool. The costly and belated construction of new harbour facilities, completed in 1809, did nothing to reverse this trend, as large vessels still had difficulty in navigating the river connection to the sea.

Westbury, in the parish and hundred of the same name, was, according to William Cobbett†, a ‘miserable hole’, a ‘nasty odious rotten borough, a really rotten place’, whose cloth factories ‘seem to be ready to tumble down as well as many of the houses’.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 400. The decline of its cloth industry, with the exception of one large concern, made the town ‘altogether insignificant’, and led to economic distress, unemployment and emigration. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Dismissed by William Cobbett† as ‘an ill-looking place enough’, Marlborough, a hundred in itself, was a small but reasonably prosperous market town in eastern Wiltshire.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 14; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 805; PP (1831-2), xl. 111; (1835), xxiii. 222; VCH Wilts. xii.

Costly litigation after the general election of 1790 had ensured that the representation of the Norfolk assize town of Thetford, straddling the Suffolk border, was controlled by the two largest local landowners, the 4th duke of Grafton, who was also the recorder, and the Catholic 11th Baron Petre. By arrangement with the mayor, ten aldermen and 20 common councilmen of the corporation, dominated by the Best, Bidwell, Burrell and Faux families prominent in the town’s brewing, coal, iron, paper and wool trades, they nominated a Member each.