Borough

Writing in 1633, Thomas Gerard praised Taunton in lavish terms:

This constituency was literally overshadowed by Dunster Castle, the ancient seat of the Luttrells located on a promontory three miles to the south east. Both overlooked the Bristol Channel. Passing through in 1635, Sir William Brereton* found Minehead ‘no market town’ but ‘a long straggling-built village, wherein there is great recourse of passengers for Ireland’. W. Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland ed. E. Hawkins (Chetham Soc.

Ilchester was one of those boroughs which had only regained the right to elect MPs earlier in the seventeenth century. In 1621 Sir Robert Phelips† of Montacute had persuaded the Commons to re-enfranchise the town. Three centuries earlier its right rested on its status as the ancient county town of Somerset. But since then it had experienced steep decline. As one contemporary lamented, the town was

Originating as a Saxon ‘port’ or burgh, Milborne Port had flourished in the middle ages as a centre for the cloth trade on the Somerset-Dorset border, and had sent representatives to the Parliaments of Edward I. By the early seventeenth century, however, the town had declined, and, as one contemporary noted, ‘all these things being lost there remains nothing but a straggling town’. Gerard’s Description of Som. ed. E.H. Bates (Som. Rec. Soc.

Seventeenth-century Windsor was a company town: the castle dominated it economically as much as it did physically. The court and its courtiers remained the principal reason for its existence. (Being the town that had grown up centuries before around the castle walls, it was ‘New’ only in the sense that there was an ‘Old Windsor’, the original village located about a mile to the south east.) Many royal servants seeking a second home away from London settled there or in the vicinity.

In the words of John Taylor, the ‘water poet’, Reading was ‘the prime and principal town in this county of Berkshire, for fair buildings, large streets, for clothing and other blessings’. J. Taylor, The Honorable and Memorable Foundations, Erections, Raisings and Ruines (1636), sig. D2v. As Taylor noted, the town was famous for its cloth production and the wealth which that trade had generated had made it the largest town in Berkshire.

Abingdon was one of a number of English towns which had never been enfranchised during the middle ages because they had been dominated by a major monastic foundation. The Benedictine abbey at Abingdon had been one of the great monasteries of England and its mitred abbot had sat in the House of Lords. Its dissolution by Henry VIII had left the town without its principal source of wealth at a time when the main alternative, cloth manufacturing, was facing decline.

In common with the other three Berkshire parliamentary boroughs, Wallingford’s prosperity had always depended on its location on the Thames. It had been represented in Parliament since 1295. By the seventeenth century, however, it had long been outperformed by the neighbouring towns of Abingdon and Reading, and there was little doubt that it was now, by some margin, the least wealthy of the Berkshire boroughs. CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 251. The corporation consisted of a mayor, three aldermen, a chamberlain and 16 burgesses.

Tamworth’s chief peculiarity was that it lay in two counties. The north part of the main street of this nucleated town, which included the parish church, lay in Staffordshire. The south part, where the castle and castle yard stood, was in Warwickshire. Shaw, Staffs. i. 415-6. The castle bailey dominated the landscape, even though a third of it had been removed by the seventeenth century. Leland described ‘the base court and the great ward of the castle ...