With a population of around 7,000 in the seventeenth century, Coventry was in the second rank of provincial English cities. In size, it dominated Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and rivalled Worcester; but because of its grievous decline since the 1520s, when it was the fourth largest city in England, it was regarded by its own leading citizens as suffering from chronic ‘decay of trading’. A. Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 12.
Chippenham had returned Members to Parliament at various times since the end of the thirteenth century, but it was incorporated only in 1554. By that charter, the government was vested in a bailiff and 12 burgesses, and in the later sixteenth century they alone constituted the electorate, notwithstanding the efforts of freemen to exert their previously exercised rights to vote. However, the absence of specificity as to the franchise and the permission granted by the charter to co-opt further burgesses continued to leave room for dispute. Wilts. Rec. Soc. v.
Great Bedwyn, which had sent two representatives to Parliament intermittently since 1295 and regularly since the later thirteenth century, was incorporated by charter in 1468. By that time its heyday was already in the past. Overshadowed by Marlborough and Hungerford, respectively a few miles to the north west and to the north east, it was essentially an agricultural village.
Salisbury was not only Wiltshire’s administrative centre and the seat of a rich bishopric but also a significant clothing city, although it had relinquished its late medieval pre-eminence and was subject to the more general depression of the early seventeenth century. Somewhat distant from the county’s main textile manufacturing area, it specialised in kerseys rather than whitecloths and depended on smaller-scale producers rather than on the clothier oligarchs who dominated local politics to the north west.
Although 16 miles west of Salisbury, Hindon was a disconnected part of the hundred of Downton, which bordered Hampshire. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Mere), 194. The settlement had been established in the thirteenth century by the bishop of Winchester on chalk downland in a corner of his manor and parish of East Knoyle. By the seventeenth century it was still essentially a village.
Situated as it was on a rocky peninsula formed by two branches of the River Avon, Malmesbury’s strategic position on the route from London to Bristol meant that it was probably already a privileged borough in 1086. First summoned to Parliament in 1275, its charters date from 1381. J.M. Moffatt, The Hist. of the Town of Malmesbury (1805), 153-4; VCH Wilts. xiv. 127, 129, 133, 149; M.G. Rathbone, Wilts. Borough Recs. (Wilts. Rec. Soc.
According to Wiltshireman Edward Hyde*, by the mid-seventeenth century Marlborough was ‘a town the most notoriously disaffected of all that county’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 403. Mentioned in Domesday Book, it was situated on the north bank of the river Kennet at the crossroads of major routes from London to Bath and Salisbury to Swindon. VCH Wilts. xii.
By this period Ludgershall had long lost its medieval importance. Its eleventh century castle was already ruinous, its market was small, and although there were clothworkers living in the town, its economy was predominantly agricultural. VCH Wilts. xv. 119, 121, 128. Situated at the eastern edge of Salisbury plain on a road from Marlborough to Winchester, it was separated from the textile centres of north west Wiltshire and of Salisbury itself, the nearest large town being Andover, over the border in Hampshire. VCH Wilts. xv. 119.
In the Anglo-Saxon period, Wilton had been the seat of kings of Wessex, while after the Norman conquest it remained for a time the administrative centre of Wiltshire. Even in the early modern period there was a bailiff representing the landed interests of the crown, and from 1649, ‘the state’ and then the protector. Wilts. RO, G25/1/21, pp.
Heytesbury was a small town on the road between Warminster and Salisbury and on the edge of the royal forest of Selwood. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Heytesbury), esp. 82; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii, map betw. pp. 282-3. Although it lay within the southern spur of the Wiltshire clothing area along the river Wylye, by the seventeenth century it does not seem to have been of great economic importance. It was not among the 14 towns proposed in the early 1630s as centres of regulation of the cloth trade. Ramsay, Wilts.