Fowey’s relative prosperity was based on its harbour, which provided a safe and generous anchorage on the otherwise forbidding south Cornish coast. According to Richard Carew†, writing at the turn of the century, the harbour entrance was ‘guarded with blockhouses … as is also the town itself, fortified and fenced with ordnance’. Carew, Survey, 134; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii.
Cornwall, ‘being cast out into the sea, with the shape of a horn’, was one of the most remote counties in England, sharing a land border only with Devon. Carew, Survey, 1v. The county’s distance from London was offset by its mineral wealth, especially in tin, and the richness of its coastal fishing grounds, notably for the pilchard trade with the Mediterranean.
Lostwithiel had been the capital of the duchy of Cornwall from its creation in 1337, and was the centre of the royal administration in the county, the venue for the county court, the stannary court and the elections for the knights of the shire. Despite its status, the town was small and relatively poor.
St Ives was a small port on the north coast of Cornwall, protected from the Atlantic by the peninsula known as Pendinas or St Ives Head. J.H. Matthews, Hist. of the Parishes of St Ives, Lelant, Towedrack and Zennor (1892), 1. Originally a centre for the export of tin, by the seventeenth century St Ives was dependent on fishing, and suffered greatly at the hands of North African pirates in the 1620s and 1630s. Matthews, St Ives, 180-1, 183; Carew, Survey, 154; Parochial Hist. Cornw. ii.
St Germans, on the River Tiddy in eastern Cornwall, had been a major ecclesiastical centre in the middle ages, thanks to the wealth and importance of its priory.
West Looe (or Porthbyhan) faced its twin settlement of East Looe across the estuary of the River Looe on the southern coast of Cornwall. The two towns were (according to one contemporary) ‘united and knit together with a fair arched stone bridge’ and shared ‘a pretty little harbour’ which was a centre for the fishing of ‘this silly little fish’, the pilchard. Corporation Chronicles…of East and West Looe ed. A.L.
Newport originated as a settlement outside the gate of Launceston Priory, and by the seventeenth century it was in many ways merely a suburb of the neighbouring borough of Launceston, holding a fair and market but lacking the normal structures of a parliamentary borough.
St Mawes was a fishing village overshadowed by Henry VIII’s castle, which commanded the eastern side of the Carrick Roads, facing its partner, Pendennis Castle, across the estuary of the River Fal.
Truro was a medieval town situated at the junction of two main roads and the Truro River, which flowed into Falmouth harbour.
Bossiney, on the north coast of Cornwall, was a tiny settlement established as a parliamentary borough by the duchy of Cornwall in the mid-sixteenth century. The borough was not incorporated until 1685, and in the interim it was controlled by the court leet, with a ‘mayor’ presiding. Maclean, Trigg Minor, iii. 185, 205-9, The franchise was never entirely settled, and the electorate was variously made up of those who owned property in the parish (the ‘burgesses’), those paying scot and lot, or the inhabitants of the parish of Tintagel in general.