Mid-seventeenth century Totnes was a town in decline. It had failed before 1640 to capitalize on the opportunity to modernize its industrial capacity represented by the rise of the so-called ‘new draperies’, the lighter cloths exported by other Devon towns in preference to the traditional heavy Devon broadcloths.
Okehampton, on the northern slope of Dartmoor, was one of the poorest Devon towns. It had not benefited from the best days of the region’s tin industry, located further south, and was merely a local centre for the wool trade. Even so, such wealth as it enjoyed came from wool, and the period when it was ‘almost suddenly prosperous’, the late sixteenth century, happened to coincide with the break up of the Courtenay family’s control over the town. R.L. Taverner, ‘The Corporation and Community of Okehampton, 1623-1885’ (London Univ.
Honiton was in the mid-1640s described as ‘a very poor built town’. Symonds, Diary, 37. When John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, came there in 1649 he remembered the place more for the poor quality horse he was provided there than for its amenities. J. Taylor, John Taylors wandering to see the Wonders of the West (1649), 19-20 (E.573.12). A more sympathetic contemporary made out the straggling settlement, three-quarters of a mile long, to be ‘a very pretty town indifferently well builded’. W. Pole, Collns.
The borough of Bere Alston was a small part of the very large parish of Bere Ferrers, which occupied the whole of the peninsula between the River Tavy on the east and the Tamar on the west, ten miles north of Plymouth. The borough had once been prosperous because of the silver mines which had been worked there, but the whole district was in decline by 1640. John Maynard* was one of a number of speculators who sought to revive the silver mines without success. D. Lysons, Magna Britannia, vi.
Plympton Erle, or Plympton St Maurice as it was generally known except in the context of parliamentary elections, was a small borough and parish. When Parliament’s Protestation of May 1641 was sent down for the assent of the population, 159 male residents in Plympton St Maurice subscribed it. Devon Protestation Returns, 235-6.
The basis of Barnstaple’s wealth was the trade it conducted as seaport. On Devon’s north coast, at the western end of the Bristol Channel, its easy access to the Atlantic trade routes was compromised by the steady silting up of the River Taw, which allowed nearby Bideford to grow at Barnstaple’s expense. W.G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), 327-30. In the early 1630s, it seems that commercial life in Barnstaple followed a long-established pattern.
Tiverton was the most industrialized of the Devon towns, with a successful cloth industry that fed the export trade of Exeter and the other ports of southern Devon and Cornwall. The population around 1660 was put at 7,000, but the minister there thought that a gross under-estimate. To judge from his remark, and from the evidence that there were about 3,500 persons in Tiverton in 1642, the town grew rapidly in size, doubtless stimulated by industrial expansion, once the economy had recovered from the effects of civil war. Compton Census, 269, 274; W.B.
Exeter was the unchallenged capital of the far south west, its nearest commercial rival, Bristol, too far distant to pose as a significant economic competitor. The population numbered around 8,000 in the 1670s, significantly less than that of Bristol. Compton Census, 276-7. It was the most important seaport in either Devon or Cornwall, but the bulk of shipping used the berths at Topsham, on the Exe three miles below Exeter, rather than risk the unsatisfactory mid-sixteenth century canal into the city itself. W.B.
Ashburton returned two burgesses to the Long Parliament after 233 years when the borough went unrepresented. Only twice had the place sent Members to Westminster before: in 1295 and 1407. HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Ashburton’. Its revival in 1640 as a parliamentary borough had little or nothing to do with any demand from within the town. Ashburton was a populous centre for tin mining and cloth production, lying on the edge of Dartmoor on the main road between Exeter and Plymouth.
The economic significance of Dartmouth lay entirely in its trade as a port. Located near the mouth of the wide River Dart, its harbour was said in 1599 to be able to accommodate 600 ships. T. Gray, ‘Fishing and the commercial world of early Stuart Dartmouth’, in Tudor and Stuart Devon ed. T.