County

In May 1641, the justices of the peace in Kent were forced to undertake extensive repairs to the shire house at Pickenden Heath, the venue for county elections. As Sir Roger Twysden* recorded, ‘there having been two elections of knights of the shire to serve in Parliament, 1640, the shire house at Pickenden Heath was much in decay in respect the concourse had been far greater than at former elections and that both coming to poll many had broke down the walls of it to put through the names of the freeholders for their friends to be written down’. Cent. Kent Stud. U47/47/O1, p.

Of the counties in England, only Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were incontestably larger than Devon in the seventeenth century. Seventy-five miles from north to south and 73 from east to west, Devon was diverse in its land use and social structure. The regions of the county were clearly delineated in terms of topography and land use. East Devon was the most populous, and manors there were large and valuable, even if field sizes were small. The South Hams, the hinterland behind Dartmouth and Totnes and north east of Plymouth, was the most fertile and productive region agriculturally.

Westmorland was described in 1671 as for the most part ‘barren, being full of great moors and high mountains (called the North Fells [the modern Lake District]), yet there are many fruitful valleys in it, abounding with good arable, meadow and pasture grounds and commended for plenty of corn and cattle’. Fleming-Senhouse Pprs. ed. E. Hughes (Cumb. Rec. Ser.

In the absence of a dominant noble interest, Dorset was controlled by a small group of interrelated gentry families. Most of these were relative newcomers to the county. The Strangwayses, Trenchards, Husseys, Tregonwells and Napers had all come to prominence through the purchase of monastic lands in the 1540s. T. Coker, Survey of Dorsetshire (1732), 31, 63-4, 83, 98. In the century that followed other families moved into the county, including the Erles from Devon, the Digbys from Warwickshire and the Bankeses from Cumberland.

Seventeenth century Worcestershire was a comparatively populous and wealthy county. In 1662, only in London and 11 other English counties were there fewer acres per fireplace, as recorded by the collectors of the hearth tax. Of the English and Welsh counties, over 60 in number, Worcestershire came sixteenth in the total tax burden imposed on it by one of the Ship Money writs, and nineteenth in its share of the 1641 subsidy. Its per capita tax burden was above the national average. R.H. Silcock, ‘County government in Worcestershire, 1603-60’ (London Univ.

Cambridgeshire was a county of two halves divided by the River Ouse. The southern half, centred on Cambridge, had good-quality soil (variously chalk or clay-based), was largely woodless, and provided excellent opportunities for arable farming. Wheat, barley and oats were produced in large quantities. Peter Munby in 1639 found this part of the county to be ‘wonderful corn country, as might be judged by the tillage and plenty of good ale and beer generally here to be had’. The Travels of Peter Mundy, ed. R.C. Temple (Hakluyt Soc. 2nd ser.

Lincolnshire was the largest county in England after Yorkshire, and like its northern neighbour it was divided into three administrative districts – Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey. Its decay as a producer and exporter of wool and cloth, which was all too apparent by the early sixteenth century, continued to cast a long shadow over the county’s economy. VCH Lincs. ii. 319-20, 332; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Lincolnshire’. Among the communities that were hit hardest by this decline were Lincolnshire’s ports and towns. VCH Lincs. ii.

In 1594 the antiquary and cartographer John Norden had described Essex in the most appreciative terms.

Although Thomas Fuller dismissed the county as ‘but the suburbs at large of London’, mid-seventeenth century Middlesex still maintained the characteristics of a rural community, supplying grain, dairy produce and fruit to the capital, and its principal industry was also land-based: the manufacture of bricks and tiles. Fuller’s Worthies, ed. R. Barber, 241; M. Robbins, Mdx. (1953), 32-3, 49. It was thus appropriate that the landowning families from the northern fringe of the county – from Ruislip to Enfield – dominated socially and politically.

The smallest of the ancient counties of England by some margin, Rutland was also dwarfed in terms of population and wealth by the adjoining shires of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. The county’s economy was based overwhelmingly upon arable farming, the rearing of sheep and cattle and the trade generated by its two modestly proportioned and ‘indifferently’ provisioned market towns, Oakham and Uppingham. R.