County

Centrifugal and centripetal elements affected elections to Oxfordshire seats throughout this period. Although Oxford provided an unrivalled focus for judicial, administrative and ecclesiastical life in the county, and a critical point of access to riverborne communications with London, its position close to the border with Berkshire and its status as a university city always had potential to complicate public life in the area. M.S. Gretton, Oxon. Justices of the Peace in the Seventeenth Century (Oxon. Rec. Soc. xvi), p.

County Durham is bounded by the Rivers Tyne and Tees to the north and south, by the North Sea to the east and by the Pennine watershed in the west. To the cartographer Richard Blome, writing in 1673 – doubtless from well south of the Trent – the county seemed ‘far engaged northwards and of a sharp and piercing air’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 92. Early-Stuart Durham’s principal distinguishing feature was its unique status as ‘the last principality’ – a county palatine presided over by the bishop of Durham.

Sussex was a county split in more ways than one. The Weald in the north and east, and the Downs in the south and west, each had their distinctive topography and economic base, particularly with the concentration of iron works in the Weald. Administratively, the county was also divided between east and west, a situation encouraged by the notoriously poor transport infrastructure, which adversely affected lateral movement; although the county’s four rivers, the Arun, Adur, Ouse and Rother, were all navigable, each ran from north to south.

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.

Surrey was dominated throughout this period by the Onslow interest, which had been established relatively recently. Sir Richard Onslow* of Cranleigh and West Clandon, the first member of the family to sit for the county, commenced his parliamentary career in 1628. He had then had to take second place to Sir Ambrose Browne*, who was from an old Surrey family and about ten years his senior.

‘Situated much about the midst of England’, Staffordshire lies on the south-western edge of the Pennines and is bounded by Cheshire, Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. In the seventeenth century, the northern parts of the county, a hilly region, were full of ‘great heaths and moors’, which afforded ‘good pasturage and breed very good cattle’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 201. The River Trent and its tributaries dominate the county’s central plain, and here there was a largely arable economy. D. Palliser, ‘Dearth and disease in Staffs.

The road between Colchester and Norwich served as an unofficial dividing line which split Suffolk in to two equal halves. Roughly speaking, the franchise of Bury St Edmunds, centred on the town of that name, lay to the west of this line and formed what was, for most purposes, a separate administrative unit. Another great liberty, that of St Audrey, situated around Woodbridge, lay entirely to the east. Everything else fell within what was called the Geldable.

The reaction of the Dutch traveller William Schellinks to the landscape of Norfolk was laconic; visiting the county in 1662, he thought it ‘a large, flat region, which sustains a lot of sheep and rabbits’. William Schellinks Jnl. 154. All those sheep were the key to the local economy. Although the county had substantial areas of arable farming, the wool produced from the sheep was what sustained its major manufacturing industries, the weaving of worsted cloth and the new draperies. This was what had helped make Norwich the second city of the kingdom.

The predominant interest in Hertfordshire belonged to the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*), of whom Edward Hyde* would later recall that ‘no man [was] so great a tyrant in his country, or was less swayed by any motives of justice or honour’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 543. A sense of the extent of Salisbury’s influence is conveniently provided by the lists which his officials began to draw up to this end in late January 1640, when it was already apparent that the king would soon call a new Parliament.

Although economically and topographically diverse, and religiously divided, Hampshire was an administratively centralised county in the early seventeenth century, and an area of notable strategic importance. While puritanism was probably dominant among the gentry, there was a notable Catholic presence in the region (represented especially by the Paulets, marquesses of Winchester), which became particularly significant during the popish plot scare in the early 1640s.