For administrative purposes Lincolnshire was parcelled into three sub-divisions; Lindsey to the north, Kesteven to the south-west, and Holland, the area of coastal marshlands surrounding the Wash, in the south-east. Although each had separate commissions of the peace, this does not appear to have produced any regular pattern in the geographical distribution of knights of the shire during the early Stuart period. Elections were held at Lincoln Castle.
A preponderantly rural county supporting a typical East Midland mixture of sheep and corn farming, with grazing for cattle along the Ouse valley, Bedfordshire’s chief products were barley, for malting; woollen yarn for the worsted weavers of Norwich; and butter, sold to London dealers at Woburn.BEDFORD; Agrarian Hist. of Eng. and Wales ed. J. Thirsk, iv. 491; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.
A ‘demi-island … besieged … with the ocean’, early seventeenth-century Cornwall largely depended economically on its proximity to the shipping routes between Wales, Ireland, Spain, France and the Netherlands. Despite its poor agricultural land and insubstantial towns, this most westerly of English counties boasted two major trading commodities. The waters around its extensive coastline teemed with pilchards, the bulk of most catches being packed for sale in France and Spain. Equally significant was the mining of tin, England’s most important export after cloth at this period.
Early modern Merioneth was the poorest and most isolated shire in Wales, a fact which induced the architects of the 1536 Act of Union to deny the county a borough seat in Parliament. Its population of about 19,500 was smaller than any except Anglesey and Radnor, and the assessment quotas imposed upon the county after 1640 were lower than elsewhere.
Wiltshire can be divided into two main regions: the chalk downlands of the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain, dominated by sheep-corn husbandry; and the cheese district of the northern and western parts of the county. There was also a separate ‘butter’ region in the south-west, and two royal forests, Savernake in the north, and Clarendon in the south-east. Wiltshire was a major centre for cloth manufacture, concentrated in the west of the county and along the Wyley, Avon and Nadder valleys in the south. D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 73-105; G.D.
Norfolk in the early seventeenth century boasted the second largest city in England (Norwich) as well as two major seaports (Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn). It was also the centre of the new drapery trade, with a large, fertile hinterland criss-crossed with navigable waterways.A.H. Smith, County and Ct. 1-20; R.W. Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, ch. 1. Thomas Fuller noted that ‘all England may be carved out of Norfolk’, T. Fuller, Worthies, ii.
Oxfordshire was described by William Camden as a ‘rich and fertile county’; but it had been troubled by a recent history of agrarian protest against enclosures.W. Camden, Britannia (1772), i. 291. The armed uprising of 1596 was targeted against the modernizing activities of landlords such as Sir William Spencer†; a decade later rumours that Oxfordshire labourers intended to join the Northamptonshire ‘Diggers’ came to nothing, perhaps because the preceding episode had been harshly suppressed. STAC 8/297/4; J. Walter, ‘The Oxon. Rising of 1596’, P and P, clxx.
Early seventeenth-century Warwickshire was a divided community, geographically and socially. The southern third of the county, with its ‘fertile fields of corn and verdant pastures’, was notable for its settled communities and traditional manorial structures. To the north, however, lay a heavily wooded region, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, where a more mobile population combined agricultural pursuits with industrial enterprise, particularly around the north-eastern coalfields and the thriving iron-works of Birmingham.
The remote and sparsely populated county of Cumberland was transformed by the Union of the crowns in 1603 from a border province into a backwater. News of the accession of King James precipitated a final outburst of pillage and looting by numerous border clans, among whom the Graham family was the most notorious; it was reported that in one ‘busy week’ there had been ‘40 towns burnt, 500 felonies and murders’.CJ, i. 1015a; VCH Cumb. ii. 282-4; P. Williams, ‘The Northern Borderland under the Early Stuarts’, in Hist. Essays Presented to David Ogg ed. H.E.
Described by Thomas Fuller in the early 1660s as ‘but the suburbs at large of London’, Middlesex was a small county, ‘scarce extending east and west to eighteen miles in length, and not exceeding twelve north and south in the breadth thereof’. Except near the Thames, where livings were made either by ferrying or fishing, the county’s inhabitants were mainly farmers for, despite its size, Middlesex boasted some of the most fertile soil anywhere in the country.
