County

Middlesex, whose ‘independent’ freeholders had famously returned John Wilkes in 1769 and Sir Francis Burdett* in 1802, was an increasingly urban metropolitan county, bounded by the Rivers Thames, Lea and Colne. Described by William Cobbett† in 1822 as an ‘ugly county’, characterized by the ‘tax eaters’ showy tea-garden-like boxes’ and the ‘shabby dwellings of [the] labouring poor’, its only hunt, the ‘Old’ Berkeley, ceased to advertise its meets in 1820, ‘in order to avoid the pressure of a swarm of nondescripts starting from every suburb in London’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed.

Tyrone, a county of mountains and bogs intermixed with fertile agricultural areas, collieries and bleach fields, had a population of about 300,000 in 1831. The predominance of its Protestant inhabitants, who formed the bulk of the large electorate, was especially marked in Omagh, the county town, as well as in the disfranchised boroughs of Augher, Clogher and Strabane.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 254; PP (1824), xxi. 696; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

The smallest Welsh county, Flintshire had industrialized early and had an admirably diversified economy. The boundaries of four of its five hundreds (Coleshill, Mold, Prestatyn and Rhuddlan) were defined by the River Dee, which separated the county from Cheshire to the north-east and east. To the south lay the hundred of Maelor (Maelor Sais), a detached part of the county adjoining Denbighshire and Shropshire.

Northumberland was noted for its coastal coalfield, shipping trade, corn and lead. Its six wards (Bamburgh, Castle, Coquetdale, Glendale, Morpeth and Tynedale), from which the detached districts of county Durham, Bedlingtonshire, Norhamshire and Islandshire, remained distinct, comprised 97 parishes and 646 constabularies.

Monaghan, a largely undeveloped county of hills and lakes, contained an almost equal population of Protestants and Catholics, so that both communities had to be wooed at elections, which took place in the county town of the same name. None of the major landlords, who were mostly absentees and therefore usually exercised their influence through powerful agents, had a predominating interest and since the Union, when the borough of Monaghan was disfranchised, they had wrangled over the representation without coming to a contest. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

Cornwall was ‘almost an island, being surrounded on all sides by the sea’, except for the border with Devon. Its geographical remoteness and cultural distinctiveness were reinforced by poor transport communications. A ‘ridge of bare rugged hills, intermixed with bleak moors’, ran through ‘the midst of its whole length’, and much of the county presented a ‘naked and almost desolate appearance’.

Leicestershire’s agriculture was dominated by corn and sheep production. As well as the thriving and expanding county town, where about 15 per cent of the freeholders lived, it contained a number of considerable settlements, some of which were centres of hosiery, cotton and worsted manufacturing, still largely conducted on a domestic basis: Loughborough (population in 1821 7,365); Hinckley (5,933); Ashby-de-la-Zouch (3,935); Melton Mowbray (2,815); Lutterworth (2,102); Market Harborough (1,873), and Market Bosworth (1,117).

Cambridgeshire was a variedly productive agricultural county, with no significant manufacturing industry. In 1824, the 5th Earl De La Warr, writing to the 3rd earl of Hardwicke, the lord lieutenant, wondered whether there was any point in backing a scheme to establish a horticultural society, as ‘our county is too thinly peopled with resident families to give such an institution any chance of success’.Add. 35691, f.

A county palatine of four wards or deaneries (Chester, Darlington, Easington and Stockton) Durham was agriculturally diverse and had rich deposits of coal, iron and lead. Despite their repeated requests to be transferred to Northumberland, the detached rural districts of Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire and Norhamshire, south of Berwick-upon-Tweed, remained part of the representative county of Durham until 1832 and of the administrative county until 1834. The only parliamentary borough, the city of Durham, was the assize and election town.