Herefordshire

The composition of the governing body of Hereford was set down in a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1597. It is evident, however, that the charter merely confirmed a framework in existence from at least the early part of the sixteenth century. The corporation, or common council, was made up of the mayor, six aldermen and 24 councilmen. They had the power to elect ‘famous and discreet’ men as stewards of the city, who, in turn, could appoint deputies ‘learned in the law’. There was also a common or town clerk, appointed for life.

Leland described Leominster as ‘meetly large’, with ‘good building of timber’. The wool produced in the area was of such high quality that it was known as ‘Leominster ore’, and the borough had a prosperous clothmaking industry as well as being, according to the Edwardian chantry commissioners, ‘the greatest market town within the county of Hereford’.

Leland noticed that the walls and gates of Hereford ‘be right well maintained by the burgesses of the town’, although the castle ‘tendeth toward ruin’. By 1509 the city was a flourishing market for the produce of the surrounding arable and orchard districts and for the renowned Herefordshire wool; early in the 16th century clothmaking was an industry there.

Whatever prosperity Leominster has enjoyed may partly be attributed to its situation on a fertile plain fed by three rivers. Although the size of its population in the period 1386-1422 is not recorded, it seems likely that, containing only one parish church, the town was then quite small and had much about it that was rural in character. Over a century later, in 1534, there were only 215 householders living in Leominster which, however, John Leland, writing about the same time, considered to be ‘meatly large’, with ‘good buyldinge of tymbar’.

In 1377 Hereford was inhabited by about 2,850 people, being, therefore, somewhat larger than the more northerly marcher town of Ludlow, but smaller than Gloucester. The city, situated at a bridging point of the river Wye and on the roads from Gloucester and Abergavenny, was potentially a successful trading centre. There had been a guild merchant there since before 1215; the St. Denis fair held regularly from 1227 acquired some importance in the western counties, and in 1331 the inhabitants were granted exemption from all kinds of tolls throughout England.

Originally the administrative centre for the Lacy Marcher lordship, Weobley declined as Ludlow rose. Nevertheless, the borough sent Members to the Model Parliament, and continued to do so until 1306, when Bromyard, Ledbury, and Ross-on-Wye were also represented, but thereafter only Hereford and Leominster regularly returned.

Described as ‘seated among most pleasant meadows and as plentiful corn fields, compassed almost round by rivers’, W. Camden, Britain (1610) trans. P. Holland, 618. Hereford is situated on the River Wye at the point where it could be forded at two separate places. M.D. Lobel, ‘Hereford’, in Historic Towns, ed. M.D. Lobel, 1. The population grew from about 4,000 in the 1520s to about 5,000 in 1700, even though Speed’s map suggests that by 1610 there had been little suburban development. A. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns, 73; P.

Leominster was the market centre for a farming area famed for the quality of its wool, considered the best in the country, which was used to make high quality cloth in Worcester, Coventry, Ludlow, Gloucester, Hereford and Leominster itself. M. Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612), p. 105; E. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern Eng. 20-1; P.J. Bowden, Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart Eng.

Leominster, a market town on the River Lug, 13 miles north of Hereford and 11 miles south of the Shropshire borough of Ludlow, lay in the hundred of Wolphy in Herefordshire’s golden vale. Its trades were mainly agricultural, but glove making, organized under a putting-out system employing female labour, afforded considerable employment and the town teemed with attorneys. Ibid. (1831-2), xxxviii. 393. R.C.

The brick-built cathedral city and county town of Hereford on the north bank of the River Wye, to which the radical John Thelwall retreated in 1798, had a strong libertarian tradition counterbalanced by the Tory-Anglican influence of the chapter clergy. E.P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, P and P, cxlii (1994), 112-40. The city, or liberties, encompassed six parishes, parts of two others, and extended ‘far beyond the mass of the town’, which in 1831 was described as ‘a place neither advancing nor receding’, with respectable shops and a well-clad population.