Somerset

The name said it all. For countless centuries hot water, which had fallen as rain thousands of years earlier in the Mendips, had bubbled up through the underlying limestone mantle at three points close together within a bend of the River Avon. B. Cunliffe, Roman Bath Discovered (2004), 10-12. This is what had attracted the earliest settlers to the site and what had brought innumerable visitors there in every intervening century. Bath in the mid-seventeenth century was very different from the Aquae Sulis of the Romans or its eighteenth-century re-creation.

The principal historical association of Bridgwater in the mid-seventeenth century is as the birthplace and hometown of Robert Blake*, the illustrious admiral who represented it in three Parliaments. Positioned on the River Parret just five miles from the Bristol Channel, it was the county’s principal port, although its potential had long been hampered by its far more successful rival, Bristol. It was governed by a mayor, two aldermen and 24 principal burgesses. One local gentry family, the Wroths, exercised strong electoral influence in the town throughout this period.

Wells, like Bath, the town to which it was linked by the title of their bishop, owed its name to the presence of springs. The crucial difference, however, was that those at Bath were hot. But if Wells had never been able to develop as a spa centre in the way that Bath had done, it had acquired other advantages in its centuries-old rivalry with its neighbour. Bishops of Bath and Wells may have taken their title from both towns and officially Bath was the senior partner, but since the thirteenth century those bishops had preferred to base themselves at Wells.

This constituency was literally overshadowed by Dunster Castle, the ancient seat of the Luttrells located on a promontory three miles to the south east. Both overlooked the Bristol Channel. Passing through in 1635, Sir William Brereton* found Minehead ‘no market town’ but ‘a long straggling-built village, wherein there is great recourse of passengers for Ireland’. W. Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland ed. E. Hawkins (Chetham Soc.

Ilchester was one of those boroughs which had only regained the right to elect MPs earlier in the seventeenth century. In 1621 Sir Robert Phelips† of Montacute had persuaded the Commons to re-enfranchise the town. Three centuries earlier its right rested on its status as the ancient county town of Somerset. But since then it had experienced steep decline. As one contemporary lamented, the town was

As a large, prosperous county, Somerset had no shortage of wealthy landowners each eager to serve as knights of the shire. Berkeleys, Hoptons, Horners, Phelippses, Pouletts and Rodeneys had all sat in recent Parliaments. The Pophams, Stawells and Portmans also could not be ignored. By the 1630s local politics had, to a great extent, revolved around the ongoing feud between the 1st Baron Poulett (John Poulett†), assisted by Sir John Stawell*, and the dominant county figure, Sir Robert Phelipps† of Montacute. Phelipps’s death in 1638 might have been the moment to move on.

Originating as a Saxon ‘port’ or burgh, Milborne Port had flourished in the middle ages as a centre for the cloth trade on the Somerset-Dorset border, and had sent representatives to the Parliaments of Edward I. By the early seventeenth century, however, the town had declined, and, as one contemporary noted, ‘all these things being lost there remains nothing but a straggling town’. Gerard’s Description of Som. ed. E.H. Bates (Som. Rec. Soc.

With an estimated population of 855 in 1377, Bath was smaller than its sister city of Wells and completely overshadowed by its neighbour, Bristol. A merchant guild had come into existence before Bath received its first royal charter in 1189. By 1230 a mayor had appeared. In 1256, a further charter gave the citizens the right of returning royal writs, of bequeathing their property by will, and of nominating coroners;J.C. Russell, Brit. Med. Pop. 142; Mun. Recs. Bath ed.