Bridgwater
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Bath
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Somerset Mid
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Somersetshire West
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Somersetshire East
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Frome
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Bridgwater
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Bath
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Bath
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.
Bridgwater
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.