Dorset

The county town of Dorchester was located on a chalk plateau above the River Frome, and its origins as a Roman settlement could be seen in the ‘Walks’ which followed the old boundary walls, and in the straight main streets, West, East and South Streets, which met at the central market place. Historic Towns in Dorset, 53-4. In the early seventeenth century, Dorchester was in many ways an unremarkable place: a modestly prosperous town with a population of about 2,000, run by an oligarchic council, whose inhabitants were said to ‘gain much by clothing and altogether trade in

Despite its small size – it had only 68 householders in the early 1660s – the borough of Corfe Castle was the most important settlement on the Isle of Purbeck, and the centre for the trade in local stone and marble.Dorset Hearth Tax, 73-4; Historic Towns in Dorset, 44. The borough’s namesake was a massive Norman castle, which, on its near-impregnable site in a gap (or ‘corfe’) in the steep east-west chalk ridge across Purbeck, dominated the isle and commanded the southern approaches to nearby Wareham and Poole.

The borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis was on the south coast of Dorset, mid-way between the rival trading ports of Poole and Lyme Regis. The borough was important for three principal reasons: as a thriving port, both in its own right, trading with France and Newfoundland in a variety of commodities, and as the out-port of the Dorchester woollen industry; as a strategic centre commanding the natural harbour formed in the lee of Portland Bill; and as a double-borough, from 1571 by act of Parliament with Melcombe Regis returning four burgesses as Members of Parliament to Westminster.

Positioned high on an escarpment above the vale of Blackmore in north Dorset, and a major staging-post on the main western road from London to Cornwall, Shaftesbury was a borough of some strategic importance.RCHM Dorset, iv.

The borough of Wareham occupied a peninsula created by the convergence of the Rivers Frome and Piddle as they approached Poole Harbour, and had been a defensible site since the dark ages. The town walls were erected by Alfred the Great after Danes sacked Wareham Priory in the ninth century, a stone castle was built after the Conquest, and the town acted as the port for the royal stronghold at Corfe Castle during the middle ages.

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A borough of notorious venality and intractable politics, the hilltop town of Shaftesbury, on Dorset’s northern border with Wiltshire, was described by Thomas Hardy, who believed that it retained its old ‘natural picturesqueness and singularity’, as ‘one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England’.J. Cannon, ‘Study in Corruption: Shaftesbury Politics’, Procs. Dorset Natural Hist. and Arch. Soc. lxxxiv (1962), 154-7; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 291; J. Hutchins, Dorset, iii (1868), 2-3; T. Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), pt. iv, ch.

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