Essex

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This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

In 1669 the Italian courtiers accompanying Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, on his visit to England would discover that Harwich was

In 1594 the antiquary and cartographer John Norden had described Essex in the most appreciative terms.

Setting the scene for the mayoral election in 1640, the town’s recorder, Harbottle Grimston*, assured the inhabitants of Colchester that ‘there are few towns in England that can more truly glory in an honourable and ancient pedigree and descent than this town of Colchester’. Herts. RO, IX.A.9, unfol. This speech and others which Grimston delivered in 1639, 1642 and 1646 were intended to enthuse the free burgesses with a sense of civic responsibility before they made their nominations for the office of mayor.

Maldon was a small, rather unimportant borough positioned at the point where the River Chelmer met the Blackwater estuary. It had always been overshadowed by Chelmsford, the county town, which had the advantage of standing on both the Chelmer and the main London-Colchester road. It was Chelmsford, not Maldon, which benefited from most of the sea-borne trade in and out of the estuary. Maldon was literally being passed by. The town had returned two MPs since the fourteenth century and its town council had been incorporated by two royal charters of 1554 and 1555.