Northamptonshire

Situated in the southern midlands and bounded by no fewer than nine other counties, Northamptonshire was described in the Restoration period as ‘of a fat and rich soil both for tillage and pasturage, bearing excellent grain and feeding great store of sheep and cattle ...[and] honoured with the seats of as many (if not more) of the nobility and gentry as any county in the kingdom, especially as to its extent’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 174. The county was divided by the River Nene into two main administrative units, the western and eastern divisions.

Lying in the south-western corner of Northamptonshire, close to the border with Buckinghamshire, early-Stuart Brackley was notable only for past glories. A staple for wool and major commercial centre in the medieval period, it had little more than its (small) weekday market and its corporate status to show for its former size and prosperity. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 178; Bridges, Northants. i. 143; Baker, Northants. i.

Lying on the main London to Leicester road where it crossed the River Nene, Higham Ferrers was part of the duchy of Lancaster and, from the mid-1620s, parcel of Queen Henrietta Maria’s jointure. HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Higham Ferrers’; VCH Northants. iii. 268; A.N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers in 1640’, Northants. Past and Present, ii. no. 5, pp.

Early Stuart Northampton was notable for its extensive town walls and as a bastion of puritan resistance to royal policies. At the heart of the town’s large godly community by 1640 was the combative figure of Thomas Ball, the stridently Calvinist vicar of the principal civic parish of All Saints (patron: Northampton corporation), which was described as the most ‘scornful’ towards Laudian church ceremonies of any in England. CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 278; 1637-8, p. 535; 1640-1, pp. 109, 351-2; Northampton Bor. Recs. ii. 391-7, 435-7; Diary of Robert Woodford ed. J.

Situated in the far eastern corner of Northamptonshire, on the county’s borders with Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, early Stuart Peterborough lay on the western fringes of the Great Level fen, close to where the Great North Road crossed the River Nene. VCH Northants. ii.

In 1715 Higham Ferrers, consisting of about 250 houses, was controlled by Thomas Wentworth, a Whig, who had bought the manor, including most of the town, from the last Earl of Feversham.