During the two centuries which followed the Norman Conquest, Northampton had been a town of national as well as local importance, owing its early development and status largely to its close association with the Crown. The borough was situated at the centre of the kingdom, was easily defensible and provided with roads which facilitated not only trade but also military communication.
Situated near Northamptonshire’s boundary with Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, Peterborough became enfranchised shortly after its former Benedictine monastery was reconstituted as a cathedral in 1541. The small town had no municipal authorities, and was run by the dean and chapter; it received no charter of incorporation until 1874, until which time the dean served as a quasi-mayor. Accordingly, it was the dean’s bailiff who received the sheriff’s precept for parliamentary elections. W.T. Mellows, Foundation of Peterborough Cathedral (Northants. Rec. Soc. xiii), p.
A small market town on the east bank of the River Nene, Higham Ferrers received a charter in 1556 which vested government of the town in a corporation consisting of a mayor, seven aldermen and 13 ‘capital burgesses’; it also conferred upon the borough the right to send one Member to Parliament.VCH Northants. iii. 269-71. Before 1640 the franchise rested exclusively with the corporation. Northants. RO, FH3467; A.N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers Election in 1640’, Northants. P and P (1958), pp.
Located at the southernmost point of Northamptonshire, about half way between Banbury and Buckingham, Brackley was a small agricultural town that in its medieval heyday had served as ‘a famous staple for wool’. However, by the turn of the seventeenth century, as William Camden noted, it could ‘only boast how great and wealthy it once was by its ruins’.Baker, Northants. i. 567, 573-4. The town was governed under a seigneurial charter granted in 1260 by the earl of Winchester to the mayor and around 32 ‘burgesses’. Northants. P and P, iii.
A staple town, Northampton received its first charter in 1189, and sent Members to Parliament in 1283. Northampton Bor. Recs. ed. C.A. Markham, i. 25. Elections were originally popular, but an Act of 1489 vested the government of the town in a mayor, two bailiffs, the ex-bailiffs (usually numbering about 12) and 48 ‘burgesses’ chosen by the mayor and his brethren, and confined the franchise to this assembly. VCH Northants. iii. 9-13; Northampton Bor. Recs. ed. J.C. Cox, ii.
The pocket borough of Higham Ferrers remained under the complete control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, who owned all but ‘five or six’ of its 171 houses and dominated the corporation of a mayor (the returning officer), seven other aldermen and 13 capital burgesses, which kept a tight rein on freeman admissions. Ibid. (1835), xxvi. 204. Fitzwilliam, the town’s recorder, continued to use the seat to accommodate friends or Members useful to the Whigs until the borough’s disfranchisement.
Brackley, a small market town in an agricultural district, had little to recommend it to contemporary observers, one of whom commented that ‘its buildings have no pretension to uniformity or architectural taste’. Formerly ‘a great mart for wool’, by 1831 its ‘only manufacture’ was ‘that of lace’.Pigot’s Northants. Commercial Dir. (1831), 156. The return of its Members was under the patronage of the 2nd marquess of Stafford, whose family had maintained an influence there for 200 years.
Northampton, one of the largest potwalloper boroughs, was ‘a flourishing town’ whose prosperity was on the increase. Ibid. (1835), xxv. 557. The opening of the branch canal in 1815, which linked the town with the main artery of the Grand Junction Canal four miles away at Blisworth, was the catalyst for its rapid expansion. The waterway gave Northampton’s traditional footwear manufacturers ready access to London, Birmingham and the fast developing industrial regions in the north.
The return of the Members for Peterborough had been under the complete control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam of nearby Milton, the principal property owner and custos rotulorum of the liberty, since 1786. The unusual jurisdiction enjoyed by the dean and chapter of the city’s cathedral over the soke of Peterborough and their power to nominate the returning officer (normally their steward) meant that their interest had always to be considered, but for many years they had been content to follow Fitzwilliam’s line.