Berkshire

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Seventeenth-century Windsor was a company town: the castle dominated it economically as much as it did physically. The court and its courtiers remained the principal reason for its existence. (Being the town that had grown up centuries before around the castle walls, it was ‘New’ only in the sense that there was an ‘Old Windsor’, the original village located about a mile to the south east.) Many royal servants seeking a second home away from London settled there or in the vicinity.

In the words of John Taylor, the ‘water poet’, Reading was ‘the prime and principal town in this county of Berkshire, for fair buildings, large streets, for clothing and other blessings’. J. Taylor, The Honorable and Memorable Foundations, Erections, Raisings and Ruines (1636), sig. D2v. As Taylor noted, the town was famous for its cloth production and the wealth which that trade had generated had made it the largest town in Berkshire.