Tamworth’s chief peculiarity was that it lay in two counties. The north part of the main street of this nucleated town, which included the parish church, lay in Staffordshire. The south part, where the castle and castle yard stood, was in Warwickshire. Shaw, Staffs. i. 415-6. The castle bailey dominated the landscape, even though a third of it had been removed by the seventeenth century. Leland described ‘the base court and the great ward of the castle ...
Situated in the heart of England, and with a population estimated to have been around 80,000 by the 1660s, Warwickshire was a county which in the seventeenth century lacked geographical coherence. Its modern historian has noted how its sub-regions had more in common economically with neighbouring districts of other counties than with the rest of Warwickshire. A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws.
With a population of around 7,000 in the seventeenth century, Coventry was in the second rank of provincial English cities. In size, it dominated Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and rivalled Worcester; but because of its grievous decline since the 1520s, when it was the fourth largest city in England, it was regarded by its own leading citizens as suffering from chronic ‘decay of trading’. A. Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 12.
Economic and social profile:
Despite its large and potentially independent electorate, Warwick during the 1690s and 1700s continued to lie under the personal influence of the 5th Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville†). His principal seat was the Castle, which overlooked the borough, and from this vantage point he tended an interest which stemmed jointly from his position as recorder and from his ownership of much property within the town limits, the extent of which is revealed in an estate account for 1686 showing a rent roll totalling £695.
Coventry, as Sir John Perceval (John, Viscount Perceval†) observed on his visit there in 1701, was ‘a very populous and trading place’ in which the manufacture, dressing and marketing of cloth was an economic mainstay. The organization of most of the city’s trades into companies endowed the wide freemen electorate with a semblance of political infrastructure. This impression obtains particular weight from the flow of petitions from these trades to Parliament concerning their various economic grievances.
Warwick was virtually a scot and lot borough. Oldfield wrote about it in 1792:Boroughs, iii. 80. ‘There have been frequent struggles here between the Earl of Warwick ... and the popular party.’ In 1754 its patrons were Lord Brooke (later Earl of Warwick) and Lord Archer. In 1774 both seats went to members of Warwick’s family; which led in 1780 to a revolt of the independent party and the loss of one seat to Robert Ladbroke, a London banker with an estate in Warwickshire.