Breconshire

The county town, Brecon was a fairly prosperous market town located in the centre of post-union Breconshire at the confluence of the Honddu and the Usk. Its liberties ran in a rough ellipse outside the walled town some three miles in length and one mile in width, but they also comprehended the detached ward of Llywel, some 11 miles to the east. In the early seventeenth century Brecon’s population numbered around 2,000, making it one of the largest of early modern Wales’s small urban centres. N.M. Powell, Urban Hist. xxxii.

The county town of Brecon (Aberhonddu), on the confluence of the Rivers Honddu and Usk, comprised two parishes and a chapelry, whose large church formerly served St. Mary’s priory.Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i. 261, 262. There was little industry, but a canal linked Brecon to the South Wales iron and coalfields and the Bristol Channel, most trades were represented in the town, and it housed the headquarters of Wilkins’s Bank, the supplier of specie for the iron works of Merthyr Tydfil.R.O.