By the beginning of the seventeenth century Pembrokeshire’s boroughs were, with the exception of prosperous Haverfordwest, in an advanced state of economic decay. Pembroke was in places ‘very ruinous’ and severely depopulated, John Speed recording in 1611 that it had ‘more houses without inhabitants than I saw in any one city’. Though nominally the shire town, it had long since been eclipsed by Haverfordwest as the county’s administrative centre.
Haverfordwest, the normal venue for Pembrokeshire assizes and county meetings and the centre of hospitality at shire elections, was an incorporated town and a county in its own right that had developed around a Norman castle overlooking the Western Cleddau, eight miles north-north-east of Milford and ten miles north-east of the old county town of Pembroke. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), ii. 286; Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dict. of Wales (unpaginated); R. Lewis, ‘Towns of Pemb. 1815-74’, Pemb. Co. Hist. ed. D. Howell, iv.
Pembroke, an integral part of the earldom of Pembroke comprising the parishes of St. Mary and St. Michael, was a chartered castellated borough, trading centre and old county town situated on the south side of the Cleddau estuary (Milford Creek), ten miles south-east of Haverfordwest and 13 by road and ferry from Milford. Its decline had been arrested in 1814 by the removal of the naval dockyard from Milford to Pater (Pembroke Dock). It was the polling town and its nominally elected mayor and bailiffs were the returning officers and assessors for the constituency.