Maldon was a market town and port in eastern Essex, situated at the influx of the River Chelmer into the Blackwater estuary. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 297-8. By the new charter of 1810 almost 1,500 freemen, mostly non-resident, and qualified by birth, apprenticeship, marriage, purchase or gift, had been added to the moribund and dwindling electorate of less than 70.
Carlow, a county town situated on the River Barrow at a point ‘navigable for barges’, was a ‘considerable mart for agricultural produce’, from which ‘vast quantities of corn and butter’ were ‘transmitted to Waterford for exportation’. Charles William Bury, 1st earl of Charleville, retained complete control over the representation and management of its self-elected Protestant corporation of 13 burgesses, in whom the right of voting had been ‘exclusively vested’ by royal charter, 24 Dec. 1674.
The representation of Norwich was dictated by long-established rivalries in municipal politics, fluctuations in party funds and commercial considerations, notably the demise after 1825 of its textile industry, whose productivity consistently failed to match that of the Yorkshire manufactories. Norwich in 19th Cent. ed. C. Barringer, 119-60; PP (1835), xxvi. 379-430. As the banker Hudson Gurney* commented in 1832, Norwich voters were ‘not counted in ones or twos’. Norf.
Helston, a ‘thriving’ market and stannary town in the south-west of the county, on the London to Land’s End road, consisted chiefly of four ‘wide and well paved’ streets, which crossed ‘at right angles’. It was the focus for an extensive and fertile agricultural region to the south and east and a highly productive tin and copper mining district to the north and west, and its market was ‘justly ranked among the principal ones of Cornwall’.
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk’s second largest town and principal port, 19 miles south-east of Norwich and nine miles north of its rival, the Suffolk port of Lowestoft, had been ‘irregularly built’ on a narrow five-mile strip of land that created a haven between the North Sea and the estuaries of the Rivers Bure and Yare.
Mitchell was little more than a hamlet situated five miles south-east of Truro, consisting of ‘between 20 and 30 houses’ of which ‘about one-half’ were inhabited. The borough limits were not clearly defined but encompassed ‘considerable’ portions of the parishes of Newlyn and St. Enoder, an ‘almost entirely ... agricultural and mining district’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 170; PP (1830-1), x. 99; (1831-2), xxxvi.
County Dublin, the small area of mostly coastal plain enclosing the metropolis, had a population of only about 150,000 (excluding the city) in 1821. Apart from Dublin itself, which naturally dominated local affairs, and its suburb of Kilmainham, where county elections were held, the main towns were the disfranchised boroughs of Newcastle and Swords, the ports of Dunleary and Howth, and the fishing villages of Rush and Skerries, near Balbriggan in the north-east.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.
Lanarkshire had developed rapidly since the mid-eighteenth century to become the most populous and economically important county in Scotland. The northern part was rich in mineral deposits, and numerous collieries and iron works were concentrated around Airdrie, Coatbridge, Hamilton, Motherwell and Wishaw. Textile manufacturing, though increasingly centred on Glasgow and its immediate vicinity, was also ‘carried on to a considerable extent’ in towns and villages such as Airdrie, Lanark, New Lanark and Strathaven.
St. Ives, a prosperous seaport and market town situated on the western angle of a ‘fine bay’ on the Bristol Channel, in the north-west of the county, was ‘large but irregularly built’, consisting of ‘narrow and intricate’ streets. Its principal sources of employment were in the pilchard fishery, the most extensive in Cornwall, and the neighbouring tin and copper mines; in 1830 both industries were said to be ‘flourishing’, but they were prone to fluctuations. The construction of a pier and lighthouse in the 1760s had made St.
Clitheroe, a growing manufacturing centre, noted for its Dissenting past and the production of cotton and lime, was a 3,000-acre township and chapelry on the River Ribble in the parish of Whalley, in Lancashire’s Pendle district. A borough by prescription, its government was vested locally in two bailiffs (one resident and one non-resident) elected at the annual court leet, who had the power of one magistrate and acted as the returning officer. E. Baines, Hist. Lancs. (1824), i. 608, 610, 612; Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.
