Sussex was broadly divided into a northern strip, an extension of the Kentish Weald, which was ‘thickly wooded’ and yielded large quantities of timber, and the South Downs, a ‘range of green open hills’ which ‘afforded excellent pasture for sheep’ and was ‘in some parts ... fertile in corn’. Manufacturing was ‘neither various nor extensive’.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 494; (1832-4), 1002; VCH Suss. ii.
Leominster, a market town on the River Lug, 13 miles north of Hereford and 11 miles south of the Shropshire borough of Ludlow, lay in the hundred of Wolphy in Herefordshire’s golden vale. Its trades were mainly agricultural, but glove making, organized under a putting-out system employing female labour, afforded considerable employment and the town teemed with attorneys. Ibid. (1831-2), xxxviii. 393. R.C.
Coventry, an important manufacturing town where out-working prevailed, was situated locally in the county of the city of Coventry, a separate jurisdiction within Warwickshire. Its economy and politics were influenced by its three main industries or trades - silk (including the weaving of ribbon and election cockades), watchmaking and cordwaining - of which silk was overwhelmingly the most important, and by its proximity to the large unrepresented town of Birmingham, 18 miles to the north-east.
Inverness, the chief town of the Highlands, situated near the mouth of the River Ness, had a population (burgh and parish) of 12,264 in 1821 and 14,304 in 1831. A ‘very thriving place’, it had woollen, hemp and leather manufactures and a commodious harbour. The completion of the Caledonian Canal in October 1822 brought considerable commercial benefits to the town, which was provided with gas and water in this period.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), iv. 301, 304, 307-9; Hist. Inverness (1847), 46, 48; N.S.
Wallingford was a ‘neat country town, respectably inhabited’, on the Thames, five miles north-west of Reading; it was notable for fluctuating unemployment and poverty among those whose living depended on agriculture. Its corporation consisted of a mayor and five other aldermen, chosen from the 18 burgesses. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 138-9; PP (1835), xxiii. 273. The borough was a byword for electoral corruption. PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 31-33; (1835), xxiii. 273; N.
Boston’s growth in the early nineteenth century was steady but undramatic. It had a prosperous agricultural market, dealing in mainly in grain and flour, and a considerable number of people were engaged in manufactures and handicrafts, but its port suffered as a consequence of the country’s general economic depression, despite improvements to the harbour.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 640; W. White, Lincs.
Thirsk was a market town in the North Riding of the county, 23 miles north-west of York. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 1112. The borough boundary was ‘entirely unknown’ and was taken to encompass ‘merely that part of the town in which the burgage houses are found’. All but one of these properties, in which the franchise was vested, were owned by Sir Thomas Frankland† of nearby Thirkleby Park, whose family had had an interest in the borough since the Restoration. He appointed the bailiff, the returning officer for parliamentary elections.
Commercially impoverished and reduced to ‘the ranks of a small and insignificant fishing town’ by repeated encroachments of the North Sea, Aldeburgh was the inspiration for its erstwhile Member Charles Arbuthnot’s* ‘Harmony in Uproar’ and the poetry of its freeman by birth George Crabbe.Suff. RO (Ipswich), J. Glude, ’Materials for Hist. Aldeburgh’, 165; H.P. Clodd, Aldeburgh, 69. It was becoming popular in the 1820s as a summer residence for ‘families of distinction’.
Athlone, located half in Westmeath and half in Roscommon on the Shannon, possessed ‘great advantages of water communication’, but its inland market had ‘gone into decay’ and it was ‘without any extensive manufactories’.
