Commons 1820-1832

Exeter, a cathedral city and port, situated on the eastern bank of the Exe, about nine miles from the English Channel, had lost its position as a leading producer and exporter of serge and other coarse woollen cloths by the late eighteenth century. It continued to provide an outlet for woollen goods manufactured in Devon and served as the chief distribution centre for the general trade of the region. There was also ‘a large demand for the various articles manufactured in the city’, including iron, brass, leather, paper, beer and milled corn.

The small irregularly built town of Bishop’s Castle was situated in the Clun hills in the hundred of Purslow, 20 miles south-west of Shrewsbury and 17 north-west of Ludlow. It comprised four townships, Broughton, Colebatch, Lea and Oakley, and Woodbatch. S. Bagshaw, Salop Dir. (1851), 696. The proprietorial interest exerted by the Clives as owners since 1763 of the Walcot estate had latterly been severely challenged by an alliance of ‘independent’ burgesses and wealthy candidates.

Wigan was a rapidly expanding manufacturing town 18 miles west-north-west of Manchester: its population, which included a large Irish Catholic element, almost doubled between 1801 and 1831. Its main industries, which had been stimulated by local improvements in canal transport, notably the Douglas navigation (1732-42) and the Leeds-Liverpool canal (1770-7), were coal mining and metal and textile manufacture.E. Baines, Hist. Lancs. (1825), ii. 602, 611; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 205; J.

Ashburton, a stannery and market town situated on the south-eastern border of Dartmoor, in a ‘fertile valley’ suited to livestock farming, had prospered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a centre of woollen cloth manufacturing and as ‘a great thoroughfare’ for traffic between Plymouth and London. The production of a coarse cloth known as long ells continued to be the town’s ‘staple trade’, employing ‘a great many hands’, but this had reached its peak by the 1820s and depended heavily on access through the East India Company to the Chinese market.

Shrewsbury, a castellated marcher and county town, was built on the north bank of the navigable River Severn, traversed to its east and west by the English-bridge and the Welsh-bridge. William Hazeldine had a large iron foundry in the town, the Mucklestons a shoe factory, and textile production persisted; but Shrewsbury remained primarily an administrative and commercial centre and its nineteenth century growth was modest compared to that of its industrial hinterland. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iv. 116-20; PP (1831-2), xxxvi. 170-81; xxxix. 201; H.

Coleraine, on the east bank of the Bann, was a town of rising commercial importance, particularly through the trade in its eponymous linens. J. C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), i. 211, 212; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 226-8; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 384-6; PP (1831-2), xliii. 33; (1836), xxiv.

Queen’s (later Laoighis) produced mainly wheat and barley. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Ballinakill and Maryborough, the venue for county elections, the post towns of Abbeyleix, Mountrath, Rathdowney and Stradbally, whose combined mills were capable of producing 12,000 barrels of flour a year, and the parliamentary borough of Portarlington, which lay partly in King’s County to the north.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

An old cathedral city situated on the eastern bank of the Severn, Gloucester was said in 1820 to be ‘as pleasant and healthy a place as any in England’. The pin making and wool stapling industries were in serious decline, but this was partially compensated for by the growth of rope making, brush making and tanning. However, the city owed its prosperity chiefly to its position as a distribution centre supplying coal, corn, timber and other imported commodities to the surrounding region and to Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Buckingham was a small market town on the River Ouse in the north-west of the county. Lace making had been ‘carried on to a great extent’, but was in decline in this period. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 150; (1830), 75-76. The borough remained under the control of the 2nd marquess of Buckingham, the high steward, whose principal residence at Stowe lay three miles away.

Donegal was a windswept and infertile Ulster county, heavily dependent on flax production, linen manufactures and fisheries. Largely Protestant in character, it saw little unrest in this period, apart from the disturbances over the distillery laws at its beginning and during the tithe war a decade later, but the revival of Orangeism in the late 1820s created greater sectarian tension. The usually uncontested elections took place at Lifford, which, like the boroughs of Ballyshannon, Donegal, Killybegs and St. Johnstown, had been disfranchised at the Union.S. Lewis, Top. Dict.