Lincolnshire, England’s second largest county, was a premier area of wheat production and also had extensive grazing regions, with long wool a speciality. Only six towns (Boston, Lincoln, Louth, Gainsborough, Spalding and Stamford) had over 5,000 inhabitants and it was dominated by rural proprietors, concentrated in Holland (the south-eastern administrative division) and parts of Lindsey (the northern division).
Christchurch, a market town close to the Dorset border, lay at the confluence of the Rivers Avon and Stour, but by the nineteenth century its natural harbour was too shallow to accommodate any but the smallest craft. In 1832 the boundary commissioners recorded that ‘the town presents no symptoms of activity or industry. The houses are of a middling description. The appearance of the inhabitants, who are thinly scattered, gives few indications of prosperity’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 311; (1830), 412-7; PP (1831-2), xxxviii.
Stamford, a large market town on the Great North Road, had recently been ‘very much improved in its buildings and general appearance’. White’s Lincs. Dir. (1826), 181. The representation was dominated by its principal landowner, the Tory 2nd marquess of Exeter, who resided at Burghley House just over the county border in Northamptonshire. He controlled the corporation of 12 aldermen and 24 capital burgesses, one of whom served annually as mayor, acted as the town’s recorder, and owned or leased most of the corporation’s property.
Oxfordshire was a fertile agricultural county, with centres of manufacture at Bicester (leather slippers), Henley (silk) and Witney (blankets).Pigot’s Commercial Dir.(1823-4), 435, 437, 441, 451. The notorious and ruinous contest of 1754, which cost the protagonists over £40,000 each, discouraged further disturbances of the peace for three generations.
In the words of the 1831 boundary commissioners, Sandwich, situated on the River Stour on the east Kent coast, was ‘a dull, deserted town, with little prospect of improving its decayed condition’; and George Agar Ellis*, a visitor in 1832, described it as ‘a deserted looking town in a swamp’.PP (1831-2), xxxix. 15-16; Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 24 July [1832]. The harbour had long ago silted up, and by the end of the eighteenth century catered only for a limited coastal trade.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 411; H.C. Bentwich, Hist.
Jane Austen wrote of Lyme Regis, a small port and market town, that
The extensive and populous county of Galway was one of the poorest and most agriculturally backward in the country. East of Lough Corrib, which divided it into two contrasting halves, the mainly productive ground provided reasonable returns on the small estates of the gentry, but its western half formed the inaccessible and lawless region of mountain and bog known as Connemara, which was largely dependent on its maritime resources.
Built along a narrow peninsula at the centre of Galway Bay, the overwhelmingly Catholic borough of Galway was described in 1818 by John Christian Curwen* as being ‘of great length and crowded with low, mean cabins, which shelter a numerous population, living apparently in great poverty’, and in 1834 by Maria Edgeworth as ‘the dirtiest town I ever saw, and the most desolate and idle-looking’.
Ayrshire was divided by rivers into three districts, the ‘bleak and moorish’ Carrick in the south, and the ‘predominantly lowland’ Kyle and Cunninghame in the centre and north. Agriculture in Kyle and Cunninghame had undergone ‘vast improvement’ since the 1780s and dairy farming was widespread; sheep were raised in Carrick. There were extensive coal deposits in the lowland areas, and Ayrshire became second in importance only to Lanarkshire for mining in Scotland.
North Berwick was a small castellated town and port on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, 22 miles north-east of Edinburgh. It had no guildry or incorporated crafts and was dominated by the largest proprietors, the Hamilton Dalrymples, who in the 1820s spent over £700 on improving the harbour. Its population was 1,694 in 1821 and 1,824 in 1831 and it had a council of 12.PP (1831-2), xlii. 211; (1836), xxiii.
