Commons 1820-1832

The Castle, in its capacity as a royal residence and centre for the Court, was central to Windsor life, and was the principal factor in the continued growth and prosperity of what was essentially a small and backward market town, with no significant industry other than brewing. Charles Knight, editor of the liberal Windsor and Eton Express until 1826, recalled that on the death of Queen Charlotte in 1818, when the Castle household was largely broken up, the Court ‘ceased to have any moral influence at Windsor. We had become as most other country towns’.

Somerset was a predominantly agricultural and pastoral county, with a maritime border on the Bristol Channel. In addition to corn growing and the fattening of livestock it was noted for cider production, which was concentrated mainly in the vale of Taunton Deane. There was a considerable number of small market towns, and the southern and eastern parts of the county contained several of the more important centres of textile manufacturing, including the unfranchised towns of Chard, Crewkerne, Frome, Glastonbury, Shepton Mallet and Wivesliscombe.Robson’s Som. Dir.

Lostwithiel, a ‘small market town’ of ‘great antiquity’, was situated in a valley at the head of the estuary of the tidal River Fowey, on the Plymouth to Truro road in the south of the county, six miles from Bodmin. It consisted of ‘three principal streets’, which were said in 1824 to be ‘narrow and roughly paved’, although many of the houses displayed ‘no contemptible degree of elegance’. The local economy was ‘thriving and ...

Ilchester, a small market town situated on ‘a flat luxuriant soil’ on the south bank of the River Ivel (or Yeo), had been an important fortified settlement in Roman and medieval times, and still laid claim to being the county town. Since the seventeenth century, however, its economy had been in decline, and by 1830 it was described as ‘an inconsiderable town ... mean in appearance’. There was a large ‘rural district in the parish beyond the town’, and the latter occupied only 35 of the 735 acres.

The ‘small town, port and ancient borough’ of Orford was an ecclesiastical chapelry of the parish of Sudbourne, situated on the River Alde, where, since 1810, its patron, Francis Ingram Seymour Conway†, 2nd marquess of Hertford, had successfully introduced oyster dredging to arrest a decline in population. W. White, Suff. Dir. (1844), 165, 166; PP (1835), xxvi.

Cashel, a small city ‘of one principal street’, possessed ‘no considerable manufacture’ and a ‘great number of poor persons in a state of distress’, who were ‘very inadequately supplied with water’. The representation continued to be ‘exclusively’ controlled by Richard Pennefather, Member, 1818-19, the patron and treasurer of its self-elected corporation of 18 aldermen (one of whom was annually elected mayor), two bailiffs and a theoretically unlimited number of honorary freemen, whose admission was in practice carefully controlled.

Nottingham, the county town, was a notable centre of the expanding hosiery industry, especially in silk, cotton, bobbin-net and lace manufacturing, and benefited from several municipal improvements in the early nineteenth century. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 330-1; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of England (1844), iii.

The port of Wexford carried on a ‘considerable export trade in cattle and agricultural produce’, but its harbour, which vessels of over 200 tons could not enter without unloading part of their cargo, was in need of ‘much improvement’. Before 1830 the predominantly Catholic population was excluded from the self-elected corporation of two bailiffs, 22 burgesses (one of whom was annually elected mayor) and an unlimited number of freemen, the majority of whom were honorary and ‘unconnected with the town by property or commercial relations’.

The county town of Lancaster on the River Lune had been polled four times between 1790 and 1818. Its politics were influenced by attempts to restore its eighteenth-century prosperity and civic pride by reversing the decline of its port and staple industries of shipbuilding, cabinet making and sailcloth manufacture, following the loss to Liverpool in 1799 of its West India trade; and by the campaign to prevent the transfer of its assizes to Liverpool, Manchester or Preston.Hist. Lancaster ed. A.

Hull, ‘one of the principal seaports of the United Kingdom’, had a thriving fishing industry, was an important banking centre and boasted ‘some of the finest [wind]mills in the kingdom for grinding corn’.E. Baines, Yorks. Dir. (1823), ii. 227, 251. Its electoral corruption, the subject of a royal commission investigation in 1854, was described as ‘universal’ before the Reform Act by a contemporary historian, who recorded how