Commons 1820-1832

Rochester, which had long been a significant strategic and commercial port, was part of one continuous settlement that included the much larger Chatham, the site of the expanding naval dockyards, directly to the east, and the smaller Strood across the Medway to the north. The three towns were generally regarded as one entity and, despite mutual rivalries, their inhabitants often petitioned Parliament together. In the absence of any manufactures, most inhabitants were engaged in crafts, retailing or the local fisheries.PP (1831-2), xxxix. 19-21, 29-31; (1835), xxiv.

Knaresborough, a former spa in which linen manufacture was ‘carried on to a very great extent’, was nominally a burgage borough, but as the boundary commissioners noted in 1831, ‘it appears very remarkable that the owner and occupier of a burgage house has not the vote, but that a distant stranger comes in and gives that vote’. E. Baines, Yorks. Dir. (1822), ii. 223; PP (1831), xvi.

Haslemere was an insignificant market town in the west of the county, 12 miles south-west of Guildford. The borough was wholly contained within but comprised ‘only part of’ the parish, and included ‘almost the whole’ of the town. The franchise was vested in ‘resident freeholders of messuages, lands and tenements’, but the estimate of 130 electors made in the official return of 1831 was certainly greatly exaggerated. William Lowther†, 1st earl of Lonsdale, was the Tory patron, and many of the nominal electors were his friends and dependants, to whom he had conveyed ‘parchment votes’.

The fortified cathedral city of Chester, separated from North Wales by the River Dee, was a county corporate of eleven parishes within the county palatine of Cheshire, of which it was the capital. Attempts to staunch the loss of trade to Liverpool in the eighteenth century by making a navigable ‘cut’ in the silted and treacherous Dee estuary had largely failed, but Chester remained the major legal and commercial centre for Cheshire and North Wales and a producer of ‘superior’ gloves, tobacco, tobacco pipes and snuff. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.

Bath, a ‘highly celebrated and truly elegant city’ with ‘many fine squares, crescents and terraces’, situated on the banks of the River Avon and surrounded by ‘fertile hills, abounding with springs of excellent water’, became a fashionable spa and pleasure resort in the reign of Queen Anne. It underwent extensive development between the 1720s and the 1790s, multiplying severalfold in size and spreading out beyond the city walls into the adjoining parishes of Walcot, Bathwick, and Lyncombe and Widcombe.

Youghal, a port and market town on the south coast ‘much frequented during the summer for sea bathing’, had a ‘considerable trade’ with England in the export of agricultural produce. The Boyles, earls of Shannon, had long dominated the representation and management of its self-elected corporation of ten aldermen (one of whom was annually elected mayor), an unlimited number of burgesses (comprising retired bailiffs) and freemen created by ‘special favour’. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii. 725; PP (1831-2), xliii.

Bandon Bridge, a market town on the River Bandon with a declining cotton spinning industry and rising unemployment, had long been considered ‘a stronghold of Protestant loyalty’.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 178-80; Cork Constitution, 19 July 1831. For many years Francis Bernard of Castle Bernard, 1st earl of Bandon, had controlled its self-elected and exclusively Protestant corporation of 13 burgesses, most of whom were his close relatives and one of whom was annually elected provost.

The bailiffs and returning officers informed Parliament in December 1831 that the parish and unincorporated market town of Weobley, 11 miles west of Hereford

comprises two townships, viz: the township of the borough and the township of the foreign. The borough, which alone returns Members to the Parliament, comprises 93 houses of ancient burgage tenure, the owners and occupiers whereof have the right of voting, but the owners and occupiers of the remaining houses within the same have not the right. Ibid. (1831-2), xxxvi. 142.

Harwich, a seaport on the north-eastern extremity of the Essex coast, contained a naval yard, was the base for government ships sailing to Holland and Germany and by the end of this period had become a popular bathing resort; but it was thought to be in ‘a declining state’ economically. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), app. p. 296; PP (1835), xxvi. 2276. It was a corporation borough controlled by the treasury, whose command had been restored in 1807 after a brief bid by some of the 32 electors to assert their independence.

Bodmin, a market town situated ‘along the bottom and some way up the sides of a deep valley’, almost in the centre of the county, consisted ‘principally of one street, running from east to west ... nearly a mile in length’. It was the trading centre for ‘an extensive agricultural district’, which included ‘exceedingly good grazing land’, and was for many purposes the county town. However, in 1824 there were said to be ‘many marks of desolation’ in ‘the western districts’, and the streets in the centre were ‘dangerously narrow’.