Commons 1820-1832

Pontefract, a market town situated near the confluence of the Rivers Aire and Calder, in the West Riding of the county 13 miles south-east of Leeds, had ‘never ... been noted’ as a centre of manufacturing, but a ‘considerable trade’ in malt was carried on there and it possessed an ‘excellent’ general trade, which was ‘much advanced by the highly respectable neighbourhood’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 1041-2; PP (1835), xxv. 271. The borough was coextensive with the township, but it covered only about one third of the parish.

Bewdley, a market town situated on the Severn with a large carpet manufactory, carried on a ‘considerable trade’ in salt, glass, ironware and ‘Manchester goods’, but ‘changes in the internal navigation of the country’ increasingly deprived it of its former commercial importance.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 568; PP (1831-2), xl. 137. The representation had not been contested since 1768, when 45 freemen had polled.

Salisbury, a cathedral city in the hundred of Underditch, was the principal town in the southern division of Wiltshire. It boasted cutlery production ‘brought to the highest degree of perfection’, and the remnants of a cloth industry, and was otherwise in a prosperous condition. The parliamentary borough comprised most of the area covered by its three parishes, but excluded The Close, which had a population of over 500. J. Easton, Salisbury Guide (1825), 22; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 809, 810; PP (1831-2), xl. 113-15; (1835), xxiv.

In his radical youth, Robert Southey* wrote an inscription for a proposed monument at Old Sarum:

Seven-eighths of Suffolk’s land were given over to arable farming, and the maltings at Ipswich, Lowestoft, Woodbridge, Beccles and Snape were major suppliers of the London breweries. The woollen trade was in terminal decline (manufacturing ceased by 1840), but silk and worsted production continued at Glemsford, Haverhill, Mildenhall and Sudbury.

Morpeth, a 7,600-acre parish and market town on the River Wansbeck, centrally situated some 17 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 18 south of Alnwick, was an important staging post on the Newcastle-Edinburgh road. Ecclesiastically comprised of the townships of Morpeth, Buller’s Green, Catchburn, Hepscott, High Church, Newminster Abbey, Shilvington, Tramwell, Twizell and Ulgham, the parliamentary borough was generally considered to extend northwards from Morpeth to Cottingwood and eastwards to Wansbeck, but excluded Buller’s Green. Parl.

The pocket borough of Higham Ferrers remained under the complete control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, who owned all but ‘five or six’ of its 171 houses and dominated the corporation of a mayor (the returning officer), seven other aldermen and 13 capital burgesses, which kept a tight rein on freeman admissions. Ibid. (1835), xxvi. 204. Fitzwilliam, the town’s recorder, continued to use the seat to accommodate friends or Members useful to the Whigs until the borough’s disfranchisement.

Brackley, a small market town in an agricultural district, had little to recommend it to contemporary observers, one of whom commented that ‘its buildings have no pretension to uniformity or architectural taste’. Formerly ‘a great mart for wool’, by 1831 its ‘only manufacture’ was ‘that of lace’.Pigot’s Northants. Commercial Dir. (1831), 156. The return of its Members was under the patronage of the 2nd marquess of Stafford, whose family had maintained an influence there for 200 years.

Whitchurch, ‘a small irregularly built town’ in ‘a low but pleasant situation’ under the chalk hills of north Hampshire, was located at a crossroads on the London to Salisbury road. For many years it served as the market town for the surrounding agricultural district, though by 1823 ‘scarcely anything’ was brought in on the appointed day. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 344; R.