Commons 1820-1832

The dominant electoral interest at Woodstock, one of the smallest of the Oxfordshire market towns, was that of the Spencer Churchills, dukes of Marlborough, whose imposing residence at Blenheim Palace adjoined it. The original crown gift of Woodstock manor had included no borough property, but successive dukes, who were major benefactors to the town and employers of its inhabitants, had subsequently acquired substantial holdings within it. By the start of this period Woodstock, though neat and handsomely built, was in economic decline, with a falling population and soaring poor rates.

New Shoreham, a small port and market town situated on the River Adur, one mile from the English Channel coast, received a boost to its general foreign trade during the early nineteenth century from the rapid growth of nearby Brighton and Worthing. It was reported in 1823 that the ‘very safe and commodious harbour for shipping’ had recently been ‘improved at an immense expense’, and that ‘a new dry dock’ for the repair of vessels had ‘just been completed’. The market was ‘principally for corn’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

The parish, borough and market town of Preston, at the head of the Ribble estuary about 35 miles north-west of Manchester, was an important cotton spinning and manufacturing centre. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iii. 649-50. Its representation had been contested four times, 1796-1818, and from 1800 was vested in a coalition formed by the Whig 12th earl of Derby and the Tory cotton manufacturer and corporator John Horrocks†.

William Cobbett†, who in March 1830 lectured at Eye, a market town affording employment in brewing, flaxwork, boot and stay making, thought it ‘a beautiful little place, though an exceedingly rotten borough’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 618; Eye Guide ed. L.J. Morley (1949), 16-18. In 1831 the boundary commissioners described it as a large and ‘irregularly built’ village, unpaved, unlit and unwatched with ‘neither trade nor manufacture’. PP (1831-2), xxxix.

Abingdon, situated on the Thames in the north of Berkshire, and six miles from Oxford, was the county town and polling place for county elections, though it was soon to be supplanted by the substantially larger and faster expanding borough of Reading. While it was essentially a market town for the surrounding agricultural region, it had become in the eighteenth century a centre for the weaving and spinning of hemp and flax and the production of sacking, sheeting and carpets.

Berkshire was notable for its lack of large landowners, aristocratic or otherwise, and its great and increasing number of ‘small proprietors, or yeomen, who cultivate their own farms, consisting of forty, fifty, or eighty acres’. Sir John Walsh* of Warfield wrote in 1833 that ‘these small properties are constantly changing hands’ and ‘the generality of our neighbours will be people of moderate fortunes, and domestic habits, who are attracted by its vicinity to London, the goodness of the roads, and the prettiness of the country’. N. Gash, Politics in Age of Peel, 270-1; Add.

Linlithgowshire was the third smallest Scottish county in area (120 square miles). Its agriculture had flourished under improving techniques since the 1770s. There was small-scale coal mining at Bo’ness on the coast. Besides the royal burghs of Linlithgow and Queensferry, the other sizeable settlements were Bathgate and Broxburn.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), iv.

The ‘well-built’ county town and port of Dumfries, 92 miles south-east of Glasgow, was situated on the left bank of the River Nith, which separated it from Maxwelltown in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Its population (burgh only) rose from 5,255 in 1821 to 5,883 in 1831. Its council of 25, who received a charter of confirmation in 1827, comprised 18 merchant councillors and the representatives of seven incorporated trades, all generally resident in Dumfries or Maxwelltown, the customary venue for radical mass meetings refused by the provost and magistrates of Dumfries.

Surrey, a mixed agricultural and commercial county which bordered on London to the north-east, was the fifth most populous English county, according to the 1831 census. Agricultural production in the southern and western areas was apparently ‘by no means of the first order’, but the farmers and market gardeners benefited from their close proximity to the London market. Census returns show that households engaged in trade outnumbered those dependent on agriculture by around three to one.