Commercially impoverished and reduced to ‘the ranks of a small and insignificant fishing town’ by repeated encroachments of the North Sea, Aldeburgh was the inspiration for its erstwhile Member Charles Arbuthnot’s* ‘Harmony in Uproar’ and the poetry of its freeman by birth George Crabbe.Suff. RO (Ipswich), J. Glude, ’Materials for Hist. Aldeburgh’, 165; H.P. Clodd, Aldeburgh, 69. It was becoming popular in the 1820s as a summer residence for ‘families of distinction’.
Athlone, located half in Westmeath and half in Roscommon on the Shannon, possessed ‘great advantages of water communication’, but its inland market had ‘gone into decay’ and it was ‘without any extensive manufactories’.
The unincorporated port and county town of Downpatrick, on the south bank of the River Quoil, was reckoned to be in a thriving condition and enjoyed several improvements in this period, including the provision of lighting.PP (1831-2), xliii. 41; (1835), xxviii. 353-6; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.
Rothesay, the chief town of Buteshire, was a port at the head of Rothesay Bay on the eastern side of the island, with a population of 4,107 in 1821. A cotton-spinning factory, established in 1779, supplemented fishing and boat building as sources of employment. Its council numbered 21, of whom all but two were resident.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), v. 274, 276, 277; PP (1823), xv. 714; (1830-1), x.
Buteshire was a small, sparsely cultivated county, surrounded by the Firth of Clyde and consisting of the islands of Bute, Arran, Big and Little Cumbrae, Holy Isle, Inchmarnuck and Pladda. There were cotton mills at Rothesay (Bute), the only royal burgh.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), i.
Cardiff (Caerdydd), the county town of Glamorgan, was situated in the south- east of the county near the Monmouthshire border. It was the polling town and its annually elected bailiffs were the returning officers for Glamorgan’s second seat, an ill-defined constituency of eight boroughs, where no uniform franchise qualification applied and the residence required of electors had not been fully determined. The size of the electorate in the boroughs varied inversely according to their population and economic importance.
Although livestock farming and transport communications improved during this period, agricultural distress was endemic in Roscommon, and in 1829 Skeffington Gibbon wrote that in ‘Roscommon, of which I have a local knowledge, there is not in Europe a more poor and wretched peasantry’. The county was mostly populated by Catholics, who exercised a strong, if usually unspectacular, influence on the county’s representation; their cause was supported by the liberal Roscommon Journal, while its rival, the Roscommon and Leitrim Gazette, was a moderate Protestant newspaper. S.
Downton, in the parish and hundred of the same name, near the Hampshire border, was ‘in appearance nothing more than a village’. It had a small lace factory and, according to Mrs. Arbuthnot, was ‘famous for phaetons’, but it was otherwise predominantly agricultural.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 800; Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 419; VCH Wilts. iv. 180; xi. 41, 42, 44; PP (1833), xxxvii.
Bedford was a thriving and expanding market town and social centre, with a steady trade in corn, timber and coals by the River Ouse, and small manufactures of lace and straw plat.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 11; PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 25; (1835), xxvi. 2123. The corporation consisted of a mayor, two bailiffs, an indefinite number of aldermen (that is, burgesses who had served as mayor, and totalling about 13 in this period) and 13 common councilmen.
The largest town in east Kent, the county borough of Canterbury, on the road from Dover to London, was a semi-urban community, in which hop farming had long since replaced silk weaving as the principal form of enterprise. As the city was the ecclesiastical centre of England, the Anglican establishment had an influence in local affairs, but the Dissenting interest was also strong, with the existence of several well- established chapels.
