Commons 1820-1832

Tavistock, situated in the Tavey valley 15 miles north of Plymouth, was one of the principal market towns of Devon. It was not entirely agricultural: it had an old tradition of coarse woollen manufacture and was located at the centre of the west Devon copper, tin and manganese mining district, though all these industries were in decline in this period. It was connected by a canal, opened in 1817, to the River Tamar and Plymouth. C.E. Hicks, ‘Tavistock’, Trans. Devon Assoc. lxxix (1947), 155, 159, 165-6; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 251-3 and (1830), 259-60; P.V.

Portarlington, lying on the River Barrow with its left bank in King’s County and its right in Queen’s, had ‘little commerce’ and ‘no extensive manufactures’, the prosperity of its mainly Protestant population being ‘ascribed to its possessing a greater proportion of resident gentry than is generally to be found in towns of its size in Ireland’.

Lincolnshire, England’s second largest county, was a premier area of wheat production and also had extensive grazing regions, with long wool a speciality. Only six towns (Boston, Lincoln, Louth, Gainsborough, Spalding and Stamford) had over 5,000 inhabitants and it was dominated by rural proprietors, concentrated in Holland (the south-eastern administrative division) and parts of Lindsey (the northern division).

Christchurch, a market town close to the Dorset border, lay at the confluence of the Rivers Avon and Stour, but by the nineteenth century its natural harbour was too shallow to accommodate any but the smallest craft. In 1832 the boundary commissioners recorded that ‘the town presents no symptoms of activity or industry. The houses are of a middling description. The appearance of the inhabitants, who are thinly scattered, gives few indications of prosperity’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 311; (1830), 412-7; PP (1831-2), xxxviii.

Stamford, a large market town on the Great North Road, had recently been ‘very much improved in its buildings and general appearance’. White’s Lincs. Dir. (1826), 181. The representation was dominated by its principal landowner, the Tory 2nd marquess of Exeter, who resided at Burghley House just over the county border in Northamptonshire. He controlled the corporation of 12 aldermen and 24 capital burgesses, one of whom served annually as mayor, acted as the town’s recorder, and owned or leased most of the corporation’s property.

Oxfordshire was a fertile agricultural county, with centres of manufacture at Bicester (leather slippers), Henley (silk) and Witney (blankets).Pigot’s Commercial Dir.(1823-4), 435, 437, 441, 451. The notorious and ruinous contest of 1754, which cost the protagonists over £40,000 each, discouraged further disturbances of the peace for three generations.

In the words of the 1831 boundary commissioners, Sandwich, situated on the River Stour on the east Kent coast, was ‘a dull, deserted town, with little prospect of improving its decayed condition’; and George Agar Ellis*, a visitor in 1832, described it as ‘a deserted looking town in a swamp’.PP (1831-2), xxxix. 15-16; Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 24 July [1832]. The harbour had long ago silted up, and by the end of the eighteenth century catered only for a limited coastal trade.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 411; H.C. Bentwich, Hist.

Jane Austen wrote of Lyme Regis, a small port and market town, that

The extensive and populous county of Galway was one of the poorest and most agriculturally backward in the country. East of Lough Corrib, which divided it into two contrasting halves, the mainly productive ground provided reasonable returns on the small estates of the gentry, but its western half formed the inaccessible and lawless region of mountain and bog known as Connemara, which was largely dependent on its maritime resources.

Built along a narrow peninsula at the centre of Galway Bay, the overwhelmingly Catholic borough of Galway was described in 1818 by John Christian Curwen* as being ‘of great length and crowded with low, mean cabins, which shelter a numerous population, living apparently in great poverty’, and in 1834 by Maria Edgeworth as ‘the dirtiest town I ever saw, and the most desolate and idle-looking’.