Ludgershall lies on the principal road between Marlborough, Salisbury and Winchester. The Normans had constructed a castle on its northern edge by 1103, which later became a garrisoned provincial treasury. A planned town was laid out on a grid pattern focused upon a central market square, though economic growth was restricted by the larger markets at nearby Marlborough and Salisbury.VCH Wilts. xv. 119, 121, 124.
Southwark owed its existence to its situation at the southern end of London Bridge. Its major highways linked the metropolis to Kent and Surrey, and made Southwark a prime location for shops and taverns. Indeed, writing in the late Elizabethan period, John Stow wrote of its ‘many fair inns’.J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Soc. 62-4, 69; J. Stow, Survey of London (1598), p. 238. The borough was also a convenient location for industries officially discouraged within the City of London itself, such as leather-dressing, tanning and the theatre.
For an English county town, Stafford in the early seventeenth century was surprisingly small. In 1622 its entire population was just 1,550, having increased perhaps by as little as 50 per cent over the previous 250 years, VCH Staffs. vi. 186; HP Commons 1386-1422, i. 610. whereas that of contemporary Worcester was four times greater, while Exeter in 1638 boasted more than 10,000 souls. Moreover, Stafford was quite eclipsed by the cathedral city of Lichfield, which lay 15 miles distant.
The ‘proud Salopians’ of Shrewsbury, as their rivals termed them, achieved the high-water mark of their prosperity in the century before the Civil War: the town’s population rose from 3,000 to 7,000, the urban area was largely rebuilt, and the borough evolved from a county seat into the economic and social focus of an area stretching from the Wrekin to Cardigan Bay.
St. Albans owed its prosperity to its position as the first staging-point out of London, where the main highways to Ireland and the north-west diverged. Royal stables were maintained there, and municipal hospitality could be exercised in an enviably wide selection of well supplied inns. It was also the administrative centre of the liberty of St. Albans, comprising the former estates of the wealthy abbey scattered throughout Hertfordshire, with its own sessions of the peace and gaol.
Situated near Northamptonshire’s boundary with Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, Peterborough became enfranchised shortly after its former Benedictine monastery was reconstituted as a cathedral in 1541. The small town had no municipal authorities, and was run by the dean and chapter; it received no charter of incorporation until 1874, until which time the dean served as a quasi-mayor. Accordingly, it was the dean’s bailiff who received the sheriff’s precept for parliamentary elections. W.T. Mellows, Foundation of Peterborough Cathedral (Northants. Rec. Soc. xiii), p.
Located on the banks of the Avon in Wiltshire’s south-east corner, Downton was owned from Saxon times by the bishops of Winchester, who founded a settlement there in the early 1200s. With few medieval privileges, the town developed slowly. At the start of the seventeenth century, Downton was still only a borough by prescription, presided over by an alderman, a tithingman and a constable.
One of the smaller English counties, Dorset in this period largely depended for its prosperity on its ‘great flocks of sheep’, the basis of the local cloth trade, though it was also the country’s leading producer of hemp and flax, the raw materials for rope and fishing nets. The extensive coastline boasted several good harbours, notably at Poole and Weymouth. Although its ports were less important than those of neighbouring Devon and Hampshire, there were strong trading links with France, while Poole was a major base for the burgeoning Newfoundland fisheries.
Winchester, the county capital of Hampshire and seat of England’s richest bishopric, received a charter in 1290 and first sent Members to Parliament seven years later. The city’s clothing and leather industries, and annual fair, fell into a prolonged period of economic decline after the Black Death, and throughout the Tudor period the corporation repeatedly applied for remission of its fee farm, and for royal subsidies to repair the walls. VCH Hants, v.
Stockbridge, a small town situated where the road from Winchester to Salisbury crosses the Test, had been part of the duchy of Lancaster since the fourteenth century. VCH Hants, iv. 484; R. Somerville, Hist. Duchy of Lancaster, i. 18, 37, 313n. Though enfranchised at the instigation of the chancellor of the duchy in 1563, it was never incorporated, and consequently its municipal institutions remained primitive.
