Seventeenth-century Windsor was a company town: the castle dominated it economically as much as it did physically. The court and its courtiers remained the principal reason for its existence. (Being the town that had grown up centuries before around the castle walls, it was ‘New’ only in the sense that there was an ‘Old Windsor’, the original village located about a mile to the south east.) Many royal servants seeking a second home away from London settled there or in the vicinity.
In the words of John Taylor, the ‘water poet’, Reading was ‘the prime and principal town in this county of Berkshire, for fair buildings, large streets, for clothing and other blessings’. J. Taylor, The Honorable and Memorable Foundations, Erections, Raisings and Ruines (1636), sig. D2v. As Taylor noted, the town was famous for its cloth production and the wealth which that trade had generated had made it the largest town in Berkshire.
Abingdon was one of a number of English towns which had never been enfranchised during the middle ages because they had been dominated by a major monastic foundation. The Benedictine abbey at Abingdon had been one of the great monasteries of England and its mitred abbot had sat in the House of Lords. Its dissolution by Henry VIII had left the town without its principal source of wealth at a time when the main alternative, cloth manufacturing, was facing decline.
In common with the other three Berkshire parliamentary boroughs, Wallingford’s prosperity had always depended on its location on the Thames. It had been represented in Parliament since 1295. By the seventeenth century, however, it had long been outperformed by the neighbouring towns of Abingdon and Reading, and there was little doubt that it was now, by some margin, the least wealthy of the Berkshire boroughs. CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 251. The corporation consisted of a mayor, three aldermen, a chamberlain and 16 burgesses.
Berkshire was among the smaller English counties, but, with four borough constituencies, it could consider itself well-represented in Parliament. Several peers had interests in the county, but none was dominant and there was no shortage of gentry families willing to compete for the county seats. The Short Parliament election demonstrated how no single interest was likely to determine a result.
Tamworth’s chief peculiarity was that it lay in two counties. The north part of the main street of this nucleated town, which included the parish church, lay in Staffordshire. The south part, where the castle and castle yard stood, was in Warwickshire. Shaw, Staffs. i. 415-6. The castle bailey dominated the landscape, even though a third of it had been removed by the seventeenth century. Leland described ‘the base court and the great ward of the castle ...
Situated in the heart of England, and with a population estimated to have been around 80,000 by the 1660s, Warwickshire was a county which in the seventeenth century lacked geographical coherence. Its modern historian has noted how its sub-regions had more in common economically with neighbouring districts of other counties than with the rest of Warwickshire. A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws.
With a population of around 7,000 in the seventeenth century, Coventry was in the second rank of provincial English cities. In size, it dominated Warwickshire and Staffordshire, and rivalled Worcester; but because of its grievous decline since the 1520s, when it was the fourth largest city in England, it was regarded by its own leading citizens as suffering from chronic ‘decay of trading’. A. Hughes, Politics, Religion and Society in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 12.
Chippenham had returned Members to Parliament at various times since the end of the thirteenth century, but it was incorporated only in 1554. By that charter, the government was vested in a bailiff and 12 burgesses, and in the later sixteenth century they alone constituted the electorate, notwithstanding the efforts of freemen to exert their previously exercised rights to vote. However, the absence of specificity as to the franchise and the permission granted by the charter to co-opt further burgesses continued to leave room for dispute. Wilts. Rec. Soc. v.
