Great Bedwyn, which had sent two representatives to Parliament intermittently since 1295 and regularly since the later thirteenth century, was incorporated by charter in 1468. By that time its heyday was already in the past. Overshadowed by Marlborough and Hungerford, respectively a few miles to the north west and to the north east, it was essentially an agricultural village.
Salisbury was not only Wiltshire’s administrative centre and the seat of a rich bishopric but also a significant clothing city, although it had relinquished its late medieval pre-eminence and was subject to the more general depression of the early seventeenth century. Somewhat distant from the county’s main textile manufacturing area, it specialised in kerseys rather than whitecloths and depended on smaller-scale producers rather than on the clothier oligarchs who dominated local politics to the north west.
Although 16 miles west of Salisbury, Hindon was a disconnected part of the hundred of Downton, which bordered Hampshire. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Mere), 194. The settlement had been established in the thirteenth century by the bishop of Winchester on chalk downland in a corner of his manor and parish of East Knoyle. By the seventeenth century it was still essentially a village.
Situated as it was on a rocky peninsula formed by two branches of the River Avon, Malmesbury’s strategic position on the route from London to Bristol meant that it was probably already a privileged borough in 1086. First summoned to Parliament in 1275, its charters date from 1381. J.M. Moffatt, The Hist. of the Town of Malmesbury (1805), 153-4; VCH Wilts. xiv. 127, 129, 133, 149; M.G. Rathbone, Wilts. Borough Recs. (Wilts. Rec. Soc.
According to Wiltshireman Edward Hyde*, by the mid-seventeenth century Marlborough was ‘a town the most notoriously disaffected of all that county’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 403. Mentioned in Domesday Book, it was situated on the north bank of the river Kennet at the crossroads of major routes from London to Bath and Salisbury to Swindon. VCH Wilts. xii.
By this period Ludgershall had long lost its medieval importance. Its eleventh century castle was already ruinous, its market was small, and although there were clothworkers living in the town, its economy was predominantly agricultural. VCH Wilts. xv. 119, 121, 128. Situated at the eastern edge of Salisbury plain on a road from Marlborough to Winchester, it was separated from the textile centres of north west Wiltshire and of Salisbury itself, the nearest large town being Andover, over the border in Hampshire. VCH Wilts. xv. 119.
In the Anglo-Saxon period, Wilton had been the seat of kings of Wessex, while after the Norman conquest it remained for a time the administrative centre of Wiltshire. Even in the early modern period there was a bailiff representing the landed interests of the crown, and from 1649, ‘the state’ and then the protector. Wilts. RO, G25/1/21, pp.
Heytesbury was a small town on the road between Warminster and Salisbury and on the edge of the royal forest of Selwood. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Heytesbury), esp. 82; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii, map betw. pp. 282-3. Although it lay within the southern spur of the Wiltshire clothing area along the river Wylye, by the seventeenth century it does not seem to have been of great economic importance. It was not among the 14 towns proposed in the early 1630s as centres of regulation of the cloth trade. Ramsay, Wilts.
The ancient and heavily wooded parish of Downton was situated a few miles to the south-east of the city of Salisbury; much of its own boundary to the south formed the Wiltshire/Hampshire border close to the New Forest. VCH Wilts. xi. 19. The manor had been owned from the seventh or eighth century by the bishops of Winchester and leased from 1551 by the Herberts, earls of Pembroke. VCH Wilts. xi.
Wootton Bassett, in north east Wiltshire about six miles south west of Swindon, has the appearance of a planned settlement, with its long, straight high street flanked by burgage plots. These probably date from the thirteenth century, when Gilbert Basset built a large house in the parish, later Vastern Park. That a weekly market, granted in 1219, was held on ground belonging to the lord of the manor is certainly suggestive. According to a 1571 grant, the market itself, together with two annual fairs, belonged to the mayor and burgesses.
