Commons 1640-1660

Westbury, a centre of the north-west Wiltshire clothing industry since the later fifteenth century, was by 1600 home to several substantial clothier families, including the Whitakers, Phippses, Adlams and Benetts, who also accumulated property in the surrounding area. The borough had first sent representatives to Parliament in 1448, but it had never received a charter of incorporation. The parish, which was co-terminous with the hundred, contained about ten manors, all with burgage tenements.

By 1100 Old Sarum, which had ancient origins as a hill-fort, boasted a castle, a cathedral and a mint. By about 1130 it had a market and a charter. The latter was renewed in 1229, but the town had already begun an inexorable decline. Nine years earlier the bishop had moved his seat to Salisbury, where water was easier to come by. In the sixteenth century no vestiges of the cathedral or episcopal palace remained and the castle was in ruins, while the town walls were demolished in the early seventeenth century. VCH Wilts. vi. 60, 62, 63, 65, 67.

By the 1630s Devizes was struggling to maintain its pre-eminence among Wiltshire towns after the city of Salisbury. Although in a commanding position at the centre of the county, well-served by roads, it was on the edge of the cloth-making area, badly hit by depression. Unlike some other nearby towns, Devizes had not responded by diversification into the manufacture of medley broadcloth, while the serge and duffel production which was to consolidate its fortunes later in the century was only just being introduced. VCH Wilts. x. 225, 227-8, 255-6; E.

Cricklade was a small town, consisting of two parishes. Although it was situated in Wiltshire, it was near the Gloucestershire border, and shared many of the characteristics of a Cotswold community, including the presence of a clothing and woollen industry. There had been signs of modest prosperity in the sixteenth century in the shape of a new market house (1569), but the town had never achieved a royal charter, and its governing institutions were simply manorial and parochial.

Situated at the west end of the Marlborough downs on the London-Bristol road, Calne was one of the leading north Wiltshire clothing towns, although it ranked behind nearby Chippenham and Devizes in administrative importance. VCH Wilts. xvii. 30, 32, 84. It had sent two representatives to Parliament intermittently since 1295 and regularly since 1425 but, unlike its neighbours, it did not have a formal charter until 1685. VCH Wilts. xvii.

In certain respects, seventeenth century Wiltshire was a county of contrasts. The cloth-making districts of the north and west had a very different economy to that of the open and in parts depopulated country to the south and east, especially Salisbury Plain.

One of the most populous cities in the country, with over 4,500 communicants in 1676, Canterbury was the most important city in Kent, not least as the seat of the country’s senior archbishop.

The easternmost of the cinque ports, Sandwich, which incorporated Deal, Fordwich, Ramsgate and Brightlingsea, was located inland of the south Kent coast, on the banks of the River Stour and on the southern side of the Wantsum Channel which traditionally divided mainland Kent from the Isle of Thanet. D. Gardiner, Historic Haven (1954), 3. Like many ports in the region, its fortunes were threatened by encroaching sandbanks, but it fared worse than most.

In May 1641, the justices of the peace in Kent were forced to undertake extensive repairs to the shire house at Pickenden Heath, the venue for county elections. As Sir Roger Twysden* recorded, ‘there having been two elections of knights of the shire to serve in Parliament, 1640, the shire house at Pickenden Heath was much in decay in respect the concourse had been far greater than at former elections and that both coming to poll many had broke down the walls of it to put through the names of the freeholders for their friends to be written down’. Cent. Kent Stud. U47/47/O1, p.

Maidstone had been a small manorial market town dominated by the archbishopric of Canterbury until the sixteenth century, but a century later it was one of the most important towns in Kent. W. Lambard, Perambulation of Kent (1656), 229; P. Clark and L. Murfin, Hist. Maidstone (Stroud, 1996), 1-2, 20-39. Maidstone evidently made an impression upon visitors.