Commons 1640-1660

Queenborough was a minor settlement dominated by a once-important castle, situated at the western tip of the Isle of Sheppey, a region ‘more celebrated for the fertility of the soil than the salubrity of air, which is gross and thick, causing aguish infirmities’. T. Philipott, Villare Cantianum (1659), 379. The site of a Saxon fort, Queenborough was effectively founded by Edward III, who named it in honour of his consort, Philippa of Hainault. Edward’s castle, built by William of Wyckham, was finished in 1367.

Situated on the River Rother, New Romney was an ancient trading town, albeit one which, like so many southern ports, had long since decayed, and had little or no access to the sea. Although its population had probably declined – there were 230 individuals of communicable age in 1676 – it had residual importance in the mid-seventeenth century because of its role as the venue for the Guestling, the assembly of the Cinque Ports.

Visitors to Rochester – a city dominated by its Norman castle, cathedral and 11 arch stone bridge over the Medway – agreed that it was an impressive town which had seen better days. The poet and traveller John Taylor described it as ‘a fine neat city’, although ‘oftentimes spoiled’. J. Taylor, Honourable and Memorable Foundations (1636), sig. B. Thomas Philipott noted that the city was

As was the case with many ports on England’s south coast in the early modern period, Hythe’s importance had been undermined by the forces of nature: by the late sixteenth century the shingle deposits by which it was affected reduced it to little more than a local fishing harbour. K.M.E. Murray, Const. Hist. of the Cinque Ports (1935), 208-9. As its mercantile base withered, so too did its population, and the Compton Census recorded only 300 inhabitants of communicable age.

The largest of the ancient ports in the south east of England, and the one with the most direct route to the continent, by the early seventeenth century Dover was the only Cinque Port which retained mercantile prominence, and the wealth which went with it. In 1634 it was required to pay £260 towards the county’s Ship Money assessment, a sum exceeded only by Canterbury and Maidstone. E. Kent RO, Do/AAm2, f.

In the late 1650s, the minister of Tavistock estimated that he had cure of 2-3,000 souls there. Diary of Thomas Larkham, 1647-1669 ed. S. Hardman Moore (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. xvii), 322. This figure, though doubtless inflated for polemical reasons, is not incompatible with the total of 750 adult males in the parish and town who assented to the Protestation in 1642, or with the estimate later in the century that put the population at a little under 2,000. Devon Protestation Returns, ii.

Mid-seventeenth century Totnes was a town in decline. It had failed before 1640 to capitalize on the opportunity to modernize its industrial capacity represented by the rise of the so-called ‘new draperies’, the lighter cloths exported by other Devon towns in preference to the traditional heavy Devon broadcloths.

Okehampton, on the northern slope of Dartmoor, was one of the poorest Devon towns. It had not benefited from the best days of the region’s tin industry, located further south, and was merely a local centre for the wool trade. Even so, such wealth as it enjoyed came from wool, and the period when it was ‘almost suddenly prosperous’, the late sixteenth century, happened to coincide with the break up of the Courtenay family’s control over the town. R.L. Taverner, ‘The Corporation and Community of Okehampton, 1623-1885’ (London Univ.

Honiton was in the mid-1640s described as ‘a very poor built town’. Symonds, Diary, 37. When John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, came there in 1649 he remembered the place more for the poor quality horse he was provided there than for its amenities. J. Taylor, John Taylors wandering to see the Wonders of the West (1649), 19-20 (E.573.12). A more sympathetic contemporary made out the straggling settlement, three-quarters of a mile long, to be ‘a very pretty town indifferently well builded’. W. Pole, Collns.

The borough of Bere Alston was a small part of the very large parish of Bere Ferrers, which occupied the whole of the peninsula between the River Tavy on the east and the Tamar on the west, ten miles north of Plymouth. The borough had once been prosperous because of the silver mines which had been worked there, but the whole district was in decline by 1640. John Maynard* was one of a number of speculators who sought to revive the silver mines without success. D. Lysons, Magna Britannia, vi.