Plympton Erle, or Plympton St Maurice as it was generally known except in the context of parliamentary elections, was a small borough and parish. When Parliament’s Protestation of May 1641 was sent down for the assent of the population, 159 male residents in Plympton St Maurice subscribed it. Devon Protestation Returns, 235-6.
The basis of Barnstaple’s wealth was the trade it conducted as seaport. On Devon’s north coast, at the western end of the Bristol Channel, its easy access to the Atlantic trade routes was compromised by the steady silting up of the River Taw, which allowed nearby Bideford to grow at Barnstaple’s expense. W.G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), 327-30. In the early 1630s, it seems that commercial life in Barnstaple followed a long-established pattern.
Tiverton was the most industrialized of the Devon towns, with a successful cloth industry that fed the export trade of Exeter and the other ports of southern Devon and Cornwall. The population around 1660 was put at 7,000, but the minister there thought that a gross under-estimate. To judge from his remark, and from the evidence that there were about 3,500 persons in Tiverton in 1642, the town grew rapidly in size, doubtless stimulated by industrial expansion, once the economy had recovered from the effects of civil war. Compton Census, 269, 274; W.B.
Exeter was the unchallenged capital of the far south west, its nearest commercial rival, Bristol, too far distant to pose as a significant economic competitor. The population numbered around 8,000 in the 1670s, significantly less than that of Bristol. Compton Census, 276-7. It was the most important seaport in either Devon or Cornwall, but the bulk of shipping used the berths at Topsham, on the Exe three miles below Exeter, rather than risk the unsatisfactory mid-sixteenth century canal into the city itself. W.B.
Ashburton returned two burgesses to the Long Parliament after 233 years when the borough went unrepresented. Only twice had the place sent Members to Westminster before: in 1295 and 1407. HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Ashburton’. Its revival in 1640 as a parliamentary borough had little or nothing to do with any demand from within the town. Ashburton was a populous centre for tin mining and cloth production, lying on the edge of Dartmoor on the main road between Exeter and Plymouth.
The economic significance of Dartmouth lay entirely in its trade as a port. Located near the mouth of the wide River Dart, its harbour was said in 1599 to be able to accommodate 600 ships. T. Gray, ‘Fishing and the commercial world of early Stuart Dartmouth’, in Tudor and Stuart Devon ed. T.
Plymouth’s population was estimated in 1676 to amount to somewhat less than 6,000 people. Compton Census, 279. In 1640, at the end of a 20-year period of stagnation in trade, there must have been far fewer inhabitants than that, but a recent growth in their numbers was that year noted even so. Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/372. It was a smaller port than either Exeter or Bristol.
Of the counties in England, only Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were incontestably larger than Devon in the seventeenth century. Seventy-five miles from north to south and 73 from east to west, Devon was diverse in its land use and social structure. The regions of the county were clearly delineated in terms of topography and land use. East Devon was the most populous, and manors there were large and valuable, even if field sizes were small. The South Hams, the hinterland behind Dartmouth and Totnes and north east of Plymouth, was the most fertile and productive region agriculturally.
Westmorland was described in 1671 as for the most part ‘barren, being full of great moors and high mountains (called the North Fells [the modern Lake District]), yet there are many fruitful valleys in it, abounding with good arable, meadow and pasture grounds and commended for plenty of corn and cattle’. Fleming-Senhouse Pprs. ed. E. Hughes (Cumb. Rec. Ser.
Situated at a crossing on the upper River Eden some 30 miles south east of Carlisle, Appleby was relatively small for a county town and, indeed, was ‘so slenderly inhabited, the buildings … so mean and the inhabitants generally so idle (having no manufacture of note among them)’, that were it not for the fact that the Westmorland assizes and quarter sessions were held there ‘it would be little better than a village’. W. Camden, Britannia ed. E. Gibson (1695), 807, 813; Fleming-Senhouse Papers ed. E. Hughes (Cumb. Rec. Ser.
