Commons 1640-1660

In the absence of a dominant noble interest, Dorset was controlled by a small group of interrelated gentry families. Most of these were relative newcomers to the county. The Strangwayses, Trenchards, Husseys, Tregonwells and Napers had all come to prominence through the purchase of monastic lands in the 1540s. T. Coker, Survey of Dorsetshire (1732), 31, 63-4, 83, 98. In the century that followed other families moved into the county, including the Erles from Devon, the Digbys from Warwickshire and the Bankeses from Cumberland.

The borough of Bridport was situated near Lyme Regis in west Dorset, at the confluence of three small rivers, the Brit, the Simene and the Asker, which enter the English Channel at West Bay, two miles to the south of the town.

Lyme Regis was a small coastal borough in the far western corner of Dorset, situated in a cleft between two hills, where the River Lim ran into the English Channel. The town was divided by the river, with the two main streets, Broad Street to the west and Church Street to the east, converging on the harbour created by the long seawall known as the Cobb. It was this medieval bulwark, periodically repaired, strengthened and lengthened, that gave Lyme its commercial advantage, as it provided a safe haven for ships trading along the coast.

‘Well situated naturally for strength’, the town and county of Poole played an important role as Parliament’s main stronghold in eastern Dorset during the first civil war.Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 281. The strategic importance Poole depended on its site, on a low-lying alluvial peninsula, surrounded by tidal creeks and marshes, extending into the natural haven of Poole Harbour. The physical separation of the town was matched by its political independence.

The county town of Dorchester was located on a chalk plateau above the River Frome, and its origins as a Roman settlement could be seen in the ‘Walks’ which followed the old boundary walls, and in the straight main streets, West, East and South Streets, which met at the central market place. Historic Towns in Dorset, 53-4. In the early seventeenth century, Dorchester was in many ways an unremarkable place: a modestly prosperous town with a population of about 2,000, run by an oligarchic council, whose inhabitants were said to ‘gain much by clothing and altogether trade in

Despite its small size – it had only 68 householders in the early 1660s – the borough of Corfe Castle was the most important settlement on the Isle of Purbeck, and the centre for the trade in local stone and marble.Dorset Hearth Tax, 73-4; Historic Towns in Dorset, 44. The borough’s namesake was a massive Norman castle, which, on its near-impregnable site in a gap (or ‘corfe’) in the steep east-west chalk ridge across Purbeck, dominated the isle and commanded the southern approaches to nearby Wareham and Poole.

The borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis was on the south coast of Dorset, mid-way between the rival trading ports of Poole and Lyme Regis. The borough was important for three principal reasons: as a thriving port, both in its own right, trading with France and Newfoundland in a variety of commodities, and as the out-port of the Dorchester woollen industry; as a strategic centre commanding the natural harbour formed in the lee of Portland Bill; and as a double-borough, from 1571 by act of Parliament with Melcombe Regis returning four burgesses as Members of Parliament to Westminster.

Positioned high on an escarpment above the vale of Blackmore in north Dorset, and a major staging-post on the main western road from London to Cornwall, Shaftesbury was a borough of some strategic importance.RCHM Dorset, iv.

The borough of Wareham occupied a peninsula created by the convergence of the Rivers Frome and Piddle as they approached Poole Harbour, and had been a defensible site since the dark ages. The town walls were erected by Alfred the Great after Danes sacked Wareham Priory in the ninth century, a stone castle was built after the Conquest, and the town acted as the port for the royal stronghold at Corfe Castle during the middle ages.

Bewdley, on the west bank of the Severn, was in the seventeenth century an important trading station on the river, which had Gloucester and Shrewsbury as its terminal ports. Although John Leland spoke of Bewdley as 'but a very new town' around 1540, there must have been a settlement of substance there before the building of the bridge in 1446-7.