The population of Worcester in 1646 has been estimated to have been around 8,000. This is a figure probably swollen by about 25 per cent from pre-war levels, produced by influxes of refugees from the countryside into the walled city during the civil war. Great differences of population and wealth were apparent between the wards of the city. St Michael’s, around the cathedral close, was the home of the wealthy and privileged minority of gentry and higher clergy.
Droitwich, on the River Salwarpe in mid-Worcestershire, was a town of some 1,500 inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century. Compton Census, 170, 180. Still known then by many as Wyche or Wych, the borough consisted of most of the united parishes of St Andrew and St Mary-de-Witton and those of St Peter-de-Witton and St Nicholas, with a portion of Dodderhill parish as well; there were two churches, of St Nicholas and St Peter. A charter of 1624 confirmed the borough government as two bailiffs, a recorder, two justices, a town clerk and the burgesses.
Seventeenth century Worcestershire was a comparatively populous and wealthy county. In 1662, only in London and 11 other English counties were there fewer acres per fireplace, as recorded by the collectors of the hearth tax. Of the English and Welsh counties, over 60 in number, Worcestershire came sixteenth in the total tax burden imposed on it by one of the Ship Money writs, and nineteenth in its share of the 1641 subsidy. Its per capita tax burden was above the national average. R.H. Silcock, ‘County government in Worcestershire, 1603-60’ (London Univ.
Evesham grew up as a community clustered around the medieval abbey, and had acquired the characteristics of a town by the late twelfth century. This section relies heavily on Evesham Borough Records ed. S.K. Roberts (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xiv), pp. xi-xiv. By that time the streets and their names familiar to seventeenth-century residents were in place, the topography of the town shaped and confined by the bend in the Avon.
Cambridge had been a town of some importance since Anglo-Saxon times. When James I and the prince of Wales visited the town in 1615, the recorder, Francis Brakin†, had gone so far as to claim in his speech of welcome that the town ‘was builded before Christ’s incarnation, with a castle, towers, and walls of defence, by Duke Cantaber, the son of the king of Spain, who was entertained in England by King Gurguntius’. Cooper, Annals Camb. iii. 69. The reality of its origins was more prosaic.
The right of the two English universities to return MPs dated back no further than 1604. M.B. Rex, University Representation in England 1604-1690 (1954), 1-36. That the two constituencies then created were distinctive is obvious enough. Their electorates were, by definition, well-educated, and, at a time when the latest theological controversies could be matters of considerable political interest, they could also claim to be especially well-informed.
The Fens, the low-lying area to the south of the Wash, had always been little more than marshland or, at best, prone to regular flooding. Although he had a vested interest in stressing the barrenness of this strange landscape, the engineer, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, described it in 1642 with the eye of an expert.
The town of Wisbech was one of the two centres of population within the Isle of Ely, the other being Ely itself. Located on the River Nene, on the border between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, Wisbech was a port with good access to the sea; Samuel Pepys† thought it ‘a pretty town’. Pepys’s Diary, iv.
Cambridgeshire was a county of two halves divided by the River Ouse. The southern half, centred on Cambridge, had good-quality soil (variously chalk or clay-based), was largely woodless, and provided excellent opportunities for arable farming. Wheat, barley and oats were produced in large quantities. Peter Munby in 1639 found this part of the county to be ‘wonderful corn country, as might be judged by the tillage and plenty of good ale and beer generally here to be had’. The Travels of Peter Mundy, ed. R.C. Temple (Hakluyt Soc. 2nd ser.
Situated on the Great North Road where it crossed the River Welland, seventeenth-century Stamford lay close to the dividing line between the fenlands of Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire to the east and the pastoral uplands of Rutland and Northamptonshire to the west. J. Thirsk, ‘Stamford in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in The Making of Stamford ed. A. Rogers (Leicester, 1965), 62, 66-7. Its economy was based largely on its markets, the leather-working industry, the manufacture of hemp and related products and stonemasonry. R.
