Grantham lay on the Great North Road about 20 miles south of Lincoln and 10 miles south-east of Newark-on-Trent. Royal Charters of Grantham 1463-1688 ed. G.H. Martin (Leicester, 1963), 11. In medieval times, the town had been a centre for the wool trade, but by the seventeenth century its economy seems to have been based largely on its markets and fairs, the buying and selling of livestock, and the leather and victualling trades. Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 11; B.
A thriving centre for the wool trade in medieval times, early Stuart Lincoln was a city in decline, with relatively few citizens of any great wealth and beset by problems of vagrancy and poor relief. CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 408-9; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/4 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1599-1638), ff. 271-2; F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956), 22, 134-8; Probate Inventories of Lincoln Citizens 1661-1714 ed. J.A. Johnston (Lincoln Rec. Soc.
After the county capital itself, Boston was the largest and wealthiest town in early Stuart Lincolnshire. Lying on the River Witham at the northern corner of The Wash, it had been a major international port in the medieval period, and although its commercial horizons had narrowed considerably by the 1630s, it retained a lively trade in the import of goods from the Netherlands and the Baltic and the export of grain and other produce from its agricultural hinterland. P. Thompson, Hist. and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), 347; Port Bks. of Boston 1601-40 ed. R.W.K.
Seventeenth-century Grimsby was a town in decline. Lying on the south bank of the Humber estuary, it had at one time been a ‘commodious roadstead for the anchorage of ships’, but by reason of the silting up of the harbour its trade had been swallowed up by Hull, on the north bank, and it had ‘fallen into great decay and poverty’. ‘Grimsby Haven, 1641’, Lincs. N and Q, i. 137-8; G. Holles, Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc. i.), 2; S. H. Rigby, Medieval Grimsby (Hull, 1993), 144; E. Gillett, Hist.
Lincolnshire was the largest county in England after Yorkshire, and like its northern neighbour it was divided into three administrative districts – Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey. Its decay as a producer and exporter of wool and cloth, which was all too apparent by the early sixteenth century, continued to cast a long shadow over the county’s economy. VCH Lincs. ii. 319-20, 332; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Lincolnshire’. Among the communities that were hit hardest by this decline were Lincolnshire’s ports and towns. VCH Lincs. ii.
In 1669 the Italian courtiers accompanying Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, on his visit to England would discover that Harwich was
In 1594 the antiquary and cartographer John Norden had described Essex in the most appreciative terms.
Setting the scene for the mayoral election in 1640, the town’s recorder, Harbottle Grimston*, assured the inhabitants of Colchester that ‘there are few towns in England that can more truly glory in an honourable and ancient pedigree and descent than this town of Colchester’. Herts. RO, IX.A.9, unfol. This speech and others which Grimston delivered in 1639, 1642 and 1646 were intended to enthuse the free burgesses with a sense of civic responsibility before they made their nominations for the office of mayor.
Maldon was a small, rather unimportant borough positioned at the point where the River Chelmer met the Blackwater estuary. It had always been overshadowed by Chelmsford, the county town, which had the advantage of standing on both the Chelmer and the main London-Colchester road. It was Chelmsford, not Maldon, which benefited from most of the sea-borne trade in and out of the estuary. Maldon was literally being passed by. The town had returned two MPs since the fourteenth century and its town council had been incorporated by two royal charters of 1554 and 1555.
The borough of Westminster was more than merely a suburb to the west of the City of London. James Howell, writing in 1657, celebrated the wealth and social status of Westminster, noting that ‘she hath the chiefest courts of justice, the chiefest court of the prince and the chiefest court of the king of Heaven’ within its confines. J.
