Commons 1640-1660

Although Thomas Fuller dismissed the county as ‘but the suburbs at large of London’, mid-seventeenth century Middlesex still maintained the characteristics of a rural community, supplying grain, dairy produce and fruit to the capital, and its principal industry was also land-based: the manufacture of bricks and tiles. Fuller’s Worthies, ed. R. Barber, 241; M. Robbins, Mdx. (1953), 32-3, 49. It was thus appropriate that the landowning families from the northern fringe of the county – from Ruislip to Enfield – dominated socially and politically.

With a population of perhaps 375,000 (including the suburbs), the City of London was by far the largest urban area in early modern England. It was also the country’s most important trading centre, being home to as many as 1,000 merchants, who dominated the domestic and overseas export markets, and the source of immense amounts of wealth and, as result, loans for the crown. G.S.

The smallest of the ancient counties of England by some margin, Rutland was also dwarfed in terms of population and wealth by the adjoining shires of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. The county’s economy was based overwhelmingly upon arable farming, the rearing of sheep and cattle and the trade generated by its two modestly proportioned and ‘indifferently’ provisioned market towns, Oakham and Uppingham. R.

In the mid-seventeenth century two factors gave Banbury a prominence beyond its size and wealth: its geographical position and its religious reputation. Not only was it at the centre of a topographically distinct region comprising parts of three counties but, standing at the junction of major routes, it had considerable commercial significance in time of peace and military significance in time of war. VCH Oxon. x.

Centrifugal and centripetal elements affected elections to Oxfordshire seats throughout this period. Although Oxford provided an unrivalled focus for judicial, administrative and ecclesiastical life in the county, and a critical point of access to riverborne communications with London, its position close to the border with Berkshire and its status as a university city always had potential to complicate public life in the area. M.S. Gretton, Oxon. Justices of the Peace in the Seventeenth Century (Oxon. Rec. Soc. xvi), p.

If a primary motive behind the enfranchisement of the universities in 1604 had been to supply them with the means to state their case for special treatment in national legislation, then this facility was needed more than ever in the mid-seventeenth century. Beyond the particular, potentially destructive, issues raised by parliamentary visitation was the incidental fall-out of reforming legislation such as that curbing pluralism (a perennial threat to academics dependent on an outside income) or abolishing dean and chapter lands.

By the 1630s the population of Oxford probably exceeded 10,000, and had thus already reached levels estimated in 1667, when it was the eighth largest town in England. VCH Oxon. iv. 75–6. Seemingly sometimes overwhelmed by its powerful university, the city none the less had a strategic importance in its own right owing to its position on the Thames and road-trade routes, and had significant connections with London. VCH Oxon. iv. 114. Nor was its electorate easy to dominate.

A modest market town dominated by distributive and victualling trades, by the reign of Charles I Woodstock was overshadowed by the adjacent royal park. VCH Oxon. xii. 361-3, 369-71, 373. A custom whereby the councillors and other freemen (who by 1627 numbered respectively 23 and 46, and may have totalled around 80 by mid-century) made their choice of one Member of Parliament, usually the recorder, while bowing to the wishes of the high steward of the manor with regard to the other, was disregarded in the later 1620s.

County Durham is bounded by the Rivers Tyne and Tees to the north and south, by the North Sea to the east and by the Pennine watershed in the west. To the cartographer Richard Blome, writing in 1673 – doubtless from well south of the Trent – the county seemed ‘far engaged northwards and of a sharp and piercing air’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 92. Early-Stuart Durham’s principal distinguishing feature was its unique status as ‘the last principality’ – a county palatine presided over by the bishop of Durham.

In urging the Rump to establish a university at Durham, the county’s inhabitants extolled the virtues of its intended site: ‘the said city of Durham is pleasant, in a wholesome air, upon a sweet river [the Wear] that doth near surround the whole city … it is within seven miles of Sunderland – a navigable port at the mouth of the said river – within 12 miles of Newcastle [upon Tyne]… provisions of all sorts are plentiful and fire-fuel [coal] in abundance’. The Humble Desires of the Gentlemen, Free-holders, and Inhabitants of the County and City of Durham…for Founding a Colledge at Du