South of the Thames and commanding the unique pedestrian crossing to the City, London Bridge, Southwark had long-standing strategic importance. Its size too conferred considerable significance: by 1603 it was ‘the second biggest urban area in England, surpassing ... its nearest rival Norwich’ by an estimated 4,000 inhabitants. J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society (1987), 20-1, 289; W.
Haslemere was an unincorporated small town 13 miles south west of Guildford near the borders of Surrey with Hampshire and Sussex. Its market dated from at least the early thirteenth century and it enjoyed modest continuing prosperity from the iron and woollen industries in the neighbourhood. Manning and Bray, Surr. i. 657; VCH Surr. iii. 45–6; E.W.
By the seventeenth century Gatton, once ‘a famous town’, was ‘scarce a small village’. W. Camden, Britain (1637), 296. Doubtless it was difficult to compete with the reasonably prosperous market town of Reigate, only two miles away. Much of the manor, consisting of a handful of cottages and a manor house, was in the hands of its lord, who for decades had been a member of the recusant Copley family and during the early Stuart period was William Copley (d. 1643). VCH Surr. iii. 196; A.B. deM.
Despite its convenient location in the middle of Staffordshire and its status as a county town, Stafford was in decline for much of the seventeenth century. Unlike Lichfield, 15 miles to the south (and described in 1612 as ‘more large and of far greater fame’), Stafford did not lie on a major road and was too distant from the burgeoning Birmingham manufacturing zone to profit from the increased demand for foodstuffs. J. Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), 69; VCH Staffs. vi. 215; K.R. Adey, ‘Seventeenth-century Stafford’, MH ii.
Newcastle-under-Lyme lay on the main road between London and the north-west, close to Staffordshire’s borders with Cheshire and Shropshire. VCH Staffs. viii. 2. The earl of Huntingdon, who passed through Newcastle in 1636, described it as ‘a long town, the street [presumably the high street] very broad, ill paved and houses poor thatched and very few either tiled or slated’. HMC Hastings, iv.
Seventeenth-century Lichfield lay at the intersection of major roads between London and Carlisle and from Bristol to York, about 15 miles north of the small but growing manufacturing town of Birmingham. H. Thorpe, ‘Lichfield: a study of its growth and function’ (Collns. Hist. Staffs. ser. 3, 1950-1), 162. According to Richard Blome, writing in the 1670s, the city was ‘well built, indifferent large, containing three parish churches, besides its cathedral ... and is a place much frequented by the gentry’. R.
‘Situated much about the midst of England’, Staffordshire lies on the south-western edge of the Pennines and is bounded by Cheshire, Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. In the seventeenth century, the northern parts of the county, a hilly region, were full of ‘great heaths and moors’, which afforded ‘good pasturage and breed very good cattle’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 201. The River Trent and its tributaries dominate the county’s central plain, and here there was a largely arable economy. D. Palliser, ‘Dearth and disease in Staffs.
The small town of Eye was situated in the north of Suffolk, just off the London-Norwich road, in that part of the county known as High Suffolk. When Sir Philip Skippon† (son of Philip Skippon*) visited the area in 1669, he observed that ‘it consists chiefly of pasture which affords very good butter and indifferent cheese’. Cent. Kent. Studs. U951 F15, unfol.; Norf. Arch. xxii.
Such importance as the town of Orford had once possessed had been due to its royal castle and its port, but by the seventeenth century both of these former advantages had long since become irrelevant. The castle had been in private hands since the fourteenth century and Orford Ness, the shingle bar off the Suffolk coast, had steadily extended itself southwards, inexorably causing the town’s decline as a port.
In the seventeenth century Ipswich was still one of the major ports on the east coast of England. Roger Coke (son of Henry Coke*) called it ‘the finest town in England, and had the noblest harbour on the east, and most convenient for the trade of the northern and eastern parts of the world’. R. Coke, A Detection of the Court and State of England (1694), i. 358. William Camden had found it ‘a little city, and of a low situation, but, as it were, the eye of this county’, an image which also occurred to another visitor in the 1630s. W. Camden, Britannia ed. E.
