Commons 1640-1660

The reaction of the Dutch traveller William Schellinks to the landscape of Norfolk was laconic; visiting the county in 1662, he thought it ‘a large, flat region, which sustains a lot of sheep and rabbits’. William Schellinks Jnl. 154. All those sheep were the key to the local economy. Although the county had substantial areas of arable farming, the wool produced from the sheep was what sustained its major manufacturing industries, the weaving of worsted cloth and the new draperies. This was what had helped make Norwich the second city of the kingdom.

St Albans survived the dissolution of the monasteries without apparent loss of prosperity, largely because it remained an important staging-post on a major route from London to the north. Its right to parliamentary representation was revived in 1553, when it was incorporated by charter, with a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and ten ‘principal burgesses’. There was also a common council of 24 assistants and a steward.

The predominant interest in Hertfordshire belonged to the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*), of whom Edward Hyde* would later recall that ‘no man [was] so great a tyrant in his country, or was less swayed by any motives of justice or honour’. Clarendon, Hist. ii. 543. A sense of the extent of Salisbury’s influence is conveniently provided by the lists which his officials began to draw up to this end in late January 1640, when it was already apparent that the king would soon call a new Parliament.

Ill-served with roads, Hertford stood at the head of navigation of the River Lea and served as the administrative centre of a county rather lacking in natural boundaries. Having failed to return Members since the fourteenth century, its right to be represented in Parliament had been revived recently as 1624, mostly as a favour to the prince of Wales, who held the castle. The lease on the castle had since been sold to Sir William Cowper, the collector of the imposts for the port of London, most of whose other estates were located in Kent. Chauncy, Herts. i.

Yarmouth, situated on the north-western extreme of the Isle of Wight, was the smallest parish on the island, yet one of its oldest boroughs. It received a seigneurial charter in the twelfth century, which was confirmed by Edward III in the thirteenth century, although it remained a mesne borough until 1440. Despite its coastal location, it was a decayed port and boasted little or no local trade or industry.

Stockbridge’s limited importance rested on its location on the main route from Winchester to Salisbury, at the point where it crossed the River Test. A parish of some 600 adults in 1676, it was not a significant centre for industrial activity and had been granted its market only in 1593. VCH Hants, iv. 483-4; Compton Census, 95. James Young described it as a ‘small pitiful place, whose great advantage of late is choosing burgesses’. Journal of James Yonge, ed. F.N.L.

By the end of the sixteenth century Newtown, on the north east coast of the Isle of Wight, opposite Lymington, was a very minor settlement, although it did have an oyster fishery and engaged in the manufacture of salt. VCH Hants, v. 265. Never incorporated, it was a borough by prescription, having been granted a seigneurial charter in 1393. This was said to have been confirmed in 1598, although documentation was subsequently lost. The chief burgesses chose a mayor annually from among their number and replenished their ranks from the burgage holders.

Newport, located at the head of the River Medina estuary, was the principal administrative town in the Isle of Wight. Part of the parish of Carisbrooke, and in the shadow of its castle, Newport provided the residence for the captain, or governor, of the island. VCH Hants, v. 253; Worsley, Isle of Wight, 147-55. In 1648 it would assume a position of national importance, and its most famous moment, when it provided the location for the Newport treaty between Parliament and the king. CSP Dom. 1648-9, p.

Although economically and topographically diverse, and religiously divided, Hampshire was an administratively centralised county in the early seventeenth century, and an area of notable strategic importance. While puritanism was probably dominant among the gentry, there was a notable Catholic presence in the region (represented especially by the Paulets, marquesses of Winchester), which became particularly significant during the popish plot scare in the early 1640s.

By the second half of the sixteenth century Southampton, once the chief port in England after London, was in serious, albeit not terminal, decline. Trade built around wool and wine, particularly with Venice, and in Newfoundland fish had given it considerable affluence and led to impressive buildings and other manifestations of conspicuous consumption. VCH Hants, iii. 490; R. Douch, Visitors’ Descriptions of Southampton: 1540-1956 (1961), 9; A.A.