Commons 1640-1660

‘Cheshire ... is a county of a fat, fruitful and rich soil, both for tillage and pasturage ... And although (in most places) it is flat and even, yet it is not without several noted hills ... besides the mountains that divide it from the shires of Derby and Stafford’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 52, 53. Bounded on its English borders by Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire and by Wales to the west, Cheshire has traditionally been regarded as an isolated border county, one of ‘dark corners of the land’. Blome, Britannia, 52; G.

Situated some 25 miles south west of Carlisle, close to the confluence of the rivers Cocker and Derwent and also to the dividing line between the Cumbrian Mountains and the lowlands along the coast, seventeenth-century Cockermouth occupied an important position both topographically and economically. The town’s economy was based largely on its markets and fairs and the trade they served between the arable lands to the west and the pastoral region to the east. W. Camden, Britannia ed. E. Gibson (1695), 822; R.

Carlisle was the principal administrative centre and stronghold of the West March with Scotland, guarding a crossing on the River Eden a few miles south of the Anglo-Scottish border. Until the accession of James I, the inhabitants had lived chiefly by hosting and catering for those who repaired to the city to attend the warden of the West March, and as late as 1655 it was reported that ‘the greatest part of the city’ consisted ‘wholly of alehousekeepers’. SP14/22/3, f. 3v; SP18/123/42, f.

Leominster was described in 1646 by the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, which was about to augment the living there, as ‘an ancient borough of large extent containing 1,800 communicants’. Add. 11044, f. 209; HMC Portland, iii.

The city of Hereford was remote and on the borders – Welsh was regularly heard on the city streets – but Hereford was of strategic importance in governing the Welsh marches, whether as a centre for criminal justice at quarter sessions and assizes, or during the civil war as a garrison town. Harl. 7189, f. 243. The economy of the town in 1640 was not in a particularly healthy condition.

This place returned Members to Parliament between 1295 and 1306, but then the franchise lapsed until it was restored in 1628. Located 12 miles north west of Hereford, it was a small market centre, no more than a village, which had no corporation. It consisted of one single street. Some 37 names appeared on a rent roll of Humphrey Tomkins in 1630; and in 1663, 42 men and women were rated for contributions towards the militia. The hearth tax returns of 1664 suggest a parish of 126 properties. Glam. Archive Service, CL/manorial box 4, Weobley rent roll ?1630; Herefs.

Herefordshire, according to Sir Robert Harley, was the most ‘clownish’, meaning rustic, county in England. J.S. Levy, ‘Perceptions and Beliefs: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Origins and Outbreak of the First Civil War’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1983), 42. It was certainly remote, but its gentry exercised an influence over the south-eastern counties of Wales, and its importance in Welsh affairs was consolidated by its subjection to the council in the marches of Wales, based at Ludlow.

The four northern counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland and County Durham were briefly conjoined to form a single parliamentary constituency under the terms of the ‘new representative’ of May-June 1653 that formed the basis for the Nominated Parliament. There were a number of precedents, some of considerable antiquity, for yoking the four northernmost English counties together in this fashion.

Ludlow was a regional capital of government until 1641, a town which though remote was a honeypot for lawyers and others looking for patronage. Its population has been estimated to have been around 2,600 in 1641. M.A. Faraday, Ludlow (Chichester, 1991), 160. The council in the marches was long established at Ludlow castle, and its lord president controlled the supply of legal posts. John Milton was perhaps the most celebrated beneficiary of the cultural life encouraged by the quasi-courtly outlook sustained by the council; his Comus was performed there in 1637.