Middlesex

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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.

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.