Bletchingley, or Blechingley as it was rendered at this period, was a market town five miles east of Reigate, situated on the road from Godstone to Redhill. VCH Surr. iv. 253. Forty-nine households were considered liable for the hearth tax in 1662, and 46 the following year. U. Lambert, Blechingley (1921), ii. 437. Although it had returned Members from 1295, it had never been incorporated as a borough.
Guildford, situated on the River Wey 30 miles south of London, received its first recorded charter in 1257. This confirmed it as the county town and as the location of assizes. VCH Surr. iii. 247; Hist. and Description of Guildford (2nd edn., ?1800), 4, 6. Incorporated in 1488, it was ruled by an oligarchical body composed of the mayor and ‘approved men’, the name given to those who had served as bailiff (between about 25 and 30 in the early seventeenth century).
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.
