‘Well situated naturally for strength’, the town and county of Poole played an important role as Parliament’s main stronghold in eastern Dorset during the first civil war.Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 281. The strategic importance Poole depended on its site, on a low-lying alluvial peninsula, surrounded by tidal creeks and marshes, extending into the natural haven of Poole Harbour. The physical separation of the town was matched by its political independence.
The county town of Dorchester was located on a chalk plateau above the River Frome, and its origins as a Roman settlement could be seen in the ‘Walks’ which followed the old boundary walls, and in the straight main streets, West, East and South Streets, which met at the central market place. Historic Towns in Dorset, 53-4. In the early seventeenth century, Dorchester was in many ways an unremarkable place: a modestly prosperous town with a population of about 2,000, run by an oligarchic council, whose inhabitants were said to ‘gain much by clothing and altogether trade in
Despite its small size – it had only 68 householders in the early 1660s – the borough of Corfe Castle was the most important settlement on the Isle of Purbeck, and the centre for the trade in local stone and marble.Dorset Hearth Tax, 73-4; Historic Towns in Dorset, 44. The borough’s namesake was a massive Norman castle, which, on its near-impregnable site in a gap (or ‘corfe’) in the steep east-west chalk ridge across Purbeck, dominated the isle and commanded the southern approaches to nearby Wareham and Poole.
The borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis was on the south coast of Dorset, mid-way between the rival trading ports of Poole and Lyme Regis. The borough was important for three principal reasons: as a thriving port, both in its own right, trading with France and Newfoundland in a variety of commodities, and as the out-port of the Dorchester woollen industry; as a strategic centre commanding the natural harbour formed in the lee of Portland Bill; and as a double-borough, from 1571 by act of Parliament with Melcombe Regis returning four burgesses as Members of Parliament to Westminster.
Positioned high on an escarpment above the vale of Blackmore in north Dorset, and a major staging-post on the main western road from London to Cornwall, Shaftesbury was a borough of some strategic importance.RCHM Dorset, iv.
The borough of Wareham occupied a peninsula created by the convergence of the Rivers Frome and Piddle as they approached Poole Harbour, and had been a defensible site since the dark ages. The town walls were erected by Alfred the Great after Danes sacked Wareham Priory in the ninth century, a stone castle was built after the Conquest, and the town acted as the port for the royal stronghold at Corfe Castle during the middle ages.
Bewdley, on the west bank of the Severn, was in the seventeenth century an important trading station on the river, which had Gloucester and Shrewsbury as its terminal ports. Although John Leland spoke of Bewdley as 'but a very new town' around 1540, there must have been a settlement of substance there before the building of the bridge in 1446-7.
The population of Worcester in 1646 has been estimated to have been around 8,000. This is a figure probably swollen by about 25 per cent from pre-war levels, produced by influxes of refugees from the countryside into the walled city during the civil war. Great differences of population and wealth were apparent between the wards of the city. St Michael’s, around the cathedral close, was the home of the wealthy and privileged minority of gentry and higher clergy.
Droitwich, on the River Salwarpe in mid-Worcestershire, was a town of some 1,500 inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century. Compton Census, 170, 180. Still known then by many as Wyche or Wych, the borough consisted of most of the united parishes of St Andrew and St Mary-de-Witton and those of St Peter-de-Witton and St Nicholas, with a portion of Dodderhill parish as well; there were two churches, of St Nicholas and St Peter. A charter of 1624 confirmed the borough government as two bailiffs, a recorder, two justices, a town clerk and the burgesses.
Evesham grew up as a community clustered around the medieval abbey, and had acquired the characteristics of a town by the late twelfth century. This section relies heavily on Evesham Borough Records ed. S.K. Roberts (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xiv), pp. xi-xiv. By that time the streets and their names familiar to seventeenth-century residents were in place, the topography of the town shaped and confined by the bend in the Avon.
