Borough

Cambridge had been a town of some importance since Anglo-Saxon times. When James I and the prince of Wales visited the town in 1615, the recorder, Francis Brakin†, had gone so far as to claim in his speech of welcome that the town ‘was builded before Christ’s incarnation, with a castle, towers, and walls of defence, by Duke Cantaber, the son of the king of Spain, who was entertained in England by King Gurguntius’. Cooper, Annals Camb. iii. 69. The reality of its origins was more prosaic.

The right of the two English universities to return MPs dated back no further than 1604. M.B. Rex, University Representation in England 1604-1690 (1954), 1-36. That the two constituencies then created were distinctive is obvious enough. Their electorates were, by definition, well-educated, and, at a time when the latest theological controversies could be matters of considerable political interest, they could also claim to be especially well-informed.

The Fens, the low-lying area to the south of the Wash, had always been little more than marshland or, at best, prone to regular flooding. Although he had a vested interest in stressing the barrenness of this strange landscape, the engineer, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, described it in 1642 with the eye of an expert.

The town of Wisbech was one of the two centres of population within the Isle of Ely, the other being Ely itself. Located on the River Nene, on the border between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, Wisbech was a port with good access to the sea; Samuel Pepys† thought it ‘a pretty town’. Pepys’s Diary, iv.

Situated on the Great North Road where it crossed the River Welland, seventeenth-century Stamford lay close to the dividing line between the fenlands of Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire to the east and the pastoral uplands of Rutland and Northamptonshire to the west. J. Thirsk, ‘Stamford in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in The Making of Stamford ed. A. Rogers (Leicester, 1965), 62, 66-7. Its economy was based largely on its markets, the leather-working industry, the manufacture of hemp and related products and stonemasonry. R.

Grantham lay on the Great North Road about 20 miles south of Lincoln and 10 miles south-east of Newark-on-Trent. Royal Charters of Grantham 1463-1688 ed. G.H. Martin (Leicester, 1963), 11. In medieval times, the town had been a centre for the wool trade, but by the seventeenth century its economy seems to have been based largely on its markets and fairs, the buying and selling of livestock, and the leather and victualling trades. Royal Charters of Grantham ed. Martin, 11; B.

A thriving centre for the wool trade in medieval times, early Stuart Lincoln was a city in decline, with relatively few citizens of any great wealth and beset by problems of vagrancy and poor relief. CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 408-9; Lincs. Archives, L1/1/1/4 (Lincoln Council min. bk. 1599-1638), ff. 271-2; F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956), 22, 134-8; Probate Inventories of Lincoln Citizens 1661-1714 ed. J.A. Johnston (Lincoln Rec. Soc.

After the county capital itself, Boston was the largest and wealthiest town in early Stuart Lincolnshire. Lying on the River Witham at the northern corner of The Wash, it had been a major international port in the medieval period, and although its commercial horizons had narrowed considerably by the 1630s, it retained a lively trade in the import of goods from the Netherlands and the Baltic and the export of grain and other produce from its agricultural hinterland. P. Thompson, Hist. and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), 347; Port Bks. of Boston 1601-40 ed. R.W.K.

Seventeenth-century Grimsby was a town in decline. Lying on the south bank of the Humber estuary, it had at one time been a ‘commodious roadstead for the anchorage of ships’, but by reason of the silting up of the harbour its trade had been swallowed up by Hull, on the north bank, and it had ‘fallen into great decay and poverty’. ‘Grimsby Haven, 1641’, Lincs. N and Q, i. 137-8; G. Holles, Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc. i.), 2; S. H. Rigby, Medieval Grimsby (Hull, 1993), 144; E. Gillett, Hist.

In 1669 the Italian courtiers accompanying Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, on his visit to England would discover that Harwich was