Borough

Setting the scene for the mayoral election in 1640, the town’s recorder, Harbottle Grimston*, assured the inhabitants of Colchester that ‘there are few towns in England that can more truly glory in an honourable and ancient pedigree and descent than this town of Colchester’. Herts. RO, IX.A.9, unfol. This speech and others which Grimston delivered in 1639, 1642 and 1646 were intended to enthuse the free burgesses with a sense of civic responsibility before they made their nominations for the office of mayor.

Maldon was a small, rather unimportant borough positioned at the point where the River Chelmer met the Blackwater estuary. It had always been overshadowed by Chelmsford, the county town, which had the advantage of standing on both the Chelmer and the main London-Colchester road. It was Chelmsford, not Maldon, which benefited from most of the sea-borne trade in and out of the estuary. Maldon was literally being passed by. The town had returned two MPs since the fourteenth century and its town council had been incorporated by two royal charters of 1554 and 1555.

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.

With a population of perhaps 375,000 (including the suburbs), the City of London was by far the largest urban area in early modern England. It was also the country’s most important trading centre, being home to as many as 1,000 merchants, who dominated the domestic and overseas export markets, and the source of immense amounts of wealth and, as result, loans for the crown. G.S.

In the mid-seventeenth century two factors gave Banbury a prominence beyond its size and wealth: its geographical position and its religious reputation. Not only was it at the centre of a topographically distinct region comprising parts of three counties but, standing at the junction of major routes, it had considerable commercial significance in time of peace and military significance in time of war. VCH Oxon. x.

If a primary motive behind the enfranchisement of the universities in 1604 had been to supply them with the means to state their case for special treatment in national legislation, then this facility was needed more than ever in the mid-seventeenth century. Beyond the particular, potentially destructive, issues raised by parliamentary visitation was the incidental fall-out of reforming legislation such as that curbing pluralism (a perennial threat to academics dependent on an outside income) or abolishing dean and chapter lands.

By the 1630s the population of Oxford probably exceeded 10,000, and had thus already reached levels estimated in 1667, when it was the eighth largest town in England. VCH Oxon. iv. 75–6. Seemingly sometimes overwhelmed by its powerful university, the city none the less had a strategic importance in its own right owing to its position on the Thames and road-trade routes, and had significant connections with London. VCH Oxon. iv. 114. Nor was its electorate easy to dominate.

A modest market town dominated by distributive and victualling trades, by the reign of Charles I Woodstock was overshadowed by the adjacent royal park. VCH Oxon. xii. 361-3, 369-71, 373. A custom whereby the councillors and other freemen (who by 1627 numbered respectively 23 and 46, and may have totalled around 80 by mid-century) made their choice of one Member of Parliament, usually the recorder, while bowing to the wishes of the high steward of the manor with regard to the other, was disregarded in the later 1620s.

In urging the Rump to establish a university at Durham, the county’s inhabitants extolled the virtues of its intended site: ‘the said city of Durham is pleasant, in a wholesome air, upon a sweet river [the Wear] that doth near surround the whole city … it is within seven miles of Sunderland – a navigable port at the mouth of the said river – within 12 miles of Newcastle [upon Tyne]… provisions of all sorts are plentiful and fire-fuel [coal] in abundance’. The Humble Desires of the Gentlemen, Free-holders, and Inhabitants of the County and City of Durham…for Founding a Colledge at Du

As one Lieutenant Hammond noted in 1635, Chichester was a ‘sweet little city’, standing ‘in a pleasant fertile level’. Restricted Grandeur ed. T.J. Maclean (1974), 6. A walled city of Roman origins, it lay on the far western edge of Sussex, on a coastal plain below the Downs, only a few miles from the Hampshire border, and some seven miles from the sea. R.