Borough

In the middle ages, Tregony had been a town of some significance, pre-dating Truro and Penryn as the main port of the Fal estuary. Parochial Hist. of Cornw. i. 282. Despite the powerful patronage of the Pomeroy family as lords of the manor, the silting of the river had choked Tregony’s economy by the early sixteenth century, and a century later it was dismissed by Richard Carew† as ‘not specially memorable … for any extraordinary worth or accident’. Parochial Hist. of Cornw. i. 278, 282-3; Carew, Survey, f.

A parliamentary borough since the middle ages, Helston owed its prosperity to its dual role as market town for the Lizard peninsula and entrepôt for the tin trade of western Cornwall. In 1642 it had a population of perhaps 1,000, and 20 years later it could boast 17 houses with five or more hearths. Cornw. Protestation Returns, 12; Cornw.

Grampound, granted its first charter in the fourteenth century, was closely connected with the duchy of Cornwall, whose manor of Tibesta surrounded the borough. Parl. Surv. Duchy Cornw. ii.

A reasonably prosperous market town, Reigate had only 90 tenements in 1622 but 124 households within the borough were recorded in 1664 as being chargeable for hearth tax, with a further 34 not chargeable. VCH Surr. iii. 233; Surr. Hearth Tax 1664 (Surr. Arch. Soc. xvii.), p. cxxi. Well wooded, with plenty of common land and water, and with many inns, the town enjoyed regular communications with London, just over twenty miles away. VCH Surr. iii. 229, 230, 234; W. Hooper, Reigate: its Story through the Ages (1945), 148; J.

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.

Despite its convenient location in the middle of Staffordshire and its status as a county town, Stafford was in decline for much of the seventeenth century. Unlike Lichfield, 15 miles to the south (and described in 1612 as ‘more large and of far greater fame’), Stafford did not lie on a major road and was too distant from the burgeoning Birmingham manufacturing zone to profit from the increased demand for foodstuffs. J. Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), 69; VCH Staffs. vi. 215; K.R. Adey, ‘Seventeenth-century Stafford’, MH ii.