Newcastle-under-Lyme lay on the main road between London and the north-west, close to Staffordshire’s borders with Cheshire and Shropshire. VCH Staffs. viii. 2. The earl of Huntingdon, who passed through Newcastle in 1636, described it as ‘a long town, the street [presumably the high street] very broad, ill paved and houses poor thatched and very few either tiled or slated’. HMC Hastings, iv.
Seventeenth-century Lichfield lay at the intersection of major roads between London and Carlisle and from Bristol to York, about 15 miles north of the small but growing manufacturing town of Birmingham. H. Thorpe, ‘Lichfield: a study of its growth and function’ (Collns. Hist. Staffs. ser. 3, 1950-1), 162. According to Richard Blome, writing in the 1670s, the city was ‘well built, indifferent large, containing three parish churches, besides its cathedral ... and is a place much frequented by the gentry’. R.
The small town of Eye was situated in the north of Suffolk, just off the London-Norwich road, in that part of the county known as High Suffolk. When Sir Philip Skippon† (son of Philip Skippon*) visited the area in 1669, he observed that ‘it consists chiefly of pasture which affords very good butter and indifferent cheese’. Cent. Kent. Studs. U951 F15, unfol.; Norf. Arch. xxii.
Such importance as the town of Orford had once possessed had been due to its royal castle and its port, but by the seventeenth century both of these former advantages had long since become irrelevant. The castle had been in private hands since the fourteenth century and Orford Ness, the shingle bar off the Suffolk coast, had steadily extended itself southwards, inexorably causing the town’s decline as a port.
In the seventeenth century Ipswich was still one of the major ports on the east coast of England. Roger Coke (son of Henry Coke*) called it ‘the finest town in England, and had the noblest harbour on the east, and most convenient for the trade of the northern and eastern parts of the world’. R. Coke, A Detection of the Court and State of England (1694), i. 358. William Camden had found it ‘a little city, and of a low situation, but, as it were, the eye of this county’, an image which also occurred to another visitor in the 1630s. W. Camden, Britannia ed. E.
The sea had not yet entirely engulfed Dunwich. The constant coastal erosion – which would cause the town to become one of the most notorious of all ‘rotten’ boroughs – had claimed most, though not all, of the old town. A thousand years earlier, Dunwich had been one of the major towns of East Anglia and for the two centuries from 673 had been the seat of a bishop. However, well before 1298, when it began sending Members to Parliament, the disadvantages of its location were apparent.
In the seventeenth century the River Stour was still one of the major trade routes within England. For several centuries much of the cloth which supported the economy of south Suffolk and north Essex had travelled down-river to Harwich to be shipped across to the lucrative export markets on the continent. Located where the river was crossed by the main road running south from Bury St Edmunds to Chelmsford (and on to London), Sudbury could hardly fail to prosper while this trade remained profitable. There was no larger town upstream of Harwich and Manningtree.
For seven centuries the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, centred on the shrine of the saint-king, Edmund the Martyr, had been one of the great churches of the kingdom. The town laid out in the eleventh century to the west of the abbey precincts was entirely a creation of the abbey authorities and, within the limits of the liberty of St Edmundsbury, successive abbots ruled almost unchallenged. As one of the most powerful of the king’s subjects, the abbot had received regular summons to Parliament as a spiritual peer and twice, in 1267 and 1447, he had hosted Parliaments in the town.
The town of Aldeburgh was first and foremost a fishing town. Beyond that, its position as one of the string of ports along the East Anglian coast brought some benefits from passing trade. Reporting to the privy council on the county’s coastal defences during the Spanish invasion scare of 1626, the Suffolk deputy lieutenants described Aldeburgh as
In wealth and population seventeenth-century Norwich vied with Bristol for position as England’s second city. Contemporaries described it in utopian terms. Thomas Fuller thought it ‘either a city in an orchard, or an orchard in a city, so equally are houses and trees blended in it; so the pleasure of the country and populousness of the city meet here together’. T. Fuller, Hist. of the Worthies of Eng. ed. P.A. Nuttall (1840), ii. 487. In 1671, when he was shown round by the famous local physician, Sir Thomas Browne, John Evelyn found Norwich to be
