Staffordshire

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This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

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.

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.