Bere Alston was jointly owned by the marquesses of Winchester and the lords Mountjoy and first returned Members in 1584. Enfranchisement was probably granted as a mark of favour to the 7th Lord Mountjoy, who succeeded to the title in 1581. Charles Blount, the new peer’s brother and heir, was rising in favour at court by 1583 and may well have played a part in the affair.
Dartmouth was governed by a mayor, who acted as returning officer, and a council of bailiffs and burgesses. Thomas Gourney (1571,1572) was a Dartmouth merchant and ex-mayor and Thomas Southcote (1559) owned property in the borough. Otherwise elections at Dartmouth, until his death in 1585, were dominated by the and Earl of Bedford, lord lieutenant of the county. Edward Yarde (1559) was later to become Bedford’s agent; Sir John More (1563) had fought with him at St. Quentin.
Tudor Exeter, a prosperous city with a population rising to perhaps eight or nine thousand, was the economic and political centre of the south-west. The grant of county status in 1537 meant that it had its own sheriff and, by the Elizabethan period, its own lord lieutenant. The government of the city was in the hands of the chamber, a self-perpetuating body of 24 councilmen, recruited for the most part from the wealthiest merchant families. The chamber provided the mayor and the sheriff each year, while eight of their number, together with the recorder, enjoyed the rank of alderman.
Elizabethan Barnstaple, dependent for its wealth on the enterprise of its merchants and seamen, was a prosperous and fast-growing town. An ancient borough, it was first incorporated in 1557, when Queen Mary’s charter placed the government of the town in the hands of the mayor and a common council of 24 capital burgesses, two of whom were to be called aldermen. This body was dominated by the wealthier merchants. There was also a recorder, an honorary official whose duties were performed by deputy.
A duchy of Cornwall borough, Saltash was enfranchised in the reign of Edward VI. According to the antiquary Richard Carew, the town prospered through ‘honest trade of merchandise’, and was ‘of late years well increased and adorned with buildings’. He added that ‘it was not long since that the neighbouring ministers successively bestowed their pains in preaching there on the market days, and the bordering gentlemen yielded their presence’.Carew’s Surv. Cornw. ed. Halliday, 181-2. In Elizabeth’s reign the town made more than one attempt to obtain a new charter.
An ‘ancient little town, situated ... upon the side of a hill’, Totnes ranked second in wealth to Exeter in the Devon of the period. In 1523, 30 of its inhabitants were assessed for subsidy on property totalling nearly £3,000 in value, whereas the much larger Plymouth had less than half as many taxpayers of comparable wealth. By 1509 the old ‘straits’, the coarse Devon cloths which sold well in Brittany, were still being produced in the north of the county and exported through Totnes, but the town itself and its neighbourhood were making the more valuable kerseys.
Tavistock was a stannary town situated near the largest single European source of tin, on the southwest edge of Dartmoor. It was also a centre for the woollen trade, being noted for its production of cloths known as Tavistocks, but by the early 16th century its prosperity was being impaired by the slump in the Devon cloth industry. Nothing came of two Acts (5 Hen. VIII, c.19 and 6 Hen. VIII, c.8) regulating the manufacture and sale of ‘white cloth’ and designed to revive the industry, and in 1540 the town was listed in the Act (32 Hen.
By the early 16th century, with the silting-up of the river Plym, the better-situated Plymouth had become the port for Plympton, which nevertheless continued to thrive as a market, a stannary town and a centre of wool-combing and cooperage. In 1523 no less than 123 townsmen were assessed towards the subsidy, their quota of £14 being quite a large one for Devon. All the same, the town was included in the Act of 1540 (32 Hen. VIII, c.19) for the re-edification of towns westward.J. Brooking-Rowe, Plympton Erle, 3, 23, 90, 115, 383-5, 399; H. P. R.
Leland described Plymouth as a very large town with strong fortifications. Shipbuilding and the manufacture of rigging were not yet the flourishing industries they were to become and the town depended on its declining export trade with the Continent, its coastal trade and its fisheries. In the 1530s it was said to have 2,500 communicants, but there were few wealthy residents and in taxable value the town ranked fourth in the county.Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, i. 212-16; W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R.
In the early 16th century Exeter ranked with London, Bristol and Norwich among the six wealthiest towns in England. Its local pre-eminence is shown by its taxable population in 1523 of over 800, more than twice that of Plymouth, the next most important town in Devon, and by its assessment at four times Plymouth’s figure. Yet this prosperity, founded on cloth, tin and the brewing of beer and cider, was already under threat from its rival, which enjoyed better access to the sea than did Exeter through Topsham.
