Mainly a farming county, where Leland remarked on the land around Southwell ‘very fruitful of corn’ adding ‘I never saw fairer meadows there’ on ‘both ripes of Trent’, Nottinghamshire played little part in national politics during the first half of the 16th century.
The Percy earls of Northumberland, the dominant family in their titular shire, were the northern peers most affected by the centralizing policy of the Tudors. The 5th Earl (1527-37), whose father had been largely excluded from office, was granted the wardenship of the east and middle marches shortly after his succession and a life tenure of the shrievalty of Northumberland in 1532, but shortly before his death he made the King the heir to his estates, the conveyance being confirmed by an Act of 1536 (27 Hen. VIII, c.47).
Centrally situated so that it was but two days’ journey from London, and traversed by two navigable rivers in the Welland and the Nene, Northamptonshire was a fertile county suitable for both arable and pasture farming. The report of Wolsey’s commission in 1517 showed at least 9,000 acres already enclosed, 7,000 of them for pasture, the abbeys of Peterborough and Crowland were accused of depopulating villages on their estates.
The elections for the knighthood of the shire for Norfolk were held at meetings of the county court in the shire house at Norwich castle. In 1542 the forthcoming election was announced at the previous meeting of the county court and at the markets at Great Yarmouth and Thetford. Indentures survive for all the Parliaments between 1542 and 1558 save that of November 1554. All are in Latin and the contracting parties are the sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and the electors, whose names number between 20 and 80; in 1542 and 1555 two of the Norfolk coroners are also mentioned.
During the early 16th century Monmouthshire, divided between the mountains in the north, the uplands of the central districts and the low lying coastal plains, was predominantly a farming county; the wool of the sheep around Abergavenny was particularly suitable for the flannel industry on which that town’s prosperity rested. There was much dairy farming and several towns had flourishing tanneries.
Middlesex was a predominantly agricultural county supplying food for the capital and court. Much of its produce was transported along the river Thames but roads radiated from London and on them lay the market towns of Brentford, Edmonton, Enfield, Harrow, Hounslow, Staines and Uxbridge, all under the clerk of the market for the Household. Little remained of the heath and woodland which had covered the county earlier, but the crown tried to preserve its chase at Enfield by enforcing the forest laws.
Until 1550 London was governed by a court of 25 aldermen, elected for life and presided over by the lord mayor, and a common council numbering almost 200 and chosen annually. After the purchase of the manor of Southwark from the King, Bridge Ward Without was established and the court of aldermen named the ward’s first alderman, thus increasing its own number to 26. The City employed a recorder and numerous civic officers, including after the Dissolution the administrators of the hospitals of St. Bartholomew, Bethlehem, Christ and St.
At the end of his progress through Lincolnshire in 1532 Henry VIII described the county as ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’. Its poverty was largely the result of erosion and inadequate provision against flooding in the marshlands. The county obtained an Act in 1532 (23 Hen. VIII, c.5) revising the commission for sewers and another in 1550 (3 and 4 Edw. VI, c.8) empowering the commissioners to distrain for money necessary for their work, but these piecemeal reforms achieved little.
Tudor Leicestershire was a predominantly agricultural county where the yeomen profited sufficiently from rising prices to buy land extensively. There was little economic or religious disturbance, and despite the local influence of the Grey family Leicestershire men played no significant part in the succession crisis of 1553.
A county palatine with three courts of its own, and with an appellate jurisdiction in the duchy of Lancaster court sitting at Westminster, Lancashire was thinly populated, remote from London and unreceptive to the new forces affecting life in the south. Coal-mining had begun there before Leland’s visit but was not to increase markedly until the early 1550s; cloth was manufactured in a number of towns, but agriculture remained the chief occupation.
