The ‘great beehive of Christendom’, London in the early seventeenth century was the largest city in England, home to more than 200,000 souls. Its population growth, more rapid than that of the rest of the country, was not halted even by severe plague outbreaks like that of 1603, which claimed the lives of around a fifth of its inhabitants.
During the Elizabethan period the electoral politics of Leicestershire were dominated by the earls of Huntingdon, heads of the powerful Hastings family. George, 4th earl of Huntingdon (Sir George Hastings†), who succeeded to the title in 1595, was lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of the county, steward and receiver of the honour of Leicester (part of the duchy of Lancaster), and forester of the forest of Leicester. HP Commons, 1558-1603, i. 192; HMC Hatfield, xvi. 387; Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. R.
Situated on the Welsh border, Herefordshire was described in the early seventeenth century as ‘most healthful and temperate, and … fertile for corn and cattle’. Indeed, so far as wheat, wool and water were concerned ‘it yieldeth to no shire in England’, and was consequently ‘passing well furnished with all things necessary for man’s life’.J. Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612), p. 49; W. Camden, Britain (1610) trans. P.
Few counties saw more of royalty than Hertfordshire, especially during the reign of James I. Royston, amid the unenclosed downlands of the north, was James’s favourite centre for hunting and hawking, and to it he added Theobalds, by exchange with his chief minister the 1st earl of Salisbury (Robert Cecil†) in 1607, thereby acquiring a palace within easier access of Whitehall.VCH Herts. ii. 346-8, 363-4; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 452; 1611-18, pp. 109, 488; 1619-23, p. 416; Illustrations of Brit. Hist. ed. E. Lodge, iii.
Described by Camden as ‘in form of a lozenge, broader in the midst and growing narrow at the ends’, Staffordshire ‘for the most part consisteth of barren land’ and ‘doth … abound with poor people’, or so said the county’s magistrates on attempting to obtain a reduction in the county’s Ship Money quota in 1637. While the northern part of the county was certainly hilly, ‘and so less fruitful’, the central region was, according to Camden, ‘more plentiful, clad with woods and embroidered gallantly with corn fields and meadows’, being ‘watered with the river Trent’.
Cardiganshire, a ‘proto-county’ under royal control from the 1240s, was given formal status by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284.J.G. Edwards, ‘The Early Hist. of the Cos. of Carm. and Card’, EHR, xxxi. 90-8. Its boundaries largely followed the native territory of Ceredigion, but it was somewhat enlarged by the Henrician Acts of Union. Most commentators concurred that it was sparsely populated and difficult to farm: with forbidding uplands in the north and east and open pasture to the south and west, the local economy was dominated by cattle farming.
Writing in response to the Crown’s demand for Privy Seal loans, the Nottinghamshire commissioners for musters wrote in November 1625 of the ‘smallness of this county … and vastness of a forest running quite through it’. Their county was ‘without trade or manufacture, without lead, iron or hidden treasurer, merely subsisting on the benefits common to it with all others’, and it was afflicted by floods of the River Trent, of which ‘they have of late lamentable experience’.SP16/10/61. However, others viewed the county in a more favourable light.
Though it was a county palatine, the administration and governance of Cheshire was broadly similar to that of any other shire. Influence and power was largely controlled by the local gentry and administered by the lord lieutenant, deputy lieutenants and magistrates. However, Cheshire remained largely outside the Westminster legal system: it maintained its own courts and justice was administered in the name of the earl of Chester, a title bestowed ever since 1301 on the prince of Wales at his creation.
Montgomeryshire was created by amalgamation of the Marcher lordships of Powis, Montgomery, Ceri and Cedewain under the 1536 Act of Union. One of the wealthier shires of early modern Wales, it encompassed not only the mountainous pastures of Powis, but also the fertile upper reaches of the Severn valley.
Prior to James I’s accession in 1603, Northumberland’s history was dominated by its location on England’s northern border. Following centuries of intermittent war with Scotland, the county was run effectively as a military zone, divided into Marches, and exempted from national taxation so that local resources could be utilized for defence purposes. Under the early Stuarts, with peace now supposedly assured, serious efforts were made to develop a more conventional administrative framework.
