County

Carmarthen was founded by the Romans and reoccupied by the Normans, who built a castle to secure their dominion over the Welsh. The borough served as the administrative centre of the principality of South Wales down to the Stuart period.R.A. Griffiths, ‘Carmarthen’, in Medieval Bor. Wales ed. R.A. Griffiths, 132-52. The town enjoyed good trading links, both by land and via the navigable River Tywi (Towy): it was the staple port for Welsh wool from 1353, and in return for the wool and cloth shipped to Bristol and the Continent, French wine was imported.Ibid.

Buckinghamshire, a grazing county, was geographically divided into two distinct regions, with the ‘mountainous, or rather hilly’ Chilterns to the south-east, and the Vale to the north.W. Camden, Britannia (1722), i. 308. During the medieval period quarter sessions and most of the county’s administrative functions had migrated away from the nominal capital, Buckingham, situated in the north-west, to the more centrally located and prosperous town of Aylesbury, where they remained throughout the early Stuart period.VCH Bucks. iv.

Somerset was a wealthy and exceptionally populous county with a wide range of economic interests. The vale of Taunton Deane was well known for its cattle; and inferior Irish imports were resented less as competition than as a threat to the breed. The shire’s most celebrated product, Cheddar cheese, was used by local politicians to gratify their metropolitan contacts.

Denbighshire was created by the 1536 Act of Union, which amalgamated those of the Marcher lordships of North Wales that had not already been assigned to existing shires. However, the lordship of Mold and the parishes of Hawarden and St. Asaph were surrendered to Flintshire only five years later.SR, iii. 568, 849; G. Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c.1415-1642, pp.

Early Stuart Cambridgeshire was, in many respects, two counties in one. The northern hundreds of Wisbech and Witchford comprised the Isle of Ely, a thinly populated area of fenland, large parts of which were wholly inundated during winter, so that, as Camden observed in 1637, it ‘resembleth in some sort a very sea’. South of the Ouse, fen gradually gave way to chalk and clay uplands, most of which was flat and laid out into fields for growing corn and saffron.

A low-lying, though comparatively sparsely populated island off the north coast of Wales, Anglesey was commended by the Beaumaris-born merchant Lewes Roberts as ‘having plenty of all food and other provision necessary to preserve the life of man, out of which is yearly sent 3,000 head of cattle to supply the wants of other countries adjoining, together with a good quantity of corn, butter, cheese’.L. Roberts, The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (1638/9), pp. 219-20; Welsh Port Books, 1550-1603 (Cymmrodorion Soc. rec. ser. xii), pp. xix-xxxviii; Agrarian. Hist. Eng.

Pembrokeshire was among the smallest of the Welsh counties, having been reduced in size by statute in 1543. In 1626 its magistrates claimed, with only slight exaggeration, that it was nowhere more than 18 miles wide.SP16/33/57. However, the county’s smallness was not always appreciated.

Breconshire was one of the counties created by the Henrician Acts of Union, centred on the old lordship of Brecon, which had escheated to the Crown following the attainder of the 3rd duke of Buckingham (1523). The county was dominated by the upland ranges of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, one seventeenth-century author observing that the ‘high hills’ were ‘so thick together … in a manner of high bulwarks and compact joints of this county’ that it was a ‘fit place of refuge for the Britons’.Harl. 7017, f.

Lancashire owed its special status as a semi-autonomous palatinate to the fact that it had once been a border territory, vulnerable to invasion from Ireland or Scotland.B. Coward, ‘Lieutenancy of Lancs. and Cheshire in the 16th and early 17th Centuries’, Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, cxix. 39-64; J.J. Bagley, Hist.

Although the second smallest county in England, seventeenth-century Huntingdonshire contained three distinct agricultural economies: cattle fattening on the fens in the east; corn and sheep farming on the heavy clay uplands in the north and west; and a mixture of the two in the Ouse valley in the south.