County

The remote and sparsely populated county of Cumberland was transformed by the Union of the crowns in 1603 from a border province into a backwater. News of the accession of King James precipitated a final outburst of pillage and looting by numerous border clans, among whom the Graham family was the most notorious; it was reported that in one ‘busy week’ there had been ‘40 towns burnt, 500 felonies and murders’.CJ, i. 1015a; VCH Cumb. ii. 282-4; P. Williams, ‘The Northern Borderland under the Early Stuarts’, in Hist. Essays Presented to David Ogg ed. H.E.

Described by Thomas Fuller in the early 1660s as ‘but the suburbs at large of London’, Middlesex was a small county, ‘scarce extending east and west to eighteen miles in length, and not exceeding twelve north and south in the breadth thereof’. Except near the Thames, where livings were made either by ferrying or fishing, the county’s inhabitants were mainly farmers for, despite its size, Middlesex boasted some of the most fertile soil anywhere in the country.

Westmorland had long been free from Scottish incursions before the Union of the Crowns in 1603, by which time ‘the old breed of northern magnates who saw their tenants as armed retainers rather than mere entries on a rent roll’ was practically extinct.A.R. Appleby, ‘Agrarian Capitalism or Seigneurial Reaction?’, AHR, lxxx. 586-7. Nevertheless, the early Stuart period was dominated by wrangling over tenant-right, the custom of rendering an uneconomic rent in consideration of the obligation to serve on the now non-existent border.

Northamptonshire, situated according to Camden ‘in the very middle, and heart, as it were, of England’, was divided by the River Nene into eastern and western divisions. To the east lay the soke of Peterborough, much of it fenland, and the royal forest of Rockingham; to the west rich farming country ‘beset with sheep’.W. Camden, Britannia (1772), i. 402. Traditionally one Member was elected from each division, although exceptions occurred.J.E. Neale, Eliz.

A county of striking geographical diversity, Kent is bisected from west to east by the chalk ridge known as the North Downs, which provided the best agricultural land in the shire, and was used mainly to grow wheat, the county’s chief crop.C.W. Chalklin, Seventeenth-Century Kent, 9; P. Clark, Eng. Prov. Soc. 6. Running parallel with the chalk ridge, sloping southwards and slightly lower, is a narrower sandstone ridge that in the early seventeenth century mainly lay wild as heath or woodland.

Described by Thomas Fuller in 1662 as a county ‘perfect in profit and pleasure’,Fuller’s Worthies ed. R. Barber, 36. Berkshire in the early seventeenth century was one of the wealthiest shires in England, as well as being one of the smallest. It owed its prosperity primarily to the fertility of its two principal agricultural districts, the Vale of White Horse, in the north, and the Vale of Kennet, in the south; the cloth industry centred on Reading and Newbury, so vigorous in the sixteenth century, was badly affected by the trade depression of the 1620s.

Monmouthshire was created in 1536 by joining the ancient kingdom of Gwent with the cantref of Gwynll?g. The new shire had an anomalous position, however, for although omitted from the jurisdiction of the Welsh Great Sessions courts, placed in the Oxford assize circuit and given two county Members in Parliament like other English counties, it was culturally and linguistically still very much Welsh in character, and many contemporaries continued to consider it part of Wales. A. Clark, Story of Mon. i. 133-4; Law and Disorder in Tudor Mon. ed. B. Howell, pp.

Caernarvonshire is divided into three by the massif of Mount Snowdon: to the east, the Creuddyn peninsula and the Conway valley; Arfon and Arllechwedd Isaf along the Menai Strait to the north; and Eifionydd and the Llŷn peninsula to the south and west. During the early modern period the shire’s economy was of the conventional upland type, mixing subsistence crops of rye and barley with the commercial farming of livestock, a combination which left the freeholders’ ability to meet tax demands heavily dependent upon the state of the cattle trade.

The notoriously bad Wealden roads meant that Sussex was more isolated from London than its geographical proximity would suggest and ensured that the assizes were usually held at East Grinstead, near the Surrey border. For most administrative purposes the county was divided between its eastern and western parts.

Founded in 1284 and enlarged in 1541, Flintshire returned a knight of the shire and a burgess to Parliament from 1542. R.R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415, pp. 364-5; SR, iii. 849. Although one of the smallest counties in Wales, it was among the least mountainous, and its population, perhaps 20,000 in 1600, was larger than that of Merioneth, Anglesey or Radnor. L.E. Owen, ‘Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), pp.