County

Meath ‘exhibited a more marked disparity than could be found in any other part of Ireland’ between the ‘houses of its proprietors’ and ‘the cultivators of the soil’, whose tenements, although improving, ‘presented an appearance of great wretchedness’. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Athboy, Duleek, Kells, Navan and Trim, the venue for county elections, which a visitor described in 1827 as a ‘wretched capital’ with a ‘towering monument’ to the duke of Wellington, ‘in true Hibernian contrast with the filth and misery which surround it’.S.

Mayo, a predominantly Catholic county, produced mainly oats, potatoes and barley and had an ‘extensive’ manufactory of linens, based chiefly in ‘cabins of the poor ... furnished with a loom’. Its population of 293,112 in 1821 had grown to 367,956 by 1831, making it the third largest after Cork and Tipperary. There were several market towns, including Ballinrobe, Ballyclare, Foxford and Killala, and the disfranchised boroughs of Castlebar, the venue for county elections, and Westport, the ‘chief market’ for its linens. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

County Limerick, a thriving area of pastoral farming and linen production, was so heavily populated by Catholics that Oldfield commented in 1816 that they, ‘in questions where their interest is concerned, must command the return of the Members’.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 239-40; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

Kilkenny, a predominantly Catholic county, produced mainly wheat, oats and potatoes and had a declining wool and blanket industry. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Callan, Gowran, Innistiogue, Knocktopher and Thomastown, the parliamentary borough of Kilkenny city, the venue for county elections, and Castlecomer, Durrow, and Graig.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

The large county of Kerry, with its famously rugged and beautiful coastline, was home to a sizeable Catholic population, but, as was reported by the Dublin barrister Arthur Chichester Macartney to the Irish lord chancellor in 1822, the inhabitants were ‘wretchedly poor, and in civilization and improvement 150 years behind the northerns’.Add. 37298, f. 320; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.

Cavan, the southernmost county of the old province of Ulster, was a bleak inland region of limited agricultural and commercial development, but it was populous and contained the disfranchised boroughs of Belturbet and Cavan, where county meetings and elections were held. The Catholic population greatly outnumbered, yet were electorally in thrall to, the almost exclusively Protestant gentry, of whom none individually had a sufficient interest to return a Member.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 221; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 314-18; Hist.

Seven-eighths of Suffolk’s land were given over to arable farming, and the maltings at Ipswich, Lowestoft, Woodbridge, Beccles and Snape were major suppliers of the London breweries. The woollen trade was in terminal decline (manufacturing ceased by 1840), but silk and worsted production continued at Glemsford, Haverhill, Mildenhall and Sudbury.

A Lakeland county separated from Scotland by the Solway Firth, Cumberland was noted for having numerous small farmers (statesmen) and few great landowners, its corn, lead and hand-woven cottons, and its coal trade with Ireland. Administratively it was divided into five wards (Cumberland, Eskdale, Leath, Allerdale below and Allerdale above Derwent). The city and county of Carlisle, the county town, shared the assizes with the county’s second parliamentary borough, Cockermouth, which was the usual venue for elections.

A mountainous Lakeland county, Westmorland comprised four wards: Kendal, Lonsdale, East and West - the first two derived from the barony of Westmorland, the last two from that of Appleby. The county and assize town of Appleby, Westmorland’s only parliamentary borough, had been eclipsed in size and local importance by the textile and shoe manufacturing town of Kendal on the River Kent, where enclosure and canal building to improve communications with Lancaster and Preston were in progress and legislation for an improved road network sought.Parl.