County

County Armagh, which, despite being the home of the Catholic church in Ireland, prided itself on being the ‘Protestant Queen of the North’, suffered the indignity of seeing its representation monopolized by pro-Catholics between 1826 and 1832. An increasingly populous county of about 200,000 inhabitants, who mostly farmed small holdings, its prosperity was based on agricultural improvements, a thriving linen trade and the presence of several market towns, including Omagh, Portadown and the disfranchised borough of Charlemont.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.

Essex was a rich agricultural and maritime county, with only one substantial urban centre, Colchester, whose population of 14,000 rising to 16,000 was almost three times that of the county town, Chelmsford. The once thriving woollen industry was virtually extinct by 1820, but this period saw a considerable growth in silk weaving as flourishing London manufacturers set up mills in most of the larger Essex towns. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 282; VCH Essex, ii.

The Orkneys, a group of almost 70 islands and islets, lay about eight miles off the eastern end of the northern coast of the Scottish mainland, separated from Caithness by the Pentland Firth. There were three main groups of islands: the South Isles, which included Hoy and South Ronaldsay; Pomona, or the Mainland, on which was situated the capital Kirkwall, a royal burgh; and the North Isles of Shapinsay, Eday, Stronsay, Sandray, Westray and North Ronaldsay, among others. Stromness, which was also on the Mainland, was a burgh of barony.

The East Fife Burghs (as they were usually called) were small fishing settlements strung over a distance of about six miles along the northern shore of the Firth of Forth at its widest point, in the East Neuk of Fife. Pittenweem, the most westerly, contained some ‘good houses’ in 1831, when its population was 1,317. It had a council of 24, who were nearly all residents. Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), v. 207-9; PP (1823), xv. 702; (1831-2), xlii. 75; (1836), xxiii.

‘This Wiltshire is a horrible county’, wrote William Cobbett† after passing through Cricklade in 1821: ‘fine fields and pastures all around, and yet the cultivators of those fields so miserable’.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 15. It was nominally divided into northern and southern districts by a line running to the south of Devizes.

Staffordshire was celebrated both for the production of earthenware (known as Staffordshireware) at its Potteries in the north-west, and for the manufacture of iron and hardware in the densely populated ‘black country’ around Walsall and Wolverhampton in the south; but the ‘greater part of it’ was ‘a highly cultivated agricultural district, abounding in wood, water and game’.PP (1833), xxxvii. 604; White’s Staffs. Dir.

Caernarvonshire was dominated by the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri). The main industries were quarrying and mining for slate, lead and copper in the hills above the new town of Porthmadog, in the neighbourhoods of Bethesda, Dolwyddelan, Llanberis and Llanllechid, and at Llanrwst on the Denbighshire border, where the 1812 Enclosure Act had proved impossible to implement and had to be revised in 1821. For administrative purposes the county was divided into ten hundreds: Cymydmaen; Creuddyn; Dinllaen; Eifionydd; Gafflogion; Isaf; Is-Gwyrfai; Uwch-Gwyrfai; Nant Conwy and Uchaf.

Monmouthshire was a maritime county on the south-eastern edge of the South Wales iron and coalfields. Between 1821 and 1831 its population increased from 71,833 to 98,130, reflecting the continued industrialization of the Sirhowy valley and growth of the iron towns of Pontypool and Tredegar.

Hampshire retained its predominantly rural and agrarian character during this period. Between 1821 and 1831 its population rose by 14 per cent, but the proportion living in the main urban centres of Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester, the county town and venue for the elections, remained virtually constant at just under a quarter. PP (1822), xv. 341; (1833), xxxvii. 24-25. Politically, it was notable among counties for the presence of a government interest which, according to the reformer Oldfield, was ‘so great as to supersede aristocracy itself’.

The freeholders of the marcher county of Hereford on the Welsh border had been polled three times between 1796 and 1818. Party organization was well developed and the squirearchy, who resented their exclusion from the representation of Leominster, expected their Members to be resident gentlemen of rank, committed to promoting the county’s agricultural and allied interests.