Located on the banks of the Avon in Wiltshire’s south-east corner, Downton was owned from Saxon times by the bishops of Winchester, who founded a settlement there in the early 1200s. With few medieval privileges, the town developed slowly. At the start of the seventeenth century, Downton was still only a borough by prescription, presided over by an alderman, a tithingman and a constable.
Still little more than a village in the seventeenth century, Hindon, which had regularly sent Members to Parliament from 1448, was an early thirteenth-century settlement planned by the bishop of Winchester and built on his manor of East Knoyle. Although close to the market towns of Wilton and Warminster, it boasted a market place and hosted a Michaelmas fair. By the mid-1630s its principal trades were weaving and the manufacture of gunpowder. The bishop’s bailiff headed the town’s administration, and acted as returning officer at parliamentary elections.
Situated on the main road from London to Bristol, Calne was already a significant settlement by the late Anglo-Saxon period, and formed part of the Crown’s ancient demesne. However, from the tenth century the original manor was divided into two, with one portion passing into ecclesiastical hands. The borough of Calne straddled the boundary between these smaller manors, and this dual patronage perhaps hindered its municipal development.
A small town in south-west Wiltshire lying on the principal road between Warminster and Salisbury, Heytesbury was, like many settlements in the region, dependent upon the cloth trade. As part of the royal forest of Selwood, there was also some trade in timber. At its heyday in the late Middle Ages the town had a market, and two annual fairs.E.D. Ginever, Ancient Wilts. Village of Heytesbury, 23-5; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii. 283. Enfranchised as a proprietary borough in 1449, it had never been incorporated.R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts.
Westbury was a small market town in the centre of Wiltshire’s clothing area. The borough, apparently restricted to the precinct in which the ancient burgage tenements lay, was never chartered, but a municipal structure had evolved by the reign of Elizabeth, which included a mayor and a town seal. Enfranchised from 1448, the parliamentary indentures for the early Stuart period were signed by the ‘mayor and burgesses’ and authenticated with the town seal; the 1625 indenture was additionally witnessed by ‘Edward Greenhill, Thomas Style, John Greenhill and others’.
Located on the River Avon, close to the royal forest of Pewsham, the settlement of Chippenham dates from at least the ninth century, and was the scene of a famous peace treaty between the Saxons and Danes in 879. In the early Stuart period the town was noted for its corn market, though its prosperity depended primarily on the manufacture of broadcloth. There were at least 94 households in 1604, and Chippenham was substantial enough to host quarter sessions in its town hall. J.J. Daniell, Hist. Chippenham, 4, 20, 29, 66-7, 69, 90-1; Recs. of Chippenham Bor. ed. F.H.
Salisbury was founded in the tenth century by the bishops of Old Sarum on water meadows by the river Avon, but it was only fully developed in the 1220s, when Bishop Poore began construction of a new cathedral. Immediately to the north of this site, burgages were laid out in a series of rectangular blocks, later called chequers. VCH Wilts. vi.
Although little more than an agricultural village lying in the northern ‘cheese’ district of Wiltshire, Wootton Bassett returned Members to the Commons from 1446, at which time it was held by the dukes of York. In 1631 the residents produced a copy of an alleged charter of 1561 which vested authority in a mayor, two aldermen and 12 capital burgesses.
The ancient market town of Malmesbury, sited on a defensive position on the upper reaches of the Avon, grew up in the shelter both of its castle and a Benedictine abbey founded in the mid-seventh century. The development of the town’s clothing industry, which processed wool produced in north Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire, was facilitated by its good trade links, for the main road between Bristol and Oxford ran through Malmesbury, while other routes linked it to nearby Chippenham and Tetbury.
Wilton was the seat of the Wessex kings until the ninth century, and thereafter the administrative centre of Wiltshire, although the rise of nearby Salisbury restricted its economic growth. R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Branch and Dole’, 55, 117. Originally a borough by prescription, the town was governed by a merchant guild until 1350, when a charter appointed a mayor, recorder, town clerk, five aldermen, three capital burgesses, 11 common councilmen and other minor officials. VCH Wilts. vi. 1, 9; Hoare, 131. Wilton first returned MPs to Parliament in 1275.
