Situated in north-east Wiltshire, Great Bedwyn at the time of the Domesday survey was a thriving community with its own mint. However, the local economy, based on the wool and clothing industries, went into severe decline in the Middle Ages.VCH Wilts. xvi. 11. Despite being incorporated by charter in 1468, the borough dwindled into insignificance, and was described as ‘a poor thing to sight’ by John Leland in the early sixteenth century.
Marlborough was founded by the Saxons on the site of a Roman fortified settlement. Situated on the River Kennet, the town was an axis for communications between London and Bristol, and from the southern ports via Winchester and Salisbury to Gloucester. Its favourable location enabled the town to develop into one of the principal trading centres in the area, while its strategic importance was recognized in the eleventh century with the construction of a castle, which was also used as a provincial mint and treasury.A.
Situated on a rocky outcrop in the centre of Wiltshire, Devizes was described by Thomas Fuller in the mid-seventeenth century as ‘the best and biggest town for trading’ in the county next to Salisbury. VCH Wilts. x. 225; T. Fuller, Worthies of Eng. ed. J. Freeman, 609-10. The town was celebrated for its twice-weekly markets, at which corn, wool, yarn, fish, butter and cheese were sold, VCH Wilts. x. 264; E. Bradby, Bk. of Devizes, 51; Wilts. Arch. Mag. i.
Situated in north Wiltshire, near the border with Gloucestershire, and lying strategically on both the Thames and Ermine Street – the principal road connecting Gloucester and Cirencester with Winchester – Cricklade was originally developed as a Saxon royal borough. It received its first charter in the twelfth century and was represented in Parliament from 1275. However, it was never incorporated and it continued to be governed by the annual manorial court leet. T.R. Thomson, ‘Early Hist. and Topography’, Materials for a Hist. of Cricklade ed. T.R. Thomson, 63-80; T.R.
Old Sarum was an ancient hill-fort known to the Romans as Sorbiodunum. A military refuge for the residents of nearby Wilton during Saxon times, a mint was established there by the late tenth century. After the Conquest a royal castle was constructed, to which William I famously summoned all the landowners of England to swear fealty to him in 1086. A cathedral was built inside the walls following the creation of the diocese of Sarum in 1075, and this in turn encouraged the development of a town. A market existed by 1130, and Henry I granted a charter around the same time.
Salisbury, a cathedral city in the hundred of Underditch, was the principal town in the southern division of Wiltshire. It boasted cutlery production ‘brought to the highest degree of perfection’, and the remnants of a cloth industry, and was otherwise in a prosperous condition. The parliamentary borough comprised most of the area covered by its three parishes, but excluded The Close, which had a population of over 500. J. Easton, Salisbury Guide (1825), 22; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 809, 810; PP (1831-2), xl. 113-15; (1835), xxiv.
In his radical youth, Robert Southey* wrote an inscription for a proposed monument at Old Sarum:
‘I could not come through that villainous hole, Calne, without cursing corruption at every step; and, when I was coming by an ill-looking, broken-winded place, called the town hall, I suppose, I poured out a double dose of execration upon it’. This was how William Cobbett† described his ride through the ‘vile rotten borough’ in 1826.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii.
Described by William Cobbett† as a ‘rotten-hole’ and a ‘mean, vile place’, Wootton Bassett was a predominantly agricultural town with a declining market and virtually no trade. It consisted of one street, on the Cricklade to Chippenham road, made up of plots of a burgage character, which were occasionally advertised for sale as conferring the right of election for the borough, Cricklade and the county. In 1821, when no population figure was ascertained for the borough, the parish in which it lay contained 379 houses and 1,701 residents. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M.
By the early nineteenth century the corporation of Devizes had established the practice of returning Tory, mostly local, landed gentlemen, who, by invitation, inheritance or purchase, had displaced the wealthy clothier representatives.HP Commons, 1790-1820, ii. 418; VCH Wilts. v. 227-9. Comprising the parishes of St. John the Baptist and St. Mary the Virgin, and (by convention) the area known as Old Park, the borough was the principal town in the county’s northern division. PP (1831-2), xl.
