In the Anglo-Saxon period, Wilton had been the seat of kings of Wessex, while after the Norman conquest it remained for a time the administrative centre of Wiltshire. Even in the early modern period there was a bailiff representing the landed interests of the crown, and from 1649, ‘the state’ and then the protector. Wilts. RO, G25/1/21, pp.
Heytesbury was a small town on the road between Warminster and Salisbury and on the edge of the royal forest of Selwood. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Heytesbury), esp. 82; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiii, map betw. pp. 282-3. Although it lay within the southern spur of the Wiltshire clothing area along the river Wylye, by the seventeenth century it does not seem to have been of great economic importance. It was not among the 14 towns proposed in the early 1630s as centres of regulation of the cloth trade. Ramsay, Wilts.
The ancient and heavily wooded parish of Downton was situated a few miles to the south-east of the city of Salisbury; much of its own boundary to the south formed the Wiltshire/Hampshire border close to the New Forest. VCH Wilts. xi. 19. The manor had been owned from the seventh or eighth century by the bishops of Winchester and leased from 1551 by the Herberts, earls of Pembroke. VCH Wilts. xi.
Wootton Bassett, in north east Wiltshire about six miles south west of Swindon, has the appearance of a planned settlement, with its long, straight high street flanked by burgage plots. These probably date from the thirteenth century, when Gilbert Basset built a large house in the parish, later Vastern Park. That a weekly market, granted in 1219, was held on ground belonging to the lord of the manor is certainly suggestive. According to a 1571 grant, the market itself, together with two annual fairs, belonged to the mayor and burgesses.
Westbury, a centre of the north-west Wiltshire clothing industry since the later fifteenth century, was by 1600 home to several substantial clothier families, including the Whitakers, Phippses, Adlams and Benetts, who also accumulated property in the surrounding area. The borough had first sent representatives to Parliament in 1448, but it had never received a charter of incorporation. The parish, which was co-terminous with the hundred, contained about ten manors, all with burgage tenements.
By 1100 Old Sarum, which had ancient origins as a hill-fort, boasted a castle, a cathedral and a mint. By about 1130 it had a market and a charter. The latter was renewed in 1229, but the town had already begun an inexorable decline. Nine years earlier the bishop had moved his seat to Salisbury, where water was easier to come by. In the sixteenth century no vestiges of the cathedral or episcopal palace remained and the castle was in ruins, while the town walls were demolished in the early seventeenth century. VCH Wilts. vi. 60, 62, 63, 65, 67.
By the 1630s Devizes was struggling to maintain its pre-eminence among Wiltshire towns after the city of Salisbury. Although in a commanding position at the centre of the county, well-served by roads, it was on the edge of the cloth-making area, badly hit by depression. Unlike some other nearby towns, Devizes had not responded by diversification into the manufacture of medley broadcloth, while the serge and duffel production which was to consolidate its fortunes later in the century was only just being introduced. VCH Wilts. x. 225, 227-8, 255-6; E.
Cricklade was a small town, consisting of two parishes. Although it was situated in Wiltshire, it was near the Gloucestershire border, and shared many of the characteristics of a Cotswold community, including the presence of a clothing and woollen industry. There had been signs of modest prosperity in the sixteenth century in the shape of a new market house (1569), but the town had never achieved a royal charter, and its governing institutions were simply manorial and parochial.
Situated at the west end of the Marlborough downs on the London-Bristol road, Calne was one of the leading north Wiltshire clothing towns, although it ranked behind nearby Chippenham and Devizes in administrative importance. VCH Wilts. xvii. 30, 32, 84. It had sent two representatives to Parliament intermittently since 1295 and regularly since 1425 but, unlike its neighbours, it did not have a formal charter until 1685. VCH Wilts. xvii.
In certain respects, seventeenth century Wiltshire was a county of contrasts. The cloth-making districts of the north and west had a very different economy to that of the open and in parts depopulated country to the south and east, especially Salisbury Plain.
