Originally an Anglo-Saxon foundation, Taunton was dominated throughout the Middle Ages by the bishops of Winchester, who owned the principal manor of Taunton Dean. J. Toulmin, Hist. Taunton ed. J. Savage, 18, 47. Accordingly, at the start of the seventeenth century, the town’s considerable economic prosperity and regional importance contrasted sharply with its primitive municipal government.
Situated on the Avon 12 miles south-east of Bristol, and described by a local doctor in 1628 as ‘a well compacted city, … beautified with very fair and goodly buildings for the receipt of strangers’, Bath was already famous for the healing powers of its waters, which were visited by Anne of Denmark in 1613 and 1615, and by Charles I in 1628. T. Vennner, Baths of Bathe (1628), p. 1; Bath RO, ‘Elevation of the status of the mayor of Bath’. Under the terms of a charter granted in 1590, a mayor, between four and ten aldermen and a council of 20 governed Bath. J.
Located five miles inland on the River Parrett, Bridgwater owed its early prosperity to the manufacture and export of cloth, principally lightweight broad cloths known as Bridgwaters, but also coarser, narrow cloths, or kerseys, which were exported to France, Spain and Ireland.
Minehead probably derived its name either from a Celtic phrase meaning ‘the haven under the hill’ or from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘main head’, which alluded to its location on one of Somerset’s most prominent coastal headlands. Following the Norman Conquest, the settlement enjoyed manorial status, and became part of the honour of Dunster. Although well placed for trade with Wales and Ireland, Minehead played only a limited role as an outport. F. Hancock, Hist.
Wells had long been dominated by the bishops of Bath and Wells, lords of the manor, liberty and hundred. In 1201 a royal charter vested municipal authority in an annually elected master (or steward) and a council of Twenty-Four. Successive bishops aimed to erode this independent jurisdiction, forcing the cancellation of the town’s first two charters of incorporation (1341 and 1574).
Ilchester was the county town of Somerset, having not only the county gaol but also hosting regular meetings of the shire and circuit courts.VCH Som. iii. 185. However, it failed to develop an economic base to match its administrative importance: under Henry VIII, John Leland observed that the town ‘hath been a very large thing’, but ‘at this time it is in wonderful decay, as a thing in a manner razed with men of war’. Ibid. 185-7; J. Leland, Itinerary ed. L. Toulmin-Smith, i.
Situated in south-eastern Somerset, Milborne Port was recorded as a substantial borough in the Domesday book, and returned Members to the Commons five times under Edward I. It declined thereafter as nearby Sherborne, Dorset, grew. By the time Leland visited Milborne in the 1530s, its market was defunct, although it ‘retaineth privileges of a franchised borough’. A century later a local man observed that ‘there remains nothing but a straggling town’, the population of which was probably around 400-500 in the seventeenth century.S.G.
Wells, a cathedral city situated at the southern foot of the Mendips near the source of the River Ax, was described in 1830 as ‘small and compact, for the most part well built and the streets ... well paved’. Its prosperity depended heavily on the retail trade, which was sustained by ‘the respectable inhabitants and the rural population in the vicinity’. Little significant industrial activity remained, as silk manufacturing had entirely decayed and only one large stocking factory still operated; there were paper mills at nearby Wookey.
Milborne Port, a ‘very irregularly built’ town with the appearance ‘more of a village’, which had been ‘anciently ... of importance’, was situated on a branch of the River Yeo close to the Dorset border. Agriculture was crucial to the town’s economy, employing 283 families in 1821, but 159 worked in trade and manufacturing and 26 in other occupations. In the eighteenth century it had been a centre for the production of linen, sailcloth and the coarser types of woollens, but these industries were in serious decline by the 1820s and the market house had long been closed up.
A small seaport and market town situated on the Bristol Channel, and surrounded inland by valleys ‘rich in pasture and agriculture’, Minehead consisted of ‘several irregular streets, ill-built’. In the eighteenth century it had been the centre of ‘an extensive foreign trade’ with America, the West Indies and the Mediterranean, but this had dwindled to insignificance and there remained only a dozen or so vessels chiefly engaged in coastal trade. There was also a small herring fishery. Woollen manufacturing, formerly the other major source of prosperity, had virtually disappeared.
