When Elizabeth succeeded, the government of Bristol was vested in the mayor, six aldermen, a recorder, two sheriffs, a number of minor officials, and 43 common councilmen. By a charter of 1581 the number of aldermen was increased to 12. MPs were chosen by the mayor, aldermen, common councilmen, 40s. freeholders and principal merchants. The return was made by the sheriffs.
Possessing charters from the reign of John, the royal borough of Gloucester was created a county of itself in 1483 and became a city in 1541 with the establishment of the bishopric, the former monastic church of St. Peter becoming the cathedral. The charter of 1483 incorporating Gloucester as the mayor and burgesses was confirmed six years later when the fee-farm was fixed at £60, and again in 1510 and 1553. The mayor was assisted by a town clerk, two sheriffs, 12 aldermen, a common council and, among minor officials, a chamberlain, constable, coroner and steward.
The town of Cirencester was a prosperous centre for wool and cloth, yet until the Dissolution it remained a manorial borough belonging to the local abbey. Founded by Henry I, the abbey had taken advantage of the financial needs of the Angevin kings to establish its powers over ‘the whole manor of Cirencester with the seven hundreds pertaining to the manor and its farm’. During the later middle ages the townsmen tried repeatedly to establish their right to a separate municipal authority. In 1403 Henry IV granted them a guild merchant, but in the next reign the abbot had this grant annulled.
A port and borough of ancient standing, Bristol had a population of about 11,000 in 1545. Its fee-farm of £100 formed parcel of the jointure of each of Henry VIII’s queens, and Bristol believed that it enjoyed a privileged connexion with each successive consort, applying to each with gifts and money for her favour and protection: on the King’s visit to Thornbury castle, Gloucestershire, in 1535, while he received only provisions, Anne Boleyn was given a gilt cup containing 100 ounces of gold.J. C. Russell, Brit. Med.
The population of Gloucester numbered about 3,360 in 1377, the town being just over a third the size of its neighbour, Bristol, but comparable with Oxford. The town’s promising location for trade, at the head of the Severn estuary, and its long history as a centre of iron production (dependent upon ore from the Forest of Dean) and of the cloth industry (using wool from the Cotswolds) gave its burgesses of the late 14th and early 15th centuries a reasonable prosperity. In 1397 they were able to lend £200 to the Crown, a large sum compared with that offered by other communities.
In 1377 Bristol, with an estimated population of over 9,500, rivalled York as England’s second largest town after London. Bristol’s greatness was built on its commerce; it could boast no ancient reputation as a cathedral seat, as a military station or as a shire town.
Cirencester had flourished as a centre of the woollen industry under the firm control of the local Augustinian Abbey.VCH Glos. ii. 80-83. Wool continued to play a vital part in the local economy, and therefore the town suffered badly from the trade depression of the 1620s: in 1628 it was reported to have 1,200 poor in need of relief. W. St. Clair Baddeley, Cirencester, 242; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 568. The parish of Cirencester, which included a significant part of the surrounding countryside, had a population of about 2,760 in 1603. P.
Bristol, as the Privy Council reminded it in 1620, when demanding a contribution of £2,500 towards the cost of a naval expedition, was ‘a port that ever hath been reputed to be the second of the kingdom’. APC, 1619-21, p. 121. With a population about one-twentieth of that of the capital, it came, indeed, a poor second; but it was foremost among the outports in its resentment of London’s trading monopolies, ‘as if God had no sons to whom he gave the benefit of the earth but in London’.
Founded by the Romans at the first easy crossing place above the mouth of the Severn, Gloucester remained ‘at the centre of a communication network stretching north-south along the Severn valley and east-west towards London and Wales’. It suffered from the general decline in the textile industries, but was still the prosperous marketing centre for grain from the vales of Berkeley, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, shipping wheat and malt to Bristol, the West Country, Wales and Ireland. Indeed, it managed to support a dozen great inns and a score of lawyers. P.
Tewkesbury lay in a peninsula of Gloucestershire, between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, at the confluence of the Severn and the Avon, and was described by Camden as ‘a large and fair town … famous for the making of woollen cloth and smart-biting mustard’. W. Camden, Britannia (1772) ed. E. Gibson, i.
