Yorkshire

Ripon had sent Members to at least two Parliaments between 1295 and 1337, but no further returns are known before the 16th century. After the Pilgrimage of Grace the 3rd Duke of Norfolk promised that the King would shortly summon a Parliament and that Ripon would be represented, but nothing more was heard of this. The re-enfranchisement of 1553 had no economic justification, for the town, once a centre of the cloth trade, had since markedly declined: the numerous tenters or cloth-frames observed by Leland were relics of a departed industry.

In 1521 a royal commission reported:

The King’s town of Hull ... is a proper town and well built. It is as full of fishermen as any in the north of England. Much of it has been destroyed by the waters of the Humber, and much swept away. Much of the King’s land is likely to be damaged. At spring water the danger to houses is worst: a large part of the streets of the town are flooded, and property is swept away ... At least £50 is needed to effect a remedy.E36/150, f. 63.

Knaresborough castle was for centuries the headquarters of the duchy of Lancaster honor of Knaresborough, and in the 16th century the town was still closely involved in duchy administration; its nearness to York also exposed it to the influence of the council in the north.

Earlier a prosperous port, Hedon had suffered from the silting up of its harbour and the growth of Hull. Leland found it to have ‘but a few boats and no merchants of any estimation’ and Camden was later to describe it as ‘so sunk as to have scarce the least traces of its former splendour’.

In the early 16th century Boroughbridge was a small market town, prosperous owing to its situation on a main road to the north where a bridge crossed the Ure near its junction with the Swale.

An old Roman town on the south bank of the river Ure, Aldborough had by 1509 been reduced to a village. After being burnt by the Danes in the 8th century it had never been restored as a walled town, but the main cause of its decline was the building in William I’s reign of a new bridge about three-quarters of a mile upstream, to replace the one destroyed at the Roman site. Around the new bridge the town of Boroughbridge grew up and soon outgrew the ‘old borough’, although it remained within the manor and parish of Aldborough.

From its days as the capital of Britannia Inferior in Roman times, York ranked as the second city of the kingdom, a position which its importance as an ecclesiastical, administrative, military and economic centre clearly justified. It commanded an impressive network of communications, some of which had been constructed by the Romans during their three centuries of occupation.

Scarborough owed its early and lasting strategic importance to a combination of geographical features, which not only gave it a fine natural habour but also provided an imposing hill site for fortifications and a signal station. Long before the Romans established a base there for defence against the Saxon invaders, Scarborough played a vital part in protecting the north Yorkshire coast.

Originally known as Wyke-upon-Hull, the port of Kingston-upon-Hull did not assume its second name until well after 1293, the date of its acquisition by Edward I from its previous owner, the abbot of Meaux. Wyke had been developed as a ‘new town’ by the monks for the export of their wool crop, and flourished so rapidly that by the late 13th century it ranked among the top four ports in England which dealt in that commodity. Its success was largely due to its geographical position at the confluence of the river Humber and a tributary, the river Hull, some 20 miles or so from the North Sea.