Yorkshire

Hull, ‘one of the principal seaports of the United Kingdom’, had a thriving fishing industry, was an important banking centre and boasted ‘some of the finest [wind]mills in the kingdom for grinding corn’.E. Baines, Yorks. Dir. (1823), ii. 227, 251. Its electoral corruption, the subject of a royal commission investigation in 1854, was described as ‘universal’ before the Reform Act by a contemporary historian, who recorded how

Malton, a non-corporate town governed by a bailiff, who was appointed at the court leet of the lord of the manor, remained under the total control of the Whig 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam throughout this period. He never neglected to attend to the needs of its inhabitants, most of whom were his tenants, and after a challenge to his authority in 1807 there was no contest until 1874. The early days of January 1820 brought very severe weather, and the navigation of the Derwent, on which many of Malton’s residents relied for employment, became impossible, leaving many families destitute. On 10 Jan.

Knaresborough, a former spa in which linen manufacture was ‘carried on to a very great extent’, was nominally a burgage borough, but as the boundary commissioners noted in 1831, ‘it appears very remarkable that the owner and occupier of a burgage house has not the vote, but that a distant stranger comes in and gives that vote’. E. Baines, Yorks. Dir. (1822), ii. 223; PP (1831), xvi.

Aldborough, an insignificant village situated on the River Wharf, and the market town of Boroughbridge, two miles to the west on the River Ure, lay on the border between the North and West Ridings of the county, some 15 miles south-west of York. Boroughbridge was described in 1828 as ‘a place of no importance as to trade or manufacturers’, whose ‘chief consequence ... derived from its thoroughfare situation ... on the great north road’. Pigot’s National Dir.

Hedon, the market town for Holderness, lay eight miles east of Hull and very much in its shadow. It consisted chiefly of one street and was described in 1833 as ‘very mean’, with ‘very little appearance of trade or business’.E. Baines, Hist. Yorks. (1823), ii. 214-16; PP (1835), xxv. 1541. The corporation comprised a mayor, nine other aldermen and two bailiffs. The parliamentary franchise was in the freemen, who qualified by birth or apprenticeship.