Dorset

The little town of Corfe was dominated by its castle, which Elizabeth I granted to her favourite Sir Christopher Hatton†. At his request the town was enfranchised in 1572 and incorporated four years later. The corporation consisted of a mayor and a bailiff, elected annually, and an uncertain number of ‘barons’, the title given to all those who had served as mayor. The Isle of Purbeck, in which Corfe is situated, still provided excellent sport, including red deer, and there were a number of resident gentry families, notably the Dackombes.

Poole received its first charter in 1248, and was represented in Parliament from 1362, though the borough did not return Members regularly until the mid-fifteenth century. Under its 1568 charter of incorporation, Poole also achieved administrative independence from the county of Dorset, the lord lieutenant alone retaining authority over the town. British Bor. Charters 1307-1660 ed. M. Weinbaum, 31-2; OR; J.

Melcombe Regis received its earliest known charter in 1280, and returned Members to Parliament from 1319. Weymouth, which lay just across the estuary of the River Wey, was a somewhat older settlement. However, it developed municipal structures more slowly, and did not regularly achieve a voice at Westminster until Richard II’s reign. The two boroughs were united by Act of Parliament in 1571, and incorporated under a mayor and two bailiffs, six aldermen, and 24 common councilmen.

Located in the extreme west of Dorset, Lyme Regis received its first charter in 1284, and sent Members to the Model Parliament. In the early seventeenth century, notwithstanding the town’s frequent pleas of poverty, it was a flourishing community of nearly 2,000 people, ‘well-built, and enriched by the conveniency of the Cobb, which is an harbour that the inhabitants with much industry and charge have built in the sea’. The charges levied for maintenance of the Cobb were confirmed by statute in 1585.

The market town of Bridport continued to prosper mainly because of its harbour, which lay about a mile to the south, particularly after the passage, sponsored by the Members, of the Bridport Harbour Act of 1823. To the traditional production of rope and fishing-nets were by this period being added the new manufactures of sailcloth and shoe thread, and the port’s commerce consisted of extensive coastal and Newfoundland trades. Western Flying Post, 17 Nov. 1823; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 278; PP (1835), xxiv. 487-8; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist.

Poole, a county of itself, was a vibrant seaport on a narrow isthmus of land to the north of a large harbour. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 288; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iii. 352-3; PP (1831), xvi. 91; (1831-2), xxxviii. 143; J. Hutchins, Dorset, i (1861), 1-2. The naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who grew up there, later recollected the typical scene on ‘the quay, with its shipping and sailors; their songs, and cries of "Heave with a will, yo ho!", the busy merchants bustling to and fro’. E.

Jane Austen wrote of Lyme Regis, a small port and market town, that

The small and nondescript town of Wareham, which had a ‘particularly neat appearance’, sent clay to the Potteries, but its port was too shallow for it to compete with its larger neighbour Poole. The inhabitants consisted of ‘persons of middling circumstances, and a few retired officers and independent persons, retail tradesmen and those deriving a subsistence from the small craft’.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 297-8; PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 151-2; (1835), xxiv. 699, 702; J. Hutchins, Dorset, i (1861), 77-78; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist. and Antiq.

Weymouth, as this constituency was usually known, and Melcombe Regis, which was in fact the larger and more important of the two towns, lay on either side of the River Wey, on a handsome bay at the centre of the Dorset coast. Though the port’s trade had much declined, improvements were made by the Acts of 1820, by which was rebuilt the bridge (opened in 1824) linking the two banks, and of 1825, by which the damage done to the harbour in the storm of November 1824 was repaired.G. Kay, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis New Guide (1823), 3-4, 11-12, 15-18; G.A. Ellis, Hist.

Dorchester, Thomas Hardy’s essentially agricultural Casterbridge, was the county town of Dorset, in which its quarter sessions (exclusively so from 1825) and county and election meetings were held. Dismissed as a ‘dreary melancholy town’ by Lady William Russell, whose husband was stationed there in the mid-1820s, another visitor at that time, Sir Stephen Glynne*, described it as ‘surrounded by beautiful avenues of trees’ and ‘small, but neat and regularly built’. Walk round Dorchester (1820), 2-3; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 282; J.