Suffolk

Bury, the assize town and commercial and social centre for west Suffolk, was considered ‘entirely dependent on its residents and the nobility, gentry and agriculturists of the neighbourhood’ for its prosperity. S. Tymms, Handbk. of Bury St. Edmunds (1854), pp. vii-x. Their largesse and the Members’ generosity facilitated the construction of assembly rooms (1804), a theatre (1819), a refurbished corn exchange (1820), botanic gardens (1821, 1831), gas works (1824), Suffolk General Hospital (1825) and improvements to churches and Nonconformist chapels.

Ipswich was a garrison town and port situated on the Rivers Gipping and Orwell, 12 miles from the North Sea. William Cobbett† described it in 1830 as a ‘fine populous and beautiful place’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 619; W. White, Suff. Dir. (1844), 89. Its shipbuilding industry was then in decline, and legislation for new docks was not enacted until 1837.

The ‘small town, port and ancient borough’ of Orford was an ecclesiastical chapelry of the parish of Sudbourne, situated on the River Alde, where, since 1810, its patron, Francis Ingram Seymour Conway†, 2nd marquess of Hertford, had successfully introduced oyster dredging to arrest a decline in population. W. White, Suff. Dir. (1844), 165, 166; PP (1835), xxvi.

Coastal erosion had reduced Dunwich to a small village coextensive with the parish of All Saints (1,340 acres). After the last contest in 1764, it had been agreed by the Barne and Vanneck families, as joint patrons and co-owners of many borough properties, to limit the electorate to 32:16 freemen appointed by themselves (eight each) and a further 16 appointed by the burgesses, among whom John Robinson of Cliff House, a former captain in the East Indian navy, was prominent.