Essex

A small and declining port, Maldon was included in Acts for urban renewal in 1540, 1542 and 1544 (32 Hen. VIII, c.19; 33 Hen. VIII, c.36; and 35 Hen. VIII, c.4).

Colchester was incorporated in 1462. Government was vested in a common council consisting of two bailiffs, eight aldermen and 32 burgesses. On receipt of the sheriff’s precept for an election the bailiffs and aldermen—in 1523 the bailiffs alone—summoned the common council to the moothall. The seven election indentures for the Parliaments between 1545 and 1555 survive; all are in English and most of them in good condition.

In 1377 Maldon, a small port, had a taxable population of 542, as compared with nearly 3,000 in Colchester. The burgesses had first been granted a charter in 1171, but in the late 14th century their independence was still curtailed by the bishops of London, who had acquired a moiety of the lordship of the town in 1284, and by the Lords Fitzwalter, who held the other moiety.

A busy port, which had a taxable population of 2,995 in 1377, Colchester was a royal borough, paying fee farm to the Crown. The charter granted by Richard I was confirmed by successive monarchs with little alteration and the borough sent Members to Parliament from 1295. The return to Chancery was always endorsed on the parliamentary writ, and there is no indication of the method of election in the local records. Ordinances for the conduct of municipal elections, made in 1372, limited the right of election to sworn freemen, who nominated a selecting body of 24.

An ancient walled town situated atop a hill overlooking the river Colne, Colchester in the early seventeenth century was the manufacturing centre of the new worsted draperies in Essex and had the largest population of any town in the county. W. Hunt, Puritan Moment, 3. The borough obtained its first known charter in 1189, which allowed it to choose its own bailiffs, who had previously been royal appointees.

In 1614 the author of England’s Way to Win Wealth described Harwich as ‘a royal harbour’ and ‘a proper town’, whose dry beach made it an ideal location from which to put to sea fleets of fishing busses to compete with the Dutch, ‘there being no place in all Holland comparable’. However, this potential remained unexploited, local fishing activity being limited to three or four vessels which caught cod and ling off Iceland every year.

Situated on a hill overlooking the confluence of the rivers Blackwater and Chelmer, Maldon was an ancient port town of approximately 1,000 inhabitants. W.J. Petchey, A Prospect of Maldon, 23. Unlike Colchester or nearby Witham, it failed to develop a significant textile industry, Ibid. 12-13, 109. and its trade with the Continent was on a decidedly small scale. E190/598/14. Though well placed to exploit the North Sea fisheries, Maldon possesed very few vessels.

Colchester, a Roman settlement and the largest urban centre in Essex (but not the county town), lay on the River Colne in the north-east of the county, five miles from the Suffolk border. Its once flourishing cloth making industry had virtually disappeared by the end of the Napoleonic wars, and in this period its economy was largely dependent on the agriculture of the surrounding area. There was some trade through its small port at The Hythe and a lucrative oyster fishery on the river. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 288-9; T. Cromwell, Hist. Colchester, i.

Maldon was a market town and port in eastern Essex, situated at the influx of the River Chelmer into the Blackwater estuary. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 297-8. By the new charter of 1810 almost 1,500 freemen, mostly non-resident, and qualified by birth, apprenticeship, marriage, purchase or gift, had been added to the moribund and dwindling electorate of less than 70.

Harwich, a seaport on the north-eastern extremity of the Essex coast, contained a naval yard, was the base for government ships sailing to Holland and Germany and by the end of this period had become a popular bathing resort; but it was thought to be in ‘a declining state’ economically. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), app. p. 296; PP (1835), xxvi. 2276. It was a corporation borough controlled by the treasury, whose command had been restored in 1807 after a brief bid by some of the 32 electors to assert their independence.