Berkshire

Wallingford owes its origin to a ford across the Thames. Having been held by the earls of Cornwall in the 13th century, the castle, town and honor formed part of the duchy of Cornwall until 1540, when they were annexed to the King’s Oxfordshire manor of Ewelme. The first charter was granted in 1156 and parliamentary representation began in 1295. The records, including the minute book of the corporation which starts in 1507, suggest that the right of election was exercised by the mayor and leading burgesses.

Reading owed its prosperity to the abbey founded there in 1121, and in particular to the cloth trade which flourished under monastic protection. The abbot of Reading became lord of the town but his rule was resisted by the merchant guild whose master was by 1301 also the mayor; this office the abbot refused to recognize until it was agreed that he should appoint to it from those candidates presented by the town. After being challenged in the reign of Henry VII, this method of appointment was observed from 1509 until the abbey’s dissolution in 1538.

New Windsor is so called to distinguish it from an older settlement two miles away, forming part of a manor briefly held by Westminster abbey before the Conquest. The new town grew up in the shadow of the castle and was a royal borough by the reign of Henry I. A charter of 1277 was confirmed in 1316 and later, and in 1466 the mayor, bailiffs, burgesses and inhabitants were incorporated. Municipal offices were monopolized by the brethren of the guild of the Holy Trinity.

The town of Abingdon grew up around the Benedictine abbey and under its rigorous and much resented control. Cloth and malt were the staple manufactures. In 1542 Leland reported that the town ‘standeth by clothing’, but by then the surrender of the abbey (1538) had threatened its markets and the surveyor of the abbey found the town ‘sore decayed and like daily more to decay’. At the beginning of Edward VI’s reign the confiscation of the property of the town guilds of the Holy Cross and of Our Lady hastened this decline.J. Townsend, Abingdon, 4; VCH Berks. iv.

Wallingford, at the time of the Domesday survey the largest and richest town in Berkshire, had reached the peak of its prosperity by the end of the 12th century, declining thereafter, if only gradually at first. This regression, gaining momentum during the reign of Edward III, accelerated throughout the period under consideration until, by 1438, the place was practically deserted. By then the number of parishes in the borough had fallen from 12 to four, two of which, moreover, were so depopulated as to be unable to pay any tithes.VCH Berks. iii.

By the last quarter of the 14th century, Reading had become the largest and most important town in Berkshire. Communications by road with London, Winchester, Oxford and the west country cloth towns were good, and Reading’s position at the confluence of the Thames and the Kennet enabled it to take advantage of the facilities for water transport these rivers provided.

The shire town of Berkshire, Abingdon lay astride a major north-south trade route and was regarded as one of the most beautiful towns in England by some. As well as being a noted centre of the malt trade, it was also an important market for horses, and despite economic decline in the mid-sixteenth century it remained a centre of the cloth trade. C.G. Durston, ‘Berks. and the County Gentry, 1625-49’, (Univ. of Reading Ph.D. thesis, 1977), i. pp. 4, 17, 22; Travels through Stuart Britain: the Adventures of John Taylor, the Water Poet ed. J. Chandler, 161; VCH Berks. iv.

Wallingford owed its origins and early importance to a ford across the Thames, dominated by a medieval castle. It received its first charter in 1156 and returned Members from 1295. The population was declining in this period and in 1636 was described as only ‘a good market town’. VCH Berks. iii. 523, 532, 534, 536; J.K. Hedges, Wallingford, ii.

Reading, with a population of about 7,000 in the 1630s, was still a prosperous clothing town at the opening of this period, producing high quality woollen fabrics much in demand on the Continent. One of the 23 staple towns created for the wool trade in 1617, it suffered heavily from the trade depression of the 1620s. John Kendrick, a wealthy London cloth exporter who came from a prominent Reading family, bequeathed £7,500 to the borough in 1624, intending to encourage the industry, but the funds were, in the event, misused. N.R. Goose, ‘Decay and Regeneration in 17th Cent.

New Windsor developed as a royal borough in the shadow of the castle. It received its first charter in 1277 and returned Members intermittently from 1302 and regularly from 1447.VCH Berks. iii. 58. A new charter issued in August 1603, on the ‘humble petition and request’ of Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, entrusted its government to some 30 brothers of the guildhall, ‘of the better and more approved inhabitants’, of whom 13 were to be styled ‘benchers’ and to include the ten aldermen from among whom the mayor was to be chosen. Ibid. 61; Bodl. Ashmole 1126, ff.