Reading, the only substantial urban centre in Berkshire, was prosperous and expanding. It remained in this period essentially an agricultural market town and hub of trade and communications, though it was a major centre of brewing and had some small scale industry in the form of sailcloth and iron manufacture and silk weaving.PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 29-30; R.C.F. Baily, ‘Parl. Hist. Reading, 1750-1850’ (Reading Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1944), 1-7; N.
Abingdon, situated on the Thames in the north of Berkshire, and six miles from Oxford, was the county town and polling place for county elections, though it was soon to be supplanted by the substantially larger and faster expanding borough of Reading. While it was essentially a market town for the surrounding agricultural region, it had become in the eighteenth century a centre for the weaving and spinning of hemp and flax and the production of sacking, sheeting and carpets.
Wallingford was a ‘neat country town, respectably inhabited’, on the Thames, five miles north-west of Reading; it was notable for fluctuating unemployment and poverty among those whose living depended on agriculture. Its corporation consisted of a mayor and five other aldermen, chosen from the 18 burgesses. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 138-9; PP (1835), xxiii. 273. The borough was a byword for electoral corruption. PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 31-33; (1835), xxiii. 273; N.
The Castle, in its capacity as a royal residence and centre for the Court, was central to Windsor life, and was the principal factor in the continued growth and prosperity of what was essentially a small and backward market town, with no significant industry other than brewing. Charles Knight, editor of the liberal Windsor and Eton Express until 1826, recalled that on the death of Queen Charlotte in 1818, when the Castle household was largely broken up, the Court ‘ceased to have any moral influence at Windsor. We had become as most other country towns’.
