Lancaster’s importance as the chief administrative centre of the duchy in the north was not matched by material prosperity. An Act of 1544 (35 Hen. VIII, c.4) included it among the towns where ‘divers ... beautiful houses of habitation have been ... which now are fallen down, decayed’, and half a century later Camden was to describe it as not populous nor much frequented, the inhabitants ‘being all husbandmen’.
Newton, a small market town near Wigan, appeared in the Domesday book as one of the townships in the ‘fee of Makerfield’, lying within Winwick parish in West Derby hundred, and was often named Newton-in-Makerfield or Newton le Willows.J.H. Lane, Newton in Makerfield, i. 3-6. Although it received charters for a market and a fair in 1257 and 1301, it was never incorporated.CChR, ii. 1, iii. 2; VCH Lancs. iv.
Wigan’s history during this period is dominated by disputes between the corporation and the rector of the local parish, who was also the lord of the manor. At issue were such matters as tithes, market tolls, corn mills, charitable uses and, by 1628, control of the borough’s parliamentary elections.
By the early seventeenth century Preston was already regarded as Lancashire’s centre for local government and administration, and a focal point of county society.VCH Lancs. vii. 73-105; A. Crosby, Hist. of Preston Guild, 34-5. Described by Camden as ‘a great and (for these countries) a fair town, and well inhabited’, the parish had a population of around 3,000 on the eve of the Civil War. W. Camden, Britannia (1610), p. 752; D. Hunt, Hist.
Clitheroe, a small and unimposing borough, was considered poor and remote even within Lancashire. Its population has been estimated at not much above 600 at the turn of the seventeenth century. W.S. Weeks, Clitheroe in Seventeenth Cent. 5-6. The castle and honour of Clitheroe, which date back to Domesday, passed into the control of the earls of Lancaster in the late thirteenth century, and so became part of the duchy of Lancaster. VCH Lancs. vi. 361-4; W.A. Abram, Hist. Blackburn, 48-53; R. Somerville, Hist.
Lancaster claimed to be the most ancient borough in Lancashire. Founded on a Roman settlement, the medieval town grew up around a Norman castle erected in around 1102. It received its first known charter from John, earl of Mortain (later King John) in 1193, which granted the inhabitants the same liberties as Bristol. Between 1295 and 1331 it was represented in Parliament.
Liverpool was a small but thriving port in the early seventeenth century, a main departure point for troops and trade to Ireland, whose overseas as well as coastal commerce was steadily increasing. According to Camden it was ‘very commodious for trade … but not as eminent for its being ancient as for being neat and populous’. W. Camden, Britannia (1610), p. 748; R. Muir and E.M. Platt, Hist. of Municipal Govt. in Liverpool, 87-9; M. Gregson, Fragments relating to the Hist.
Successive waves of industrial and commercial expansion, associated with West Indian slavery and the development of the corporation-owned docks, which sustained international, Irish and coastal trades, had made Liverpool, on the eastern shore of the Mersey, the premier entrepôt and canal terminus of the North-West, the second largest town and port in the country and an important cultural centre. S. Marriner, Economic and Social Development of Merseyside, 31-34; PP (1835), xxvi. 615; Liverpool Shipping, Trade and Industry ed. V. Burton, passim; C.W.
The parish, borough and market town of Preston, at the head of the Ribble estuary about 35 miles north-west of Manchester, was an important cotton spinning and manufacturing centre. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iii. 649-50. Its representation had been contested four times, 1796-1818, and from 1800 was vested in a coalition formed by the Whig 12th earl of Derby and the Tory cotton manufacturer and corporator John Horrocks†.
Clitheroe, a growing manufacturing centre, noted for its Dissenting past and the production of cotton and lime, was a 3,000-acre township and chapelry on the River Ribble in the parish of Whalley, in Lancashire’s Pendle district. A borough by prescription, its government was vested locally in two bailiffs (one resident and one non-resident) elected at the annual court leet, who had the power of one magistrate and acted as the returning officer. E. Baines, Hist. Lancs. (1824), i. 608, 610, 612; Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.
