A talk for Romsey and District Society
by Barbara Burbridge and Phoebe Merrick
on 21st March 2007 in the 400th anniversary year of the granting of the Charter

1. Introduction

On 6th April 1607 King James I granted a royal charter that created the Borough of Romsey Infra. We should emphasise that the borough status applied only to Romsey Infra - not Romsey Extra.

Moreover, Romsey Infra was then much smaller than it is today. It was lens shaped, reaching roughly from Greatbridge in the north to Middlebridge in the south. The western boundary, as today, was the main flow of the Test but the eastern boundary was much closer to the town centre. It followed the Fishlake and its easterly branch, the Holbrook stream. This stream, running behind King John's House and through the bus station, separates the Market Place from The Hundred. The divisions of Romsey Infra and Romsey Extra derived from the one-time bridge by Boots. Infra was within the bridge, Extra without. Infra, or inner Romsey, became the borough; Romsey Extra was under a different civic administration.

So The Hundred, Latimer Street and Banning Street all lay outside the bridge, and were excluded from the Borough until 1876. From that date the borough was expanded several times as urban Romsey has been extended.

The community to which James 1 granted a degree of autonomy was also very small with the 1607 population being barely 2,000 for Infra and Extra combined. It took nearly 200 years to double this size.

We propose to talk about the governance of Romsey Infra by the new Borough Corporation, a system that survived until the reorganisation of 1974. We are not in this talk examining the social standing of the men who served on the Corporation. Rather, we are looking at the charter itself and then discussing how it was put into practice, not just in the early years of the borough but sometimes through into Victorian times.

Most of our information comes from the charter itself, the unpublished works of Dr John Latham in the early 1800s and the diary of William Roles from the late 1880s.

We know little of the workings of the borough in its early years, and the first real evidence comes from the regulations made by the Corporation in 1625 (as recorded by Dr Latham). By that time the men of the 16th century who had initiated the negotiations for the charter were all dead. 17th-century men were now running the town, and they were prepared to impose their refinements on the charter provisions.

We propose to look at the key clauses of the charter and to comment on how they were executed in practice. The charter was written in Latin but for this evening we are using the translation made by Barbara. Events in Romsey mirror what was happening in other small English towns.

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