Chester

The 1621 franchise dispute was not, as were so many other cases, occasioned by the clothing depression of the 1620s. Although the Dee was silting up and the city increasingly affected by the competition of Liverpool merchants, Chester had not yet become an economic backwater. After a depression at the start of the century, its cloth trade was recovering in the later 1610s, largely in response to the demands of the Irish market, and it was therefore not overly affected by the European slump. Trade generally was probably increasing around 1620, particularly that geared to the provisioning of Ireland, but much of this was not in the hands of Chester merchants, and thus failed to raise the town's prosperity proportionally. This perhaps accounts for some of the unusually strong hostility to ‘foreigners’ in the town. A further possible cause of disruption was that the leather trades bulked large in the city's economy, possibly related to the Irish cattle connection, and yet were considerably under-represented in the city's government. But militating most strongly against a purely economic interpretation of the 1620–1 troubles was the fact that the local harvest of 1620 was particularly good.

Despite the relative economic stability of the city, its internal affairs were thoroughly disordered in the years before 1621. The freemen divided from, and were over-ruled by, the corporation in the mayoral election for 1619–20, and at the end of 1620 a major riot occurred, arising from a bull-baiting, in which the mayor's authority was completely flouted.